Books published by Harvard University Press

A longstanding tradition holds that universities in early modern Italy suffered from cultural sclerosis and long-term decline. Drawing on rich archival sources, including teaching records, David Lines shows that one of Italy¿s leading institutions, the University of Bologna, displayed remarkable vitality in the arts and medicine.

Amid the nationalization of Russian imperial politics, Jews developed a powerful version of race science and biopolitics as a response to their colonial condition, nonterritoriality, and exclusion from looming postimperial modernity. Marina Mogilner explores this story in the context of Russiäs turbulent early twentieth century.

Central banks are supposed to stabilize markets, yet decades of mounting central bank power have seen wave after wave of financial crisis. Leon Wansleben offers novel explanations for the rise of central banks and the problematic implications of their finance-dependent policies.

The China Questions 2 assembles top experts to explore key issues in US¿China relations today, including conflict over Taiwan, economic and military competition, public health concerns, and areas of cooperation. Rejecting a new Cold War mindset, the authors call for dealing with the world¿s most important bilateral relationship on its own terms.

Lu Xun was Chinäs greatest literary modernist and a key thinker of the early twentieth century. This new translation assembles some of Lu Xun¿s essays and experimental writings little known to English readers¿works of profound imagination that seek to find beauty and meaning in an unjust world.

The root of democratic decline is insecurity, not inequality. Antidemocrats across the globe feel differently about inequality, but all fear losing what they have¿financially or culturally. Pranab Bardhan urges context-sensitive policy solutions and the promotion of civic patriotism and moderate community values over aggrandizing ethnonationalism.

Guru to the World tells the story of Swami Vivekananda, the nineteenth-century Hindu ascetic who introduced the West to yoga and to a tolerant, scientifically minded universalist conception of religion. Ruth Harris explores the many legacies of Vivekanandäs thought, including his impact on anticolonial movements and contemporary Hindu nationalism.

As US power grew after WWI, officials and nonprofits joined to promote citizen participation in world affairs. David Allen traces the rise and fall of the Foreign Policy Association, a public-education initiative that retreated in the atomic age, scuttling dreams of democratic foreign policy and solidifying the technocratic national security model.

The 1980s saw spirited debate in China, as officials and the public pressed for economic and political liberalization. But after Tiananmen, the Communist Party erased the reform debate from memory. Julian Gewirtz shows how the leadership expunged alternative visions of Chinäs future and set the stage for the policing of history under Xi Jinping.

Against the dominant view of reductive naturalism, John McDowell argues that human life should be seen as transformed by reason so that human minds, while not supernatural, are sui generis. This collection assembles eleven critical essays that highlight the enduring significance and wide ramifications of McDowell¿s unorthodox position.

Childhood pain is a widespread problem, yet it often goes untreated. Drawing on the latest research, two leading voices on pediatric pain show parents and medical practitioners how to handle children¿s pain, from bumps and bruises to chronic illnesses, providing strategies that make a real difference in kids¿ lives.

Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE) produced in his Natural History a vast compendium of Roman knowledge. Topics included are the mathematics and metrology of the universe; world geography and ethnography; human anthropology and physiology; zoology; botany, agriculture, and horticulture; medicine; minerals, fine arts, and gemstones.

Seneca the Elder (?55 BCE-40 CE) collected ten books devoted to controversiae (some only preserved in excerpt) and at least one (surviving) of suasoriae. Extracts from famous declaimers of Seneca's illuminate influences on the styles of most pagan (and many Christian) writers of the Empire.

At the time of his death in 1882, Ralph Waldo Emerson was counted among the greatest poets in nineteenth-century America. This variorum edition of all the poems published during his lifetime offers the reader the opportunity to situate Emerson's poetic achievement alongside his celebrated essays and to consider their interrelationship.

A guide to the strange and often illogical world of neural function, this book shows how the brain is not an optimized, general-purpose problem-solving machine, but rather a weird agglomeration of ad-hoc solutions that have been piled on through millions of years of evolutionary history.

This text argues that constitutional change, seemingly so orderly, and refined, has in fact been a revolutionary process from the first. It sets contemporary events, such as the Reagan revolution, in deeper, constitutional perspective and considers fundamental reforms that might resolve them.

The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution is a classic of American historical literature-required reading for understanding the Founders' ideas and their struggles to implement them. In the preface to this 50th anniversary edition, Bernard Bailyn isolates the Founders' profound concern with the uses and misuses of power.

Here, find source literature for the most important contributions to the remarkable recent expansion of geological knowledge. Excerpted are 65 articles on topics including the constitution of Earth¿s interior, earthquakes, radioactive timekeepers, submarine features and deep-sea cores, entrapment of petroleum, and crystal structure.

This text is an interpretation of the universal civilization of the Romans, so much of it Hellenic, that later gave way to Christianity. The civilization, culture, literature, art, and even religion of Rome are discussed.

On the basis of extensive manuscript study, Goffart disentangles the order of composition and authoritatively pronounces on the authenticity of the eighty-four Le Mans charters. Most of all, he insists that the forgeries are an essay on church property and its law.

Designed for professional and amateur myrmecologists alike, this book, by the world's leading ant taxonomist, offers a definitive guide for identifying these ubiquitous insects. Bolton provides identification keys to all the living ant subfamilies and genera, presented in alphabetical order and separated by zoogeographical region.

Whether flying a kite in Franklin Park, gardening in the Fens, or jogging along the Riverway, today's Bostonians are greatly indebted to the legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted, America's premier landscape architect. Zaitzevsky's book is a richly detailed, fully illustrated account of the design and construction of Olmsted's Boston parks.

A comprehensive introduction to Shakespeare. It offers coverage ranging from big-picture issues such as the implications of shifts in Elizabethan culture to close readings of Shakespeare's deployment of complex words in his plays.

Roth charts changes in the character and incidence of homicide in the U.S. from colonial times to the present. He examines the four factors that explain why homicide rates have gone up and down in the U.S. and in other Western nations over the past four centuries, and why the U.S. is today the most homicidal affluent nation.

Liu Zhi (ca. 1670-1724) was one of the most important scholars of Islam in traditional China. His Tianfang xingli (Nature and Principle in Islam) focuses on the roots or principles of Islam. The annotations here explain Liu's text and draw attention to parallels in Chinese-, Arabic-, and Persian-language works as well as differences.