Books published by Princeton University Press

"In this capstone book, fairy tale expert Jack Zipes has assembled what he describes as his last theoretical and critical study of fairy tales. His purpose is to create a coherent collection that pays tribute to a group of writers that he views as "survivors with a mission" whose tales inspire readers to this day. The book begins with a substantial introduction in which Zipes discusses the history of his interest in fairy tales and the motivation for his scholarship in the field. In a world filled with conflict, he writes, "fairy tales can be used for enlightenment by all of us or abused by small groups of powerful people who seek domination." The main text includes thirteen essays on notable authors of fairy tales-âEdouard Laboulaye, Kurt Schwitters, Bâela Bâalazs, Christian Bèarmann, Charles Godfrey Leland, Mariette Lydis, Ernst Bloch, Paul Vaillant-Couturier, Hermynia zur Mèuhlen, Lisa Teztner, Felix Salten, Emery Kelen, and Gianni Rodari-many of whom lived through revolutions and world wars or were otherwise compelled to confront political oppression during their lives. Zipes considers their cultural significance and their contributions to fairy tale literature, arguing that each deserves greater attention and appreciation. Some of the chapters have been adapted from previously published introductions Zipes wrote for the Oddly Modern Fairy Tales series, which he edits, and others are adapted from scholarly volumes that Zipes has published over his long career as a self-identified "scholarly scavenger" of largely forgotten tales. Together, they create a portrait of the political stakes that have animated Zipes's lifelong fascination with the fairy tale, and explain why readers and writers alike continue to return to this narrative form"--

"Songs, barks, roars, hoots, squeals, and growls: exploring the mysteries of how animal communicate by soundWhat is the meaning of a bird's song, a baboon's bark, an owl's hoot, a dolphin's clicks? In The Voices of Nature, Nicolas Mathevon explores the mysteries of animal sound. Putting readers in the middle of animal soundscapes that range from the steamy heat of the Amazon jungle to the icy terrain of the Arctic, Mathevon reveals the amazing variety of animal vocalizations. He describes how animals use sound to express emotion, to choose a mate, to trick others, to mark their territory, to call for help, and much more. What may seem like random chirps, squawks, and cries are actually signals that, like our human words, allow animals to carry on conversations with others.Mathevon explains how the science of bioacoustics works to decipher the ways animals make and hear sounds, what information is encoded in these sound signals, and what this information is used for in daily life. Drawing on these findings as well as observations in the wild, Mathevon describes, among many other things, how animals communicate with their offspring, how they exchange information despite ambient noise, how sound travels underwater, how birds and mammals learn to vocalize, and even how animals express emotion though sound. Finally, Mathevon asks if these vocalization, complex and expressive as they are, amount to language.For readers who have wondered about the meaning behind a robin's song or the cicadas' relentless "tchik-tchik-tchik," this book offers a listening guide for the endlessly varied concert of nature"--]cProvided by publisher.

"A definitive reframing of the economic, institutional, and intellectual history of the managerial eraThe twentieth century was the managerial century in the United States. An organizational transformation, from entrepreneurial to managerial capitalism, brought forth what became a dominant narrative: that administrative coordination by trained professional managers is essential to the efficient running of organizations both public and private. And yet if managerialism was the apotheosis of administrative efficiency, why did both its practice and the accompanying narrative lie in ruins by the end of the century? In The Corporation and the Twentieth Century, Richard Langlois offers an alternative version: a comprehensive and nuanced reframing and reassessment of the the economic, institutional, and intellectual history of the managerial era.Langlois argues that managerialism rose to prominence not because of its inherent superiority but because of its contingent value in a young and rapidly developing American economy. The structures of managerialism solidified their dominance only because the century's great catastrophes of war, depression, and war again superseded markets, scrambled relative prices, and weakened market-supporting institutions. By the end of the twentieth century, Langlois writes, these market-supporting institutions had reemerged to shift advantage toward entrepreneurial and market-driven modes of organization.This magisterial new account of the rise and fall of managerialism holds significant implications for contemporary debates about industrial and antitrust policies and the role of the corporation in the twenty-first century"--

Leading art historians, architects, designers, artists, and urbanists share new perspectives on this visionary architect’s material legacyLina Bo Bardi (1914–1992) is renowned for her boldly modernist designs like the São Paulo Museum of Art and the culture and leisure center SESC Pompéia. An artist, architect, designer, writer, and activist, she was a tireless champion for local craft and materials. Her democratic designs were inclusive and stood as an open invitation to those typically excluded from elitist institutions, embodying an aesthetic that stood out among the modernist movement in Brazil and abroad. This collection of essays presents new perspectives on Bo Bardi from leading contemporary artists, architects, curators, and scholars. Contributors engage with the conceptual, social, and political philosophies latent in the architectural materials she chose—from her application of concrete to her implementation of nature and her reuse of vernacular materials.Beautifully illustrated and featuring seven gatefolds, Lina Bo Bardi: Material Ideologies sheds vital new light on the ideological strategies inherent in Bo Bardi’s iconic projects and lesser-known work.Distributed for the Princeton University School of Architecture

"Set amid the glimmering lakes and disappearing forests of the United States in the 1830s, The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s imagines how individuals at the time experienced their lives. Part truth, part fiction, this book follows painters, poets, enslaved individuals, farmers, and artisans through various settings. Some, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Nat Turner, Thomas Cole, and Edgar Allan Poe, are well-known; others are not. All are creators of private and grand designs, and makers of the worlds they inhabited. The Forest unfolds in brief stories. Each is an episode revealing a lost world of intricate relations: human beings going their own ways or crossing paths, in a place that is known to history, or is remote and unknown. For Alex Nemerov, the forest is a description of American society, as he writes, "the dense and discontinuous woods of nation, the foliating thoughts of different people, each with their separate life to lead." Nemerov's art history is at its center an experiment in writing, in how to write differently about visual culture. The Forest examines the history of the United States on a human scale, displaying the patterns of life alongside examples of paintings, prints, photographs and objects"--

How Brazil's long history of racism and authoritarian politics has led to the country's present crises and epidemic of violenceBrazil has long nurtured a cherished national myth, one of a tolerant, peaceful, and racially harmonious society. A closer look at the nation's heritage, however, reveals a far more troubling story. In Brazilian Authoritarianism, esteemed anthropologist and historian Lilia Schwarcz presents a provocative and panoramic overview of Brazilian culture and history to demonstrate how the nation has always been staunchly authoritarian. It has papered over centuries of racially motivated cruelty and exploitation-sources of the structural oppression experienced today by its Black and Indigenous population. Linking the country's violent past to its dire present, Schwarcz shows why the social democratic left was defeated and how Jair Bolsonaro ascended to the presidency.Schwarcz travels through five hundred years of colonial history to consider Brazil's allegiance to slavery, which made it the last country to abolish the system. She delves into eight elements that pervade Brazil's problematic culture: racism, bossism, patrimonialism, corruption, inequality, violence, gender issues, and intolerance. But Schwarcz also argues that Brazil's future is not absolutely hopeless. History is not destiny, and even as the nation experiences its worst crises ever-social, political, moral, and environmental-it has the potential to overcome them.A stark, revealing investigation into Brazil's difficult roots, Brazilian Authoritarianism shines a light on how the country might imagine a more hopeful path forward.

"The extraordinary life story of the celebrated naturalist who transformed our understanding of evolution Enchanted by Daphne is legendary ecologist Peter Grant's personal account of his remarkable life and career. In this revelatory book, Grant takes readers from his childhood in World War II-era Britain to his ongoing research today in the Galâapagos archipelago, vividly describing what it is like to do fieldwork in one of the most magnificent yet inhospitable places on Earth. This is also the story of two brilliant and courageous biologists as they raised a family together while balancing the demands of professional lives that would take them to the far corners of the globe. In 1973, Grant and his wife Rosemary embarked on a journey that would fundamentally change how we think about evolution. Over the next four decades, they visited the Galâapagos every year to observe Darwin's famous finches on the remote, uninhabited island of Daphne Major. Documenting how eighteen species have diversified from a single ancestral species, they demonstrated that we could actually see and measure evolution in a natural setting. Grant recounts the blind alleys and breathtaking triumphs of this historic research as he and Rosemary followed in Darwin's footsteps-and ushered in a new era in ecology. A wonderfully absorbing portrait of a life in science, Enchanted by Daphne is an unforgettable chronicle of the travels and discoveries of one of the world's most influential naturalists"--

Muslim intellectuals who sought to establish the boundaries of modern Muslim identity Muslim modernism was a political and intellectual movement that sought to redefine the relationship between Islam and the colonial West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Spearheaded by Muslim leaders in Asia and the Middle East, the modernist project arose from a desire to reconcile Islamic beliefs and practices with European ideas of secularism, scientific progress, women's rights, and democratic representation. Teena Purohit provides innovative readings of the foundational thinkers of Muslim modernism, showing how their calls for unity and reform led to the marginalization of Muslim minority communities that is still with us today. Sunni Chauvinism and the Roots of Muslim Modernism offers fresh perspectives on figures such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad Abduh, Muhammad Iqbal, and Abul A'la Mawdudi. It sheds light on the exclusionary impulses and Sunni normative biases of modernist Muslim writers and explores how their aim to unite the global Muslim community--which was stagnant and fragmented in their eyes--also created lasting divisions. While modernists claimed to represent all Muslims when they asserted the centrality and significance of unity, they questioned the status of groups such as Ahmadis, Bahais, and the Shia more broadly. Addressing timely questions about religious authority and reform in modern Islam, this incisive book reveals how modernist notions of Islam as a single homogeneous tradition gave rise to enduring debates about who belongs to the Muslim community and who should be excluded.

An eye-opening portrait of the gun sellers who navigated the social turmoil leading up to the January 6 Capitol attack Gun sellers sell more than just guns. They also sell politics. Merchants of the Right sheds light on the unparalleled surge in gun purchasing during one of the most dire moments in American history, revealing how conservative political culture was galvanized amid a once-in-a-century pandemic, racial unrest, and a U.S. presidential election that rocked the foundations of American democracy. Drawing on a wealth of in-depth interviews with gun sellers across the United States, Jennifer Carlson takes readers to the front lines of the culture war over gun rights. Even though the majority of gun owners are conservative, new gun buyers are more likely to be liberal than existing gun owners. This posed a dilemma to gun sellers in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election: embrace these liberal customers as part of a new, perhaps post-partisan chapter in the American gun saga or double down on gun politics as conservative terrain. Carlson describes how gun sellers mobilized mainstays of modern conservative culture--armed individualism, conspiracism, and partisanship--as they navigated the uncertainty and chaos unfolding around them, asserting gun politics as conservative politics and reworking and even rejecting liberal democracy in the process. Merchants of the Right offers crucial lessons about the dilemmas confronting us today, arguing that we must reckon with the everyday politics that divide us if we ever hope to restore American democracy to health.

Sherpas are portrayed by Westerners as heroic mountain guides, or "e;tigers of the snow,"e; as Buddhist adepts, and as a people in touch with intimate ways of life that seem no longer available in the Western world. In this book, Vincanne Adams explores how attempts to characterize an "e;authentic"e; Sherpa are complicated by Western fascination with Sherpas and by the Sherpas' desires to live up to Western portrayals of them. Noting that diplomatic aides at world summit meetings go by the name "e;Sherpa,"e; as do a van in the U.K. built for rough terrain and a software product from Silicon Valley, Adams examines the "e;authenticating"e; effects of this mobile signifier on a community of Himalayan Sherpas who live at the base of Mount Everest, Nepal, and its "e;deauthenticating"e; effects on anthropological representation.This book speaks not only to anthropologists concerned with ethnographic portrayals of Otherness but also to those working in cultural studies who are concerned with ethnographically grounded analyses of representations. Throughout Adams illustrates how one might undertake an ethnography of transnationally produced subjects by using the notion of "e;virtual"e; identities. In a manner informed by both Buddhism and shamanism, virtual Sherpas are always both real and distilled reflections of the desires that produce them.

A fun and fact-filled A-Z treasury for anyone with a head on their shouldersNeuropedia journeys into the mysteries and marvels of the three pounds of tissue between your ears-the brain. Eric Chudler takes you on a breathtaking tour of the nervous system with dozens of entries that explore the structure and function of the brain and cover topics such as the spinal cord and nerve cells, the methods of neuroscientific research, and the visionary scientists who have dedicated their lives to understanding what makes each of us who we are.The brain has fascinated and puzzled researchers, physicians, and philosophers for thousands of years and captivated us with each new discovery. This compendium of neuroscientific wonders is brimming with facts and insights, helping us to make sense of our current understanding of the nervous system while identifying the frontiers in our knowledge that remain unexplored. Chudler guides readers through a variety of rare and common neurological disorders such as alien hand disorder, Capgras syndrome, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and stroke, and discusses the latest brain-imaging methods used to diagnose them. He discusses neurochemicals, neurotoxins, and lifesaving drugs, and offers bold perspectives on human consciousness that enable us to better appreciate our place in nature.With marvelous illustrations by Kelly Chudler, Neuropedia is an informative and entertaining trip into the inner world of the brain.

The world's leading textbook on astrobiology-ideal for an introductory one-semester course and now fully revised and updatedAre we alone in the cosmos? How are scientists seeking signs of life beyond our home planet? Could we colonize other planets, moons, or even other star systems? This introductory textbook, written by a team of four renowned science communicators, educators, and researchers, tells the amazing story of how modern science is seeking the answers to these and other fascinating questions. They are the questions that are at the heart of the highly interdisciplinary field of astrobiology, the study of life in the universe.Written in an accessible, conversational style for anyone intrigued by the possibilities of life in the solar system and beyond, Life in the Universe is an ideal place to start learning about the latest discoveries and unsolved mysteries in the field. From the most recent missions to Saturn's moons and our neighboring planet Mars to revolutionary discoveries of thousands of exoplanets, from the puzzle of life's beginning on Earth to the latest efforts in the search for intelligent life elsewhere, this book captures the imagination and enriches the reader's understanding of how astronomers, planetary scientists, biologists, and other scientists make progress at the cutting edge of this dynamic field. Enriched with a wealth of engaging features, this textbook brings any citizen of the cosmos up to speed with the scientific quest to discover whether we are alone or part of a universe full of life.An acclaimed text designed to inspire students of all backgrounds to explore foundational questions about life in the cosmosCompletely revised and updated to include the latest developments in the field, including recent exploratory space missions to Mars, frontier exoplanet science, research on the origin of life on Earth, and moreEnriched with helpful learning aids, including in-chapter Think about It questions, optional Do the Math and Special Topic boxes, Movie Madness boxes, end-of-chapter exercises and problems, quick quizzes, and much moreSupported by instructor's resources, including an illustration package and test bank, available upon request

Focusing on the art of Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904) and his colleagues Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Frederic Bazille, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Fellow Men argues for the importance of the group as a defining subject of nineteenth-century French painting. Through close readings of some of the most ambitious paintings of the realist and impressionist generation, Bridget Alsdorf offers new insights into how French painters understood the shifting boundaries of their social world, and reveals the fragile masculine bonds that made up the avant-garde.A dedicated realist who veered between extremes of sociability and hermetic isolation, Fantin-Latour painted group dynamics over the course of two decades, from 1864 to 1885. This was a period of dramatic change in French history and art--events like the Paris Commune and the rise and fall of impressionism raised serious doubts about the power of collectivism in art and life. Fantin-Latour's monumental group portraits, and related works by his friends and colleagues from the 1850s through the 1880s, represent varied visions of collective identity and test the limits of association as both a social and an artistic pursuit. By examining the bonds and frictions that animated their social circles, Fantin-Latour and his cohorts developed a new pictorial language for the modern group: one of fragmentation, exclusion, and willful withdrawal into interior space that nonetheless presented individuality as radically relational.

Ambitious Form describes the transformation of Italian sculpture during the neglected half century between the death of Michelangelo and the rise of Bernini. The book follows the Florentine careers of three major sculptors--Giambologna, Bartolomeo Ammanati, and Vincenzo Danti--as they negotiated the politics of the Medici court and eyed one another's work, setting new aims for their art in the process. Only through a comparative look at Giambologna and his contemporaries, it argues, can we understand them individually--or understand the period in which they worked. Michael Cole shows how the concerns of central Italian artists changed during the last decades of the Cinquecento. Whereas their predecessors had focused on specific objects and on the particularities of materials, late sixteenth-century sculptors turned their attention to models and design. The iconic figure gave way to the pose, individualized characters to abstractions. Above all, the multiplicity of master crafts that had once divided sculptors into those who fashioned gold or bronze or stone yielded to a more unifying aspiration, as nearly every ambitious sculptor, whatever his training, strove to become an architect.

A groundbreaking account of the role of writing in Michelangelo's artMichelangelo is best known for great artistic achievements such as the Sistine ceiling, the David, the Pieta, and the dome of St. Peter's. Yet throughout his seventy-five year career, he was engaged in another artistic act that until now has been largely overlooked: he not only filled hundreds of sheets of paper with exquisite drawings, sketches, and doodles, but also, on fully a third of these sheets, composed his own words. Here we can read the artist's marginal notes to his most enduring masterpieces; workaday memos to assistants and pupils; poetry and letters; and achingly personal expressions of ambition and despair surely meant for nobody's eyes but his own. Michelangelo: A Life on Paper is the first book to examine this intriguing interplay of words and images, providing insight into his life and work as never before.This sumptuous volume brings together more than two hundred stunning, museum-quality reproductions of Michelangelo's most private papers, many in color. Accompanying them is Leonard Barkan's vivid narrative, which explains the important role the written word played in the artist's monumental public output. What emerges is a wealth of startling juxtapositions: perfectly inscribed sonnets and tantalizing fragments, such as "e;Have patience, love me, sufficient consolation"e;; careful notations listing money spent for chickens, oxen, and funeral rites for the artist's father; a beautiful drawing of a Madonna and child next to a mock love poem that begins, "e;You have a face sweeter than boiled grape juice, and a snail seems to have passed over it."e; Magnificently illustrated and superbly detailed, this book provides a rare and intimate look at how Michelangelo's artistic genius expressed itself in words as well as pictures.

The fascinating history of the twentieth century's most successful experiment in mass housingWhile the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, and their contemporaries frequently influences our ideas about house design at the midcentury, most Americans during this period lived in homes built by little-known builders who also served as developers of the communities. Often dismissed as "e;little boxes, made of ticky-tacky,"e; the tract houses of America's postwar suburbs represent the twentieth century's most successful experiment in mass housing. Houses for a New World is the first comprehensive history of this uniquely American form of domestic architecture and urbanism.Between 1945 and 1965, more than thirteen million houses-most of them in new ranch and split-level styles-were constructed on large expanses of land outside city centers, providing homes for the country's rapidly expanding population. Focusing on twelve developments in the suburbs of Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles, Barbara Miller Lane tells the story of the collaborations between builders and buyers, showing how both wanted houses and communities that espoused a modern way of life-informal, democratic, multiethnic, and devoted to improving the lives of their children. The resulting houses differed dramatically from both the European International Style and older forms of American domestic architecture.Based on a decade of original research, and accompanied by hundreds of historical images, plans, and maps, this book presents an entirely new interpretation of the American suburb. The result is a fascinating history of houses and developments that continue to shape how tens of millions of Americans live.Featured housing developments in Houses for a New World:Boston area:Governor Francis Farms (Warwick, RI)Wethersfield (Natick, MA)Brookfield (Brockton, MA)Chicago area:Greenview Estates (Arlington Heights, IL)Elk Grove VillageRolling MeadowsWeathersfield at SchaumburgLos Angeles and Orange County area:Cinderella Homes (Anaheim, CA)Panorama City (Los Angeles)Rossmoor (Los Alamitos, CA)Philadelphia area:Lawrence Park (Broomall, PA)Rose Tree Woods (Broomall, PA)

The first history of Frank Lloyd Wright's exhibitions of his own work-a practice central to his careerMore than one hundred exhibitions of Frank Lloyd Wright's work were mounted between 1894 and his death in 1959. Wright organized the majority of these exhibitions himself and viewed them as crucial to his self-presentation as his extensive writings. He used them to promote his designs, appeal to new viewers, and persuade his detractors. Wright on Exhibit presents the first history of this neglected aspect of the architect's influential career.Drawing extensively from Wright's unpublished correspondence, Kathryn Smith challenges the preconceived notion of Wright as a self-promoter who displayed his work in search of money, clients, and fame. She shows how he was an artist-architect projecting an avant-garde program, an innovator who expanded the palette of installation design as technology evolved, and a social activist driven to revolutionize society through design. While Wright's earliest exhibitions were largely for other architects, by the 1930s he was creating public installations intended to inspire debate and change public perceptions about architecture. The nature of his exhibitions expanded with the times beyond models, drawings, and photographs to include more immersive tools such as slides, film, and even a full-scale structure built especially for his 1953 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum. Placing Wright's exhibitions side by side with his writings, Smith shows how integral these exhibitions were to his vision and sheds light on the broader discourse concerning architecture and modernism during the first half of the twentieth century.Wright on Exhibit features color renderings, photos, and plans, as well as a checklist of exhibitions and an illustrated catalog of extant and lost models made under Wright's supervision.

Enduring lessons from the desert soundscapes that shaped the Christian monastic traditionFor the hermits and communal monks of antiquity, the desert was a place to flee the cacophony of ordinary life in order to hear and contemplate the voice of God. But these monks discovered something surprising in their harsh desert surroundings: far from empty and silent, the desert is richly reverberant. Sonorous Desert shares the stories and sayings of these ancient spiritual seekers, tracing how the ambient sounds of wind, thunder, water, and animals shaped the emergence and development of early Christian monasticism.Kim Haines-Eitzen draws on ancient monastic texts from Egypt, Sinai, and Palestine to explore how noise offered desert monks an opportunity to cultivate inner quietude, and shows how the desert quests of ancient monastics offer profound lessons for us about what it means to search for silence. Drawing on her own experiences making field recordings in the deserts of North America and Israel, she reveals how mountains, canyons, caves, rocky escarpments, and lush oases are deeply resonant places. Haines-Eitzen discusses how the desert is a place of paradoxes, both silent and noisy, pulling us toward contemplative isolation yet giving rise to vibrant collectives of fellow seekers.Accompanied by Haines-Eitzen's evocative audio recordings of desert environments, Sonorous Desert reveals how desert sounds taught ancient monks about solitude, silence, and the life of community, and how they can help us understand ourselves if we slow down and listen.

The most authoritative and up-to-date core econometrics textbook availableEconometrics is the quantitative language of economic theory, analysis, and empirical work, and it has become a cornerstone of graduate economics programs. Econometrics provides graduate and PhD students with an essential introduction to this foundational subject in economics and serves as an invaluable reference for researchers and practitioners. This comprehensive textbook teaches fundamental concepts, emphasizes modern, real-world applications, and gives students an intuitive understanding of econometrics.Covers the full breadth of econometric theory and methods with mathematical rigor while emphasizing intuitive explanations that are accessible to students of all backgroundsDraws on integrated, research-level datasets, provided on an accompanying websiteDiscusses linear econometrics, time series, panel data, nonparametric methods, nonlinear econometric models, and modern machine learningFeatures hundreds of exercises that enable students to learn by doingIncludes in-depth appendices on matrix algebra and useful inequalities and a wealth of real-world examplesCan serve as a core textbook for a first-year PhD course in econometrics and as a follow-up to Bruce E. Hansen's Probability and Statistics for Economists

A comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to the mathematics that all economics students need to knowProbability theory is the quantitative language used to handle uncertainty and is the foundation of modern statistics. Probability and Statistics for Economists provides graduate and PhD students with an essential introduction to mathematical probability and statistical theory, which are the basis of the methods used in econometrics. This incisive textbook teaches fundamental concepts, emphasizes modern, real-world applications, and gives students an intuitive understanding of the mathematics that every economist needs to know.Covers probability and statistics with mathematical rigor while emphasizing intuitive explanations that are accessible to economics students of all backgroundsDiscusses random variables, parametric and multivariate distributions, sampling, the law of large numbers, central limit theory, maximum likelihood estimation, numerical optimization, hypothesis testing, and moreFeatures hundreds of exercises that enable students to learn by doingIncludes an in-depth appendix summarizing important mathematical results as well as a wealth of real-world examplesCan serve as a core textbook for a first-semester PhD course in econometrics and as a companion book to Bruce E. Hansen's EconometricsAlso an invaluable reference for researchers and practitioners

An iconoclastic history of the first two decades after independence in IndiaNehru's India brings a provocative but nuanced set of new interpretations to the history of early independent India. Drawing from her extensive research over the past two decades, Taylor Sherman reevaluates the role of Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, in shaping the nation. She argues that the notion of Nehru as the architect of independent India, as well as the ideas, policies, and institutions most strongly associated with his premiership-nonalignment, secularism, socialism, democracy, the strong state, and high modernism-have lost their explanatory power. They have become myths.Sherman examines seminal projects from the time and also introduces readers to little-known personalities and fresh case studies, including India's continued engagement with overseas Indians, the importance of Buddhism in secular India, the transformations in industry and social life brought about by bicycles, a riotous and ultimately doomed attempt to prohibit the consumption of alcohol in Bombay, the early history of election campaign finance, and the first state-sponsored art exhibitions. The author also shines a light on underappreciated individuals, such as Apa Pant, the charismatic diplomat who influenced foreign policy from Kenya to Tibet, and Urmila Eulie Chowdhury, the rebellious architect who helped oversee the building of Chandigarh.Tracing and critiquing developments in this formative period in Indian history, Nehru's India offers a fresh and definitive exploration of the nation's early postcolonial era.