Books published by Harvard University Press

Often called the Newton of France, Pierre Simon Laplace has been called the greatest scientist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In this compact biography, Hahn illuminates the man in his historical setting. This book reflects a lifetime of thinking and research on a singularly important figure in the annals of Enlightenment science.

Drawing on previously inaccessible sources and extensive personal interviews, Epstein offers an unparalleled portrait of the most enduring and influential generation of Central European communists. In the service of their party, these communists experienced solidarity and betrayal, power and persecution, sacrifice and reward, triumph and defeat.

In her most personal and deeply considered book about difference, Johnson asks: Is the mother the guardian of a oneness we have never had? The relations that link mothers, bodies, words, and laws serve as the guiding puzzles as she searches for an answer.

Ukrainization originally meant active recruitment of Ukrainians into the Soviet state, but soon Ukrainian communists came to demand far greater self-determination than Moscow would tolerate. Those who made such demands in the 1920s were labelled "national deviationists," and the issues they raised engulfed the regime in a major political crisis.

In this volume, the expansion of modern humans and their impact on the populations of Neandertals in Europe, Western Asia, and Northern Africa is discussed in depth, with particular focus on the lithic industries of the late Middle and early Upper Paleolithic.

A major work of environmental and behavioral biology, this book reinterprets the classification, evolution, anatomy, physiology, and behavior of the higher social insects-ants, social wasps and bees, and termites-through the concepts of modern biology, from biochemistry to evolutionary theory and population ecology.

Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) was the leading Platonic philosopher of the Renaissance and is generally recognized as the greatest authority on ancient Platonism before modern times. The I Tatti edition of his commentary on Plotinus, in 6 volumes, contains the first modern edition of the Latin text and the first translation into any modern language.

Attilio Teruzzi, Mussolini's commander of the Black Shirts, exemplified fascism's obsession with male strength. Through the story of his broken marriage to a young Jewish American opera star, Victoria de Grazia explores the cult of masculinity on which the New Rome was to be built, revealing the seductive appeal of fascism.

Volume 18 of the Papers of John Adams chronicles John Adams' tenure as minister to Great Britain and his joint commission, with Jefferson, to negotiate treaties with Europe and North Africa. Adams found it impossible to do "any Thing Satisfactory" with Britain, and the volume ends with his decision to resign his posts.

Michael Rosen shows how the redemptive hope of religion became the redemptive hope of historical progress. This was the heart of German Idealism: purpose lay not in God's judgment but in worldly projects; freedom required not being subject to arbitrary authority, human or divine. Yet purpose and freedom never shed their theistic structure.

Babyn Yar brings together the responses to the tragic events of September 1941. Presented here in the original and in English translation, the poems create a language capable of portraying the suffering and destruction of the Ukrainian Jewish population during the Holocaust as well as other peoples murdered at the site.

The pre-Gangesa Navya-Nyaya treatise Upadhidarpana (UD) deals with the upadhi, a key concept in the Navya-Nyaya theory of inference. This volume is the first published edition and translation of the only manuscript of the UD. Notes have been added to elucidate the historical context of the authors, works, and philosophical doctrines in the UD.

A comprehensive introduction to Chinese legal scholarship and the scholars who developed the new Communist legal system during the initial decades of the PRC when the old system was abolished by the newly established Communist government. Through their scholarship, we see where the field of Chinese legal studies came from and where it is going.

World Inequality Report 2022 is the most authoritative and comprehensive account of global trends in inequality, providing cutting-edge information about income and wealth inequality and also pioneering data about the history of inequality, gender inequality, environmental inequalities, and trends in international tax reform and redistribution.

Smaro Nikolaidou-Arampatzi analyzes the direct and indirect evidence of Euripides' fragmentary play, the Ino, and reexamines matters of reconstruction and interpretation. This work is a full-scale commentary on Euripides' Ino, with a new arrangement of the fragments, an English translation in prose, and an extensive bibliography.

Text and Interpretation examines the main characteristics of the legal thought of Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq, preeminent religious scholar jurist of Medina in the first half of the second century of the Muslim calendar. This book presents an intellectual history of how the Ja'fari school began and examines the scholar's interpretive approach.

Before the Communists came to power, China lay broken. Today it is a global force, but its leaders are haunted by the past. Sulmaan Wasif Khan chronicles the grand strategies that have sought to protect China from aggression and ensure it would never again experience the powerlessness of the late Qing and Republican eras.

The first intellectual history of Song, Yuan, and Ming China written from a local perspective, Localizing Learning traces how debates over the relative value of cultural accomplishment and political service unfolded locally. Close readings and quantitative analysis of social networks consider why and how the local literati enterprise was built.

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.

How did the United States appoint itself as the world's supreme military power? Stephen Wertheim delves into the archives of the U.S. foreign policy elite to trace armed dominance to its origin in World War II. He shows how officials and intellectuals suddenly chose to embrace perpetual dominance-at the price of perpetual war.

What will it take to make humanity a spacefaring species? The usual: good reasons and good planning. Christopher Wanjek explores the practical motivations for striking out into the far reaches of the solar system and the realities of the challenge. And he introduces us to the scientists and entrepreneurs who are already tackling that challenge.

Versions of the Snow White story have been shared across the world for centuries. Acclaimed folklorist and translator Maria Tatar places the well-known editions of Walt Disney and the Brothers Grimm alongside other tellings, inviting readers to experience anew a beloved fantasy of melodrama and imagination.

Renowned historian Anthony Grafton invites us to see the scholars of early modern Europe as laborers. Bookish but hardly divorced from physical tasks, they were artisans of script and print. Drawing new connections between text and craft, publishing and intellectual history, Grafton shows that the life of the mind depends on the work of the hands.

Under Seleucid rule, time no longer restarted with each new monarch. Instead, progressively numbered years, identical to the system we use today, became the measure of historical duration. Paul Kosmin shows how this invention of a new kind of time-and resistance to it-transformed the way we organize our thoughts about the past, present, and future.

Of the roughly seventy treatises in the Hippocratic Collection, many are not by Hippocrates (said to have been born in Cos in or before 460 BCE), but they are essential sources of information about the practice of medicine in antiquity and about Greek theories concerning the human body, and he was undeniably the "Father of Medicine."

The Historia Augusta is a biographical collection written by a single author under six pseudonyms that covers the lives of the Roman emperors from Hadrian (r. 117-138) to Carinus (283-285). While it is our most detailed surviving source for this period, it has more value as an enigmatic work of literary fiction than as history.

The Historia Augusta is a biographical collection written by a single author under six pseudonyms that covers the lives of the Roman emperors from Hadrian (r. 117-138) to Carinus (283-285). While it is our most detailed surviving source for this period, it has more value as an enigmatic work of literary fiction than as history.

The Historia Augusta is a biographical collection written by a single author under six pseudonyms that covers the lives of the Roman emperors from Hadrian (r. 117-138) to Carinus (283-285). While it is our most detailed surviving source for this period, it has more value as an enigmatic work of literary fiction than as history.

Works in this volume explore the relationship between two people known as love (eros) or friendship (philia). In Lysis, Socrates meets two young men at a wrestling school; in Symposium, he joins a company of accomplished men at a drinking party; and in Phaedrus, experimental speeches about love lead to a discussion of rhetoric.

An authoritative biography of Jozef Pilsudski, a key figure in interwar Europe regarded as the founding hero of a pluralistic and democratic modern Poland. After the first elected president was assassinated, Pilsudski lost faith in Poles' commitment to democracy, led a military coup, and ruled as a strongman, leaving a complicated legacy.