Books published by Harvard University Press

In September 1755, the most famous Indian in the world--a Mohawk leader known in English as King Hendrick--died in the Battle of Lake George. He was fighting the French in defense of British claims to North America, and his death marked the end of an era in Anglo-Iroquois relations. He was not the first Mohawk of that name to attract international attention. Half a century earlier, another Hendrick worked with powerful leaders in the frontier town of Albany. He cemented his transatlantic fame when he traveled to London as one of the "four Indian kings."Until recently the two Hendricks were thought to be the same person. Eric Hinderaker sets the record straight, reconstructing the lives of these two men in a compelling narrative that reveals the complexities of the Anglo-Iroquois alliance, a cornerstone of Britain's imperial vision. The two Hendricks became famous because, as Mohawks, they were members of the Iroquois confederacy and colonial leaders believed the Iroquois held the balance of power in the Northeast. As warriors, the two Hendricks aided Britain against the French; as Christians, they adopted the trappings of civility; as sachems, they stressed cooperation rather than bloody confrontation with New York and Great Britain.Yet the alliance was never more than a mixed blessing for the two Hendricks and the Iroquois. Hinderaker offers a poignant personal story that restores the lost individuality of the two Hendricks while illuminating the tumultuous imperial struggle for North America.

The Letters of Emily Dickinson collects, redates, and recontextualizes all of the poet's extant letters, including dozens newly discovered or never before anthologized. Insightful annotations emphasize not the reclusive poet of myth but rather an artist firmly embedded in the political and literary currents of her time.

Selected Stories by Franz Kafka offers new renderings of the author's finest work. Mark Harman's English translations convey the uniqueness of Kafka's German-the wit, irony, and cadence. Expert annotations illuminate Kafka's cultural allusions and wordplay, while a biographical introduction places the man and his work in historical context.

The Sea of Separation, a new free verse translation of Tulsidas's beloved R¿mcaritm¿nas, presents renowned episodes from the Ramayana epic, including Ram's battles with demons, the kidnapping of his wife Sita, and the god Hanuman's heroic journey to Lanka to find her.

Setting wages isn¿t an exact science, but we like to think that our workplace performance provides an objective basis for pay. Yoüre Paid What Yoüre Worth offers a bold theory to the contrary, arguing that pay is decided in contests over interests and ideals¿that social conflicts, not economic metrics, determine who gets how much.

In 1739 Bordeaux's Royal Academy of Sciences held an essay contest seeking answers to a pressing question: What was the cause of Africans' black skin? Published here for the first time and translated into English, these early documents of scientific racism lay bare the Enlightenment origins of the phantom of racial hierarchy.

Blaise Pascal is a marquee name, yet little read outside France. Antoine Compagnon provides an ideal introduction to one of the great intellects, contextualizing Pascal in his own time and offering insightful readings of the Pensées and the Provincial Letters. Compagnon proves a welcoming guide to Pascal's challenging and rewarding thought.

Francis Cogliano revisits the relationship between Washington and Jefferson, arguing that their vaunted differences mask mutual investments in the Revolution itself. Their later divergence demonstrates how wartime unity gave way to competing visions for the new nation, making clear that there was no single founding ideal-only compromise.

Largely forgotten today, the Second Mexican Empire was a transformative nineteenth-century moment. Raymond Jonas explores the conspiracy of European rulers and Mexican conservatives to erect an Old World empire on New World soil. Though quixotic, it was a scheme with a purpose: to contain both Mexican democracy and the rising United States.

In US foreign policy, conflict has replaced diplomacy. At home, wars on crime, drugs, immigration, and terrorism dissolve barriers between law enforcement and combat. Tracing the origins of militarized policy to post-Vietnam fears of waning US power, Osamah Khalil argues that it is time to discard forever wars and invest in political solutions.

Elizabeth Ingleson explores the roots of bilateral trade between the United States and China. Telling the story of the 1970s US activists and entrepreneurs who pressed for access to China's vast labor market, Ingleson shows how not just Chinese reform but also US deindustrialization fueled a dramatic, unanticipated shift in global capitalism.

In readings attuned to the textual, sexual and historical specificities of Ashbery's poetic project, from Some Trees through the vast summation of Flow Chart, Shoptaw introduces readers to the poet's processes of production. The first reader with full access to Ashbery's manuscripts and source materials, he is able to reveal the poet at work. He shows us, for instance, how Ashbery built Europe and The Skaters upon children's books picked up at a Paris quai and how he drew on his own unpublished lyrics for the long dialogue Fantasia on 'The Nut-Brown Maid'.

The events of the 1920s and 1930s were crucial in the evolution of modern Vietnam. Yet our knowledge of this complex period of student strikes, revolt against the patriarchal family, debates on women's emancipation, and the search for a new worldview to replace the bankrupt Confucian ideology has been distorted by a preoccupation with the eventual establishment of a Communist regime there.

England's 17th-century colonial empire in North America and the Caribbean was created by migration. This migration is captured in the London port register of 1635, the largest port register for any single year in the colonial period and unique in its record of migration to America and to the European continent. This work analyzes the 7500 people who travelled from London in that year, recreating individual careers, exploring colonial societies at a time of emerging viability and delineating a world sustained and defined by migration.

Cats is 'dogs', and rabbits is 'dogs', and so's parrots; but this 'ere 'tortis' is a insect, a porter explains to an astonished traveler in a 19th-century Punch cartoon. Railways were not the only British institution to schematize the world. This book aims to capture the fervor of the Victorian age for classifying and categorizing every new specimen, plant or animal, that British explorers and soldiers and sailors brought home. As she depicts a whole complex of competing groups deploying rival schemes and nomenclatures, Harriet Ritvo shows us a society drawing and redrawing its own boundaries and ultimately identifying itself.

Mark McGurl explores the connections between fiction and higher education in the United States by demonstrating how much literature comes to us mediated by writing programs.

They were not the Banquet Years, those anxious wartime years when poets and novelists were made to feel embarrassed by their impulse to write literature. And yet it was the attitude of those writers and critics in the 1930s and 1940s that shaped French literature - the ideas of Derrida, Foucault, de Man, Deleuze, and Ricoeur - and has so influenced literary enterprise in the English-speaking world since 1968. This literary history, the prehistory of postmodernism, is what Denis Hollier recovers in his interlocking studies of the main figures of French literary life before the age of anxiety gave way to the era of existentialist commitment.

The concept of global cultures such as postcolonial, hybrid, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism are common. This book aims to expose the drama played out under the guise of globalism and to present a critique of cosomopolitanism, while exploring forces acting against globalism.

Discusses the nature of equality and looks at examples related to medical care, employment, political rights and religion.

From the 1920s through World War II, hundreds of thousands of Americans took part in a campaign to overcome racial, ethnic and religious prejudices. They celebrated the 'cultural gifts' that immigrant and minority groups brought to society and encouraged pluralism in many areas of American life.

Much of our law is based on authoritative texts, such as constitutions and statutes. The common law, in contrast, is that part of the law that is established by the courts. Common law rules predominate in some areas of law, such as torts and contracts, and are extremely important in other areas, such as corporations. Nevertheless, it has been far from clear what principles courts use--or should use--in establishing common law rules. In this lucid yet subtly argued book, Melvin Eisenberg develops the principles that govern this process. The rules established in every common law case, he shows, are a product of the interplay between the rules announced in past precedents, on the one hand, and moral norms, policies, and experience, on the other. However, a court establishing a common law rule is not free, as a legislator would be, to employ those norms and policies it thinks best. Rather, it can properly employ only those that have a requisite degree of social support. More specifically, the common law should seek to satisfy three standards. First, it should correspond to the body of rules that would be arrived at by giving appropriate weight to all moral norms, policies, and experiential propositions that have the requisite support, and by making the best choices where norms, policies, and experience conflict. Second, all the rules that make up the body of the law should be consistent with one another. Third, the rules adopted in past precedents should be applied consistently over time. Often, these three standards point in the same direction. The central problems of legal reasoning arise when they do not. These problems are resolved by the principles of common law adjudication. With the general principles of common law adjudication as a background, the author then examines and explains the specific modes of common law reasoning, such as reasoning from precedent, reasoning by analogy, drawing distinctions, and overruling. Throughout the book, the analysis is fully illustrated by leading cases. This innovative and carefully worked out account of the common law will be of great interest to lawyers, law students, students in undergraduate legal studies programs, scholars interested in legal theory, and all those who want to understand the basic legal institutions of our society.

This book tells the story of how the transition to democracy in South Africa enfranchised blacks politically but without raising most of them from poverty. It shows in detail how the continuing strength of the white establishment forces the leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) to compromise plans for full political and economic transformation. Deferring the economic transformation, the new dispensation nurtures a small black elite. The new elite absorbs the economic interests of the established white elites while continuing to share racial identities with the majority of their countrymen, muffling the divisions between rich whites and poor blacks, thus ensuring political stability in the new South Africa.Although democratic South Africa is officially "non-racial," the book shows that racial solidarities continue to play a role in the country's political economy. Ironically, racial identities, which ultimately proved the undoing of apartheid, have come to the rescue of contemporary democratic capitalism. The author explains how and why racial solidarities are being revamped, focusing particularly on the role of black economic empowerment, the black bourgeoisie, and how calls to represent the identities of black South Africans are having the effect of substituting the racial interests of black elites for the economic interests of the black poor.

Any sound practical philosophy must be clear on practical concepts concepts, in particular, of life, action, and practice. This clarity is Michael Thompson s aim in his ambitious work. In Thompson s view, failure to comprehend the structures of thought and judgment expressed in these concepts has disfigured modern moral philosophy, rendering it incapable of addressing the larger questions that should be its focus.In three investigations, Thompson considers life, action, and practice successively, attempting to exhibit these interrelated concepts as pure categories of thought, and to show how a proper exposition of them must be Aristotelian in character. He contends that the pure character of these categories, and the Aristotelian forms of reflection necessary to grasp them, are systematically obscured by modern theoretical philosophy, which thus blocks the way to the renewal of practical philosophy. His work recovers the possibility, within the tradition of analytic philosophy, of hazarding powerful generalities, and of focusing on the larger issues like life that have the power to revive philosophy.As an attempt to relocate crucial concepts from moral philosophy and the theory of action into what might be called the metaphysics of life, this original work promises to reconfigure a whole sector of philosophy. It is a work that any student of contemporary philosophy must grapple with."

In a world where more people know who Princess Di was than who their own senators are, where Graceland draws more visitors per year than the White House, and where Michael Jordan is an industry unto himself, fame and celebrity are central currencies. In this book, Tyler Cowen explores and elucidates the economics of fame.

The controversies between traditionalists and postmodernists are the topic of this book. It examines questions at the heart of the debate, such as: truth, reason, and objectivity - can we survive without them? What happens to law, science and the persuit of justice when these ideals are abandoned? The clash of belief and skepticism, and our need for intellectual stability are also examined.

In this blistering critique of our failing public schools and our fuzzy thinking about how to fix them, Myron Lieberman explains why public education is in irreversible and terminal decline and tells us what we must do to get American schooling back on track. No other book on educational policy or reform covers such a broad range of issues or draws upon such extensive empirical data across such diverse academic disciplines. This is a refreshingly clear analysis of our educational crisis and a rallying cry for market-system approaches to school reform. Nobody emerges unscathed--Lieberman's analysis challenges the advocates of choice as well as the defenders of the public schools.

What is the connection between the United States' imbalance of trade with Japan and the imbalance of translation in the other direction? Between Western literary critics' estimates of Japanese fiction and Japanese politicians' America bashing?