Books published by Harvard University Press

Sarah Bilston unfolds the story of orchid mania, the nineteenth-century craze among European and North American collectors vying to own the world's most coveted flowers. Focusing the hunt for the so-called lost orchid, an especially vaunted flower native to Brazil, Bilston reveals the enormous human and environmental cost of a colonial obsession.

Parrots and mynahs have played a unique role in Chinese literature for two millennia. In this wide-ranging thematic study, Wilt L. Idema traces the development of the parrot and the mynah as characters in many forms of poetry and prose of Chinese elite literature, as well as in the long narrative ballads of traditional popular literature.

After liberation in 1945, Koreans erupted with hopes for reform that had been bottled up during forty years of Japanese imperial rule. Arguing that permanent North-South division was far from inevitable, Kornel Chang explores the movement for a unified Korean social democracy and its suppression by anticommunist US military authorities.

Velleius Paterculus, soldier and senator, chronicles in concise fashion the story of Rome and Roman culture from the fall of Troy to the time of his work's publication in AD 30 and provides much valuable information, especially about the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius (30 BC-AD 37), for which no other eyewitness historical depiction survives.

Ten Indian Classics showcases translations from a vast array of India's literary traditions, Hindi, Kannada, Pali, Panjabi, Persian, Sanskrit, Telugu, and Urdu, with a foreword by the award-winning poet and translator Ranjit Hoskote. It is an invitation to explore classic literature that continues to shape modern South Asian culture and aesthetics.

Dreaming Reality looks to mystical traditions to challenge orthodoxies of brain science that model consciousness in purely physical terms. Instead of privileging the experience of waking life, the authors study visionary states, ego death, meditation, prayer, and other phenomena that bring us closer to understanding how the mind makes experience.

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, the most famous philosopher of the Italian Renaissance, urged Christians to save their souls with Jewish mysticism-Kabbalah-offering to debate anyone in Italy. Nine Hundred Conclusions offers a definitive new critical edition and translation of the Latin and commentary on Pico's theses that were denounced by the Pope.

Andrea Navagero (1483-1529), among the principal poets of Venice, pioneered the Renaissance pastoral epigram genre. Marcantonio Flaminio (1498-1550), though now better known for his controversial religious writings, began his career as a poet. Latin Pastoral Poetry is the first volume to combine their poetry alongside authoritative Latin texts.

Lucy Caplan explores the flourishing of Black composers, performers, and critics of opera in America during the early twentieth century. Working outside mainstream opera houses, these artists fostered countercultural forms of expression that reimagined opera as a medium of Black aesthetic and political creativity.

Esteemed scholar, poet, and critic Stephanie Burt anthologizes five decades of verse for and by queer Americans. Interpreted by Burt, the poems of Frank O'Hara, Audre Lorde, Judy Grahn, James Merrill, Thom Gunn, Jackie Kay, Adrienne Rich, Chen Chen, The Cyborg Jillian Weise, and others trace a flourishing of queer life from Stonewall to today.

How does emotion shape public intellectual debate? In Sentimental Republic, Hang Tu proposes emotion as a new critical framework to approach a post-Mao cultural controversy. Covering forty years (1978-2018) of bitter cultural wars, Tu analyzes how liberals, the left, cultural conservatives, and nationalists debated Mao's revolutionary legacies.

Rebecca Haw Allensworth pries open the inner workings of professional licensing boards, showing how they erect arbitrary barriers to work, corruptly influence markets for routine services such as hairdressing, and tolerate bad actors in high-stakes arenas like medicine and law. The Licensing Racket is a call for reform and, where needed, abolition.

The crises of American democracy and criminal justice are intimately connected. David A. Sklansky shows how police, courts, and prisons helped to break American democracy and can be reformed to empower equitable self-governance. Seeking durable change, Sklansky urges pragmatic proposals rooted in a strong commitment to pluralism.

Make Your Own Job charts the transformation of the American work ethic in the twentieth century. It is no longer enough to be reliable; now, workers must lead with creative vision. Erik Baker argues that the entrepreneurial ethic has been a Band-Aid for a society in which ever-mounting precarity discredits the old ethics of effort and persistence.

The Discovery of Ottoman Greece unearths forgotten research by the early modern philhellenist and Lutheran reformer Martin Crusius. His extensive study of Greek Orthodox life, including interviews with traveling alms-seekers, sheds light on European views of Greek decline under Ottoman rule as well as on the global ambitions of Lutheran reform.

The British Crown's 1813 legalization of Christian evangelism among its Indian subjects set off a storm of criticism in Bengal. Mou Banerjee shows that Hindu and Muslim detractors energetically marginalized converts, in the process developing ideals that cemented the connection between political and communal identity on the subcontinent.

For over two decades, Theresa S. Betancourt researched former child soldiers from Sierra Leone's civil war to find out if they could reintegrate into communities where they had been forced to commit atrocities. She found that the key to resilience after trauma was not just their individual capacities, but the layers of support and care around them.

The people of Smolensk survived both of the twentieth century's most brutal dictatorships. Michael David-Fox probes their experiences under Stalinist and Nazi rule to unravel the threads of authoritarianism. Focused on personal stories, David-Fox leaves no question as to despots' reliance on the collaboration and acquiescence of ordinary citizens.

From renowned legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein, a concise, case-by-case guide to resolving free-speech dilemmas at colleges and universities.Free speech is indispensable on college campuses: allowing varied views and frank exchanges of opinion is a core component of the educational enterprise and the pursuit of truth. But free speech does not mean a free-for-all. The First Amendment prohibits "abridging the freedom of speech," yet laws against perjury or bribery, for example, are still constitutional. In the same way, valuing freedom of speech does not stop a university from regulating speech when doing so is necessary for its educational mission. So where is the dividing line? How can we distinguish reasonable restrictions from impermissible infringement?In this pragmatic, no-nonsense explainer, Cass Sunstein takes us through a wide range of scenarios involving students, professors, and administrators. He discusses why it's consistent with the First Amendment to punish students who shout down a speaker, but not those who chant offensive slogans; why a professor cannot be fired for writing a politically charged op-ed, yet a university might legitimately consider an applicant's political views when deciding whether to hire her. He explains why private universities are not legally bound by the First Amendment yet should, in most cases, look to follow it. And he addresses the thorny question of whether a university should officially take sides on public issues or deliberately keep the institution outside the fray.At a time when universities are assailed on free-speech grounds from both left and right, Campus Free Speech: A Pocket Guide is an indispensable resource for cutting through the noise and understanding the key issues animating the debates.

The award-winning art historian and founder of Vision & Justice uncovers a pivotal era in the story of race in the United States when Americans came to ignore the truth about the false foundations of the nation's racial regime. In a masterpiece of historical detective work, Sarah Lewis exposes one of the most damaging lies in American history. There was a time when Americans were confronted with the fictions shoring up the nation's racial regime and learned to disregard them. The true significance of this hidden history has gone unseen--until now. The surprising catalyst occurred in the nineteenth century when the Caucasian War--the fight for independence in the Caucasus that coincided with the end of the US Civil War--revealed the instability of the entire regime of racial domination. Images of the Caucasus region and peoples captivated the American public but also showed that the place from which we derive "Caucasian" for whiteness was not white at all. Cultural and political figures ranging from P. T. Barnum to Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois to Woodrow Wilson recognized these fictions and more, exploiting, unmasking, critiquing, or burying them. To acknowledge the falsehood at the core of racial order proved unthinkable, especially as Jim Crow and segregation took hold. Sight became a form of racial sculpture, vision a knife excising what no longer served the stability of racial hierarchy. That stability was shaped, crucially, by what was left out, what we have been conditioned not to see. Groundbreaking and profoundly resonant, The Unseen Truth shows how visual tactics have long secured our regime of racial hierarchy in spite of its false foundations--and offers a way to begin to dismantle it.

In the tense years of the early Cold War, American and Soviet women conducted a remarkable pen-pal correspondence that enabled them to see each other as friends rather than enemies. In a compelling new perspective on the early Cold War, prizewinning historian Alexis Peri explores correspondence between American and Soviet women begun in the last years of World War II and continuing into the 1950s. Previously unexamined, the women's letters movingly demonstrate the power of the personal, as the pen pals engaged in a "diplomacy of the heart" that led them to question why their countries were so divided. Both Soviet and American women faced a patriarchal backlash after World War II that marginalized them professionally and politically. The pen pals discussed common challenges they faced, such as unequal pay and the difficulties of balancing motherhood with a career. Each side evinced curiosity about the other's world, asking questions about family and marriage, work conditions, educational opportunities, and religion. The women advocated peace and cooperation but at times disagreed strongly over social and economic issues, such as racial segregation in the United States and mandatory labor in the Soviet Union. At first both governments saw no risk in the communications, as women were presumed to have little influence and no knowledge of state secrets, but eventually Cold War paranoia set in. Amid the Red Scare, the House Un-American Activities Committee even accused some of the American women of being communist agents. A rare and poignant tale, Dear Unknown Friend offers a glimpse of the Cold War through the perspectives of women who tried to move beyond the label of "enemy" and understand, even befriend, people across increasingly bitter political divides.