In four elegant chapters, Robert Alter explains the prismlike radiance created by the association of three modern masters: Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and Gershom Scholem. The volume pinpoints the intersections of these divergent witnesses to the modern condition of doubt, the no-man’s-land between traditional religion and modern secular culture.

Scholem, the devoted Zionist and master historian of Jewish mysticism, and Benjamin, the Marxist cultural critic, dedicated much of their thought and correspondence to Kafka, the explorer in fiction of radical alienation. Kafka’s sense of spiritual complexities was an inspiration to both thinkers in their resistance to the murderous simplification of totalitarian ideology. In Necessary Angels, Alter uncovers a moment when the future of modernism is revealed in its preoccupation with the past. The angel of the title is first Kafka’s: on June 25, 1914, the writer recorded in his diary a dream vision of an angel that turned into the painted wooden figurehead of a ship. In 1940, at the end of his life, Walter Benjamin devoted the ninth of his Theses on the Philosophy of History to a meditation on an angel by the artist Paul Klee, first quoting a poem he had written on that painting. In Benjamin’s vision, the figure from Klee becomes an angel of history, sucked into the future by the storm of progress, his face looking back to Eden. Benjamin bequeathed the Klee oil painting to Scholem; it hung in the living room of Scholem’s home on Abarbanel Street in Jerusalem until 1989, when his widow placed it in the Israel Museum.

Alter’s focus on the epiphanic force of memory on these three great modernists shows with sometimes startling, sometimes prophetic clarity that a complete break with tradition is not essential to modernism. Necessary Angels itself continues the necessary discovery of the future in the past.

A berserk elephant gunned down in the heart of London, a machine for composing Latin hexameters, and the original rock band (1841)—these are but three of the sights that London curiosity–seekers from every walk of life paid to see from the Elizabethan era to the mid–Victorian period. Examining hundreds of the wonderfully varied exhibitions that culminated in the Crystal Palace of 1851, this generously illustrated book sheds light on a vast and colorful expanse of English social history that has thus far remained wholly unsurveyed.

Drawing on a wealth of never-before-used information, Mr. Altick traces London exhibitions as they evolved from the display of relics in pre-Reformation churches, through the collections of eighteenth-century virtuosi, to the first science museums and public art galleries. He also narrates for the first time the history of the panorama and diorama as an influential genre of nineteenth-century popular art. At every point, the London shows are linked to the prevailing intellectual atmosphere and to trends in public taste.

The material is fresh and fascinating; the range--from freaks to popular science, from the funeral effigies at Westminster Abbey to Madame Tussaud's waxworks--impressive. Like the exhibitions that best served the Victorian ideal of mass culture, The Shows of London is both entertaining and informative.

The medicinal properties of plants have been of interest to society for centuries and continue to be a subject of modern research. Yet too often research has been predicated upon poorly identified plant material and secondary sources of information. Much of what we know about the use of plants as drugs, poisons, foods, and as instruments of magical or religious practice derives from lore inherited from the clay tablets and papyri of the ancients and from compilations of early Greek, Arabic, and Indian physicians. Meanwhile, information pertaining to plant parts used even now in the daily life of peoples far removed from the influence of modern medical and health practices has been largely overlooked.

With the encroachment of civilized cultures on primitive societies, unique traditions—often unwritten—are being destroyed. In many instances, the very plants involved are disappearing. Not infrequently, the only record, where one exists at all, of these vanishing pools of knowledge is that of the botanical field worker. For no matter what chemical or biological investigations may follow, the botanist can affix to an actual specimen, as he collects it in the field, the local terms applied to the plant and a description of native medicinal or other uses.

Dr. Altschul has compiled field notes of health and medical interest on over 5,000 species of plants, culled from some 2,500,000 specimens of higher plants collected by field botanists from all over the world and deposited in the combined collections of the Arnold Arboretum and Gray Herbarium of Harvard University. The resulting catalogue represents a unique approach to supplying new investigational leads to researchers seeking biologically active plant principles. Dr. Altschul's meticulous sheet&ndashby–sheet examination of the Harvard collections provides the pharmacognosist, pharmacologist, and others in the medical and health sciences with an extensive firsthand survey of the domestic medicines of many cultures.

These previously unpublished botanists' notes are here made available in a comprehensive publication that should become an important resource for every investigation into the area of medicinal phytochemistry. Indexes to families and genera are provided, as well as a medical index referring to diseases and to therapeutic properties for researchers intent on locating plants with special medicinal capacities. The author is a Research Fellow at the Botanical Museum of Harvard University.

World Inequality Report 2018 is the most authoritative and up-to-date account of global trends in inequality. Researched, compiled, and written by a team of the world’s leading economists of inequality, it presents—with unrivaled clarity and depth—information and analysis that will be vital to policy makers and scholars everywhere.

Inequality has taken center stage in public debate as the wealthiest people in most parts of the world have seen their share of the economy soar relative to that of others, many of whom, especially in the West, have experienced stagnation. The resulting political and social pressures have posed harsh new challenges for governments and created a pressing demand for reliable data. The World Inequality Lab at the Paris School of Economics and the University of California, Berkeley, has answered this call by coordinating research into the latest trends in the accumulation and distribution of income and wealth on every continent. This inaugural report analyzes the Lab’s findings, which include data from major countries where information has traditionally been difficult to acquire, such as China, India, and Brazil. Among nations, inequality has been decreasing as traditionally poor countries’ economies have caught up with the West. The report shows, however, that inequality has been steadily deepening within almost every nation, though national trajectories vary, suggesting the importance of institutional and policy frameworks in shaping inequality.

World Inequality Report 2018 will be a key document for anyone concerned about one of the most imperative and contentious subjects in contemporary politics and economics.

From an eminent and provocative historian, a wrenching parable of the ravages of colonialism in the South Pacific.

Countless museums in the West have been criticized for their looted treasures, but few as trenchantly as the Humboldt Forum, which displays predominantly non-Western art and artifacts in a modern reconstruction of the former Royal Palace in Berlin. The Forum’s premier attraction, an ornately decorated fifteen-meter boat from the island of Luf in modern-day Papua New Guinea, was acquired under the most dubious circumstances by Max Thiel, a German trader, in 1902 after two decades of bloody German colonial expeditions in Oceania.

Götz Aly tells the story of the German pillaging of Luf and surrounding islands, a campaign of violence in which Berlin ethnologists were brazenly complicit. In the aftermath, the majestic vessel was sold to the Ethnological Museum in the imperial capital, where it has remained ever since. In Aly’s vivid telling, the looted boat is a portal to a forgotten chapter in the history of empire—the conquest of the Bismarck Archipelago. One of these islands was even called Aly, in honor of the author’s great-granduncle, Gottlob Johannes Aly, a naval chaplain who served aboard ships that helped subjugate the South Sea islands Germany colonized.

While acknowledging the complexity of cultural ownership debates, Götz Aly boldly questions the legitimacy of allowing so many treasures from faraway, conquered places to remain located in the West. Through the story of one emblematic object, The Magnificent Boat artfully illuminates a sphere of colonial brutality of which too few are aware today.

Inked is a social history of common soldiers of the Song Dynasty, most of whom would have been recognized by their tattooed bodies. Overlooked in the historical record, tattoos were an indelible aspect of the Song world, and their ubiquity was tied to the rise of the penal–military complex, a vast system for social control, warfare, and labor.

Although much has been written about the institutional, strategic, and political aspects of the history of the Song and its military, this book is a first-of-its-kind investigation into the lives of the people who fought for the state. Elad Alyagon examines the army as a meeting place between marginalized social groups and elites. In the process, he shows the military to be a space where a new criminalized lower class was molded in a constant struggle between common soldiers and the agents of the Song state. For the millions of people caught in the orbit of this system—the tattooed soldiers, their families, and their neighbors—the Song period was no age of benevolence, but one of servitude, violence, and resistance. Inked is their story.

Amalar of Metz’s On the Liturgy (the Liber officialis, or De ecclesiastico officio) was one of the most widely read and circulated texts of the Carolingian era. The fruit of lifelong reflection and study in the wake of liturgical reform in the early ninth century, Amalar’s commentary inaugurated the Western medieval tradition of allegorical liturgical exegesis and has bequeathed a wealth of information about the contents and conduct of the early medieval Mass and Office. In 158 chapters divided into four books, On the Liturgy addresses the entire phenomenon of Christian worship, from liturgical prayers to clerical vestments to the bodily gestures of the celebrants. For Amalar, this liturgical diversity aimed, above all, to commemorate the life of Christ, to provide the Christian faithful with moral instruction, and to recall Old Testament precursors of Christian rites. To uncover these layers of meaning, Amalar employed interpretive techniques and ideas that he had inherited from the patristic tradition of biblical exegesis—a novel approach that proved both deeply popular and, among his contemporaries, highly controversial.

This volume adapts the text of Jean Michel Hanssens’s monumental 1948 edition of Amalar’s treatise and provides the first complete translation into a modern language.

Amalar of Metz’s On the Liturgy (the Liber officialis, or De ecclesiastico officio) was one of the most widely read and circulated texts of the Carolingian era. The fruit of lifelong reflection and study in the wake of liturgical reform in the early ninth century, Amalar’s commentary inaugurated the Western medieval tradition of allegorical liturgical exegesis and has bequeathed a wealth of information about the contents and conduct of the early medieval Mass and Office. In 158 chapters divided into four books, On the Liturgy addresses the entire phenomenon of Christian worship, from liturgical prayers to clerical vestments to the bodily gestures of the celebrants. For Amalar, this liturgical diversity aimed, above all, to commemorate the life of Christ, to provide the Christian faithful with moral instruction, and to recall Old Testament precursors of Christian rites. To uncover these layers of meaning, Amalar employed interpretive techniques and ideas that he had inherited from the patristic tradition of biblical exegesis—a novel approach that proved both deeply popular and, among his contemporaries, highly controversial.

This volume adapts the text of Jean Michel Hanssens’s monumental 1948 edition of Amalar’s treatise and provides the first complete translation into a modern language.

The indigenous Bedouin Arab population in the Naqab/Negev desert in Israel has experienced a history of displacement, intense political conflict, and cultural disruption, along with recent rapid modernization, forced urbanization, and migration. This volume of essays highlights international, national, and comparative law perspectives and explores the legal and human rights dimensions of land, planning, and housing issues, as well as the economic, social, and cultural rights of indigenous peoples. Within this context, the essays examine the various dimensions of the “negotiations” between the Bedouin Arab population and the State of Israel.

Indigenous (In)Justice locates the discussion of the Naqab/Negev question within the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict and within key international debates among legal scholars and human rights advocates, including the application of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the formalization of traditional property rights, and the utility of restorative and reparative justice approaches. Leading international scholars and professionals, including the current United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women and the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, are among the contributors to this volume.

Composed in Germany by a monastic poet steeped in classical lore and letters, the Satires of Amarcius (Sextus Amarcius Gallus Piosistratus) unrelentingly attack both secular vices and ecclesiastical abuses of the late eleventh century. The verses echo Horace and Prudentius, are laced with proverbs and polemic, and portray vividly aspects of contemporary life—the foppery of young nobles, the vainglory of the nouveaux riches, the fastidiousness of debauched gluttons. This is the first English translation of the Satires.

The Eupolemius is a late-eleventh-century Latin epic that recasts salvation history, from Lucifer’s fall through Christ’s resurrection. The poem fuses Greek and Hebrew components within a uniquely medieval framework. At once biblical, heroic, and allegorical, it complements the so-called Bible epics in Latin from late antiquity and the refashionings of biblical narrative in Old English verse. It emulates classical Latin epics by Virgil, Lucan, and Statius and responds creatively to the foundational personification allegory by the Christian poet Prudentius. The poem was composed by an anonymous German monk, possibly the author who used the pseudonym Amarcius. Although it focuses on events of both the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, it is also rooted in its own momentous times.

Just what do we know about the current generation of young Americans? So little it seems that we have dubbed them Generation X. Coming of age in the 1980s and '90s, they hail from families in flux, from an intimate landscape changing faster and more profoundly than ever before. This book is the first to give us a clear, close-up picture of these young Americans and to show how they have been affected and formed by the tremendous domestic changes of the last three decades.

How have members of this generation fared at school and at work, as they have moved into the world and formed families of their own? Do their struggles or successes reflect the turbulence of their time? These are the questions A Generation at Risk answers in comprehensive detail. Based on a unique fifteen-year study begun in 1980, the book considers parents' socioeconomic resources, their gender roles and relations, and the quality and stability of their marriages. It then examines children's relations with their parents, their intimate and broader social affiliations, and their psychological well-being. The authors provide rare insight into how both familial and historical contexts affect young people as they make the transition to adulthood.

Perhaps surprising is the authors' finding that, in this era of shifting gender roles, children who grow up in traditional father-breadwinner, mother-homemaker families and those in more egalitarian, role-sharing families apparently turn out the same. Also striking are the beneficial influence of parental education on children and the troubling long-term impact of marital conflict and divorce--an outcome that prompts the authors to suggest policy measures that encourage marital quality and stability.

Most observers agree that marriage in America has been changing. Some think it is in decline, that the growth of individualism has made it increasingly difficult to achieve satisfying and stable relationships. Others believe that changes, such as increasing gender equality, have made marriage a better arrangement for men as well as women.

Based on two studies of marital quality in America twenty years apart, this book takes a middle view, showing that while the divorce rate has leveled off, spouses are spending less time together—people may be “bowling alone” these days, but married couples are also eating alone. Indeed, the declining social capital of married couples—including the fact that couples have fewer shared friends—combined with the general erosion of community ties in American society has had pervasive, negative effects on marital quality.

At the same time, family income has increased, decision-making equality between husbands and wives is greater, marital conflict and violence have declined, and the norm of lifelong marriage enjoys greater support than ever.

The authors conclude that marriage is an adaptable institution, and in accommodating the vast changes that have occurred in society over the recent past, it has become a less cohesive, yet less confining arrangement.

Towering over the Kanto Plain, the sacred mountain Ōyama (literally, “Big Mountain”) has loomed large over the religious landscape of early modern Japan.

By the Edo period (1600–1868), the revered peak had undergone a transformation from secluded spiritual retreat to popular pilgrimage destination. Its status as a regional landmark among its devotees was boosted by its proximity to the shogunal capital and the wide appeal of its amalgamation of Buddhism, Shinto, mountain asceticism, and folk beliefs. The influence of the Ōyama cult—the intersecting beliefs, practices, and infrastructure associated with the sacred site—was not lost on the ruling Tokugawa shogunate, which saw in the pilgrimage an opportunity to reinforce the communal ideals and social structures that the authorities espoused.

Barbara Ambros provides a detailed narrative history of the mountain and its place in contemporary society and popular religion by focusing on the development of the Ōyama cult and its religious, political, and socioeconomic contexts. Richly illustrated and carefully researched, this study emphasizes the importance of “site” or “region” in considering the multifaceted nature and complex history of religious practice in Tokugawa Japan.

In the decades since the end of the Second World War, the unification of Europe has been a subject of enormous importance and tension to politicians, citizens, and scholars. Yet lacking the basic demographic, economic, and social data that would provide a fuller picture of what this integration will involve, the debate has produced more heat than light.

This book, the most comprehensive single-volume source of information available on the social and economic transformations in Europe over the past hundred years, fills that critical gap in our knowledge. In its pages we find examinations of population trends (including growth, mortality, national and international migration, and fertility), social structures (work, income, lifestyle, consumer patterns, welfare programs), and economic structures (agriculture, industry, and services), and an integrative overview of changes in both the organization of the economy and the role of the state in economic management. Paying particular attention to the period since 1950, the authors summarize the developmental paths of the four socioeconomic regions of Europe.The data and analyses provided here make this book an invaluable resource to professionals and scholars in a wide range of fields, from history, politics, and economics to journalism and international business.

Advanced Econometrics is both a comprehensive text for graduate students and a reference work for econometricians. It will also be valuable to those doing statistical analysis in the other social sciences. Its main features are a thorough treatment of cross-section models, including qualitative response models, censored and truncated regression models, and Markov and duration models, as well as a rigorous presentation of large sample theory, classical least-squares and generalized least-squares theory, and nonlinear simultaneous equation models.

Although the treatment is mathematically rigorous, the author has employed the theorem-proof method with simple, intuitively accessible assumptions. This enables readers to understand the basic structure of each theorem and to generalize it for themselves depending on their needs and abilities. Many simple applications of theorems are given either in the form of examples in the text or as exercises at the end of each chapter in order to demonstrate their essential points.

This outstanding text by a foremost econometrician combines instruction in probability and statistics with econometrics in a rigorous but relatively nontechnical manner. Unlike many statistics texts, it discusses regression analysis in depth. And unlike many econometrics texts, it offers a thorough treatment of statistics. Although its only mathematical requirement is multivariate calculus, it challenges the student to think deeply about basic concepts.

The coverage of probability and statistics includes best prediction and best linear prediction, the joint distribution of a continuous and discrete random variable, large sample theory, and the properties of the maximum likelihood estimator. Exercises at the end of each chapter reinforce the many illustrative examples and diagrams. Believing that students should acquire the habit of questioning conventional statistical techniques, Takeshi Amemiya discusses the problem of choosing estimators and compares various criteria for ranking them. He also evaluates classical hypothesis testing critically, giving the realistic case of testing a composite null against a composite alternative. He frequently adopts a Bayesian approach because it provides a useful pedagogical framework for discussing many fundamental issues in statistical inference.

Turning to regression, Amemiya presents the classical bivariate model in the conventional summation notation. He follows with a brief introduction to matrix analysis and multiple regression in matrix notation. Finally, he describes various generalizations of the classical regression model and certain other statistical models extensively used in econometrics and other applications in social science.

In contemporary discussions of abortion, both sides argue well-worn positions, particularly concerning the question, When does human life begin? Though often invoked by the Catholic Church for support, Thomas Aquinas in fact held that human life begins after conception, not at the moment of union. But his overall thinking on questions of how humans come into being, and cease to be, is more subtle than either side in this polarized debate imagines. Fabrizio Amerini—an internationally-renowned scholar of medieval philosophy—does justice to Aquinas’ views on these controversial issues.

Some pro-life proponents hold that Aquinas’ position is simply due to faulty biological knowledge, and if he knew what we know today about embryology, he would agree that human life begins at conception. Others argue that nothing Aquinas could learn from modern biology would have changed his mind. Amerini follows the twists and turns of Aquinas’ thinking to reach a nuanced and detailed solution in the final chapters that will unsettle familiar assumptions and arguments.

Systematically examining all the pertinent texts and placing each in historical context, Amerini provides an accurate reconstruction of Aquinas’ account of the beginning and end of human life and assesses its bioethical implications for today. This major contribution is available to an English-speaking audience through translation by Mark Henninger, himself a noted scholar of medieval philosophy.

In 1834 Harvard dropout Richard Henry Dana Jr. sailed to California as a common seaman. His account of the voyage, Two Years Before the Mast, quickly became an American classic. But literary acclaim could not erase the young lawyer’s memory of the brutal floggings he had witnessed aboard ship or undermine the vow he had made to combat injustice. In Slavish Shore, Jeffrey Amestoy tells the story of Dana’s unflagging determination to keep that vow in the face of nineteenth-century America’s most exclusive establishment: the Boston society in which he had been born and bred.

The drama of Dana’s life arises from the unresolved tension between the Brahmin he was expected to be on shore and the man he had become at sea. Dana’s sense of justice made him a lawyer who championed sailors and slaves, and his extraordinary advocacy put him at the center of some of the most consequential cases in American history: defending fugitive slave Anthony Burns, justifying President Lincoln’s war powers before the Supreme Court, and prosecuting Confederate president Jefferson Davis for treason. Yet Dana’s own promising political career remained unfulfilled as he struggled to reconcile his rigorous conscience with his restless spirit in public controversy and private life.

The first full-length biography of Dana in more than half a century, Slavish Shore reintroduces readers to one of America’s most zealous defenders of freedom and human dignity.

“God necessarily exists, since it is not possible for things to be otherwise, as Aristotle shows in the Metaphysics.” So Mehmed II, the Ottoman conqueror of both Constantinople and Trebizond, tells George Amiroutzes, the Byzantine scholar and native of Trebizond, in the beginning of a conversation reported in Amiroutzes’s dialogue The Philosopher, or On Faith.

The dialogue is a literary recreation of the conversations between Mehmed, a Muslim, and Amiroutzes, a Christian. In the course of The Philosopher, the two debate the role of logic and rationality in religious debate, the nature of God, and the fate of the body and soul in the afterlife. Surprisingly complex and subtle arguments emerge, firmly situated in their fifteenth-century context but steeped in the long Greek philosophical tradition.

Previously known only from a sixteenth-century Latin translation, The Philosopher was rediscovered in a Greek manuscript in Toledo. In this volume, John Monfasani presents both the editio princeps and the first translation from the Greek, with an introduction that discusses the life of Amiroutzes and the text, the text and translation with full apparatus and notes, and two appendixes that present documents related to the relationship between Amiroutzes and Mehmed.

A soldier’s chronicle of Rome in decline.

Ammianus Marcellinus (ca. AD 325–ca. 395), a Greek of Antioch, joined the army when still young and served under the governor Ursicinus and the emperor of the East Constantius II, and later under the emperor Julian, whom he admired and accompanied against the Alamanni and the Persians. He subsequently settled in Rome, where he wrote in Latin a history of the Roman empire in the period AD 96–378, entitled Rerum Gestarum Libri XXXI. Of these 31 books only 14–31 (AD 353–378) survive, a remarkably accurate and impartial record of his own times. Soldier though he was, he includes economic and social affairs. He was broadminded towards non-Romans and towards Christianity. We get from him clear indications of causes of the fall of the Roman empire. His style indicates that his prose was intended for recitation.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Ammianus Marcellinus is in three volumes.

A soldier’s chronicle of Rome in decline.

Ammianus Marcellinus (ca. AD 325–ca. 395), a Greek of Antioch, joined the army when still young and served under the governor Ursicinus and the emperor of the East Constantius II, and later under the emperor Julian, whom he admired and accompanied against the Alamanni and the Persians. He subsequently settled in Rome, where he wrote in Latin a history of the Roman empire in the period AD 96–378, entitled Rerum Gestarum Libri XXXI. Of these 31 books only 14–31 (AD 353–378) survive, a remarkably accurate and impartial record of his own times. Soldier though he was, he includes economic and social affairs. He was broadminded towards non-Romans and towards Christianity. We get from him clear indications of causes of the fall of the Roman empire. His style indicates that his prose was intended for recitation.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Ammianus Marcellinus is in three volumes.

A soldier’s chronicle of Rome in decline.

Ammianus Marcellinus (ca. AD 325–ca. 395), a Greek of Antioch, joined the army when still young and served under the governor Ursicinus and the emperor of the East Constantius II, and later under the emperor Julian, whom he admired and accompanied against the Alamanni and the Persians. He subsequently settled in Rome, where he wrote in Latin a history of the Roman empire in the period AD 96–378, entitled Rerum Gestarum Libri XXXI. Of these 31 books only 14–31 (AD 353–378) survive, a remarkably accurate and impartial record of his own times. Soldier though he was, he includes economic and social affairs. He was broadminded towards non-Romans and towards Christianity. We get from him clear indications of causes of the fall of the Roman empire. His style indicates that his prose was intended for recitation.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Ammianus Marcellinus is in three volumes.

The Indian Ocean was global long before the Atlantic, and today the countries bordering the Bay of Bengal—India, Bangladesh, Burma, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Malaysia—are home to one in four people on Earth. Crossing the Bay of Bengal places this region at the heart of world history for the first time. Integrating human and environmental history, and mining a wealth of sources, Sunil Amrith gives a revelatory and stirring new account of the Bay and those who have inhabited it.

For centuries the Bay of Bengal served as a maritime highway between India and China, and then as a battleground for European empires, all while being shaped by the monsoons and by human migration. Imperial powers in the nineteenth century, abetted by the force of capital and the power of steam, reconfigured the Bay in their quest for coffee, rice, and rubber. Millions of Indian migrants crossed the sea, bound by debt or spurred by drought, and filled with ambition. Booming port cities like Singapore and Penang became the most culturally diverse societies of their time. By the 1930s, however, economic, political, and environmental pressures began to erode the Bay’s centuries-old patterns of interconnection.

Today, rising waters leave the Bay of Bengal’s shores especially vulnerable to climate change, at the same time that its location makes it central to struggles over Asia’s future. Amrith’s evocative and compelling narrative of the region’s pasts offers insights critical to understanding and confronting the many challenges facing Asia in the decades ahead.

In this remarkable collaboration, one of the nation's leading civil rights lawyers joins forces with one of the world's foremost cultural psychologists to put American constitutional law into an American cultural context. By close readings of key Supreme Court opinions, they show how storytelling tactics and deeply rooted mythic structures shape the Court's decisions about race, family law, and the death penalty.



Minding the Law explores crucial psychological processes involved in the work of lawyers and judges: deciding whether particular cases fit within a legal rule ("categorizing"), telling stories to justify one's claims or undercut those of an adversary ("narrative"), and tailoring one's language to be persuasive without appearing partisan ("rhetorics"). Because these processes are not unique to the law, courts' decisions cannot rest solely upon legal logic but must also depend vitally upon the underlying culture's storehouse of familiar tales of heroes and villains.

But a culture's stock of stories is not changeless.



Amsterdam and Bruner argue that culture itself is a dialectic constantly in progress, a conflict between the established canon and newly imagined "possible worlds." They illustrate the swings of this dialectic by a masterly analysis of the Supreme Court's race-discrimination decisions during the past century.



A passionate plea for heightened consciousness about the way law is practiced and made, Minding the Law will be welcomed by a new generation concerned with renewing law's commitment to a humane justice.

What should be the place of Shari‘a—Islamic religious law—in predominantly Muslim societies of the world? In this ambitious and topical book, a Muslim scholar and human rights activist envisions a positive and sustainable role for Shari‘a, based on a profound rethinking of the relationship between religion and the secular state in all societies.

An-Na‘im argues that the coercive enforcement of Shari‘a by the state betrays the Qur’an’s insistence on voluntary acceptance of Islam. Just as the state should be secure from the misuse of religious authority, Shari‘a should be freed from the control of the state. State policies or legislation must be based on civic reasons accessible to citizens of all religions. Showing that throughout the history of Islam, Islam and the state have normally been separate, An-Na‘im maintains that ideas of human rights and citizenship are more consistent with Islamic principles than with claims of a supposedly Islamic state to enforce Shari‘a. In fact, he suggests, the very idea of an “Islamic state” is based on European ideas of state and law, and not Shari‘a or the Islamic tradition.

Bold, pragmatic, and deeply rooted in Islamic history and theology, Islam and the Secular State offers a workable future for the place of Shari‘a in Muslim societies.

In the early 1990s, South Korea was showcased as a country that had combined extraordinary economic growth with a narrowing of income distribution, achieving remarkably low rates of unemployment and poverty. In the years following the financial crisis of 1997–1998, however, these rates ballooned to pre-crisis levels, giving rise to the perception that the gap between the rich and the poor in Korea had once again widened.

Income Inequality in Korea explores the relationship between economic growth and social developments in Korea over the last three decades. Analyzing the forces behind the equalizing trends in the 1980s and early 1990s, and the deterioration evident in the post-crisis years, Chong-Bum An and Barry Bosworth investigate the macroeconomic conditions, gains in educational attainment, demographic changes and conditions in labor markets, and social welfare policies that have contributed to the evolution of income inequality over time.

The authors also raise fundamental questions about whether the pre-crisis pattern of combining strong economic growth with improving equality can be restored, as well as how government policies might be designed to promote that objective. The book concludes with a discussion of some proposals for improving the efficacy of redistributive policies in Korea.

The Muwaṭṭaʾ, written in the eighth century CE by Mālik b. Anas—known as the Imam of Medina—is the first written treatise of Islamic law. The Prophet Muḥammad and his earliest followers immigrated to the city of Medina after they experienced severe persecution in their hometown of Mecca, establishing the first Muslim community in Medina. As the Muslim community rapidly expanded, Medina lost some of its political importance, but retained its position as the leading Muslim center of learning for over one hundred years after the Prophet Muḥammad’s death. Imam Mālik’s Muwaṭṭaʾ provides an unparalleled window into the life of this early Muslim community, and the rituals, laws, and customs they upheld.

This translation is based on the recently published critical edition of the Muwaṭṭaʾ, The Royal Moroccan Edition (2013). With its extensive notes, this edition is intended to make this important early legal text widely accessible to a broad spectrum of readers, including those interested in both legal history and Islamic Studies.

This account of efforts to build a domestic Japanese computer industry is enlivened with quotations from industrial leaders commenting on the stages through which Japan has emerged as a world-class competitor.

In the late 1950s, Japan was still relying on IBM and other foreign suppliers. After the decision to enter the computer field, the government used protectionism, financial aid, and cooperative R&D projects to assist firms in developing hardware and improving their technology. The establishment of a quasi-public computer rental company to carry the burden of financing rentals played a key role in helping fledgling firms compete with IBM.

Marie Anchordoguy shows how government intervention in the market avoided the risks of technological sluggishness by encouraging keen competition among domestic computer firms. She traces the growth of Japanese computer hardware to Japan’s position as an exporter of mainframes and describes some of the problems encountered in producing software. This study provides a clear example of the way in which government–industry cooperation has enhanced Japan’s position in the world market.

The question of truth has never been more urgent than today, when the distortion of facts and the imposition of pseudo-realities in the service of the powerful have become the order of the day. In The Paradox of Being Poul Andersen addresses the concept of truth in Chinese Daoist philosophy and ritual. His approach is unapologetically universalist, and the book may be read as a call for a new way of studying Chinese culture, one that does not shy away from approaching “the other” in terms of an engagement with “our own” philosophical heritage.

The basic Chinese word for truth is zhen, which means both true and real, and it bypasses the separation of the two ideas insisted on in much of the Western philosophical tradition. Through wide-ranging research into Daoist ritual, both in history and as it survives in the present day, Andersen shows that the concept of true reality that informs this tradition posits being as a paradox anchored in the inexistent Way (Dao). The preferred way of life suggested by this insight consists in seeking to be an exception to ordinary norms and rules of behavior which nonetheless engages what is common to us all.

Emma Anderson uses one man's compelling story to explore the collision of Christianity with traditional Native religion in colonial North America.

Pierre-Anthoine Pastedechouan was born into a nomadic indigenous community of Innu living along the St. Lawrence River in present-day Quebec. At age eleven, he was sent to France by Catholic missionaries to be educated for five years, and then brought back to help Christianize his people.

Pastedechouan's youthful encounter with French Catholicism engendered in him a fatal religious ambivalence. Robbed of both his traditional religious identity and critical survival skills, he had difficulty winning the acceptance of his community upon his return. At the same time, his attempts to prove himself to his people led the Jesuits to regard him with increasing suspicion. Suspended between two worlds, Pastedechouan ultimately became estranged--with tragic results--from both his native community and his missionary mentors.

An engaging narrative of cultural negotiation and religious coercion, Betrayal of Faith documents the multiple betrayals of identity and culture caused by one young man's experiences with an inflexible French Catholicism. Pastedechouan's story illuminates key struggles to retain and impose religious identity on both sides of the seventeenth-century Atlantic, even as it has a startling relevance to the contemporary encounter between native and non-native peoples.

In the 1640s--a decade of epidemic and warfare across colonial North America--eight Jesuit missionaries met their deaths at the hands of native antagonists. With their collective canonization in 1930, these men, known to the devout as the North American martyrs, would become the continent's first official Catholic saints. In The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs, Emma Anderson untangles the complexities of these seminal acts of violence and their ever-changing legacy across the centuries. While exploring how Jesuit missionaries perceived their terrifying final hours, the work also seeks to comprehend the motivations of the those who confronted them from the other side of the axe, musket, or caldron of boiling water, and to illuminate the experiences of those native Catholics who, though they died alongside their missionary mentors, have yet to receive comparable recognition as martyrs by the Catholic Church.

In tracing the creation and evolution of the cult of the martyrs across the centuries, Anderson reveals the ways in which both believers and detractors have honored and preserved the memory of the martyrs in this "afterlife," and how their powerful story has been continually reinterpreted in the collective imagination over the centuries. As rival shrines rose to honor the martyrs on either side of the U.S.-Canadian border, these figures would both unite and deeply divide natives and non-natives, francophones and anglophones, Protestants and Catholics, Canadians and Americans, forging a legacy as controversial as it has been enduring.

In the mid-eighteenth century, colonial Americans became enamored with the rich colors and silky surface of mahogany. This exotic wood, imported from the West Indies and Central America, quickly displaced local furniture woods as the height of fashion. Over the next century, consumer demand for mahogany set in motion elaborate schemes to secure the trees and transform their rough-hewn logs into exquisite objects. But beneath the polished gleam of this furniture lies a darker, hidden story of human and environmental exploitation.

Mahogany traces the path of this wood through many hands, from source to sale: from the enslaved African woodcutters, including skilled “huntsmen” who located the elusive trees amidst dense rainforest, to the ship captains, merchants, and timber dealers who scrambled after the best logs, to the skilled cabinetmakers who crafted the wood, and with it the tastes and aspirations of their diverse clientele. As the trees became scarce, however, the search for new sources led to expanded slave labor, vicious competition, and intense international conflicts over this diminishing natural resource. When nineteenth-century American furniture makers turned to other materials, surviving mahogany objects were revalued as antiques evocative of the nation's past.

Jennifer Anderson offers a dynamic portrait of the many players, locales, and motivations that drove the voracious quest for mahogany to adorn American parlors and dining rooms. This complex story reveals the cultural, economic, and environmental costs of America’s growing self-confidence and prosperity, and how desire shaped not just people’s lives but the natural world.

In Close Association is the first English-language study of the local networks of women and men who built modern Japan in the Meiji period (1868–1912). Marnie Anderson uncovers in vivid detail how a colorful group of Okayama-based activists founded institutions, engaged in the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement, promoted social reform, and advocated “civilization and enlightenment” while forging pathbreaking conceptions of self and society. Alongside them were Western Protestant missionaries, making this story at once a local history and a transnational one.

Placing gender analysis at its core, the book offers fresh perspectives on what women did beyond domestic boundaries, while showing men’s lives, too, were embedded in home and kin. Writing “history on the diagonal,” Anderson documents the gradual differentiation of public activity by gender in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Meiji-era associations became increasingly sex-specific, though networks remained heterosocial until the twentieth century.

Anderson attends to how the archival record shapes what historians can know about individual lives. She argues for the interdependence of women and men and the importance of highlighting connections between people to explain historical change. Above all, the study sheds new light on how local personalities together transformed Japan.

This book addresses how gender became a defining category in the political and social modernization of Japan. During the early decades of the Meiji period (1868–1912), the Japanese encountered an idea with great currency in the West: that the social position of women reflected a country’s level of civilization. Although elites initiated dialogue out of concern for their country’s reputation internationally, the conversation soon moved to a new public sphere where individuals engaged in a wide-ranging debate about women’s roles and rights.

By examining these debates throughout the 1870s and 1880s, Marnie S. Anderson argues that shifts in the gender system led to contradictory consequences for women. On the one hand, as gender displaced status as the primary system of social and legal classification, women gained access to the language of rights and the chance to represent themselves in public and play a limited political role; on the other, the modern Japanese state permitted women’s political participation only as an expression of their “citizenship through the household” and codified their formal exclusion from the political process through a series of laws enacted in 1890. This book shows how “a woman’s place” in late-nineteenth-century Japan was characterized by contradictions and unexpected consequences, by new opportunities and new constraints.

Download PDF of corrected version of Chapter 2The intrinsic links between economics and human rights has led some scholars and practitioners to affirm that if strategies of economic development and policies to implement human rights are united, they will reinforce one another and improve the human condition.

This book draws on the papers presented at the Nobel Symposium on The Right to Development and Human Rights in Development. Opening with an essay by Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, the book contains chapters by experts in the fields of philosophy, economics, international law, and international relations on the conceptual underpinnings of development as a human right, the national dimensions of this right, and the role of international institutions. The contributors explore the meaning and practical implications of human rights-based approaches to economic development and ask what this relationship may add to our understanding and thinking about human and global development.

During the late twelfth to fourteenth centuries, several precursors of what is now commonly known as Shinto came together for the first time. By focusing on Mt. Miwa in present-day Nara Prefecture and examining the worship of indigenous deities (kami) that emerged in its proximity, this book serves as a case study of the key stages of “assemblage” through which this formative process took shape. Previously unknown rituals, texts, and icons featuring kami, all of which were invented in medieval Japan under the strong influence of esoteric Buddhism, are evaluated using evidence from local and translocal ritual and pilgrimage networks, changing land ownership patterns, and a range of religious ideas and practices. These stages illuminate the medieval pedigree of Ryōbu Shintō (kami ritual worship based loosely on esoteric Buddhism’s Two Mandalas), a major precursor to modern Shinto.

In analyzing the key mechanisms for “assembling” medieval forms of kami worship, Andreeva challenges the twentieth-century master narrative of Shinto as an unbroken, monolithic tradition. By studying how and why groups of religious practitioners affiliated with different cultic sites and religious institutions responded to esoteric Buddhism’s teachings, this book demonstrates that kami worship in medieval Japan was a result of complex negotiations.

The Byzantine Sinbad collects The Book of Syntipas the Philosopher and The Fables of Syntipas, both translated from Syriac in the late eleventh century by the scholar Michael Andreopoulos.

Originally written in Persian and part of a multilingual and multicultural medieval storytelling tradition, The Book of Syntipas recounts how the Persian king Cyrus’s unnamed son—a student of the fictional philosopher Sinbad, who is known in Greek as Syntipas—is falsely accused of rape by a royal concubine. While the young man awaits execution, seven philosophers and the concubine attempt to influence Cyrus’s judgment. After seven days of storytelling, the son is exonerated and demonstrates the wisdom he learned from Syntipas.

The sixty-two moral tales in The Fables of Syntipas are inspired mainly by the tradition of Aesop but include fifteen that are uniquely attributed to the philosopher.

This volume is the first English translation to bring together Andreopoulos’s Byzantine Greek texts.

The story of Paris in the 1930s seems straightforward enough, with the Popular Front movement leading toward the inspiring 1936 election of a leftist coalition government. The socialist victory, which resulted in fundamental improvements in the lives of workers, was then derailed in a precipitous descent that culminated in France's capitulation before the Nazis in June 1940. Yet no matter how minutely recounted, this "straight story" clarifies only the political activity behind which turbulent cultural currents brought about far-reaching changes in everyday life and the way it is represented.

In this book, Dudley Andrew and Steven Ungar apply an evocative "poetics of culture" to capture the complex atmospherics of Paris in the 1930s. They highlight the new symbolic forces put in play by technologies of the illustrated press and the sound film—technologies that converged with efforts among writers (Gide, Malraux, Céline), artists (Renoir, Dalí), and other intellectuals (Mounier, de Rougemont, Leiris) to respond to the decade's crises.

Their analysis takes them to expositions and music halls, to upscale architecture and fashion sites, to traditional neighborhoods, and to overseas territories, the latter portrayed in metropolitan exhibits and colonial cinema. Rather than a straight story of the Popular Front, they have produced something closer to the format of an illustrated newspaper whose multiple columns represent the breadth of urban life during this critical decade at the end of the Third French Republic.

THIS EDITION HAS BEEN REPLACED BY A NEWER EDITION..

Thirty centuries ago most of the mummified bodies now lying linen-wrapped in the British Museum were alive in ancient Egypt. Why did the Egyptians try to preserve their dead for eternity? How did they achieve it? Carol Andrews answers these questions in a fully illustrated survey of the techniques of mummification, the religious beliefs which lay behind the practice, the ornate coffins and elaborate tombs which housed the bodies and the grave goods which accompanied them. She explains how animals also came to be embalmed and relates the curious role assumed by Egyptian mummies in European culture and mythology.

Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 38 collects papers ranging widely on topics of the literary and material culture of the Celtic regions of Ireland, Wales, and Breton in the medieval and modern periods. Several articles concern the self-awareness of the literary elite in Ireland and Wales, whose members respected the traditional forms of their literature but used them to further contemporary purposes. For example, they introduce new references to foreign places and cultures, or use older topographical lore to describe and justify contemporary land use and settlement. Other articles review material culture as it is reflected in literary works of their respective periods and discuss how this in turn illuminates the attitudes of the authors and their intended readers. A number of contributions concern the grammatical structure and linguistic formation of the languages of Ireland, Wales, and Brittany, both early and modern.

The special lecture for the Harvard Celtic Colloquium this year was given by Dr. Aled Jones, Senior Lecturer in Welsh and Medieval Studies at Bangor University, Wales, comparing modern astrophysics to the plasticity of time in medieval Celtic literature, a thought-provoking consideration of congruences in modern and medieval conceptions of time and space. This volume also contains the 2018 Kelleher lecture given by Dr. William Gilles of the University of Edinburgh on a problematic early Scots-Gaelic text, the Harlaw Brosnachadh.

This volume of the Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium offers a wide range of articles on topics across the field of Celtic Studies.

It includes the 2017 J. V. Kelleher lecture delivered by Paul Russell, Professor of Celtic, University of Cambridge, entitled “‘Mistakes of All Kinds’: The Glossography of Medieval Irish Literary Texts.” In this address Russell offers cogent analysis of this rarely addressed facet of medieval Irish codicology. The articles from other presentations at the Colloquium extend the focus on Celtic glossing into other areas of Celtic linguistics and literary studies. In addition, the volume includes articles on the medieval folkloric, religious, legal, and material culture of Celtic communities, some aspects of which persist into modernity. This volume exemplifies the broad range of topics and time periods characteristic of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium.

As Protestantism expanded across the Atlantic world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most evangelists were not white Anglo-Americans, as scholars have long assumed, but members of the same groups that missionaries were trying to convert. Native Apostles offers one of the most significant untold stories in the history of early modern religious encounters, marshalling wide-ranging research to shed light on the crucial role of Native Americans, Africans, and black slaves in Protestant missionary work. The result is a pioneering view of religion’s spread through the colonial world.

From New England to the Caribbean, the Carolinas to Africa, Iroquoia to India, Protestant missions relied on long-forgotten native evangelists, who often outnumbered their white counterparts. Their ability to tap into existing networks of kinship and translate between white missionaries and potential converts made them invaluable assets and potent middlemen. Though often poor and ostracized by both whites and their own people, these diverse evangelists worked to redefine Christianity and address the challenges of slavery, dispossession, and European settlement. Far from being advocates for empire, their position as cultural intermediaries gave native apostles unique opportunities to challenge colonialism, situate indigenous peoples within a longer history of Christian brotherhood, and harness scripture to secure a place for themselves and their followers.

Native Apostles shows that John Eliot, Eleazar Wheelock, and other well-known Anglo-American missionaries must now share the historical stage with the black and Indian evangelists named Hiacoomes, Good Peter, Philip Quaque, John Quamine, and many more.

Of the almost 11 million Africans who came to the Americas between 1500 and 1870, two-thirds came to Spanish America and Brazil. Over four centuries, Africans and their descendants—both free and enslaved—participated in the political, social, and cultural movements that indelibly shaped their countries’ colonial and post-independence pasts. Yet until very recently Afro-Latin Americans were conspicuously excluded from narratives of their hemisphere’s history.

George Reid Andrews seeks to redress this damaging omission by making visible the past and present lives and labors of black Latin Americans in their New World home. He cogently reconstructs the Afro-Latin heritage from the paper trail of slavery and freedom, from the testimonies of individual black men and women, from the writings of visiting African-Americans, and from the efforts of activists and scholars of the twentieth century to bring the Afro-Latin heritage fully into public view.

While most Latin American countries have acknowledged the legacy of slavery, the story still told throughout the region is one of “racial democracy”—the supposedly successful integration and acceptance of African descendants into society. From the 1970s to today, black civil rights movements have challenged that narrative and demanded that its promises of racial equality be made real. They have also called for fuller acknowledgment of Afro-Latin Americans’ centrality in their countries’ national histories. Afro-Latin America brings that story up to the present, examining debates currently taking place throughout the region on how best to achieve genuine racial equality.

What can we learn from a high-country valley tucked into an isolated corner of Rocky Mountain National Park? In this pathbreaking book, Thomas Andrews offers a meditation on the environmental and historical pressures that have shaped and reshaped one small stretch of North America, from the last ice age to the advent of the Anthropocene and the latest controversies over climate change.

Large-scale historical approaches continue to make monumental contributions to our understanding of the past, Andrews writes. But they are incapable of revealing everything we need to know about the interconnected workings of nature and human history. Alongside native peoples, miners, homesteaders, tourists, and conservationists, Andrews considers elk, willows, gold, mountain pine beetles, and the Colorado River as vital historical subjects. Integrating evidence from several historical fields with insights from ecology, archaeology, geology, and wildlife biology, this work simultaneously invites scientists to take history seriously and prevails upon historians to give other ways of knowing the past the attention they deserve.

From the emergence and dispossession of the Nuche—“the People”—who for centuries adapted to a stubborn environment, to settlers intent on exploiting the land, to forest-destroying insect invasions and a warming climate that is pushing entire ecosystems to the brink of extinction, Coyote Valley underscores the value of deep drilling into local history for core relationships—to the land, climate, and other species—that complement broader truths. This book brings to the surface the critical lessons that only small and seemingly unimportant places on Earth can teach.

On a spring morning in 1914, in the stark foothills of southern Colorado, members of the United Mine Workers of America clashed with guards employed by the Rockefeller family, and a state militia beholden to Colorado’s industrial barons. When the dust settled, nineteen men, women, and children among the miners’ families lay dead. The strikers had killed at least thirty men, destroyed six mines, and laid waste to two company towns.

Killing for Coal offers a bold and original perspective on the 1914 Ludlow Massacre and the “Great Coalfield War.” In a sweeping story of transformation that begins in the coal beds and culminates with the deadliest strike in American history, Thomas Andrews illuminates the causes and consequences of the militancy that erupted in colliers’ strikes over the course of nearly half a century. He reveals a complex world shaped by the connected forces of land, labor, corporate industrialization, and workers’ resistance.

Brilliantly conceived and written, this book takes the organic world as its starting point. The resulting elucidation of the coalfield wars goes far beyond traditional labor history. Considering issues of social and environmental justice in the context of an economy dependent on fossil fuel, Andrews makes a powerful case for rethinking the relationships that unite and divide workers, consumers, capitalists, and the natural world.

At the turn of the twentieth century, two young women find themselves in Stanyslaviv under Austro-Hungarian rule. Adela, the daughter of a wealthy German doctor, and Stefania, her orphan Ukrainian servant, could not be further apart socially and economically; but their fates intertwine in the cityscape of the late Habsburg Empire, densely inhabited by Ukrainians, Poles, Germans, and Jews for centuries. The intricate relationship between the two women—told by an unreliable narrator—unfolds against the backdrop of a rich ethnic, social, and cultural fabric that seems almost implausible to today’s reader who knows it to be irretrievably lost.

In Felix Austria, Sophia Andrukhovych uses techniques from Gothic literature to reconstruct with astonishing detail the atmosphere and the everyday life of Stanyslaviv. As if foreshadowing the wars to come and their devastation, the city’s population delights in earthly pleasures: extravagant dinner parties and receptions, mass celebrations, exotic theater performances, art exhibitions, glitzy shows of stars and starlets from near and far, local rituals of soap making, competition among fashionable dames, and much more. Felix Austria is a must-read for all those who seek to understand Ukraine’s deep ties with Western Europe and its struggle to break away from Russia’s orbit.

From 1895 to the founding of the United Nations in 1945, the promising new science of ecology flourished in the British Empire. Peder Anker asks why ecology expanded so rapidly and how a handful of influential scientists and politicians established a tripartite ecology of nature, knowledge, and society.

Patrons in the northern and southern extremes of the Empire, he argues, urgently needed tools for understanding environmental history as well as human relations to nature and society in order to set policies for the management of natural resources and to effect social control of natives and white settlement. Holists such as Jan Christian Smuts and mechanists such as Arthur George Tansley vied for the right to control and carry out ecological research throughout the British Empire and to lay a foundation of economic and social policy that extended from Spitsbergen to Cape Town.

The enlargement of the field from botany to human ecology required a broader methodological base, and ecologists drew especially on psychology and economy. They incorporated those methodologies and created a new ecological order for environmental, economic, and social management of the Empire.

The Old English poems in this volume are among the first retellings of scriptural texts in a European vernacular. More than simple translations, they recast the familiar plots in daringly imaginative ways, from Satan's seductive pride (anticipating Milton), to a sympathetic yet tragic Eve, to Moses as a headstrong Germanic warrior-king, to the lyrical nature poetry in Azarias.

Whether or not the legendary Caedmon authored any of the poems in this volume, they represent traditional verse in all its vigor. Three of them survive as sequential epics in a manuscript in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. The first, the Old English Genesis, recounts biblical history from creation and the apocryphal fall of the angels to the sacrifice of Isaac; Abraham emerges as the central figure struggling through exile toward a lasting covenant with God. The second, Exodus, follows Moses as he leads the Hebrew people out of Egyptian slavery and across the Red Sea. Both Abraham and Moses are transformed into martial heroes in the Anglo-Saxon mold. The last in the triad, Daniel, tells of the trials of the Jewish people in Babylonian exile up through Belshazzar's feast. Azarias, the final poem in this volume (found in an Exeter Cathedral manuscript), relates the apocryphal episode of the three youths in Nebuchadnezzar's furnace.

Plato’s unusual combination of argumentative and creative talents complicates any interpretative approach to his work, as does his choice of Socrates as a major figure. In recent years, scholars have looked more closely at the philosophical importance of the imaginative and literary aspects of Plato’s writing, and have begun to appreciate the methods of the ancient philosophers and commentators who studied Plato and their attitudes to Plato’s appropriation of Socrates.

This study brings together leading philosophical and literary scholars who investigate these new–old approaches and their significance in distancing us from the standard ways of reading Plato. Confronting the standard modern readings more directly, this work attempts to present the outcomes of these investigations to readers in a way that will encourage further exploration and innovative engagement.

As readers of classic Russian literature know, the nineteenth century was a time of pervasive financial anxiety. With incomes erratic and banks inadequate, Russians of all social castes were deeply enmeshed in networks of credit and debt. The necessity of borrowing and lending shaped perceptions of material and moral worth, as well as notions of social respectability and personal responsibility. Credit and debt were defining features of imperial Russia’s culture of property ownership. Sergei Antonov recreates this vanished world of borrowers, bankrupts, lenders, and loan sharks in imperial Russia from the reign of Nicholas I to the period of great social and political reforms of the 1860s.

Poring over a trove of previously unexamined records, Antonov gleans insights into the experiences of ordinary Russians, rich and poor, and shows how Russia’s informal but sprawling credit system helped cement connections among property owners across socioeconomic lines. Individuals of varying rank and wealth commonly borrowed from one another. Without a firm legal basis for formalizing debt relationships, obtaining a loan often hinged on subjective perceptions of trustworthiness and reputation. Even after joint-stock banks appeared in Russia in the 1860s, credit continued to operate through vast networks linked by word of mouth, as well as ties of kinship and community. Disputes over debt were common, and Bankrupts and Usurers of Imperial Russia offers close readings of legal cases to argue that Russian courts—usually thought to be underdeveloped in this era—provided an effective forum for defining and protecting private property interests.

Since the late 1960s a ubiquitous feature of popular culture in Japan has been the "idol," an attractive young actor, male or female, packaged and promoted as an adolescent role model and exploited by the entertainment, fashion, cosmetic, and publishing industries to market trendy products. This book offers ethnographic case studies regarding the symbolic qualities of idols and how these qualities relate to the conceptualization of selfhood among adolescents in Japan and elsewhere in East Asia. The author explores how the idol-manufacturing industry absorbs young people into its system of production, molds them into marketable personalities, commercializes their images, and contributes to the construction of ideal images of the adolescent self.

Since the relationship between the idols and their consumers is dynamic, the study focuses on the fans of idols as well. Ultimately, Aoyagi argues, idol performances substantiate capitalist values in the urban consumer society of contemporary Japan and East Asia. Regardless of how crude their performances may appear in the eyes of critics, the idols have helped establish the entertainment industry as an agent of public socialization by driving public desires toward the consumption of commoditized fantasies.

A classic and invaluable reference work. Soon after its initial publication, the Harvard Dictionary of Music by Willi Apel was firmly established as a standard and essential resource for everyone concerned with music. The product of exceptional scholarship, it was praised as being comprehensive, concise, authoritative, scholarly, and enjoyable. Leopold Stokowski wrote, “I so often consult your dictionary of music, and with such never failing enlightenment, that I must offer you my thanks for your unique book, so profound and so broad in scope… The vast scholarship…is of immeasurable value to the whole world of music.”

For this second edition the dictionary has been thoroughly revised, updated, and substantially enlarged. Apel and eighty-eight other eminent music scholars have contributed new articles and revised old ones completely. The already comprehensive list of accurate definitions has grown measurably and it now even includes nothus, pyiba, and merengue.

In the greatly expanded coverage of ethnomusicology, cumbia—an Afro-Panamanian dance form—and Vietnam are only two of the new entries. Additionally, all the general information about individual countries has been revised and the discussion of both theory and history has been amply increased. Developments of the last two decades are given special attention with particular emphasis on compositional techniques, including electronic music and serial music. Individual compositions, representative of every type from every era, are described. The bibliography following each article, a unique feature of the first edition, has been updated and expanded. There are fifty percent more illustrations than in the first edition, including explicit drawings of instruments, clear music examples, diagrams, charts and a full-page outline of the history of music.

An extensive list of the most important music libraries and collections throughout the world with summaries of their significant musical holdings is a valuable part of the dictionary. The section on historical editions now lists fifty-three collections of music and briefly describes each volume within each collection.

The Harvard Dictionary of Music, Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged, is the result of imaginative, specialized, modern, and reliable music scholarship. Containing nearly 1,000 pages of precise and accessible information on all musical subjects, it offers over fifty percent more material than the first edition. It is essential not only to the scholar of music, the professional performer, and the practicing amateur, but to everyone who has ever anticipated the pleasure of a weekly musical broadcast, purchased a favorite recording, or truly enjoyed a concert.

Antiquity’s most influential mythological handbook.

The Library provides in three books a grand summary of traditional Greek mythology and heroic legends. Written in clear and unaffected style, the compendium faithfully follows the Greek literary sources. It is thus an important record of Greek accounts of the origin and early history of the world and their race. This work has been attributed to Apollodorus of Athens (born ca. 180 BC), a student of Aristarchus. But the text as we have it was written by an author probably living in the first or second century of our era.

In his highly valued notes to the Loeb Classical Library edition (which is in two volumes) J. G. Frazer cites the principal passages of other ancient writers where each particular story is told and compares the various versions to those in the Library.

Antiquity’s most influential mythological handbook.

The Library provides in three books a grand summary of traditional Greek mythology and heroic legends. Written in clear and unaffected style, the compendium faithfully follows the Greek literary sources. It is thus an important record of Greek accounts of the origin and early history of the world and their race. This work has been attributed to Apollodorus of Athens (born ca. 180 BC), a student of Aristarchus. But the text as we have it was written by an author probably living in the first or second century of our era.

In his highly valued notes to the Loeb Classical Library edition (which is in two volumes) J. G. Frazer cites the principal passages of other ancient writers where each particular story is told and compares the various versions to those in the Library.

The Greek epic account of the quest for the golden fleece.

Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica, composed in the 3rd century BC, is the epic retelling of Jason’s quest for the golden fleece. Along with his contemporaries Callimachus and Theocritus, Apollonius refashioned Greek poetry to meet the interests and aesthetics of a Hellenistic audience, especially that of Alexandria in the Ptolemaic period following Alexander’s death. In this carefully crafted work of 5,835 hexameter verses in four books, the author draws on the preceding literary traditions of epic (Homer), lyric (Pindar), and tragedy (especially Euripides) but creates an innovative and complex narrative that includes geography, religion, ethnography, mythology, adventure, exploration, human psychology, and, most of all, the coming of age and love affair of Jason and Medea. It greatly influenced Roman authors such as Catullus, Virgil, and Ovid, and was imitated by Valerius Flaccus.

This new edition of the first volume in the Loeb Classical Library offers a fresh translation and improved text.

Apollonius was a Greek grammarian and epic poet of Alexandria in Egypt and lived late in the 3rd century and early in the 2nd century BCE. While still young he composed his extant epic poem of four books on the story of the Argonauts. When this work failed to win acceptance he went to Rhodes where he not only did well as a rhetorician but also made a success of his epic in a revised form, for which the Rhodians gave him the 'freedom' of their city; hence his surname. On returning to Alexandria he recited his poem again, to applause. In 196 Ptolemy Epiphanes made him the librarian of the Museum (the university) at Alexandria.

Apollonius's Argonautica is one of the better minor epics, remarkable for originality, powers of observation, sincere feeling, and depiction of romantic love. His Jason and Medea are natural and interesting, and did much to inspire Virgil (in a very different setting) in the fourth book of the Aeneid.

“Appiah is a writer and thinker of remarkable range… [He] has packed into this short book an impressive amount of original reflection… A rich and illuminating book.”
—Thomas Nagel, New York Review of Books

Idealization is a fundamental feature of human thought. We build simplified models to make sense of the world, and life is a constant adjustment between the models we make and the realities we encounter. Our beliefs, desires, and sense of justice are bound up with these ideals, and we proceed “as if” our representations were true, while knowing they are not. In this elegant and original meditation, Kwame Anthony Appiah suggests that this instinct to idealize is not dangerous or distracting so much as it is necessary. As If explores how strategic untruth plays a critical role in far-flung areas of inquiry: decision theory, psychology, natural science, and political philosophy. A polymath who writes with mainstream clarity, Appiah defends the centrality of the imagination not just in the arts but in science, morality, and everyday life.

“Appiah is the rare public intellectual who is also a first-rate analytic philosopher, and the characteristic virtues associated with each of these identities are very much in evidence throughout the book.”
—Thomas Kelly, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

In the past few decades, scientists of human nature—including experimental and cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists, evolutionary theorists, and behavioral economists—have explored the way we arrive at moral judgments. They have called into question commonplaces about character and offered troubling explanations for various moral intuitions. Research like this may help explain what, in fact, we do and feel. But can it tell us what we ought to do or feel? In Experiments in Ethics, the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah explores how the new empirical moral psychology relates to the age-old project of philosophical ethics.

Some moral theorists hold that the realm of morality must be autonomous of the sciences; others maintain that science undermines the authority of moral reasons. Appiah elaborates a vision of naturalism that resists both temptations. He traces an intellectual genealogy of the burgeoning discipline of "experimental philosophy," provides a balanced, lucid account of the work being done in this controversial and increasingly influential field, and offers a fresh way of thinking about ethics in the classical tradition.

Appiah urges that the relation between empirical research and morality, now so often antagonistic, should be seen in terms of dialogue, not contest. And he shows how experimental philosophy, far from being something new, is actually as old as philosophy itself. Beyond illuminating debates about the connection between psychology and ethics, intuition and theory, his book helps us to rethink the very nature of the philosophical enterprise.

W. E. B. Du Bois never felt so at home as when he was a student at the University of Berlin. But Du Bois was also American to his core, scarred but not crippled by the racial humiliations of his homeland. In Lines of Descent, Kwame Anthony Appiah traces the twin lineages of Du Bois’ American experience and German apprenticeship, showing how they shaped the great African-American scholar’s ideas of race and social identity.

At Harvard, Du Bois studied with such luminaries as William James and George Santayana, scholars whose contributions were largely intellectual. But arriving in Berlin in 1892, Du Bois came under the tutelage of academics who were also public men. The economist Adolf Wagner had been an advisor to Otto von Bismarck. Heinrich von Treitschke, the historian, served in the Reichstag, and the economist Gustav von Schmoller was a member of the Prussian state council. These scholars united the rigorous study of history with political activism and represented a model of real-world engagement that would strongly influence Du Bois in the years to come.

With its romantic notions of human brotherhood and self-realization, German culture held a potent allure for Du Bois. Germany, he said, was the first place white people had treated him as an equal. But the prevalence of anti-Semitism allowed Du Bois no illusions that the Kaiserreich was free of racism. His challenge, says Appiah, was to take the best of German intellectual life without its parochialism—to steal the fire without getting burned.

Rome’s foreign wars, nation by nation.

Appian (Appianus) is among our principal sources for the history of the Roman Republic, particularly in the second and first centuries BC, and sometimes our only source, as for the Third Punic War and the destruction of Carthage. Born circa AD 95, Appian was an Alexandrian official at ease in the highest political and literary circles who later became a Roman citizen and advocate. He apparently received equestrian rank, for in his later years he was offered a procuratorship. He died during the reign of Antoninus Pius (emperor 138–161).

Appian’s theme is the process by which the Roman Empire achieved its contemporary prosperity, and his unique method is to trace in individual books the story of each nation’s wars with Rome up through her own civil wars. Although this triumph of “harmony and monarchy” was achieved through characteristic Roman virtues, Appian is unusually objective about Rome’s shortcomings along the way. His history is particularly strong on financial and economic matters, and on the operations of warfare and diplomacy.

Of the work’s original twenty-four books, only the Preface and Books 6–9 and 11–17 are preserved complete or nearly so: those on the Spanish, Hannibalic, African, Illyrian, Syrian, and Mithridatic wars, and five books on the civil wars.

This edition of Appian replaces the original Loeb edition by Horace White and adds the fragments, as well as his letter to Fronto.

Rome’s foreign wars, nation by nation.

Appian (Appianus) is among our principal sources for the history of the Roman Republic, particularly in the second and first centuries BC, and sometimes our only source, as for the Third Punic War and the destruction of Carthage. Born circa AD 95, Appian was an Alexandrian official at ease in the highest political and literary circles who later became a Roman citizen and advocate. He apparently received equestrian rank, for in his later years he was offered a procuratorship. He died during the reign of Antoninus Pius (emperor 138–161).

Appian’s theme is the process by which the Roman Empire achieved its contemporary prosperity, and his unique method is to trace in individual books the story of each nation’s wars with Rome up through her own civil wars. Although this triumph of “harmony and monarchy” was achieved through characteristic Roman virtues, Appian is unusually objective about Rome’s shortcomings along the way. His history is particularly strong on financial and economic matters, and on the operations of warfare and diplomacy.

Of the work’s original twenty-four books, only the Preface and Books 6–9 and 11–17 are preserved complete or nearly so: those on the Spanish, Hannibalic, African, Illyrian, Syrian, and Mithridatic wars, and five books on the civil wars.

This edition of Appian replaces the original Loeb edition by Horace White and adds the fragments, as well as his letter to Fronto.

Rome’s foreign wars, nation by nation.

Appian (Appianus) is among our principal sources for the history of the Roman Republic, particularly in the second and first centuries BC, and sometimes our only source, as for the Third Punic War and the destruction of Carthage. Born circa AD 95, Appian was an Alexandrian official at ease in the highest political and literary circles who later became a Roman citizen and advocate. He apparently received equestrian rank, for in his later years he was offered a procuratorship. He died during the reign of Antoninus Pius (emperor 138–161).

Appian’s theme is the process by which the Roman Empire achieved its contemporary prosperity, and his unique method is to trace in individual books the story of each nation’s wars with Rome up through her own civil wars. Although this triumph of “harmony and monarchy” was achieved through characteristic Roman virtues, Appian is unusually objective about Rome’s shortcomings along the way. His history is particularly strong on financial and economic matters, and on the operations of warfare and diplomacy.

Of the work’s original twenty-four books, only the Preface and Books 6–9 and 11–17 are preserved complete or nearly so: those on the Spanish, Hannibalic, African, Illyrian, Syrian, and Mithridatic wars, and five books on the civil wars.

This edition of Appian replaces the original Loeb edition by Horace White and adds the fragments, as well as his letter to Fronto.

Rome’s internal conflicts, from the Gracchi to the Empire.

Appian (Appianus) is among our principal sources for the history of the Roman Republic, particularly in the second and first centuries BC, and sometimes our only source, as for the Third Punic War and the destruction of Carthage. Born circa AD 95, Appian was an Alexandrian official at ease in the highest political and literary circles who later became a Roman citizen and advocate. He apparently received equestrian rank, for in his later years he was offered a procuratorship. He died during the reign of Antoninus Pius (emperor 138–161).

Appian’s theme is the process by which the Roman Empire achieved its contemporary prosperity, and his unique method is to trace in individual books the story of each nation’s wars with Rome up through her own civil wars. Although this triumph of “harmony and monarchy” was achieved through characteristic Roman virtues, Appian is unusually objective about Rome’s shortcomings along the way. His history is particularly strong on financial and economic matters, and on the operations of warfare and diplomacy.

Of the work’s original twenty-four books, only the Preface and Books 6–9 and 11–17 are preserved complete or nearly so: those on the Spanish, Hannibalic, African, Illyrian, Syrian, and Mithridatic wars, and five books on the civil wars.

This edition of Appian replaces the original Loeb edition by Horace White and adds the fragments, as well as his letter to Fronto.

Rome’s internal conflicts, from the Gracchi to the Empire.

Appian (Appianus) is among our principal sources for the history of the Roman Republic, particularly in the second and first centuries BC, and sometimes our only source, as for the Third Punic War and the destruction of Carthage. Born circa AD 95, Appian was an Alexandrian official at ease in the highest political and literary circles who later became a Roman citizen and advocate. He apparently received equestrian rank, for in his later years he was offered a procuratorship. He died during the reign of Antoninus Pius (emperor 138–161).

Appian’s theme is the process by which the Roman Empire achieved its contemporary prosperity, and his unique method is to trace in individual books the story of each nation’s wars with Rome up through her own civil wars. Although this triumph of “harmony and monarchy” was achieved through characteristic Roman virtues, Appian is unusually objective about Rome’s shortcomings along the way. His history is particularly strong on financial and economic matters, and on the operations of warfare and diplomacy.

Of the work’s original twenty-four books, only the Preface and Books 6–9 and 11–17 are preserved complete or nearly so: those on the Spanish, Hannibalic, African, Illyrian, Syrian, and Mithridatic wars, and five books on the civil wars.

This edition of Appian replaces the original Loeb edition by Horace White and adds the fragments, as well as his letter to Fronto.

Rome’s internal conflicts, from the Gracchi to the Empire.

Appian (Appianus) is among our principal sources for the history of the Roman Republic, particularly in the second and first centuries BC, and sometimes our only source, as for the Third Punic War and the destruction of Carthage. Born circa AD 95, Appian was an Alexandrian official at ease in the highest political and literary circles who later became a Roman citizen and advocate. He apparently received equestrian rank, for in his later years he was offered a procuratorship. He died during the reign of Antoninus Pius (emperor 138–161).

Appian’s theme is the process by which the Roman Empire achieved its contemporary prosperity, and his unique method is to trace in individual books the story of each nation’s wars with Rome up through her own civil wars. Although this triumph of “harmony and monarchy” was achieved through characteristic Roman virtues, Appian is unusually objective about Rome’s shortcomings along the way. His history is particularly strong on financial and economic matters, and on the operations of warfare and diplomacy.

Of the work’s original twenty-four books, only the Preface and Books 6–9 and 11–17 are preserved complete or nearly so: those on the Spanish, Hannibalic, African, Illyrian, Syrian, and Mithridatic wars, and five books on the civil wars.

This edition of Appian replaces the original Loeb edition by Horace White and adds the fragments, as well as his letter to Fronto.

Appian (Appianus) was a Greek official of Alexandria. He saw the Jewish rebellion of 116 CE, and later became a Roman citizen and advocate and received the rank of eques (knight). In his older years he held a procuratorship. He died during the reign of Antoninus Pius who was emperor 138–161 CE. Honest admirer of the Roman empire though ignorant of the institutions of the earlier Roman republic, he wrote, in the simple 'common' dialect, 24 books of 'Roman affairs', in fact conquests, from the beginnings to the times of Trajan (emperor 98–117 CE). Eleven have come down to us complete, or nearly so, namely those on the Spanish, Hannibalic, Punic, Illyrian, Syrian, and Mithridatic wars, and five books on the Civil Wars. They are valuable records of military history.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Appian is in four volumes.

Appian (Appianus) was a Greek official of Alexandria. He saw the Jewish rebellion of 116 CE, and later became a Roman citizen and advocate and received the rank of eques (knight). In his older years he held a procuratorship. He died during the reign of Antoninus Pius who was emperor 138–161 CE. Honest admirer of the Roman empire though ignorant of the institutions of the earlier Roman republic, he wrote, in the simple 'common' dialect, 24 books of 'Roman affairs', in fact conquests, from the beginnings to the times of Trajan (emperor 98–117 CE). Eleven have come down to us complete, or nearly so, namely those on the Spanish, Hannibalic, Punic, Illyrian, Syrian, and Mithridatic wars, and five books on the Civil Wars. They are valuable records of military history.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Appian is in four volumes.

Appian (Appianus) was a Greek official of Alexandria. He saw the Jewish rebellion of 116 CE, and later became a Roman citizen and advocate and received the rank of eques (knight). In his older years he held a procuratorship. He died during the reign of Antoninus Pius who was emperor 138–161 CE. Honest admirer of the Roman empire though ignorant of the institutions of the earlier Roman republic, he wrote, in the simple 'common' dialect, 24 books of 'Roman affairs', in fact conquests, from the beginnings to the times of Trajan (emperor 98–117 CE). Eleven have come down to us complete, or nearly so, namely those on the Spanish, Hannibalic, Punic, Illyrian, Syrian, and Mithridatic wars, and five books on the Civil Wars. They are valuable records of military history.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Appian is in four volumes.

Appian (Appianus) was a Greek official of Alexandria. He saw the Jewish rebellion of 116 CE, and later became a Roman citizen and advocate and received the rank of eques (knight). In his older years he held a procuratorship. He died during the reign of Antoninus Pius who was emperor 138–161 CE. Honest admirer of the Roman empire though ignorant of the institutions of the earlier Roman republic, he wrote, in the simple “common” dialect, 24 books of “Roman affairs,” in fact conquests, from the beginnings to the times of Trajan (emperor 98–117 CE). Eleven have come down to us complete, or nearly so, namely those on the Spanish, Hannibalic, Punic, Illyrian, Syrian, and Mithridatic wars, and five books on the Civil Wars. They are valuable records of military history.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Appian is in four volumes.

At an unsettled time for liberal democracy, with global eruptions of authoritarian and arbitrary rule, here is one of the first full-fledged philosophical accounts of what makes governments legitimate.

What makes a government legitimate? The dominant view is that public officials have the right to rule us, even if they are unfair or unfit, as long as they gain power through procedures traceable to the consent of the governed. In this rigorous and timely study, Arthur Isak Applbaum argues that adherence to procedure is not enough: even a properly chosen government does not rule legitimately if it fails to protect basic rights, to treat its citizens as political equals, or to act coherently.

How are we to reconcile every person’s entitlement to freedom with the necessity of coercive law? Applbaum’s answer is that a government legitimately governs its citizens only if the government is a free group agent constituted by free citizens. To be a such a group agent, a government must uphold three principles. The liberty principle, requiring that the basic rights of citizens be secured, is necessary to protect against inhumanity, a tyranny in practice. The equality principle, requiring that citizens have equal say in selecting who governs, is necessary to protect against despotism, a tyranny in title. The agency principle, requiring that a government’s actions reflect its decisions and its decisions reflect its reasons, is necessary to protect against wantonism, a tyranny of unreason.

Today, Applbaum writes, the greatest threat to the established democracies is neither inhumanity nor despotism but wantonism, the domination of citizens by incoherent, inconstant, and incontinent rulers. A government that cannot govern itself cannot legitimately govern others.

Born after the Revolution, the first generation of Americans inherited a truly new world--and, with it, the task of working out the terms of Independence. Anyone who started a business, marketed a new invention, ran for office, formed an association, or wrote for publication was helping to fashion the world's first liberal society. These are the people we encounter in Inheriting the Revolution, a vibrant tapestry of the lives, callings, decisions, desires, and reflections of those Americans who turned the new abstractions of democracy, the nation, and free enterprise into contested realities.

Through data gathered on thousands of people, as well as hundreds of memoirs and autobiographies, Joyce Appleby tells myriad intersecting stories of how Americans born between 1776 and 1830 reinvented themselves and their society in politics, economics, reform, religion, and culture. They also had to grapple with the new distinction of free and slave labor, with all its divisive social entailments; the rout of Enlightenment rationality by the warm passions of religious awakening; the explosion of small business opportunities for young people eager to break out of their parents' colonial cocoon. Few in the nation escaped the transforming intrusiveness of these changes. Working these experiences into a vivid picture of American cultural renovation, Appleby crafts an extraordinary--and deeply affecting--account of how the first generation established its own culture, its own nation, its own identity.



The passage of social responsibility from one generation to another is always a fascinating interplay of the inherited and the novel; this book shows how, in the early nineteenth century, the very idea of generations resonated with new meaning in the United States.

Like dye cast into water, liberal assumptions color everything American, from ideas about human nature to fears about big government. Not the dreaded “L” word of the 1988 presidential campaign, liberalism in its historical context emerged from the modern faith in free inquiry, natural rights, economic liberty, and democratic government. Expressed in the nation-building acts of revolution and constitution-writing, liberalism both structured and limited Americans’ sense of reality for two centuries.

The nation’s scholars were unable to break away from liberalism’s pervasive hold on the American mind until the last generation—when they recovered the lost world of classical republicanism. Ornate, aristocratic, prescriptive, and concerned with the common good, this form of republicanism held sway among the founding fathers before the triumph of liberal thought, with its simple, egalitarian, rational, and individualistic emphasis. The two concepts, as Joyce Appleby shows, posed choices for eighteenth-century thinkers much as they have divided twentieth-century scholars.

Entering one of the liveliest debates in the scholarly world about our ideological roots, Appleby follows the labyrinthine controversies that these two perspectives have generated in their day and in ours. In doing so, she addresses the tensions that remain to be resolved in the democratic societies of the late twentieth century—the complex relations between individual and community, personal liberty and the common good, aspiration and practical wisdom.

What does the Chinese Communist Revolution teach us about the relationship between political discourse and real experiences and events? This unique interpretation of the revolutionary process in China uses empirical evidence as well as concepts from contemporary cultural studies to probe this significant question. David Apter and Tony Saich base their analysis on recently available primary sources on party history, English- and Chinese-language accounts of the Long March and Yan’an period, and interviews with veterans and their relatives.

Written by an eminent political theorist well seasoned in comparative development and an internationally recognized China scholar, and abounding in new approaches to central issues, this incisive analysis will be welcomed by social theorists and China scholars alike.

Reconstructing the dramatic struggle surrounding the building of the New Tokyo (Narita) International Airport near Sanrizuka, this scrutiny of modern protest politics dispels the myth of corporate Japan’s unassailable success. While sensitive to the specific events they describe, the authors provide analyses of broader contemporary issues—the sources of violence in an orderly society and the problems of democratic theory in an institutional setting.

Narita Airport, the largest single government project in Japan, has been the scene of intense conflict over what might be called the unfinished business of Japan as number one. Since 1965, small groups of farmers have been fighting to protect their land, first from the bulldozers, then from the environmental damage of a modern airport. They were joined in the battle by militants from New Left sects, students, and other protesters representing peace, antinuclear, and antipollution issues. Using field observation, in-depth interviewing, and firsthand experience drawn from living in the “fortresses” surrounding the airport, the authors examine the conflict and violence that ensued. They describe the confrontations from the point of view of each group of participants, pinpointing weaknesses in the Japanese political and bureaucratic systems that prolonged and heightened the struggle: the lack of effective due process, inadequate consultative mechanisms outside elite circles, and the failure of local government to represent local issues.

In a broad adaptation of their findings, David Apter and Nagayo Sawa show that the problems of the Narita situation are also endemic to other industrialized countries. Their discussion of violent protest in advanced societies explores how it evolves, who is caught up in it, and the ways that governments respond. Finally, they identify the limitations of contemporary social science theories in addressing in human terms such volcanic eruptions. To overcome these shortcomings they combine several approaches—structural, experiential, and functional—and devise alternative ways to enter the day-to-day lives of the people studied.

Against the State in no way diminishes the magnitude of Japan’s accomplishments. However, the authors find in the Narita protest evidence of that country’s still unfelt need to address its most abstract and pressing moral concerns. Their book raises important questions about the nature of extra-institutional protest and authority in modern states.

A beguiling tale of mistaken transformation.

In the Metamorphoses of Apuleius, also known as The Golden Ass, we have the only Latin novel which survives entire. It is truly enchanting: a delightful romance combining realism and magic.

The hero, Lucius, eager to experience the sensations of a bird, resorts to witchcraft but by an unfortunate pharmaceutical error finds himself transformed into an ass. He knows he can revert to his own body by eating rose-petals, but these prove singularly elusive; and the bulk of the work describes his adventures as an animal. He also retails many stories that he overheard, the most charming being that of Cupid and Psyche (beginning, in true fairy-tale fashion, ‘Erant in quadam civitate rex et regina’). Some of the stories are as indecent as they are witty, and two in the ninth book were deemed by Boccaccio worthy of inclusion in the Decameron. At last the goddess Isis takes pity on Lucius. In a surprising denouement, he is restored to human shape and, now spiritually regenerated, is initiated into her mysteries. The author’s baroque Latin style nicely matches his fantastic narrative and is guaranteed to hold a reader's attention from beginning to end.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Apuleius is in three volumes.

A beguiling tale of mistaken transformation.

In the Metamorphoses of Apuleius, also known as The Golden Ass, we have the only Latin novel which survives entire. It is truly enchanting: a delightful romance combining realism and magic.

The hero, Lucius, eager to experience the sensations of a bird, resorts to witchcraft but by an unfortunate pharmaceutical error finds himself transformed into an ass. He knows he can revert to his own body by eating rose-petals, but these prove singularly elusive; and the bulk of the work describes his adventures as an animal. He also retails many stories that he overheard, the most charming being that of Cupid and Psyche (beginning, in true fairy-tale fashion, ‘Erant in quadam civitate rex et regina’). Some of the stories are as indecent as they are witty, and two in the ninth book were deemed by Boccaccio worthy of inclusion in the Decameron. At last the goddess Isis takes pity on Lucius. In a surprising denouement, he is restored to human shape and, now spiritually regenerated, is initiated into her mysteries. The author’s baroque Latin style nicely matches his fantastic narrative and is guaranteed to hold a reader's attention from beginning to end.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Apuleius is in three volumes.

Oratory and philosophy from a Latin novelist.

Apuleius, one of the great stylists of Latin literature, was born ca. AD 125 in Madauros to a politically prominent family and received an elite education in the provincial capital Carthage and at Athens, where he began a lifelong allegiance to Platonic philosophy. In the later 150s, he married Pudentilla of Oea, a wealthy widow, and seems to have enjoyed a distinguished public career in Africa and perhaps as an advocate in Rome.

Although Apuleius is best known for his picaresque novel Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass (LCL 44, 453), he also wrote and declaimed on a wide variety of subjects. This edition contains the other surviving works of Apuleius that are considered genuine. Apologia is a speech delivered probably in 158/59 in which Apuleius defends himself against in-laws who had accused him of having used sinister means, including magic, to induce Pudentilla to marry him. The Florida is a collection of twenty-three excerpts from speeches by Apuleius, probably all of them delivered in Africa; the title refers either to their florid style or to their resemblance to an anthology, perhaps both. De Deo Socratis (On Socrates’ God) takes the form of a speech addressed to a cultured, nonspecialist Latin-speaking audience that locates Socrates’ invisible guide and protector (daimonion) within the more general concept of daimones as forces intermediary between gods and humans.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Apuleius is in three volumes.

In the mid-nineteenth century writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville produced works of fiction that even today, centuries later, help to define what American literature means. In this work of innovative literary history, Jonathan Arac explains what made this remarkable creativity possible and what it accomplished. His work also delves into a deep paradox that has haunted American literature: our nation's great works of literary narrative place themselves at a tense distance from our national life.

Arac prepares the way with substantial critical readings of masterpieces such as Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and the Narrative of Frederick Douglass, as well as astute commentary on dozens of other works of fiction, comic sketches, life testimony, and history. His interpretation demonstrates how the national crisis over slavery around 1850 led writers to invent new forms. In light of this analysis, Arac proposes an explanation for the shifting relations between prose narratives and American political history; he shows how these new works changed the understanding of what prose narrative was capable of doing--and how this moment when the literary writer was redefined as an artist inaugurated a continuing crisis in the relation of narrative to its public.

The Civil War revealed what united as well as what divided Americans in the nineteenth century—not only in its deadly military conflict, but also in the broader battle of ideas, dueling moral systems, and competing national visions that preceded and followed. This cultural civil war was the clash among North, South, and West, as their leaders sought to shape Manifest Destiny and slavery politics.

No site embodied this struggle more completely than St. Louis, the largest city along the border of slavery and freedom. In this sweeping history, Adam Arenson reveals a city at the heart of the cultural civil war. St. Louisans heralded a new future, erasing old patterns as the United States stretched across the continent. They tried to reorient the nation’s political landscape, with westerners in the vanguard and St. Louis as the cultural, commercial, and national capital. John C. Calhoun, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, and John Brown tracked the progress of the cultural contest by monitoring events in St. Louis, observing how the city’s leaders tried yet ultimately failed to control the national destiny.

The interplay of local ambitions and national meanings reveals the wider cultural transformation brought about by westward expansion, political strife, and emancipation in the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction. This vibrant and beautifully written story enriches our understanding of America at a crossroads.

What makes people fight and risk their lives for countries other than their own? Why did diverse individuals such as Lord Byron, George Orwell, Che Guevara, and Osama bin Laden all volunteer for ostensibly foreign causes? Nir Arielli helps us understand this perplexing phenomenon with a wide-ranging history of foreign-war volunteers, from the wars of the French Revolution to the civil war in Syria.

Challenging narrow contemporary interpretations of foreign fighters as a security problem, Arielli opens up a broad range of questions about individuals’ motivations and their political and social context, exploring such matters as ideology, gender, international law, military significance, and the memory of war. He shows that even though volunteers have fought for very different causes, they share a number of characteristics. Often driven by a personal search for meaning, they tend to superimpose their own beliefs and perceptions on the wars they join. They also serve to internationalize conflicts not just by being present at the front but by making wars abroad matter back at home. Arielli suggests an innovative way of distinguishing among different types of foreign volunteers, examines the mixed reputation they acquire, and provides the first in-depth comparative analysis of the military roles that foreigners have played in several conflicts.

Merging social, cultural, military, and diplomatic history, From Byron to bin Laden is the most comprehensive account yet of a vital, enduring, but rarely explored feature of warfare past and present.