front cover of We Are What We Eat
We Are What We Eat
Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans
Donna R. Gabaccia
Harvard University Press, 2000

Ghulam Bombaywala sells bagels in Houston. Demetrios dishes up pizza in Connecticut. The Wangs serve tacos in Los Angeles. How ethnicity has influenced American eating habits—and thus, the make-up and direction of the American cultural mainstream—is the story told in We Are What We Eat. It is a complex tale of ethnic mingling and borrowing, of entrepreneurship and connoisseurship, of food as a social and political symbol and weapon—and a thoroughly entertaining history of our culinary tradition of multiculturalism.

The story of successive generations of Americans experimenting with their new neighbors’ foods highlights the marketplace as an important arena for defining and expressing ethnic identities and relationships. We Are What We Eat follows the fortunes of dozens of enterprising immigrant cooks and grocers, street hawkers and restaurateurs who have cultivated and changed the tastes of native-born Americans from the seventeenth century to the present. It also tells of the mass corporate production of foods like spaghetti, bagels, corn chips, and salsa, obliterating their ethnic identities. The book draws a surprisingly peaceful picture of American ethnic relations, in which “Americanized” foods like Spaghetti-Os happily coexist with painstakingly pure ethnic dishes and creative hybrids.

Donna Gabaccia invites us to consider: If we are what we eat, who are we? Americans’ multi-ethnic eating is a constant reminder of how widespread, and mutually enjoyable, ethnic interaction has sometimes been in the United States. Amid our wrangling over immigration and tribal differences, it reveals that on a basic level, in the way we sustain life and seek pleasure, we are all multicultural.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
A Life for New Music
Selected Papers of Paul Fromm
David Gable
Harvard University Press, 1988

front cover of Sense, Nonsense, and Subjectivity
Sense, Nonsense, and Subjectivity
Markus Gabriel
Harvard University Press, 2024

A leading German philosopher offers his most ambitious work yet on the nature of knowledge, arguing that being wrong about things defines the human condition.

For millennia, philosophers have dedicated themselves to advancing understanding of the nature of truth and reality. In the process they have amassed a great deal of epistemological theory—knowledge about knowledge. But negative epistemological phenomena, such as ignorance, falsity, illusion, and delusion, are persistently overlooked. This is surprising given that we all know how fallible humans are.

Sense, Nonsense, and Subjectivity replies with a theory of false thought, demonstrating that being wrong about things is part and parcel of subjectivity itself. For this reason, knowledge can never be secured without our making claims that can always, in principle, be wrong. Even in successful cases, where we get something right and thereby gain knowledge, the possibility of failure lingers with us. Markus Gabriel grounds this argument in a novel account of the relationship between sense, nonsense, and subjectivity—phenomena that hang together in the temporal unfolding of our cognitive lives.

While most philosophers continue to theorize subjectivity in terms of conscious self-representation and the supposedly infallible grip we have on ourselves as thinkers, Sense, Nonsense, and Subjectivity addresses the age-old Platonic challenge to understand situations in which we do not get reality right. Adding a stimulating perspective on epistemic failures to the work of New Realism, Gabriel addresses long-standing ontological questions in an age where the line between the real and the fake is increasingly blurred.

[more]

front cover of The Social Biology of <i>Ropalidia marginata</i>
The Social Biology of Ropalidia marginata
Toward Understanding the Evolution of Eusociality
Raghavendra Gadagkar
Harvard University Press, 2001

In this book, the biologist Raghavendra Gadagkar focuses on the single species he has worked on throughout his career. Found throughout southern India, Ropalidia marginata is a primitively eusocial wasp--a species in which queens and workers do not differ morphologically and even the latter retain the ability to reproduce. New colonies may be founded by a single fertile female or by several, which then share reproductive and worker duties.

R. marginata has provided Gadagkar with a unique opportunity to study the evolution of eusociality; its long-lived dynasties can continue almost indefinitely, as old or weakened queens are replaced by young and healthy ones and new colonies are founded throughout the year. Understanding such primitively eusocial species is crucial, Gadagkar argues, if we are to understand the evolution of the greater degrees of sociality found in other wasp species and in ants, termites, and bees. His years of study have led him to believe that ecological, physiological, and demographic factors can be more important than genetic relatedness in the selection for or against social traits.

[more]

front cover of Survival Strategies
Survival Strategies
Cooperation and Conflict in Animal Societies
Raghavendra Gadagkar
Harvard University Press, 2001

Did you know that Tasmanian hens have two husbands? That cellular slime molds commit suicide? That vampire bats will share food with hungry fellow bats and that hanuman langurs commit infanticide? Why creatures great and small behave in such fascinating and seemingly perplexing ways is explained in this delightful account of the evolutionary foundations of animal social behavior.

Only in recent years have biologists and ethologists begun to apply careful evolutionary thinking to the study of animal societies--and with spectacular results. This book presents the choicest of these findings, with a remarkable wealth of insights into the myriad strategies that animals have developed to perpetuate their kind. In an irresistible style, Raghavendra Gadagkar explores the strategies of cooperation and conflict adopted by animals--from the lordly lion to the primitive wasp worker--as they choose mates, raise their young, communicate with others, and establish the division of labor necessary to feed and protect the group and safeguard their territory.

Whether focusing on the birds or the bees, this book offers both superb descriptions and lucid explanations of many different behaviors encountered in the animal world: why a ground squirrel will sound an alarm--even risk its own safety--to warn fellow squirrels of impending danger; why weaver ant larvae donate silk for nest building; why house mice raise their offspring in a communal nursery; and how animals can recognize the relatives they want to favor--or avoid.

Illustrated with both photographs and explanatory diagrams, this expert and inviting tour of the social world of animals will inform and charm anyone curious about the motivations behind the amazing range of activity in the animal kingdom.

[more]

front cover of Organization of Insect Societies
Organization of Insect Societies
From Genome to Sociocomplexity
Jürgen Gadau
Harvard University Press, 2009

In this landmark volume, an international group of scientists has synthesized their collective expertise and insight into a newly unified vision of insect societies and what they can reveal about how sociality has arisen as an evolutionary strategy.

Jürgen Gadau and Jennifer Fewell have assembled leading researchers from the fields of molecular biology, evolutionary genetics, neurophysiology, behavioral ecology, and evolutionary theory to reexamine the question of sociality in insects. Recent advances in social complexity theory and the sequencing of the honeybee genome ensure that this book will be valued by anyone working on sociality in insects. At the same time, the theoretical ideas presented will be of broad-ranging significance to those interested in social evolution and complex systems.

[more]

front cover of Surprise, Security, and the American Experience
Surprise, Security, and the American Experience
John Lewis Gaddis
Harvard University Press, 2005

September 11, 2001, distinguished Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis argues, was not the first time a surprise attack shattered American assumptions about national security and reshaped American grand strategy. We've been there before, and have responded each time by dramatically expanding our security responsibilities.

The pattern began in 1814, when the British attacked Washington, burning the White House and the Capitol. This early violation of homeland security gave rise to a strategy of unilateralism and preemption, best articulated by John Quincy Adams, aimed at maintaining strength beyond challenge throughout the North American continent. It remained in place for over a century. Only when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941 did the inadequacies of this strategy become evident: as a consequence, the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt devised a new grand strategy of cooperation with allies on an intercontinental scale to defeat authoritarianism. That strategy defined the American approach throughout World War II and the Cold War.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11, Gaddis writes, made it clear that this strategy was now insufficient to ensure American security. The Bush administration has, therefore, devised a new grand strategy whose foundations lie in the nineteenth-century tradition of unilateralism, preemption, and hegemony, projected this time on a global scale. How successful it will be in the face of twenty-first-century challenges is the question that confronts us. This provocative book, informed by the experiences of the past but focused on the present and the future, is one of the first attempts by a major scholar of grand strategy and international relations to provide an answer.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Ritual Speech in the Himalayas
Oral Texts and Their Contexts
Martin Gaenszle
Harvard University Press
The traditions of oral ritual speech in the Himalayas have a lively existence alongside the written “great” traditions that predominate. However, as Martin Gaenszle shows, the oral traditions are still little known and even less understood. This collection of oral texts from Nepal, Bhutan, and northeast India, rich with translation and interpretation, serves two purposes. First, it presents the texts themselves, not just as fragments, but as coherent performances of ritual speech, varied in their linguistic form. Second, it displays various possible methods of presenting oral ritual texts in written form; no single standard form is yet agreed upon. In Ritual Speech in the Himalayas, each contributor showcases a unique style of transforming the spoken language and its translation or comments into an editorial format to fit the respective genres and scholarly interests, such as interlinear or sectional translation, morphological glossing, or musical scores.
[more]

front cover of Milan Undone
Milan Undone
Contested Sovereignties in the Italian Wars
John Gagné
Harvard University Press, 2020

A new history of how one of the Renaissance’s preeminent cities lost its independence in the Italian Wars.

In 1499, the duchy of Milan had known independence for one hundred years. But the turn of the sixteenth century saw the city battered by the Italian Wars. As the major powers of Europe battled for supremacy, Milan, viewed by contemporaries as the “key to Italy,” found itself wracked by a tug-of-war between French claimants and its ruling Sforza family. In just thirty years, the city endured nine changes of government before falling under three centuries of Habsburg dominion.

John Gagné offers a new history of Milan’s demise as a sovereign state. His focus is not on the successive wars themselves but on the social disruption that resulted. Amid the political whiplash, the structures of not only government but also daily life broke down. The very meanings of time, space, and dynasty—and their importance to political authority—were rewritten. While the feudal relationships that formed the basis of property rights and the rule of law were shattered, refugees spread across the region. Exiles plotted to claw back what they had lost.

Milan Undone is a rich and detailed story of harrowing events, but it is more than that. Gagné asks us to rethink the political legacy of the Renaissance: the cradle of the modern nation-state was also the deathbed of one of its most sophisticated precursors. In its wake came a kind of reversion—not self-rule but chaos and empire.

[more]

front cover of The First Amendment Bubble
The First Amendment Bubble
How Privacy and Paparazzi Threaten a Free Press
Amy Gajda
Harvard University Press, 2015

In determining the news that’s fit to print, U.S. courts have traditionally declined to second-guess professional journalists. But in an age when news, entertainment, and new media outlets are constantly pushing the envelope of acceptable content, the consensus over press freedoms is eroding. The First Amendment Bubble examines how unbridled media are endangering the constitutional privileges journalists gained in the past century.

For decades, judges have generally affirmed that individual privacy takes a back seat to the public’s right to know. But the growth of the Internet and the resulting market pressures on traditional journalism have made it ever harder to distinguish public from private, news from titillation, journalists from provocateurs. Is a television program that outs criminals or a website that posts salacious videos entitled to First Amendment protections based on newsworthiness? U.S. courts are increasingly inclined to answer no, demonstrating new resolve in protecting individuals from invasive media scrutiny and enforcing their own sense of the proper boundaries of news.

This judicial backlash now extends beyond ethically dubious purveyors of infotainment, to mainstream journalists, who are seeing their ability to investigate crime and corruption curtailed. Yet many—heedless of judicial demands for accountability—continue to push for ever broader constitutional privileges. In so doing, Amy Gajda warns, they may be creating a First Amendment bubble that will rupture in the courts, with disastrous consequences for conventional news.

[more]

front cover of The Trials of Academe
The Trials of Academe
The New Era of Campus Litigation
Amy Gajda
Harvard University Press, 2009

Once upon a time, virtually no one in the academy thought to sue over campus disputes, and, if they dared, judges bounced the case on grounds that it was no business of the courts. Tenure decisions, grading curves, course content, and committee assignments were the stuff of faculty meetings, not lawsuits.

Not so today. As Amy Gajda shows in this witty yet troubling book, litigation is now common on campus, and perhaps even more commonly feared. Professors sue each other for defamation based on assertions in research articles or tenure review letters; students sue professors for breach of contract when an F prevents them from graduating; professors threaten to sue students for unfairly criticizing their teaching.

Gajda’s lively account introduces the new duo driving the changes: the litigious academic who sees academic prerogative as a matter of legal entitlement and the skeptical judge who is increasingly willing to set aside decades of academic deference to pronounce campus rights and responsibilities.

This turn to the courts is changing campus life, eroding traditional notions of academic autonomy and confidentiality, and encouraging courts to micromanage course content, admissions standards, exam policies, graduation requirements, and peer review.

This book explores the origins and causes of the litigation trend, its implications for academic freedom, and what lawyers, judges, and academics themselves can do to limit the potential damage.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Brandeis of Boston
Allon Gal
Harvard University Press, 1980

This compelling biography of Louis D. Brandeis uncovers the social and psychological roots of his progressivism, ethnicity, and Zionism. Beginning with a detailed description of Brandeis's evolution as a Jew in the Puritan world of Boston and Harvard, Allon Gal lays the groundwork for understanding the conflicts of values and interests that marked Brandeis's career. He traces Brandeis's growing skepticism of Yankee ethics and cultural values. At the same time, Gal unfolds Brandeis's admiration of Jewish laborers and professionals because of their struggles and idealism. He found Jews to be in sharp contrast to his Yankee acquaintances, who first had separated him out socially and then had isolated him professionally. This estrangement culminated in the Brahmins' rejection of President Wilson's suggestion to make Brandeis attorney general.

Paradoxically, although Brandeis was viewed as an outsider by Bostonians, he was judged to be an unrepresentative Jew by the Jewish elite. Doubly alienated, Brandeis began to redirect his career toward a more militant course of social reform and an ideal of a Jewish state. Gal's book is thoughtful and scholarly and is an unusual contribution to the understanding of one of the major figures of Jewish and American history.

[more]

front cover of Competition Policy for Small Market Economies
Competition Policy for Small Market Economies
Michal S. Gal
Harvard University Press, 2003

For the most part, competition policy literature has focused on large economies. Yet the economic paradigms on which such policies are based do not necessarily apply to small market economies. This book demonstrates that optimal competition policy is very much dependent on the size of an economy. Whether and how firms compete is a matter of the natural conditions of the markets in which firms operate. A critical feature of small economies is the concentrated nature of many of their markets, which are often protected by high entry barriers. Competition policy must be designed to deal effectively with these unique obstacles to competition. Accordingly, applying the same competition policy to all economies alike may be contrary to the policy's goals.

Michal Gal's thorough analysis shows the effects of market size on competition policy, ranging from rules of thumb to more general policy prescriptions, such as goals and remedial tools. Competition policy in small economies is becoming increasingly important, since the number of small jurisdictions adopting such policy is rapidly growing. Gal's focus extends beyond domestic competition policy to the evaluation of the current trend toward the worldwide harmonization of policies. This book will provide important guidance to academics, policy makers, and practitioners of competition policy as well as to anyone interested in the globalization of competition laws.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Dyslexia and Development
Neuro-Biological Aspects of Extra-Ordinary Brains
Albert M. Galaburda
Harvard University Press, 1993

Dyslexia and Development presents the latest findings of neurobiological research, which suggest a link between seemingly minor brain abnormalities and epilepsy, learning disorders, and autism. The authors focus on the plasticity of the developing nervous system and the possible role of subtle early brain injury in the emergence of these disorders, particularly dyslexia.

The distinguished contributors to this volume examine epidemiological and clinical issues that may make the developing brain more vulnerable to environmental and genetic influences, which can in turn lead to abnormal brain plasticity and behavior. Although major forms of brain malformation have been clearly associated with functional deficits, mild forms have historically been ignored or trivialized; this book supports the hypothesis that several types of such malformation reflect brain injury during critical stages of development, and also the premise that more and more disturbances of thought and behavior stem from abnormalities of brain organization.

Neurologists and neurobiologists, psychologists, psycholinguists, psychiatrists, and special educators will find here a guide to more enlightened understanding and more effective treatment of dyslexia. In fact, the book emphasizes the positive aspect of the neurobiological deviation that dyslexic brains seem to show, along with the observation that people with such brains are often quite creative and extraordinary, rather than handicapped. In turn, the revised consideration of dyslexia should lead to more serious attention to other disturbances of childhood behavior as problems in developmental neurology, as well as to a deeper analysis of possible neurological bases for individual differences in normal behavior and personality.

[more]

front cover of The Languages of the Brain
The Languages of the Brain
Albert M. Galaburda
Harvard University Press, 2002

The only way we can convey our thoughts in detail to another person is through verbal language. Does this imply that our thoughts ultimately rely on words? Is there only one way in which thoughts can occur? This ambitious book takes the contrary position, arguing that many possible "languages of thought" play different roles in the life of the mind.

"Language" is more than communication. It is also a means of representing information in both working and long-term memory. It provides a set of rules for combining and manipulating those representations.

A stellar lineup of international cognitive scientists, philosophers, and artists make the book's case that the brain is multilingual. Among topics discussed in the section on verbal languages are the learning of second languages, recovering language after brain damage, and sign language, and in the section on nonverbal languages, mental imagery, representations of motor activity, and the perception and representation of space.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Nature of Mass Poverty
John Kenneth Galbraith
Harvard University Press, 1979

logo for Harvard University Press
A Theory of Price Control
With a New Introduction by the Author
John Kenneth Galbraith
Harvard University Press, 1952
Galbraith supplies the underlying economic ideas that will help readers understand how particular controls affect general operation of the economy. He shows why price controls during World War II worked as well as they did and analyzes the criteria for effective price control both under a fully mobilized economy and under limited mobilization.
[more]

front cover of The Voice of the Poor
The Voice of the Poor
Essays in Economic and Political Persuasion
John Kenneth Galbraith
Harvard University Press, 1983
What is surprising about these essays is not the insight and grace with which they are written—we have come to expect that—but the fact that nobody has expressed matters in quite this way before. John Kenneth Galbraith writes about what advice the poor nations (as, avoiding euphemism, he calls them) ought to offer to the more fortunate countries. In this little book there are essential lessons to ponder—for the governments of the rich countries, for those of the poor lands, and for the concerned citizens of both.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Letters to Kennedy
John Kenneth Galbraith
Harvard University Press, 1998

A unique document in the history of the Kennedy years, these letters give us a firsthand look at the working relationship between a president and one of his close advisers, John Kenneth Galbraith. In an early letter, Galbraith mentions his "ambition to be the most reticent adviser in modern political history." But as a respected intellectual and author of the celebrated The Affluent Society, he was not to be positioned so lightly, and his letters are replete with valuable advice about economics, public policy, and the federal bureaucracy. As the United States' ambassador to India from 1961 to 1963, Galbraith made use of his position to counsel the President on foreign policy, especially as it bore on the Asian subcontinent and, ultimately, Vietnam.

Written with verve and wit, his letters were relished by a president who had little patience for foolish ideas or bad prose. They stand out today as a vibrant chronicle of some of the most subtle and critical moments in the days of the Kennedy administration--and a fascinating record of the counsel that Galbraith offered President Kennedy. Ranging from a pithy commentary on Kennedy's speech accepting the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination (and inaugurating the "New Frontier") to reflections on critical matters of state such as the Cuban Missile Crisis and the threat of Communism in Indochina, Letters to Kennedypresents a rare, intimate picture of the lives and minds of a political intellectual and an intellectual politician during a particularly bright moment in American history.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
On the Natural Faculties
A. J. Galen
Harvard University Press

Antiquity’s most prolific and influential medical writer and practitioner.

If the work of Hippocrates is taken as representing the foundation upon which the edifice of historical Greek medicine was raised, then the work of Galen, who lived some six hundred years later, may be looked upon as the summit of the same edifice.

He was born in Pergamum AD 129, and both there and in other academic centers of the Aegean pursued his medical studies before being appointed physician to the Pergamene gladiators in 157. Becoming dissatisfied with this type of practice he emigrated to Rome, where he soon won acknowledgement as the foremost medical authority of his time and where, with one brief interruption, he remained until his death in 199.

Galen’s merit is to have crystallized or brought into focus all the best work of the Greek medical schools which had preceded his own time. It is essentially in the form of Galenism that Greek medicine was transmitted to after ages.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Hygiene, Volume I
Books 1–4
Ian Galen
Harvard University Press, 2018

Antiquity’s most prolific and influential medical writer and practitioner.

Galen of Pergamum (129–?199/216), physician to the court of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, was a philosopher, scientist, medical historian, theoretician, and practitioner who wrote forcefully and prolifically on an astonishing range of subjects and whose impact on later eras rivaled that of Aristotle. Galen synthesized the entirety of Greek medicine as a basis for his own doctrines and practice, which comprehensively embraced theory, practical knowledge, experiment, logic, and a deep understanding of human life and society.

His treatise Hygiene, also known as “On the Preservation of Health” (De sanitate tuenda), was written during one of Galen’s most prolific periods (170–180) and ranks among his most important and influential works, providing a comprehensive account of the practice of preventive medicine that still has relevance today. Also included in this two-volume edition are two shorter treatises on the relationship between health and wellness. Thrasybulus explores the theoretical question of whether hygiene is part of medicine or gymnastics, and in so doing delineates the interrelated roles of doctors and physical therapists. On Exercise with a Small Ball strenuously advocates that activity’s superiority to all other forms of exercise.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Hygiene, Volume II
Books 5–6. Thrasybulus. On Exercise with a Small Ball
Ian Galen
Harvard University Press, 2018

Antiquity’s most prolific and influential medical writer and practitioner.

Galen of Pergamum (129–?199/216), physician to the court of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, was a philosopher, scientist, medical historian, theoretician, and practitioner who wrote forcefully and prolifically on an astonishing range of subjects and whose impact on later eras rivaled that of Aristotle. Galen synthesized the entirety of Greek medicine as a basis for his own doctrines and practice, which comprehensively embraced theory, practical knowledge, experiment, logic, and a deep understanding of human life and society.

His treatise Hygiene, also known as “On the Preservation of Health” (De sanitate tuenda), was written during one of Galen’s most prolific periods (170–180) and ranks among his most important and influential works, providing a comprehensive account of the practice of preventive medicine that still has relevance today. Also included in this two-volume edition are two shorter treatises on the relationship between health and wellness. Thrasybulus explores the theoretical question of whether hygiene is part of medicine or gymnastics, and in so doing delineates the interrelated roles of doctors and physical therapists. On Exercise with a Small Ball strenuously advocates that activity’s superiority to all other forms of exercise.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
On Temperaments. On Non-Uniform Distemperment. The Soul’s Traits Depend on Bodily Temperament
Ian Galen
Harvard University Press, 2020

Antiquity’s most prolific and influential medical writer and practitioner.

Galen of Pergamum (129–?199/216), physician to the court of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, was a philosopher, scientist, medical historian, theoretician, and practitioner who wrote forcefully and prolifically on an astonishing range of subjects and whose impact on later eras rivaled that of Aristotle. Galen synthesized the entirety of Greek medicine as a basis for his own doctrines and practice, which comprehensively embraced theory, practical knowledge, experiment, logic, and a deep understanding of human life and society.

This volume presents three works of the greatest importance to Galen’s theory and practice of medicine. On Temperaments sets out Galen’s concept of the combination (krasis) of the four elemental qualities (hot, cold, wet, and dry), which is fundamental to his account of the structure and function of the human body and of animal and plant bodies generally, and is in turn essential to his theory of medical practice. The two related works, On Non-Uniform Distemperment and The Soul’s Traits Depend on Bodily Temperament, deal with specific aspects of dyskrasia, which is a disturbance in the combination of these qualities. Appended are two related short treatises, On the Best Constitution of Our Body and On Good Bodily State.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
On the Constitution of the Art of Medicine. The Art of Medicine. A Method of Medicine to Glaucon
Ian Galen
Harvard University Press, 2016

Antiquity’s most prolific and influential medical writer and practitioner.

Galen of Pergamum (129–?199/216), physician to the court of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, was a philosopher, scientist, and medical historian, a theoretician and practitioner, who wrote forcefully and prolifically on an astonishing range of subjects and whose impact on later eras rivaled that of Aristotle. Galen synthesized the entirety of Greek medicine as a basis for his own doctrines and practice, which comprehensively embraced theory, practical knowledge, experiment, logic, and a deep understanding of human life and society.

In the three classic works in this volume, On the Constitution of the Art of Medicine, The Art of Medicine, and A Method of Medicine to Glaucon, Galen covers fundamental aspects of his practice in a lucid and engaging style designed to appeal to a broad audience.

[more]

front cover of Method of Medicine, Volume I
Method of Medicine, Volume I
Books 1–4
Ian Galen
Harvard University Press, 2011

Antiquity’s most prolific and influential medical writer and practitioner.

Galen of Pergamum (129–?199/216), physician to the court of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, was a philosopher, scientist, and medical historian, a theoretician and practitioner, who wrote forcefully and prolifically on an astonishing range of subjects and whose impact on later eras rivaled that of Aristotle. Galen synthesized the entirety of Greek medicine as a basis for his own doctrines and practice, which comprehensively embraced theory, practical knowledge, experiment, logic, and a deep understanding of human life and society.

Method of Medicine is a systematic and comprehensive account of the principles of treating injury and disease and one of Galen’s greatest and most influential works. Enlivening the detailed case studies are many theoretical and polemical discussions, acute social commentary, and personal reflections. The Loeb Method of Medicine is in three volumes.

[more]

front cover of Method of Medicine, Volume II
Method of Medicine, Volume II
Books 5–9
Ian Galen
Harvard University Press, 2011

Antiquity’s most prolific and influential medical writer and practitioner.

Galen of Pergamum (129–?199/216), physician to the court of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, was a philosopher, scientist, and medical historian, a theoretician and practitioner, who wrote forcefully and prolifically on an astonishing range of subjects and whose impact on later eras rivaled that of Aristotle. Galen synthesized the entirety of Greek medicine as a basis for his own doctrines and practice, which comprehensively embraced theory, practical knowledge, experiment, logic, and a deep understanding of human life and society.

Method of Medicine is a systematic and comprehensive account of the principles of treating injury and disease and one of Galen’s greatest and most influential works. Enlivening the detailed case studies are many theoretical and polemical discussions, acute social commentary, and personal reflections. The Loeb Method of Medicine is in three volumes.

[more]

front cover of Method of Medicine, Volume III
Method of Medicine, Volume III
Books 10–14
Ian Galen
Harvard University Press, 2011

Antiquity’s most prolific and influential medical writer and practitioner.

Galen of Pergamum (129–?199/216), physician to the court of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, was a philosopher, scientist, and medical historian, a theoretician and practitioner, who wrote forcefully and prolifically on an astonishing range of subjects and whose impact on later eras rivaled that of Aristotle. Galen synthesized the entirety of Greek medicine as a basis for his own doctrines and practice, which comprehensively embraced theory, practical knowledge, experiment, logic, and a deep understanding of human life and society.

Method of Medicine is a systematic and comprehensive account of the principles of treating injury and disease and one of Galen’s greatest and most influential works. Enlivening the detailed case studies are many theoretical and polemical discussions, acute social commentary, and personal reflections. The Loeb Method of Medicine is in three volumes.

[more]

front cover of Painting outside the Lines
Painting outside the Lines
Patterns of Creativity in Modern Art
David W. Galenson
Harvard University Press, 2002

Why have some great modern artists—including Picasso—produced their most important work early in their careers while others—like Cézanne—have done theirs late in life? In a work that brings new insights, and new dimensions, to the history of modern art, David Galenson examines the careers of more than 100 modern painters to disclose a fascinating relationship between age and artistic creativity.

Galenson’s analysis of the careers of figures such as Monet, Seurat, Matisse, Pollock, and Jasper Johns reveals two very different methods by which artists have made innovations, each associated with a very different pattern of discovery over the life cycle. Experimental innovators, like Cézanne, work by trial and error, and arrive at their most important contributions gradually. In contrast, Picasso and other conceptual innovators make sudden breakthroughs by formulating new ideas. Consequently, experimental innovators usually make their discoveries late in their lives, whereas conceptual innovators typically peak at an early age.

A novel contribution to the history of modern art, both in method and in substance, Painting outside the Lines offers an enlightening glimpse into the relationship between the working methods and the life cycles of modern artists. The book’s explicit use of simple but powerful quantitative techniques allows for systematic generalization about large numbers of artists—and illuminates significant but little understood features of the history of modern art. Pointing to a new and richer understanding of that history, from Impressionism to Abstract Expressionism and beyond, Galenson’s work also has broad implications for future attempts to understand the nature of human creativity in general.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The CIO Challenge to the AFL
A History of the American Labor Movement, 1935–1941
Walter Galenson
Harvard University Press

The period immediately preceding World War II was probably the most critical in the history of the American labor movement. Prior to 1936, the trade unions were weak, but by 1941 a fundamental change in power relationships enabled them to penetrate the strongholds of American industry—steel and automobiles.

The CIO Challenge to the AFL is a three-part study. It discusses the split in the American Federation of Labor and the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations; presents eighteen specific industry or union case studies, each an independent essay in economic history; and, finally, analyzes various general aspects of the labor movement.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The United Brotherhood of Carpenters
The First Hundred Years
Walter Galenson
Harvard University Press, 1983

What makes American labor unions distinctive from others in advanced Western countries is neither as simple as their wanting “more” nor as philosophical as their operating in an open-class society. Through a comprehensive analysis of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters—the largest union before the 1930s and the pioneer—Walter Galenson details the reasons for the union’s success. He finds that the Carpenters survived the vicissitudes of rapid industrialization and modernization because it was a conservative, business union.

From its inception in 1881, the Carpenters’ union embraced the capitalist system and worked to improve productivity. This resulted in a higher wage scale, greater leisure time, use of technology to stretch construction work over the winter months, increased fringe benefits, job security during jurisdictional disputes, and more than normal advances by minorities and blacks. Galenson’s book is based on a vast sampling of archival materials, including union records, diaries, minutes of local and affiliate unions, and AFL and CIO primary sources. The author blends narrative with shrewd intuitive analysis to provide an indispensable source for labor and economic historians and students of labor movements.

[more]

front cover of John Rawls
John Rawls
The Path to a Theory of Justice
Andrius Gališanka
Harvard University Press, 2019

An engaging account of the titan of political philosophy and the development of his most important work, A Theory of Justice, coming at a moment when its ideas are sorely needed.

It is hard to overestimate the influence of John Rawls on political philosophy and theory over the last half-century. His books have sold millions of copies worldwide, and he is one of the few philosophers whose work is known in the corridors of power as well as in the halls of academe. Rawls is most famous for the development of his view of “justice as fairness,” articulated most forcefully in his best-known work, A Theory of Justice. In it he develops a liberalism focused on improving the fate of the least advantaged, and attempts to demonstrate that, despite our differences, agreement on basic political institutions is both possible and achievable.

Critics have maintained that Rawls’s view is unrealistic and ultimately undemocratic. In this incisive new intellectual biography, Andrius Gališanka argues that in misunderstanding the origins and development of Rawls’s central argument, previous narratives fail to explain the novelty of his philosophical approach and so misunderstand the political vision he made prevalent. Gališanka draws on newly available archives of Rawls’s unpublished essays and personal papers to clarify the justifications Rawls offered for his assumption of basic moral agreement. Gališanka’s intellectual-historical approach reveals a philosopher struggling toward humbler claims than critics allege.

To engage with Rawls’s search for agreement is particularly valuable at this political juncture. By providing insight into the origins, aims, and arguments of A Theory of Justice, Gališanka’s John Rawls will allow us to consider the philosopher’s most important and influential work with fresh eyes.

[more]

front cover of Nazis of Copley Square
Nazis of Copley Square
The Forgotten Story of the Christian Front
Charles Gallagher
Harvard University Press, 2021

Winner of a Catholic Media Association Book Award

The forgotten history of American terrorists who, in the name of God, conspired to overthrow the government and formed an alliance with Hitler.

On January 13, 1940, FBI agents burst into the homes and offices of seventeen members of the Christian Front, seizing guns, ammunition, and homemade bombs. J. Edgar Hoover’s charges were incendiary: the group, he alleged, was planning to incite a revolution and install a “temporary dictatorship” in order to stamp out Jewish and Communist influence in the United States. Interviewed in his jail cell, the front’s ringleader was unbowed: “All I can say is—long live Christ the King! Down with Communism!”

In Nazis of Copley Square, Charles Gallagher provides a crucial missing chapter in the history of the American far right. The men of the Christian Front imagined themselves as crusaders fighting for the spiritual purification of the nation, under assault from godless Communism, and they were hardly alone in their beliefs. The front traced its origins to vibrant global Catholic theological movements of the early twentieth century, such as the Mystical Body of Christ and Catholic Action. The front’s anti-Semitism was inspired by Sunday sermons and by lay leaders openly espousing fascist and Nazi beliefs.

Gallagher chronicles the evolution of the front, the transatlantic cloak-and-dagger intelligence operations that subverted it, and the mainstream political and religious leaders who shielded the front’s activities from scrutiny. Nazis of Copley Square is a grim tale of faith perverted to violent ends, and a warning for those who hope to curb the spread of far-right ideologies today.

[more]

front cover of Nazis of Copley Square
Nazis of Copley Square
The Forgotten Story of the Christian Front
Charles Gallagher
Harvard University Press

Winner of a Catholic Media Association Book Award

“A great, but deeply unsettling, revelation…This book is more than an account of Boston in wartime. It is a warning.”—Boston Globe

“The rare book by a scholar that is such a page-turner it is hard to put down…A potent brew of spy story, detective story, and frank, fearless account of how a significant wing of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States spawned a movement aimed at defending Hitler and sabotaging America’s war effort.”—David I. Kertzer, author of The Pope and Mussolini

“[A] well told, expertly researched, and much-needed history of the Christian Front, an organization that presages today’s far-right activity…Riveting.”—Commonweal

On January 13, 1940, FBI agents burst into the homes of seventeen members of the Christian Front, seizing guns, ammunition, and homemade bombs. J. Edgar Hoover’s charges were incendiary: the group, he alleged, was planning to incite a revolution and install a “temporary dictatorship” to stamp out Jewish and Communist influence in the United States. Interviewed in his jail cell, the front’s ringleader was unbowed: “All I can say is—long live Christ the King! Down with Communism!”

In this brilliant work of historical reconstruction, Charles Gallagher provides a crucial missing chapter in the history of the American far right. The men of the Christian Front imagined themselves to be crusaders fighting for the spiritual purification of the nation, and they were hardly alone in their beliefs.

Nazis of Copley Square chronicles the evolution of the front, the transatlantic cloak-and-dagger intelligence operations that subverted it, and the political and religious leaders who shielded it from scrutiny. A riveting tale of faith perverted to violent ends, it offers a potent warning to those who hope to curb the spread of far-right ideologies today.

[more]

front cover of The Confederate War
The Confederate War
Gary W. Gallagher
Harvard University Press, 1999
If one is to believe contemporary historians, the South never had a chance. Many allege that the Confederacy lost the Civil War because of internal division or civilian disaffection; others point to flawed military strategy or ambivalence over slavery. But, argues distinguished historian Gary Gallagher, we should not ask why the Confederacy collapsed so soon but rather how it lasted so long. In The Confederate War he reexamines the Confederate experience through the actions and words of the people who lived it to show how the home front responded to the war, endured great hardships, and assembled armies that fought with tremendous spirit and determination.Gallagher’s portrait highlights a powerful sense of Confederate patriotism and unity in the face of a determined adversary. Drawing on letters, diaries, and newspapers of the day, he shows that Southerners held not only an unflagging belief in their way of life, which sustained them to the bitter end, but also a widespread expectation of victory and a strong popular will closely attuned to military events. In fact, the army’s “offensive-defensive” strategy came remarkably close to triumph, claims Gallagher—in contrast to the many historians who believe that a more purely defensive strategy or a guerrilla resistance could have won the war for the South. To understand why the South lost, Gallagher says we need look no further than the war itself: after a long struggle that brought enormous loss of life and property, Southerners finally realized that they had been beaten on the battlefield.Gallagher’s interpretation of the Confederates and their cause boldly challenges current historical thinking and invites readers to reconsider their own conceptions of the American Civil War.
[more]

front cover of The Union War
The Union War
Gary W. Gallagher
Harvard University Press, 2012

Even one hundred and fifty years later, we are haunted by the Civil War—by its division, its bloodshed, and perhaps, above all, by its origins. Today, many believe that the war was fought over slavery. This answer satisfies our contemporary sense of justice, but as Gary Gallagher shows in this brilliant revisionist history, it is an anachronistic judgment.

In a searing analysis of the Civil War North as revealed in contemporary letters, diaries, and documents, Gallagher demonstrates that what motivated the North to go to war and persist in an increasingly bloody effort was primarily preservation of the Union. Devotion to the Union bonded nineteenth-century Americans in the North and West against a slaveholding aristocracy in the South and a Europe that seemed destined for oligarchy. Northerners believed they were fighting to save the republic, and with it the world’s best hope for democracy.

Once we understand the centrality of union, we can in turn appreciate the force that made northern victory possible: the citizen-soldier. Gallagher reveals how the massive volunteer army of the North fought to confirm American exceptionalism by salvaging the Union. Contemporary concerns have distorted the reality of nineteenth-century Americans, who embraced emancipation primarily to punish secessionists and remove slavery as a future threat to union—goals that emerged in the process of war. As Gallagher recovers why and how the Civil War was fought, we gain a more honest understanding of why and how it was won.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
A Story of South Africa
J. M. Coetzee’s Fiction in Context
Susan Gallagher
Harvard University Press, 1991

With the publication of Age of Iron--winner of Britain's richest fiction prize, the Sunday Express Book of the Year for 1990--J. M. Coetzee is now recognized as one of the foremost writers of our day. In this timely study of Coetzee's fiction, Susan Gallagher places his work in the context of South African history and politics. Her close historical readings of Coetzee's six major novels explore how he lays bare the "dense complicity between thought and language" in South Africa.

Following a penetrating description of the unique difficulties facing writers under apartheid, Gallagher recounts how history, language, and authority have been used to marginalize the majority of South Africa's people. Her story reaches from the beginnings of Afrikaner nationalism to the recent past: the Sharpeville massacre, the jailing of Nelson Mandela, and the Soweto uprising.

As a result of his rejection of liberal and socialist realism, Coetzee has been branded an escapist, but Gallagher ably defends him from this charge. Her cogent, convincingly argued examination of his novels demonstrates that Coetzee's fictional response is "apocalyptic in the most profound Biblical sense, obscurely pointing toward ineffable realities transcending discursive definition." Viewing Coetzee's fiction in this context, Gallagher describes a new kind of novel "that arises out of history, but also rivals history." This analysis reveals Coetzee's novels to be profound responses to their time and place as well as richly rewarding investigations of the storyteller's art.

[more]

front cover of American Railroads
American Railroads
Decline and Renaissance in the Twentieth Century
Robert E. Gallamore
Harvard University Press, 2014

Once an icon of American industry, railroads fell into a long decline beginning around the turn of the twentieth century. Overburdened with regulation and often displaced by barge traffic on government-maintained waterways, trucking on interstate highways, and jet aviation, railroads measured their misfortune in lost market share, abandoned track, bankruptcies, and unemployment. Today, however, as Robert Gallamore and John Meyer demonstrate, rail transportation is reviving, rescued by new sources of traffic and advanced technology, as well as less onerous bureaucracy.

In 1970, Congress responded to the industry's plight by consolidating most passenger rail service nationwide into Amtrak. But private-sector freight service was left to succeed or fail on its own. The renaissance in freight traffic began in 1980 with the Staggers Rail Act, which allowed railroad companies to contract with customers for services and granted freedom to set most rates based on market supply and demand. Railroads found new business hauling low-sulfur coal and grain long distances in redesigned freight cars, while double-stacked container cars moved a growing volume of both international and domestic goods. Today, trains have smaller crews, operate over better track, and are longer and heavier than ever before.

Near the end of the twentieth century, after several difficult but important mergers, privately owned railroads increased their investments in safe, energy-efficient, environmentally friendly freight transportation. American Railroads tells a riveting story about how this crucial U.S. industry managed to turn itself around.

[more]

front cover of The Italian Renaissance of Machines
The Italian Renaissance of Machines
Paolo Galluzzi
Harvard University Press, 2019

The Renaissance was not just a rebirth of the mind. It was also a new dawn for the machine.

When we celebrate the achievements of the Renaissance, we instinctively refer, above all, to its artistic and literary masterpieces. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, the Italian peninsula was the stage of a no-less-impressive revival of technical knowledge and practice. In this rich and lavishly illustrated volume, Paolo Galluzzi guides readers through a singularly inventive period, capturing the fusion of artistry and engineering that spurred some of the Renaissance’s greatest technological breakthroughs.

Galluzzi traces the emergence of a new and important historical figure: the artist-engineer. In the medieval world, innovators remained anonymous. By the height of the fifteenth century, artist-engineers like Leonardo da Vinci were sought after by powerful patrons, generously remunerated, and exhibited in royal and noble courts. In an age that witnessed continuous wars, the robust expansion of trade and industry, and intense urbanization, these practitioners—with their multiple skills refined in the laboratory that was the Renaissance workshop—became catalysts for change. Renaissance masters were not only astoundingly creative but also championed a new concept of learning, characterized by observation, technical know-how, growing mathematical competence, and prowess at the draftsman’s table.

The Italian Renaissance of Machines enriches our appreciation for Taccola, Giovanni Fontana, and other masters of the quattrocento and reveals how da Vinci’s ambitious achievements paved the way for Galileo’s revolutionary mathematical science of mechanics.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Religions of the People in Sixteenth-Century Champagne
A. N. Galpern
Harvard University Press, 1976

This study in religious anthropology explores the social history of popular belief. The book begins with an evocation of the river towns, open fields, and vineyards of Champagne. In addition to the historical geography and quantitative material that are hallmarks of the French tradition, the author studies the rich artistic evidence that still graces the provincial churches.

Galpern interprets religious behavior at the beginning of the century as a lingering response to difficulties of the late Middle Ages. The nascent Protestant movement highlights the ways in which many Catholics modified their practices, yet remained orthodox. The book charts the paths of antipathy that converged in civil war, and concludes with a discussion of the late-sixteenth-century atmosphere of revivalism, which mimicked the earlier spiritualclimate.

[more]

front cover of The Sicilian Mafia
The Sicilian Mafia
The Business of Private Protection
Diego Gambetta
Harvard University Press, 1993
In a society where trust is in short supply and democracy weak, the Mafia sells protection, a guarantee of safe conduct for parties to commercial transactions. Drawing on the confessions of eight Mafiosi, Diego Gambetta develops an elegant analysis of the economic and political role of the Sicilian Mafia.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Timewalkers
The Prehistory of Global Colonization
Clive Gamble
Harvard University Press, 1994
Gamble reconsiders the remarkable record of geographical expansion that began with the early hominids of sub-Saharan Africa. Through this astonishing dispersal of humans, which exceeds that of all other mammals, he traces calculated responses to variations in climate and environment.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Chemical Anatomy, Physiology and Pathology of Extracellular Fluid
A Lecture Sylabus, 6th edition
James L. Gamble
Harvard University Press

front cover of Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World
Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World
Alison Games
Harvard University Press, 1999

England's seventeenth-century colonial empire in North America and the Caribbean was created by migration. The quickening pace of this essential migration is captured in the London port register of 1635, the largest extant port register for any single year in the colonial period and unique in its record of migration to America and to the European continent. Alison Games analyzes the 7,500 people who traveled from London in that year, recreating individual careers, exploring colonial societies at a time of emerging viability, and delineating a world sustained and defined by migration.

The colonial travelers were bound for the major regions of English settlement--New England, the Chesapeake, the West Indies, and Bermuda--and included ministers, governors, soldiers, planters, merchants, and members of some major colonial dynasties--Winthrops, Saltonstalls, and Eliots. Many of these passengers were indentured servants. Games shows that however much they tried, the travelers from London were unable to recreate England in their overseas outposts. They dwelled in chaotic, precarious, and hybrid societies where New World exigencies overpowered the force of custom. Patterns of repeat and return migration cemented these inchoate colonial outposts into a larger Atlantic community. Together, the migrants' stories offer a new social history of the seventeenth century. For the origins and integration of the English Atlantic world, Games illustrates the primary importance of the first half of the seventeenth century.

[more]

front cover of Urban Exodus
Urban Exodus
Why the Jews Left Boston and the Catholics Stayed
Gerald Gamm
Harvard University Press, 2001

Across the country, white ethnics have fled cities for suburbs. But many have stayed in their old neighborhoods. When the busing crisis erupted in Boston in the 1970s, Catholics were in the forefront of resistance. Jews, 70,000 of whom had lived in Roxbury and Dorchester in the early 1950s, were invisible during the crisis. They were silent because they departed the city more quickly and more thoroughly than Boston's Catholics. Only scattered Jews remained in Dorchester and Roxbury by the mid-1970s.

In telling the story of why the Jews left and the Catholics stayed, Gerald Gamm places neighborhood institutions--churches, synagogues, community centers, schools--at its center. He challenges the long-held assumption that bankers and real estate agents were responsible for the rapid Jewish exodus. Rather, according to Gamm, basic institutional rules explain the strength of Catholic attachments to neighborhood and the weakness of Jewish attachments. Because they are rooted, territorially defined, and hierarchical, parishes have frustrated the urban exodus of Catholic families. And because their survival was predicated on their portability and autonomy, Jewish institutions exacerbated the Jewish exodus.

Gamm shows that the dramatic transformation of urban neighborhoods began not in the 1950s or 1960s, but in the 1920s. Not since Anthony Lukas's Common Ground has there been a book that so brilliantly explores not just Boston's dilemma but the roots of the American urban crisis.

[more]

front cover of The Emperor Who Never Was
The Emperor Who Never Was
Dara Shukoh in Mughal India
Supriya Gandhi
Harvard University Press, 2019

The definitive biography of the eldest son of Emperor Shah Jahan, whose death at the hands of his younger brother Aurangzeb changed the course of South Asian history.

Dara Shukoh was the eldest son of Shah Jahan, the fifth Mughal emperor, best known for commissioning the Taj Mahal as a mausoleum for his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal. Although the Mughals did not practice primogeniture, Dara, a Sufi who studied Hindu thought, was the presumed heir to the throne and prepared himself to be India’s next ruler. In this exquisite narrative biography, the most comprehensive ever written, Supriya Gandhi draws on archival sources to tell the story of the four brothers—Dara, Shuja, Murad, and Aurangzeb—who with their older sister Jahanara Begum clashed during a war of succession. Emerging victorious, Aurangzeb executed his brothers, jailed his father, and became the sixth and last great Mughal. After Aurangzeb’s reign, the Mughal Empire began to disintegrate. Endless battles with rival rulers depleted the royal coffers, until by the end of the seventeenth century Europeans would start gaining a foothold along the edges of the subcontinent.

Historians have long wondered whether the Mughal Empire would have crumbled when it did, allowing European traders to seize control of India, if Dara Shukoh had ascended the throne. To many in South Asia, Aurangzeb is the scholastic bigot who imposed a strict form of Islam and alienated his non-Muslim subjects. Dara, by contrast, is mythologized as a poet and mystic. Gandhi’s nuanced biography gives us a more complex and revealing portrait of this Mughal prince than we have ever had.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Homeric Durability
Telling Time in the Iliad
Lorenzo F. Garcia Jr.
Harvard University Press, 2013

The Iliad defines its poetic goal as preserving the kleos aphthiton, “fame unwithered,” (IX.413) of its hero, Achilles. But how are we to understand the status of the “unwithered” in the Iliad?

In Homeric Durability, Lorenzo F. Garcia, Jr., investigates the concept of time and temporality in Homeric epic by studying the semantics of “durability” and “decay”: namely, the ability of an entity to withstand the effects of time, and its eventual disintegration. Such objects—the ships of the Achaeans, the bodies of the dead, the walls of the Greeks and Trojans, and the tombs of the dead—all exist within time and possess a demonstrable “durability.” Even the gods themselves are temporal beings. Through a framework informed by phenomenology, psychology, and psychopathology, Garcia examines the temporal experience of Homer’s gods and argues that in moments of pain, sorrow, and shame, Homeric gods come to experience human temporality. If the gods themselves are defined by human temporal experience, Garcia argues, the epic tradition cannot but imagine its own temporal durability as limited: hence, one should understand kleos aphthiton as fame which has not yet decayed, rather than fame which will not decay.

[more]

front cover of The Joy of Consent
The Joy of Consent
A Philosophy of Good Sex
Manon Garcia
Harvard University Press, 2023

“From the bedroom to the classroom to the courtroom, ‘consent’ is a key term in our contemporary sexual ethics. In this timely reexamination, Manon Garcia deftly reveals the hidden complexities of consent and proposes how to reconceptualize it as a tool of liberation.”
—Amia Srinivasan, author of The Right to Sex


A feminist philosopher argues that consent is not only a highly imperfect legal threshold but also an underappreciated complement of good sex.

In the age of #MeToo, consent has become the ultimate answer to problems of sexual harassment and violence: as long as all parties agree to sex, the act is legitimate. Critics argue that consent, and the awkwardness of confirming it, rob sex of its sexiness. But that objection is answered with the charge that opposing the consent regime means defending a masculine erotics of silence and mystery, a pillar of patriarchy.

In The Joy of Consent, French philosopher Manon Garcia upends the assumptions that underlie this very American debate, reframing consent as an ally of pleasure rather than a legalistic killjoy. In doing so, she rejects conventional wisdom on all sides. As a legal norm, consent can prove rickety: consent alone doesn’t make sex licit—adults engaged in BDSM are morally and legally suspect even when they consent. And nonconsensual sex is not, as many activists insist, always rape. People often agree to sex because it is easier than the alternative, Garcia argues, challenging the simplistic equation between consent and noncoercion.

Drawing on sources rarely considered together—from Kantian ethics to kink practices—Garcia offers an alternative framework grounded in commitments to autonomy and dignity. While consent, she argues, should not be a definitive legal test, it is essential to realizing intimate desire, free from patriarchal domination. Cultivating consent makes sex sexy. By appreciating consent as the way toward an ethical sexual flourishing rather than a legal litmus test, Garcia adds a fresh voice to the struggle for freedom, equality, and security from sexist violence.

[more]

front cover of Eli and the Octopus
Eli and the Octopus
The CEO Who Tried to Reform One of the World’s Most Notorious Corporations
Matt Garcia
Harvard University Press, 2023

The poignant rise and fall of an idealistic immigrant who, as CEO of a major conglomerate, tried to change the way America did business before he himself was swallowed up by corporate corruption.

At 8 a.m. on February 3, 1975, Eli Black leapt to his death from the 44th floor of Manhattan’s Pan Am building. The immigrant-turned-CEO of United Brands—formerly United Fruit, now Chiquita—Black seemed an embodiment of the American dream. United Brands was transformed under his leadership—from the “octopus,” a nickname that captured the corrupt power the company had held over Latin American governments, to “the most socially conscious company in the hemisphere,” according to a well-placed commentator. How did it all go wrong?

Eli and the Octopus traces the rise and fall of an enigmatic business leader and his influence on the nascent project of corporate social responsibility. Born Menashe Elihu Blachowitz in Lublin, Poland, Black arrived in New York at the age of three and became a rabbi before entering the business world. Driven by the moral tenets of his faith, he charted a new course in industries known for poor treatment of workers, partnering with labor leaders like Cesar Chavez to improve conditions. But risky investments, economic recession, and a costly wave of natural disasters led Black away from the path of reform and toward corrupt backroom dealing.

Now, two decades after Google’s embrace of “Don’t be evil” as its unofficial motto, debates about “ethical capitalism” are more heated than ever. Matt Garcia presents an unvarnished portrait of Black’s complicated legacy. Exploring the limits of corporate social responsibility on American life, Eli and the Octopus offers pointed lessons for those who hope to do good while doing business.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Traffic and the Police
Variations in Law-Enforcement Policy
John A. Gardiner
Harvard University Press

Although laws governing moving-traffic violations are fairly uniform throughout the United States, the effective levels of enforcement of these laws vary dramatically from city to city. Basing this study on statistics from nearly seven hundred police departments, census data, personal interviews, on-the-spot observation, and detailed case studies of four Massachusetts cities--Lynn, Waltham, Malden, and Cambridge--Mr. Gardiner identifies and discusses the factors that determine police decisionmaking in relation to traffic violations.

After a brief description of the role of various state and local agencies in settling traffic-enforcement policy, the author analyzes in depth the traffic activities of the four Massachusetts cities. He examines in particular the extent of public pressure in seeking modification of enforcement standards, intradepartmental practices, or "norms," and the role of traffic enforcement in the total spectrum of police activities.

Following the case studies, the author discusses the variations among the traffic policies of municipal police departments, and questions the "public pressure" interpretation of police policies. Mr. Gardiner finds that, although citizens and city officials frequently seek to influence individual decisions, they seldom know how strict or lenient their department's general policies are, and seldom care. In addition, the author finds no significant connection between the severity of ticketing policies and such factors as income, race, or education, but does find some correlation with the geographical stability of a city's population.

Finally, the author concludes that the chief source of departmental traffic policy is an internally established set of norms concerning the importance of traffic work and the frequency with which officers should write tickets. Evidence from cities that change their traffic policies indicates that individual preferences on the part of chiefs or ranking officers are the primary source of these norms.

This book is an important contribution to the growing area in social sciences that deals with law enforcement and, more broadly, local political systems.

[more]

front cover of American Agriculture in the Twentieth Century
American Agriculture in the Twentieth Century
How It Flourished and What It Cost
Bruce L. Gardner
Harvard University Press, 2006

American agriculture in the twentieth century has given the world one of its great success stories, a paradigm of productivity and plenty. Yet the story has its dark side, from the plight of the Okies in the 1930s to the farm crisis of the 1980s to today's concerns about low crop prices and the impact of biotechnology. Looking at U.S. farming over the past century, Bruce Gardner searches out explanations for both the remarkable progress and the persistent social problems that have marked the history of American agriculture.

Gardner documents both the economic difficulties that have confronted farmers and the technological and economic transformations that have lifted them from relative poverty to economic parity with the nonfarm population. He provides a detailed analysis of the causes of these trends, with emphasis on the role of government action. He reviews how commodity support programs, driven by interest-group politics, have spent hundreds of billions of dollars to little purpose. Nonetheless, Gardner concludes that by reconciling competing economic interests while fostering productivity growth and economic integration of the farm and nonfarm economies, the overall twentieth-century role of government in American agriculture is fairly viewed as a triumph of democracy.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Chinese Traditional Historiography
Charles S. Gardner
Harvard University Press
This is the first attempt in any language to provide a comprehensive description of the motivation, textual and historical criticism, methods of synthesis, and style which have dominated Chinese historical scholarship for over two thousand years. Copious footnotes provide ample illustrations through characterization, textual history, and criticism of specific Chinese texts. The volume emphasizes both the strength and the deficiencies of the traditional procedure, confronting each feature of it with the strict methodology now currently practiced by leading sinologists alike in Europe, in the United States, in Japan, and in China.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Chu Hsi and the Ta-hsueh
Neo-Confucian Reflection on the Confucian Canon
Daniel K. Gardner
Harvard University Press, 1986

logo for Harvard University Press
In Defence of the Imagination
Helen Gardner
Harvard University Press

Helen Gardner is a vigorous and eloquent champion of traditional literary values. These values have been subverted, she feels, by some of the ablest of modern academics and by prevalent tendencies in criticism and teaching today. She discusses the new schools of criticism which exalt the sometimes unintelligible theorist above the creator of the work of art, the imaginative interpreter of life, or which replace the authority of the author with that of the reader. She regrets the tendency of teachers to emphasize contemporary literature to the neglect of the great writings of the past and to teach past literature only if it can somehow be made “relevant.” She reproves theater directors who distort Shakespeare's plays and who convert serious drama into happenings. And she finds that biographers of writers are so preoccupied with the inner lives of their subjects that the writings become psychological documents rather than works of the imagination.

In a closing chapter, partly autobiographical, she affirms the values she has found in a life devoted to the study of literature. Even the most polemical sections of the book are courteous and good-humored. Her own lucidity, range of reference, and passionate concern for literature are in themselves powerful affirmations of her argument.

[more]

front cover of Giotto and His Publics
Giotto and His Publics
Three Paradigms of Patronage
Julian Gardner
Harvard University Press, 2011

This probing analysis of three works by Giotto and the patrons who commissioned them goes far beyond the clichés of Giotto as the founding figure of Western painting. It traces the interactions between Franciscan friars and powerful bankers, illuminating the complex interplay between mercantile wealth and the iconography of poverty.

Political strife and religious faction lacerated fourteenth-century Italy. Giotto’s commissions are best understood against the background of this social turmoil. They reflected the demands of his patrons, the requirements of the Franciscan Order, and the restlessly inventive genius of the painter. Julian Gardner examines this important period of Giotto’s path-breaking career through works originally created for Franciscan churches: Stigmatization of Saint Francis from San Francesco at Pisa, now in the Louvre, the Bardi Chapel cycle of the Life of St. Francis in Santa Croce at Florence, and the frescoes of the crossing vault above the tomb of Saint Francis in the Lower Church of San Francesco at Assisi.

These murals were executed during a twenty-year period when internal tensions divided the friars themselves and when the Order was confronted by a radical change of papal policy toward its defining vow of poverty. The Order had amassed great wealth and built ostentatious churches, alienating many Franciscans in the process and incurring the hostility of other Orders. Many elements in Giotto’s frescoes, including references to St. Peter, Florentine politics, and church architecture, were included to satisfy patrons, redefine the figure of Francis, and celebrate the dominant group within the Franciscan brotherhood.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Making Dead Birds
Chronicle of a Film
Robert Gardner
Harvard University Press, 2007

Robert Gardner’s classic Dead Birds is one of the most highly acclaimed and controversial documentary films ever made. This detailed and candid account of the process of making Dead Birds, from the birth of the idea through filming in New Guinea to editing and releasing the finished film, is more than the chronicle of a single work. It is also a thoughtful examination of what it meant to record the moving and violent rituals of warrior-farmers in the New Guinea highlands and to present to the world a graphic story of their behavior as a window onto our own. Letters, journals, telegrams, newspaper clippings, and over 50 images are assembled to recreate a vivid chronology of events. Making Dead Birds not only addresses the art and practice of filmmaking, but also explores issues of representation and the discovery of meaning in human lives.

Gardner led a remarkable cast of participants on the 1961 expedition. All brought back extraordinary bodies of work. Probably most influential of all was Dead Birds, which marked a sea change in nonfiction filmmaking. This book takes the reader inside the creative process of making that landmark film and offers a revealing look into the heart and mind of one of the great filmmakers of our time.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Still Points
Robert Gardner
Harvard University Press

Still Points is a collection of remarkable and evocative still photographs taken by award-winning nonfiction filmmaker and author Robert Gardner during his anthropological and filming expeditions around the world. Thousands of his original photographic transparencies and negatives from the Kalahari Desert, New Guinea, Colombia, India, Ethiopia, Niger, and other remote locations are now housed in the Photographic Archives of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. This elegantly produced volume presents a curated selection of more than 70 color and black-and-white images made by Gardner between the 1950s and the 1980s. Edited by Adele Pressman, Gardner's wife and literary executor, and with a foreword by Eliot Weinberger, Still Points both honors an important and influential artist and reveals new dimensions in his work.

“There at the end of the endless cycles of time and the loops of film is stillness, and these still photos.”—From the foreword by Eliot Weinberger

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Human Documents
Eight Photographers
Robert Gardner
Harvard University Press, 2009

In Human Documents, Robert Gardner introduces the work of photographers with whom he has worked over a period of nearly fifty years under the auspices of the Film Study Center at Harvard. Their images achieve the status of what Gardner calls “human documents”: visual evidence that testifies to our shared humanity. In images and words, the book adds to the already significant literature on photography and filmmaking as ways to gather both fact and insight into the human condition. In nearly 100 images spanning geographies and cultures including India, New Guinea, Ethiopia, and the United States, Human Documents demonstrates the important role photography can play in furthering our understanding of human nature and connecting people through an almost universal visual language.

Author and cultural critic Eliot Weinberger contributes the essay “Photography and Anthropology (A Contact Sheet),” in which he provides a new and intriguing context for viewing and thinking about the images presented here.

With photographs by Michael Rockefeller, Robert Gardner, Kevin Bubriski, Adelaide de Menil, Christopher James, Jane Tuckerman, Susan Meiselas, and Alex Webb.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Advertising Tower
Japanese Modernism and Modernity in the 1920s
William O. Gardner
Harvard University Press, 2006

On a December morning in 1925, a newspaper journalist reported receiving 25 different handbills in an hour's walk in downtown Tokyo, advertising everything from Western-style clothing and furniture to sweet shops, charity organizations, phonograph recordings, plays, and films. The activities of advertisers, and the new entertainment culture and patterns of consumption that they promoted, helped to define a new urban aesthetic emerging in the 1920s.

This book examines some of the responses of Japanese authors to the transformation of Tokyo in the early decades of the twentieth century. In particular, it explores the themes and formal strategies of the modernist literature that flourished in the 1920s, focusing on the work of Hagiwara Kyojiro (1899-1938) and Hayashi Fumiko (1903-1951). William Gardner shows how modernist works offer new constructions of individual subjectivity amid the social and technological changes that provided the ground for the appearance of "mass media." Hagiwara's conception of the poem and poet as an electric-radio "advertising tower" provides an emblem for the aesthetic tensions and multiple discourses of technology, media, urbanism, commerce, and propaganda that were circulating through the urban environment at the time; while Hayashi's work, with its references to popular songs, plays, and movies, suggests an understanding of "everyday life" as the interface between individual subjectivity and a highly mediated environment.

[more]

front cover of Peculiar Institution
Peculiar Institution
America's Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition
David Garland
Harvard University Press, 2012

The U.S. death penalty is a peculiar institution, and a uniquely American one. Despite its comprehensive abolition elsewhere in the Western world, capital punishment continues in dozens of American states– a fact that is frequently discussed but rarely understood. The same puzzlement surrounds the peculiar form that American capital punishment now takes, with its uneven application, its seemingly endless delays, and the uncertainty of its ever being carried out in individual cases, none of which seem conducive to effective crime control or criminal justice. In a brilliantly provocative study, David Garland explains this tenacity and shows how death penalty practice has come to bear the distinctive hallmarks of America’s political institutions and cultural conflicts.

America’s radical federalism and local democracy, as well as its legacy of violence and racism, account for our divergence from the rest of the West. Whereas the elites of other nations were able to impose nationwide abolition from above despite public objections, American elites are unable– and unwilling– to end a punishment that has the support of local majorities and a storied place in popular culture.

In the course of hundreds of decisions, federal courts sought to rationalize and civilize an institution that too often resembled a lynching, producing layers of legal process but also delays and reversals. Yet the Supreme Court insists that the issue is to be decided by local political actors and public opinion. So the death penalty continues to respond to popular will, enhancing the power of criminal justice professionals, providing drama for the media, and bringing pleasure to a public audience who consumes its chilling tales.

Garland brings a new clarity to our understanding of this peculiar institution– and a new challenge to supporters and opponents alike.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Parisiana poetria
John of Garland
Harvard University Press, 2020
The Parisiana poetria, first published around 1220, expounds the medieval theory of poetry (ars poetica) and summarizes early thirteenth-century thought about writing. While the text draws on predecessors such as the Rhetorica ad Herennium, Horace’s Ars poetica, and work by Geoffrey of Vinsauf, its style and content reveal the unique experience of its author, John of Garland, a prominent teacher of the language arts at the University of Paris. John was also a well-read poet with broad tastes, and his passion for poetry, as well as for fine prose composition, is on display throughout the Parisiana poetria. This treatise is the only thoroughgoing attempt to unite three distinct arts—quantitative poetry, rhythmic poetry, and prose composition, especially of letters—under a single set of rules. The sections on low, middle, and high style, illustrated by his “Wheel of Virgil,” have attracted wide attention; and his long account of rhymed poetry is the most complete that has survived. This volume presents the most authoritative edition of the Latin text alongside a fresh English translation.
[more]

front cover of Convicting the Innocent
Convicting the Innocent
Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong
Brandon L. Garrett
Harvard University Press, 2011

On January 20, 1984, Earl Washington—defended for all of forty minutes by a lawyer who had never tried a death penalty case—was found guilty of rape and murder in the state of Virginia and sentenced to death. After nine years on death row, DNA testing cast doubt on his conviction and saved his life. However, he spent another eight years in prison before more sophisticated DNA technology proved his innocence and convicted the guilty man.

DNA exonerations have shattered confidence in the criminal justice system by exposing how often we have convicted the innocent and let the guilty walk free. In this unsettling in-depth analysis, Brandon Garrett examines what went wrong in the cases of the first 250 wrongfully convicted people to be exonerated by DNA testing.

Based on trial transcripts, Garrett’s investigation into the causes of wrongful convictions reveals larger patterns of incompetence, abuse, and error. Evidence corrupted by suggestive eyewitness procedures, coercive interrogations, unsound and unreliable forensics, shoddy investigative practices, cognitive bias, and poor lawyering illustrates the weaknesses built into our current criminal justice system. Garrett proposes practical reforms that rely more on documented, recorded, and audited evidence, and less on fallible human memory.

Very few crimes committed in the United States involve biological evidence that can be tested using DNA. How many unjust convictions are there that we will never discover? Convicting the Innocent makes a powerful case for systemic reforms to improve the accuracy of all criminal cases.

[more]

front cover of End of Its Rope
End of Its Rope
How Killing the Death Penalty Can Revive Criminal Justice
Brandon L. Garrett
Harvard University Press, 2017

It isn’t enough to celebrate the death penalty’s demise. We must learn from it.

When Henry McCollum was condemned to death in 1984 in rural North Carolina, death sentences were commonplace. In 2014, DNA tests set McCollum free. By then, death sentences were as rare as lethal lightning strikes. To most observers this national trend came as a surprise. What changed? Brandon Garrett hand-collected and analyzed national data, looking for causes and implications of this turnaround. End of Its Rope explains what he found, and why the story of who killed the death penalty, and how, can be the catalyst for criminal justice reform.

No single factor put the death penalty on the road to extinction, Garrett concludes. Death row exonerations fostered rising awareness of errors in death penalty cases, at the same time that a decline in murder rates eroded law-and-order arguments. Defense lawyers radically improved how they litigate death cases when given adequate resources. More troubling, many states replaced the death penalty with what amounts to a virtual death sentence—life without possibility of parole. Today, the death penalty hangs on in a few scattered counties where prosecutors cling to entrenched habits and patterns of racial bias.

The failed death penalty experiment teaches us how inept lawyering, overzealous prosecution, race discrimination, wrongful convictions, and excessive punishments undermine the pursuit of justice. Garrett makes a strong closing case for what a future criminal justice system might look like if these injustices were remedied.

[more]

front cover of Too Big to Jail
Too Big to Jail
How Prosecutors Compromise with Corporations
Brandon L. Garrett
Harvard University Press, 2014

American courts routinely hand down harsh sentences to individual convicts, but a very different standard of justice applies to corporations. Too Big to Jail takes readers into a complex, compromised world of backroom deals, for an unprecedented look at what happens when criminal charges are brought against a major company in the United States.

Federal prosecutors benefit from expansive statutes that allow an entire firm to be held liable for a crime by a single employee. But when prosecutors target the Goliaths of the corporate world, they find themselves at a huge disadvantage. The government that bailed out corporations considered too economically important to fail also negotiates settlements permitting giant firms to avoid the consequences of criminal convictions. Presenting detailed data from more than a decade of federal cases, Brandon Garrett reveals a pattern of negotiation and settlement in which prosecutors demand admissions of wrongdoing, impose penalties, and require structural reforms. However, those reforms are usually vaguely defined. Many companies pay no criminal fine, and even the biggest blockbuster payments are often greatly reduced. While companies must cooperate in the investigations, high-level employees tend to get off scot-free.

The practical reality is that when prosecutors face Hydra-headed corporate defendants prepared to spend hundreds of millions on lawyers, such agreements may be the only way to get any result at all. Too Big to Jail describes concrete ways to improve corporate law enforcement by insisting on more stringent prosecution agreements, ongoing judicial review, and greater transparency.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Social Reformers in Urban China
The Chinese Y.M.C.A., 1895-1926
Shirley S. Garrett
Harvard University Press, 1970

During the years before the advent of the Nationalist regime in China, a public concern for social welfare took shape. The cry for reform and the need for energies with which to meet the new demands of urban life opened the way for the Y.M.C.A. and other Western institutions to influence the course of change.

In this volume Garrett presents the impressive early history of the Y.M.C.A. in China, an organization which, during the first quarter of the twentieth century, became that country's most prominent private agency of social planning.

The men who went to China as Y.M.C.A. personnel were a new breed, infused not only with a sense of service but also with qualities of practicality and flexibility that enabled them to appreciate another culture. The author interviewed many ex-Y.M.C.A. China hands and combed a variety of archives to complete this inside account of the missionary origins of, and Chinese participation and leadership in, the Chinese Y.M.C.A. In describing its many constructive measures of reform, she covers the Y's formation of the first youth association in the country, its pioneer work in education, health, and welfare programs, and its promotion of community-wide urban action. What emerges is a portrait of a reform-minded institution, eager to respond to the needs of students and workers, but fearful that revolutionary change might alter its identity beyond recognition.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Letters
David Garrick
Harvard University Press

front cover of A Secret among the Blacks
A Secret among the Blacks
Slave Resistance before the Haitian Revolution
John D. Garrigus
Harvard University Press, 2023

A bold rethinking of the Haitian Revolution reveals the roots of the only successful slave uprising in the modern world.

Unearthing the progenitors of the Haitian Revolution has been a historical project of two hundred years. In A Secret among the Blacks, John D. Garrigus introduces two dozen Black men and women and their communities whose decades of resistance to deadly environmental and political threats preceded and shaped the 1791 revolt.

In the twenty-five miles surrounding the revolt’s first fires, enslaved people of diverse origins lived in a crucible of forces that arose from the French colonial project. When a combination of drought, trade blockade, and deadly anthrax bacteria caused waves of death among the enslaved in the 1750s, poison investigations spiraled across plantations. Planters accused, tortured, and killed enslaved healers, survivors, and community leaders for deaths the French regime had caused. Facing inquisition, exploitation, starvation, and disease, enslaved people devised resistance strategies that they practiced for decades. Enslaved men and women organized labor stoppages and allied with free Blacks to force the French into negotiations. They sought enforcement of freedom promises and legal protection from abuse. Some killed their abusers.

Through remarkable archival discoveries and creative interpretations of the worlds endured by the enslaved, A Secret among the Blacks reveals the range of complex, long-term political visions pursued by enslaved people who organized across plantations located in the seedbed of the Haitian Revolution. When the call to rebellion came, these men and women were prepared to answer.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Formation of the Parisian Bourgeoisie, 1690-1830
David Garrioch
Harvard University Press, 1996

Despite their importance during the French Revolution, the Paris middle classes are little known. This book focuses on the family organization and the political role of the Paris commercial middle classes, using as a case study the Faubourg St. Marcel and particularly the parish of St. Médard.

David Garrioch argues that in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the commercial middle classes were steadfastly local in their family ties and outlook. He shows, too, that they took independent political action in defense of their local position. This gradually changed during the eighteenth century, and the Revolution greatly accelerated the process of integration, at the same time broadening the composition of what may now be termed the Parisian bourgeoisie.

Central to Garrioch's argument is the idea that family, politics, and power are intimately connected. He shows the centrality of kinship to local politics in the first half of the eighteenth century, and the way new family structures were related to changes in the nature of politics even before the Revolution. Among the many important issues considered are birth control, the role of women, the importance of lineage, the spatial limits of middle-class lives, and the language and secularization of politics.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison
William Lloyd Garrison
Harvard University Press, 1971

William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879), outstanding among the dedicated fighters for the abolition of slavery, was also an activist in other movements such as women's and civil rights and religious reform. Never tiring in battle, he was "irrepressible, uncompromising, and inflammatory." He antagonized many, including some of his fellow reformers. There were also many who loved and respected him. But he was never overlooked.

His letters, a source of the first magnitude, begin in 1822, when Garrison was seventeen, and end in 1879, the year of his death. They offer an insight into the mind and life of an outstanding figure in American history, a reformer-revolutionary who sought radical changes in the institutions of his day--in the relationship of the races, the rights of women, the nature and role of religion and religious institutions, and the relations between the state and its citizens; and who, perhaps more than any other single individual, was ultimately responsible for the emancipation of the slaves.

Garrison's letters are also, sui generis, important as the expression of a vigorous writer, whose letters reflect his strength of character and warm humanity, and who appears here not only as the journalist, the reformer, and the leader of men, but also as the loving husband and father, the devoted son and son-in-law, the staunch friend, and the formidable opponent.

Included in this well illustrated first volume are Garrison's letters from the earliest known--one to his mother during his apprenticeship--through the 1831 founding of his famous newspaper, The Liberator; the founding in 1832 and 1833 of the New England and the American Anti-Slavery Societies; his first trip to England to meet with British abolitionists; his courtship and marriage; and his being dragged through the streets of Boston by a mob out to tar and feather the British abolitionist George Thompson.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison
William Lloyd Garrison
Harvard University Press

By 1861, William Lloyd Garrison’s public image had progressed from that of impulsive fanatic to one of widely respected and influential abolitionist. As editor of The Liberator and president of the American Anti-Slavery Society, he was the acknowledged spokesman for radical antislavery opinion.

Garrison was profoundly disturbed by the advent of war. In his correspondence, he kept military events at a distance, focusing on the morality of the conflict, an issue made the more poignant by his eldest son’s enlistment in the 55th Massachusetts Regiment in 1863—the same year that his wife suffered a paralytic stroke. Gradually he became convinced that the war would effect the abolition he had sought for so many years.

Likewise his attitude toward Lincoln underwent significant changes; he moved from critic to supporter, defending the President’s re-election against the arguments of fellow abolitionists. His visit with Lincoln in the White House he described as “a very satisfactory one indeed,” for he was pleased with Lincoln’s “spirit, and the familiar and candid way in which he unbosomed himself.” With the war ended and his goal as abolitionist achieved, Garrison discontinued The Liberator and withdrew from the American Anti-Slavery Society. Fortunately, friends arranged for a national testimonial that provided financial security. By 1866–1867 he was enjoying an active retirement with honors at home and abroad, and a “plump and cunning” first grandchild. His letters show Garrison as a family man and curious observer as well as a reformer with a vision of a free and peaceful land.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison
William Lloyd Garrison
Harvard University Press
As early as 1842 Garrison advanced the idea of disunion, arguing that the Constitution was "a covenant with death." Distressed by Calhoun's signing of the annexation treaty for Texas, he prophesied that civil war was inevitable. Though plagued by illness and death in his immediate family throughout the years covered in this volume, Garrison drove himself to win supporters for the radical abolitionist cause. In 1846 he traveled to Great Britain, denouncing the Free Church of Scotland for accepting funds from South Carolina. While in England he lectured often with Frederick Douglass; the two embarked the following year on a grueling lecture tour of the western United States, heretofore the exclusive domain of moderate abolitionists. In 1848, despite the objections of close friends, Garrison held the controversial Anti-Sabbath Convention in Boston. Throughout these years he continued to write extensively for the Liberator and involved himself in a variety of liberal causes; in 1849 he publicized and circulated in Massachusetts the earliest petition for women's suffrage.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison
William Lloyd Garrison
Harvard University Press

This is the sixth and final volume collecting the letters of an outstanding figure in American history. During the years when these letters were written, Garrison was secure, both financially and in his reputation as distinguished abolitionist. Although officially retired, he remained vigorously concerned with issues crucial to him--the relationship of the races, woman suffrage, temperance, national and international affairs, and, above all, his family.

He writes about the Alabama Claims and the proposed annexation of Santo Domingo, aligning himself with the Radical Republicans. His letters support President Grant, despite the charges of corruption that surrounded him, but his public views on Rutherford B. Hayes change from cautious optimism to condemnation. He is saddened by the return to power in the South of the white ruling class, and to the end of his life he is deeply involved with the plight of minority groups in the country.

The center of Garrison's life was his family, and his correspondence reveals the ways his days passed in association with those nearest to him. There is evidence of friction in the family, but his relationships are warm and loving. His private letters tell of the death of his wife in 1875 and his failing health. He died in 1879, an old reformer still fighting for the rights of humanity.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison
William Lloyd Garrison
Harvard University Press

The fiery editor of the Liberator helped shape the destiny of a divided nation rapidly moving toward war. His letters ring with denunciations of the Compromise of 1850 and the barbarous Fugitive Slave Law, a federal bill that not only sent runaway slaves back to angry masters but threatened the liberty of all free blacks. Despite such provocation. Garrison was an advocate of nonresistance during this period though he continued to advocate the emancipation of slaves.

Garrison's writings also reflect the interests of his times. He engaged in lively correspondence with fellow countrymen Harriet Beecher Stowe, Wendell Phillips, Susan B. Anthony, Theodore Parker, and Stephen S. Foster. In a long letter to Louis Kossuth, he challenges that Hungarian patriot's stand of opposing tyranny in Europe while ignoring slavery in America.

Set against a background of wide-ranging travels throughout the western United States and of family affairs back home in Boston, Garrison's letters of this decade make a distinctive contribution to antebellum life and thought.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison
William Lloyd Garrison
Harvard University Press

William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879), outstanding among the dedicated fighters for the abolition of slavery, was also an activist in other movements such as women's and civil rights and religious reform. Never tiring in battle, he was "irrepressible, uncompromising, and inflammatory." He antagonized many, including some of his fellow reformers. There were also many who loved and respected him. But he was never overlooked.

His letters, a source of the first magnitude, begin in 1822, when Garrison was seventeen, and end in 1879, the year of his death. They offer an insight into the mind and life of an outstanding figure in American history, a reformer-revolutionary who sought radical changes in the institutions of his day--in the relationship of the races, the rights of women, the nature and role of religion and religious institutions, and the relations between the state and its citizens; and who, perhaps more than any other single individual, was ultimately responsible for the emancipation of the slaves.

Garrison's letters are also, sui generis, important as the expression of a vigorous writer, whose letters reflect his strength of character and warm humanity, and who appears here not only as the journalist, the reformer, and the leader of men, but also as the loving husband and father, the devoted son and son-in-law, the staunch friend, and the formidable opponent.

During the five years covered in this volume Garrison's three sons were born and he entered the arena of social reform with full force. In 1836 he began his public criticism of the orthodox observance of the Sabbath. The year 1837 witnessed the severe attack from orthodox clergyman on The Liberator. In 1838 Garrison attended the Peace Convention in Boston. The simmering conflict within the antislavery movement over the issues of political action and the participation of women broke out in 1839, and at the annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1840, the anti-Garrisonian minority seceded and formed the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. Meanwhile the World's Anti-Slavery Convention was called in London in June. Garrison attended, arriving several days after the opening. The female delegates from Massachusetts and Pennsylvania were excluded from the convention, and Garrison protested by sitting in the balcony with them and refusing to participate.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Poetry and the Criticism of Life
H.W. Garrod
Harvard University Press

logo for Harvard University Press
The Epic Histories (Buzandaran Patmut‘iwnk‘)
Attributed to P‘awstos Buzand
Nina G. Garsoïan
Harvard University Press, 1989

The late fifth-century anonymous Epic Histories, formerly known as the History of Armenia attributed to another unknown P‘awstos (Faustos) Buzand, form the earliest historical work written in Armenian. They are the main source for our knowledge of social structure, beliefs and customs of early Christian Armenia, and especially of the profound and lasting influence of Zoroastrian Persia on the recently converted country. This influence is evident in the very composition of the work, which owes as much to the lost oral tradition of the Iranian epic as to more familiar Classical and early Christian models.

Hence, it is unmatched for the reconstruction of the ambivalent world of the Near East in Late Antiquity at the cross roads between Classical and Iranian civilizations. Since no scholarly translation of this work into any Western language has been attempted for more than a century, much of its contribution has remained beyond the reach of most scholars. The aim of the present publication is to fill this lacuna by complementing the translation of the original Armenian text with a Commentary and Appendices that are intended to serve not only Armenian scholars but Classicists and Iranians alike.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Bouttios and Late Antique Antioch
Reconstructing a Lost Historian
Benjamin Garstad
Harvard University Press, 2022
Bouttios and Late Antique Antioch undertakes the exciting, if laborious, task of assembling clues and piecing back together a book that has disappeared from our library of Greek and Roman works. But it does not merely add another author to the bibliography of antiquity and place him in fourth-century Antioch. It shows how the gods could be reduced to historical characters, the powerful goddess of luck turned into a pitiful victim of virgin sacrifice, and respected emperors defamed as despots—and, in sum, how the writing of history could be exploited for partisan purposes. We see how people in what we consider the distant past thought about their own history, and how they discussed momentous political and social issues across a seemingly insurmountable divide in a period of existential crisis.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Heart of a Heartless World
Liberal Religion and Modern Liberty
Bryan Garsten
Harvard University Press

front cover of Saving Persuasion
Saving Persuasion
A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment
Bryan Garsten
Harvard University Press, 2009
In today's increasingly polarized political landscape it seems that fewer and fewer citizens hold out hope of persuading one another. Even among those who have not given up on persuasion, few will admit to practicing the art of persuasion known as rhetoric. To describe political speech as "rhetoric" today is to accuse it of being superficial or manipulative. In Saving Persuasion, Bryan Garsten uncovers the early modern origins of this suspicious attitude toward rhetoric and seeks to loosen its grip on contemporary political theory. Revealing how deeply concerns about rhetorical speech shaped both ancient and modern political thought, he argues that the artful practice of persuasion ought to be viewed as a crucial part of democratic politics. He provocatively suggests that the aspects of rhetoric that seem most dangerous--the appeals to emotion, religious values, and the concrete commitments and identities of particular communities--are also those which can draw out citizens' capacity for good judgment. Against theorists who advocate a rationalized ideal of deliberation aimed at consensus, Garsten argues that a controversial politics of partiality and passion can produce a more engaged and more deliberative kind of democratic discourse.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Children’s Talk
Catherine Garvey
Harvard University Press, 1984

How do children learn the intangible rules of conversation? How do they make talk “work”? Adults usually regard talk as a simple means of conveying information. Catherine Garvey’s examination of children’s talk reveals, however, that much more than this goes on in any conversational exchange.

Talk always takes place in a particular situation or context: the speakers are continuously interpreting what is going on, and they adjust their responses accordingly. To be sure that the message is received, children must learn to engage the attention of the other person, to take turns at talking, and to set up signals for the beginning and end of conversation. They learn to confirm that the intended meaning is understood and to evaluate the acceptability of the message, and they acquire an understanding of the ritual aspects of talk, including marks of courtesy such as “please” and “thank you,” displays of attentiveness, and an awareness of interpersonal status. Children must also learn to say “no,” to use talk to reach a goal, and to interpret the differences in the ways other people talk.

Garvey explains the importance of talk to children’s socialization and development and shows why talk is an integral and revealing part of the child’s life that reflects important changes in thinking and social interaction.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Play
Catherine Garvey
Harvard University Press

front cover of Play
Play
Enlarged Edition
Catherine Garvey
Harvard University Press, 1990
Since the original publication of Play in 1977, dramatic economic and social changes have resulted in a marked increase in the number of young children from diverse backgrounds enrolled in group child-care programs, a trend that has created a need for a better understanding of play and its significance for the growing child. Over the same period, researchers studying child development have become even more interested in the relationship between play and children's well-being. In this enlarged edition of Play, Catherine Garvey explores some of the more promising new directions in the study of play and summarizes the findings of recent research.
[more]

front cover of What Are Freedoms For?
What Are Freedoms For?
John H. Garvey
Harvard University Press, 1996

We generally suppose that it is our right to freedom which allows us to make the choices that shape our lives. The right to have an abortion is called "freedom of choice" because, it is said, a woman should be free to choose between giving birth and not doing so. Freedom of speech protects us whether we want to salute the flag or burn it. There is a correlative principle: one choice is as good as another. Freedom is not a right that makes moral judgments. It lets us do what we want.

John Garvey disputes both propositions. We should understand freedom, he maintains, as a right to act, not a right to choose; and furthermore, we should view freedom as a right to engage in actions that are good and valuable. This may seem obvious, but it inverts a central principle of liberalism--the idea that the right is prior to the good. Thus friendship is a good thing; and one reason the Constitution protects freedom of association is that it gives us the space to form friendships.

This book casts doubt on the idea that freedoms are bilateral rights that allow us to make contradictory choices: to speak or remain silent, to believe in God or to disbelieve, to abort or to give birth to a child. Garvey argues that the goodness of childbearing does not entail the goodness of abortion; and if freedom follows from the good, then freedom to do the first does not entail the freedom to do the second. Each action must have its own justification. Garvey holds that if the law is to protect freedoms, it is permissible--indeed it is necessary--to make judgments about the goodness and badness of actions.

The author's keen insights into important rights issues, communicated with verve and a variety of both real and hypothetical cases, will be of interest to all who care about the meaning of freedoms.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Circles without Center
Paths to the Discovery and Creation of Self in Modern Literature
Enrico Garzilli
Harvard University Press, 1972

logo for Harvard University Press
Inventions of Difference
On Jacques Derrida
Rodolphe Gasché
Harvard University Press, 1994

Rodolphe Gasché, one of the world's foremost—and most provocative—authorities on Jacques Derrida, has news for deconstruction's devotees, whose traffic in the terms of “difference” signals privileged access to the most radically chic of intellectual circles: they do not know their Derrida. A deconstruction of the criticism that goes by deconstruction's name, this book reveals the true philosophical nature of Derrida's thought, its debt to the tradition it engages, and its misuse by some of its most fervent admirers.

Gasché's Inventions of Difference explodes the current myth of Derrida's singularity and sets in its place a finely informed sense of the philosopher's genuine accomplishment. Derrida's recent turn from philosophical concerns to matters literary, historical, and political has misled many of his self-styled followers, Gasché contends. Though less overtly philosophical, Derrida's later writings can be properly understood only in relation to a certain philosophical tradition, which Inventions of Difference cogently traces.

Gasché shows that terms like “difference” and “other” are devoid of meaning outside the context of identity, a context that draws not only on Husserl's phenomenology and Heidegger's writings but also on the work of Hegel. By setting forth this affinity with Hegel, Gasché clarifies the philosophical weight and direction of Derrida's recent work and the philosophical engagement of his larger project. His book puts a stop to the loose talk of deconstruction and points to the real rigors and pleasures of knowing Derrida.

[more]

front cover of The Wild Card of Reading
The Wild Card of Reading
On Paul de Man
Rodolphe Gasché
Harvard University Press, 1998

One of the most knowledgeable and provocative explicators of Paul de Man's writings, Rodolphe Gasché, a philosopher by training, demonstrates for the first time the systematic coherence of the critic's work, insisting that de Man continues to merit close attention despite his notoriously difficult and obscure style. Gasché shows that de Man's "reading" centers on a dimension of the texts that is irreducible to any possible meaning, a dimension characterized by the "absolutely singular."

Given that de Man and Derrida are both termed deconstructionists, Gasché differentiates between the two by emphasizing Derrida's primary interest in "writing," and postulates that the best way to come to terms with de Man's works is to "read" them athwart the writings of Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Heidegger, and Derrida. He shows his respect for the "immanent logic" of de Man's thought--which he lays out in great detail--while revealing his uneasiness at the oddness of that thought and its consequences.

[more]

front cover of The Tain of the Mirror
The Tain of the Mirror
Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection
Rodolphe Gasché
Harvard University Press, 1986
Deconstruction is no game of mirrors, revealing the text as a play of surface against surface. Its more radical philosophical effort is to get behind the mirror and question the very nature of reflection. The Tain of the Mirror (tain names the tinfoil, or lusterless back of the mirror) explores that gritty surface without which no reflection would be possible. Rodolphe Gasché does what no one has done before in many discussions of Derrida, namely to tie his work in an authoritative way to its origins in the history of the criticism of reflexivity.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Aristocracy and People
Britain, 1815–1865
Norman Gash
Harvard University Press
One of the foremost scholars of nineteenth–century England, Gash has written a new interpretation of the years 1815 to 1865 that takes industrialization off center stage as the great dramatic event in national life. Gash integrates other equally significant changes the postwar slump in trade and manufacturing, the unprecedented expansion of population, and the increasing urbanization. He argues that the singular ability of the industrial revolution to produce wealth and skills enabled England to cope with impending social catastrophe. Gash also reintroduces the importance of politics in explaining events, and he challenges the recent historical interpretations giving primacy to class history and class consciousness.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Lord Liverpool
The Life and Political Career of Robert Banks Jenkinson, Second Earl of Liverpool, 1770–1828
Norman Gash
Harvard University Press, 1984

Less cynical than Talleyrand, more imaginative than Metternich, as creative as Guizot, Lord Liverpool was one of the great European conservatives of his age. He served as prime minister for the longest continuous term in nineteenth-century Britain and presided over the triumphant years of the Napoleonic War, the strife-torn era of the “Peterloo” massacre, and the founding of the great liberal free-trade revolution in financial and commercial policy that heralded Victorianism.

Norman Gash’s biography is the first modern reassessment of this misunderstood statesman. Gash places Liverpool within the kaleidoscopic parliamentary politics of the time and shows how he governed with the collective strength and unity of the cabinet. By offering parsimonious administration and enlightened economic policy, Liverpool hoped to preserve the old constitution and prevent both Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform. Balancing interests and preserving order, Liverpool also contended with the vicissitudes of the still powerful monarchs—the aging and disturbed George III and the capricious and self-indulgent George IV, whose attempted divorce almost toppled the Liverpool administration.

This is not only an account of one of the most professional prime ministers of Great Britain, but also the story of the personal relations that shaped Lord Liverpool and the private life that gave him immense satisfaction. Based on correspondence and Lord Liverpool’s private papers, Gash’s work recasts the history of a turbulent age and its most prominent political figure.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell
Elizabeth Cleghorn (Stevenson) Gaskell
Harvard University Press
Elizabeth Gaskell not only was a significant figure in her own right but moved in the center of the Victorian literary world. The list of her correspondents is a roster of many of the most distinguished literary names of mid-nineteenth-century England. This volume contains all of her available extant letters written from about 1832 to 1865; they have been transcribed from the originals whenever possible. The collection is chronologically arranged, except for a short series of letters for which dates are unobtainable, and a reference system allows the reader to follow letters to any particular writer. A full index frequently includes brief biographical sketches.
[more]

front cover of Witchfinders
Witchfinders
A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy
Malcolm Gaskill
Harvard University Press, 2007

By spring 1645, two years of civil war had exacted a dreadful toll upon England. People lived in terror as disease and poverty spread, and the nation grew ever more politically divided. In a remote corner of Essex, two obscure gentlemen, Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne, exploited the anxiety and lawlessness of the time and initiated a brutal campaign to drive out the presumed evil in their midst. Touring Suffolk and East Anglia on horseback, they detected demons and idolators everywhere. Through torture, they extracted from terrified prisoners confessions of consorting with Satan and demonic spirits.

Acclaimed historian Malcolm Gaskill retells the chilling story of the most savage witch-hunt in English history. By the autumn of 1647 at least 250 people--mostly women--had been captured, interrogated, and hauled before the courts. More than a hundred were hanged, causing Hopkins to be dubbed "Witchfinder General" by critics and admirers alike. Though their campaign was never legally sanctioned, they garnered the popular support of local gentry, clergy, and villagers. While Witchfinders tells of a unique and tragic historical moment fueled by religious fervor, today it serves as a reminder of the power of fear and fanaticism to fuel ordinary people's willingness to demonize others.

[more]

front cover of Making Black Scientists
Making Black Scientists
A Call to Action
Marybeth Gasman
Harvard University Press, 2019

Americans have access to some of the best science education in the world, but too often black students are excluded from these opportunities. This essential book by leading voices in the field of education reform offers an inspiring vision of how America’s universities can guide a new generation of African Americans to success in science.

Educators, research scientists, and college administrators have all called for a new commitment to diversity in the sciences, but most universities struggle to truly support black students in these fields. Historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are different, though. Marybeth Gasman, widely celebrated as an education-reform visionary, and Thai-Huy Nguyen show that many HBCUs have proven adept at helping their students achieve in the sciences. There is a lot we can learn from these exemplary schools.

Gasman and Nguyen explore ten innovative schools that have increased the number of black students studying science and improved those students’ performance. Educators on these campuses have a keen sense of their students’ backgrounds and circumstances, familiarity that helps their science departments avoid the high rates of attrition that plague departments elsewhere. The most effective science programs at HBCUs emphasize teaching when considering whom to hire and promote, encourage students to collaborate rather than compete, and offer more opportunities for black students to find role models among both professors and peers.

Making Black Scientists reveals the secrets to these institutions’ striking successes and shows how other colleges and universities can follow their lead. The result is a bold new agenda for institutions that want to better serve African American students.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
A Small City in France
Françoise Gaspard
Harvard University Press, 1995

The picturesque town of Dreux, 60 miles west of Paris, quietly entered history in 1821, when Victor Hugo won the hand of his beloved there. Another century and a half would pass before the town made history again, but this time there was nothing quiet about it. In 1983, Jean-François Le Pen’s National Front candidates made a startling electoral gain in the Dreux region. Its liberal traditions had ended abruptly. With the radical right controlling the municipal council and the deputy mayor’s office, Dreux became the forerunner of neofascist advances all across the nation. How could it happen?

A trained historian, Françoise Gaspard was born in Dreux and served as the city’s socialist mayor from 1977 to 1983. She brings this experience to bear in her study, giving us an evocative picture of the town in all its particularity and at the same time fitting it into the broader context. Local history, collective memory, political life, the role of personality, partisanship, and rumor, the claims of newcomers and oldtimers, Muslims and Catholics: Gaspard sifts through these factors as she crafts a clear and rousing account of the conditions that brought the National Front to power. Viewed amid the explosive consequences of recent demographic and economic transformations, Dreux, with a population of about 30,000, is facing big-city problems: class conflict, unemployment, racism. This is a book about the decline of small-town “virtues” and, more ominously, the democratic ideal in France. With its disturbing implications for other European nations and the United States, it could well be a parable for our time.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
San Lorenzo
A Florentine Church
Robert W. Gaston
Harvard University Press

This comprehensive, interdisciplinary collection illuminates many previously unexplored aspects of the Basilica of San Lorenzo’s history, extending from its Early Christian foundation to the modern era. Brunelleschi’s rebuilt Basilica, the center of liturgical patronage of the Medici and their grand-ducal successors until the nineteenth century, is today one of the most frequently studied churches in Florence. Modern research has tended, however, to focus on the remarkable art and architecture from ca. 1400–1600.

In this wide-ranging collection, scholars investigate: the urban setting of the church and its parish; San Lorenzo’s relations with other ecclesiastical institutions; the genesis of individual major buildings of the complex and their decorations; the clergy, chapels and altars; the chapter’s administration and financial structure; lay and clerical patronage; devotional furnishings, music, illuminated liturgical manuscripts, and preaching; as well as the annual or ephemeral festal practices on the site. Each contribution offers a profound exploration of its topic, wide-ranging in its chronological scope. One encounters here fresh archival research, the publication of relevant documents, and critical assessments of the historiography. San Lorenzo is represented in this volume as a living Florentine institution, continually reshaped by complex historical forces.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
John Gorham Palfrey and the New England Conscience
Frank Otto Gatell
Harvard University Press

The New England of his day regarded John Gorham Palfrey's life as blameless and exemplary, a nineteenth-century "monument to the Puritan ideal of rectitude." Yet he himself once called it "his personal tragicomedy." At least, it was diverse, for Palfrey had been historian, Harvard educator, Unitarian minister, Massachusetts politician, editor of the North American Review, and crusader against slavery, and himself an emancipator. During his lifetime, from 1796 to 1881, Palfrey participated, sometimes reluctantly, in revolutionary changes in the political, economic, and intellectual climate of New England.

In his stormy political career, Palfrey not only was Massachusetts Secretary of State, member of Congress, and Postmaster of Boston, but also played a key role in the formation of the Free Soil Party. When the Whigs, in the name of national unity and compromise, seemed to ignore the moral necessities of the slavery question, he joined with such men as Charles Francis Adams, Charles Sumner and Richard Henry Dana, Jr., to reaffirm traditional moral values. From this struggle, Palfrey emerged a political loser. Hampered by inflexibility, he laterretreated to his study to write his massive history of New England, nursing his disappointment and cherishing his sense of rectitude. We are left with the image of a man whose achievements were substantial, perhaps because he insisted upon making his life a Bay State morality play.

For this biography of Palfrey, Gatell has used papers of Palfrey's contemporaries and of the Palfrey family manuscripts, among them an unpublished autobiography, itself a search for meaning in a long and perplexing life.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Germany and the United States
A "Special Relationship"
Hans W. Gatzke
Harvard University Press, 1980

Beginning with Bismarck's forging of a nation with "iron and blood," Gatzke tells of Germany's relentless struggle for domination in Europe and in the West, its defeat in two world wars, its division, East Germany's travail, and West Germany's search for identity as a modern democratic state.

A discerning statement about Germany and other nations, this book reevaluates for the general reader and the historian the impact of rapid industrialization, the origins of the world wars, the question of war guilt, the decade of Weimar democracy, and the rise and fall of Hitler. Gatzke looks anew at the economic miracle in West Germany and the consequences of making prosperity the cornerstone of a new republic.

It is to the realities of these German characteristics as an evolving nation-state that Gatzke relates American foreign policy and perceptions. He recounts the American fluctuations, from favorable to hostile to friendly, as Germany's policies and fortunes changed, and he places the division of Germany in historical perspective.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar
Gerald Gazdar
Harvard University Press, 1985

Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar provides the definitive exposition of the theory of grammar originally proposed by Gerald Gazdar and developed during half a dozen years' work with his colleagues Ewan Klein, Geoffrey Pullum, and Ivan Sag. This long-awaited book contains both detailed specifications of the theory and extensive illustrations of its power to describe large parts of English grammar. Experts who wish to evaluate the theory and students learning GPSP for the first time will find this book an invaluable guide.

The initial chapters lay out the theoretical machinery of GPSP in a readily intelligible way. Combining informal discussion with precise formalization, the authors describe all major aspects of their grammatical system, including a complete theory of syntactic features, phrase structure rules, meta rules, and feature instantiation principles. The book then shows just what a GPSP analysis of English syntax can accomplish. Topics include the internal structure of phrases, unbounded dependency constructions of many varieties, and coordinate conjunction—a construction long considered the sticking point for phrase structure approaches to syntax.

The book concludes with a well developed proposal for a model theoretic semantic system to go along with GPSP syntax. Throughout, the authors maintain the highest standards of explicitness and rigor in developing and assessing their grammatical system. Their aim is to provide the best possible test of the hypothesis that syntactic description can be accomplished in a single-level system. And more generally, it is their intention to formulate a grammatical framework in which linguistic universals follow directly from the form of the system and therefore require no explicit statement. Their book sets new methodological standards for work in generative grammar while presenting a grammatical system of extraordinary scope.

[more]

front cover of The Best of the Best
The Best of the Best
Becoming Elite at an American Boarding School
Rubén A. Gaztambide-Fernández
Harvard University Press, 2009

For two years, Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández shared the life of what he calls the “Weston School,” an elite New England boarding school. He sat in on classes, ate meals in the dining halls, cheered at sporting events, hung out in dorms while students baked cookies or celebrated birthdays. And through it all, observing the experiences of a diverse group of students, conducting interviews and focus groups, he developed a nuanced portrait of how these students make sense of their extraordinary good fortune in attending the school.

Vividly describing the pastoral landscape and graceful buildings, the rich variety of classes and activities, and the official and unofficial rules that define the school, The Best of the Best reveals a small world of deeply ambitious, intensely pressured students. Some are on scholarship, others have never met a public school student, but all feel they have earned their place as a “Westonian” by being smart and working hard. Weston is a family, they declare, with a niche for everyone, but the hierarchy of coolness—the way in which class, race, sexism, and good looks can determine one’s place—is well known.

For Gaztambide-Fernández, Weston is daunting yet strikingly bucolic, inspiring but frustratingly incurious, and sometimes—especially for young women—a gilded cage for a gilded age. “Would you send your daughter here?” one girl asks him, and seeing his hesitation asks, “Because you love her?”

[more]

front cover of What Is China?
What Is China?
Territory, Ethnicity, Culture, and History
Zhaoguang Ge
Harvard University Press, 2018

Ge Zhaoguang, an eminent historian of traditional China and a public intellectual, takes on fundamental questions that shape the domestic and international politics of the world’s most populous country and its second largest economy. What Is China? offers an insider’s account that addresses sensitive problems of Chinese identity and shows how modern scholarship about China—whether conducted in China, East Asia, or the West—has attempted to make sense of the country’s shifting territorial boundaries and its diversity of ethnic groups and cultures.

Ge considers, for example, the ancient concept of tianxia, or All-Under-Heaven, which assigned supremacy to the imperial court and lesser status to officials, citizens, tributary states, and tribal peoples. Does China’s government still operate with a belief in divine rule of All-Under-Heaven, or has it taken a different view of other actors, inside and outside its current borders? Responding both to Western theories of the nation-state and to Chinese intellectuals eager to promote “national learning,” Ge offers an insightful and erudite account of how China sees its place in the world. As he wrestles with complex historical and cultural forces guiding the inner workings of an often misunderstood nation, Ge also teases out many nuances of China’s encounter with the contemporary world, using China’s past to explain aspects of its present and to provide insight into various paths the nation might follow as the twenty-first century unfolds.

[more]

front cover of After the Fact
After the Fact
Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist
Clifford Geertz
Harvard University Press, 1995

"Suppose," Clifford Geertz suggests, "having entangled yourself every now and again over four decades or so in the goings-on in two provincial towns, one a Southeast Asian bend in the road, one a North African outpost and passage point, you wished to say something about how those goings-on had changed." A narrative presents itself, a tour of indices and trends, perhaps a memoir? None, however, will suffice, because in forty years more has changed than those two towns--the anthropologist, for instance, anthropology itself, even the intellectual and moral world in which the discipline exists. And so, in looking back on four decades of anthropology in the field, Geertz has created a work that is characteristically unclassifiable, a personal history that is also a retrospective reflection on developments in the human sciences amid political, social, and cultural changes in the world. An elegant summation of one of the most remarkable careers in anthropology, it is at the same time an eloquent statement of the purposes and possibilities of anthropology's interpretive powers.

To view his two towns in time, Pare in Indonesia and Sefrou in Morocco, Geertz adopts various perspectives on anthropological research and analysis during the post-colonial period, the Cold War, and the emergence of the new states of Asia and Africa. Throughout, he clarifies his own position on a broad series of issues at once empirical, methodological, theoretical, and personal. The result is a truly original book, one that displays a particular way of practicing the human sciences and thus a particular--and particularly efficacious--view of what these sciences are, have been, and should become.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Making Civilizations
The World before 600
Hans-Joachim Gehrke
Harvard University Press, 2020

Distinguished historians of the ancient world analyze the earliest developments in human history and the rise of the first major civilizations, from the Middle East to India and China.

In this volume of the six-part History of the World series, Hans-Joachim Gehrke, a noted scholar of ancient Greece, leads a distinguished group of historians in analyzing prehistory, the earliest human settlements, and the rise of the world’s first advanced civilizations.

The Neolithic period—sometimes called the Agrarian Revolution—marked a turning point in human history. People were no longer dependent entirely on hunting animals and gathering plants but instead cultivated crops and reared livestock. This led to a more settled existence, notably along rivers such as the Nile, Tigris, Euphrates, Ganges, and Yangzi. Increased mastery of metals, together with innovations in tools and technologies, led to economic specialization, from intricate crafts to deadlier weapons, which contributed to the growth of village communities as well as trade networks. Family was the fundamental social unit, its relationships and hierarchies modeled on the evolving relationship between ruler and ruled. Religion, whether polytheist or monotheist, played a central role in shaping civilizations from the Persians to the Israelites. The world was construed in terms of a divinely ordained order: the Chinese imperial title Huangdi expressed divinity and heavenly splendor, while Indian emperor Ashoka was heralded as the embodiment of moral law.

From the latest findings about the Neanderthals to the founding of imperial China to the world of Western classical antiquity, Making Civilizations offers an authoritative overview of humanity’s earliest eras.

[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter