Books published by Harvard University Press

From the Alien Friends Act to the Cold War and the War on Terror, the US has used ideological exclusions and deportations to suppress freedom of speech and association of foreigners depicted as threatening to national security. Julia Rose Kraut provides the first history of the tensions between immigration law and the First Amendment.

The Threshold, a study of the culture of historiography in early medieval China, explores the History of Liu-Song, a dynastic history of the fifth century compiled in 488. Zeb Raft shows how history was constructed through rhetorical elements including the narration of officialdom, the anecdote, and, above all, the historical document.

How do we justify our political convictions? Libertarians appeal to a love of freedom, liberals to a dedication to fairness. Niko Kolodny, however, argues that neither value actually makes sense of our avowed convictions. Instead, what drives much of our politics is an opposition to social hierarchy.

Wang Hui asks what it means for China to be modern and for modernity to be Chinese. Is there a rupture between tradition and modernity in China? How has Confucian thought evolved? Did China become modern in the Middle Ages? A deep intellectual history, The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought revises our senses of both modernity and Chinese philosophy.

Officially, revolutionary France granted all citizens a right to property. In practice, however, there was significant continuity with the Old Regime. H. B. Callaway argues that the state's fraught attempts to confiscate property from Parisian émigrés reveal contradictions in ideas of ownership considered foundational to modern property rights.

In countries with officially egalitarian property law, women still accumulate less wealth than men. Combining quantitative, ethnographic, and archival research, The Gender of Capital explains how and why women of all classes are economically disadvantaged at crucial junctures in family life such as divorce, inheritance, and succession.

The Fifth Prap¿¿haka of the V¿dh¿la ¿rautas¿tra includes a critical edition, followed by a translation and a commentary, of the fifth chapter (prap¿¿haka) of the V¿dh¿la ¿rautas¿tra. This chapter is dedicated to the description of the so-called ¿independent¿ animal sacrifice (nir¿¿hapäubandha) in Vedic ritual.

Millions of innocent people were arrested in Stalin's Soviet Union during the 1930s and forced to confess to crimes they did not commit. Oleksandr Shums¿kyi, the Ukrainian Marxist revolutionary, was one of the few to have refused and to protest. Stalin's Liquidation Game opens a window into understanding Soviet repression in the Ukraine.

The legends collected in Saints at the Limits, despite sometimes being viewed with suspicion by the Church, fascinated Christians during the Middle Ages¿as cults and retellings attest. These Byzantine Greek stories, translated into English here for the first time, continue to resonate with readers seeking to understand universal fears and desires.

Paolo Giovio's Portraits of Learned Men provides brief biographies of 146 men from Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio to Erasmus, Thomas More, and Juan Luis Vives that were meant to accompany portraits in a museum of great figures in modern history. This volume contains a fresh edition of the Latin text and a new, more complete English translation.

James Hankins offers the first full-length study of Francesco Patrizi's life and thought. A key but largely forgotten Renaissance thinker, Patrizi wrote influentially on "virtue politics," with the goal of nurturing citizens' character and education so societies could effectively balance demands of liberty, equality, and merit-based leadership.

Sara Marcus argues for the emancipatory potential of political disappointment-the unrealized desire for liberation. Exploring literature and sound from Reconstruction to Black Power, from the Popular Front to second-wave feminism and the AIDS crisis, Marcus shows how moments of defeat have inspired new ensembles of art and activism.

The idea of al-Andalus-medieval Muslim Iberia-has many uses, inspiring artists and activists who imagine a place and time of peaceful coexistence among Europeans, North Africans, and Middle Easterners; Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Eric Calderwood explores the consolidation of this reputation and its impact on artistic and political aspiration.

Neeti Nair explores the trend toward legal protection for the religious "sentiments" of majorities in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Nair offers historical context for contemporary persecution and rising religious fundamentalism, and highlights how growing political solicitation of religious sentiments has fueled a secular resistance.

John Geometres's Life of the Virgin Mary, a work of outstanding theological sophistication animated by deeply felt devotion to the Mother of God, remains largely unknown today. This new edition of the Byzantine Greek text and the first complete translation in a modern language presents a masterpiece of early Marian writing to new audiences.

Fredrik Albritton Jonsson and Carl Wennerlind chart ideas about economic scarcity across centuries of European intellectual history. Showing how ideologies of infinite desire and infinite growth came to dominate capitalist societies, they argue for alternative modes of economic thought that respect nature's boundaries in the face of climate crisis.

Eli Black was the immigrant rabbi-turned-CEO who transformed the notoriously corrupt United Fruit into a model of ethical business. Then he died by suicide. How did it all go wrong? Matt Garcia traces Black’s own descent into corruption and despair—the unraveling, and the deliberate forgetting, of one of America’s most enigmatic business leaders.

Equity for Women in Science is the first large-scale empirical study of the global gender gap in science. Analyzing millions of scientific papers, the authors show that women are undervalued for their labor in science as measured through publications and citations. The data also reveal how the scientific community can promote equity.

Deeply Responsible Business profiles corporate leaders of the past two centuries who made social missions vital to their businesses. Geoffrey Jones explores the characters and motivations of fourteen such leaders and compares their deep social and environmental commitments to the lukewarm "corporate social responsibility" of today.

Alexis de Tocqueville famously wrote about democracy in America, but he also lauded Catholic society in Quebec, feared the nationalism he saw in Germany, and controversially defended French colonization of Algeria. Jeremy Jennings traces Tocqueville's lesser-known travels, recovering the wider insights of one of history's great political thinkers.

Drawing on alchemical theory, Édouard Laugier and Auguste Laurent set out to find the vital essence of life through the craft of perfumes. While drawing the ire of enlightened Bohemian Paris, they discovered fundamental differences in the structures of naturally occurring and synthetic molecules, inaugurating a persistent scientific mystery.

After WWII, Ilse Koch became known worldwide as the "Bitch of Buchenwald." She was assuredly guilty of atrocities, but the most sensational crimes ascribed to her by prosecutors and newspapers went unproven. Tomaz Jardim reveals how Koch's perceived betrayal of womanhood sealed her fate as a scapegoat for a society seeking absolution.