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Politics in War
The Bases of Political Community in South Vietnam
Allan E. Goodman
Harvard University Press, 1973

"Internal war does not create politics or processes of government. This is likely to be the most tragic aspect of the war in Vietnam. When the guns are silent, the political analyst will find essentially the same political forces and governmental institutions intact as when the conflict began."

Politics in War deals mainly with the years 1967-1970 but bears on the problems South Vietnam faces now that American forces are no longer active. The book provides an understanding of Vietnamese politics, the forces underlying it, and the bases upon which political community and a future political settlement might be achieved.

Mr. Goodman has based his analysis on first-hand research. He conducted over 300 interviews with Vietnamese political leaders and government officials. His field work in South Vietnam encompassed three years and he presents materials from such sources as South Vietnam's National Assembly, its Ministry of Interior, and the U.S. Department of State's Vietnam Working Group.

Politics in War presents the untold story of how the Vietnamese saw the period of deepest American involvement. Goodman supplies background material on the Thieu government, its motivations, and its response to the people.

Students of politics who have been concerned about what the Vietnam involvement meant to America can now better assess what the last decade has meant to the Vietnamese.

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Politics is for People
Shirley Williams
Harvard University Press, 1981

If we are to enhance the quality of life, a bold new approach to politics is needed that takes into consideration the economic realities of the 1980s. Shirley Williams, a founder of the new British Social Democratic Party, former Labourite and government minister, outlines her blueprint for action in this forthright and intelligent book.

Traditional institutions in both capitalist and communist systems are cracking under the stresses of advanced industrialism, Williams contends. The sturdy structures once responsible for economic abundance, emergent class interests, and political responses are now in disrepair. Even the impressive postwar economic and social achievements are jeopardized by scarce energy and the unmet educational needs of high technology. Policymakers and citizens in the West can no longer assume that full employment, or a wide range of social services, or good industrial relations are achievable unless there is a quantum leap in our political thinking.

What Williams wants and is working toward is a government that is limited, accountable, and able to be superseded when it forfeits popular support. The welfare state, furthermore, needs to be reformed to allow for more participation. She calls for the devolution of power and decentralization in government, big business, and unions. In three sweeping proposals, she suggests a ten year plan to bring the welfare state into the future, a Marshall Plan to assist the Third World, and greater disarmament after a period of successful detente.

Williams' words ring with harsh truths and tangible needs. She challenges us with her own declaration of intent: "The old politics is dying. The battle to decide what the new politics will be like is just beginning. It is possible, just possible, that it will be a politics for people."

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Politics of Development
Perspectives on Twentieth-Century Asia
Robert Scalapino
Harvard University Press, 1989
The renowned political scientist Robert Scalapino traces the evolution of Asian countries in our century, seeking to determine the precise mix of culture, experience, scale, timing, leadership, and policy that shapes individual developing nations. Blending discussions of political, cultural, and economic events, Scalapino provides scenarios for the future that give grounds for hope but that also underscore the dangerous potential for racial conflict and religious fanaticism. General readers as well as students of Asia will find this book rich in wisdom and insight.
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The Politics of Ethnicity
Michael Walzer, Edward T. Kantowicz, John Higham, and Mona Harrington
Harvard University Press, 1982

The monumental Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups is the most authoritative single source available on the history, culture, and distinctive characteristics of ethnic groups in the United States. The Dimensions of Ethnicity series is designed to make this landmark scholarship available to everyone in a series of handy paperbound student editions. Selections in this series will include outstanding articles that illuminate the social dynamics of a pluralistic nation or masterfully summarize the experience of key groups.

Written by the best-qualified scholars in each field, Dimensions of Ethnicity will reflect the complex interplay between assimilation and pluralism that is a central theme of the American experience.

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The Politics of Ethnicity and the Crisis of the Peloponnesian League
Peter Funke
Harvard University Press, 2009

The crisis of Spartan power in the first half of the fourth century has been connected to Spartan inability to manage the hegemony built on the ruins of the Athenian Empire, or interpreted as a result of the unexpected annihilation of the Spartan army by the Boeotians at Leuktra. The present book offers a new perspective, suggesting that the crisis that finally brought down Sparta was in important ways a result of centrifugal impulses within the Peloponnesian League, accompanied by a general awakening of ethnicity in various areas of the Peloponnese.

A series of regional case studies is combined with thematic contributions focusing on topics such as the relationship of religious cults and ethnicity and of democracy and ethnicity, the use of archaeological evidence for ethnic phenomena, and comparative approaches based on social anthropology.

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The Politics of Ethnicity
Indigenous Peoples in Latin American States
Edited by David Maybury-Lewis
Harvard University Press, 2002

The indigenous people of the hemisphere have resisted a five-hundred-year assault, fighting to maintain their cultural identities. During this time, authorities in the Americas have insisted that the toleration of indigenous societies and cultures would undermine their respective states. In recent years, however, the nations of the Americas have started to reverse themselves. They are altering their constitutions and proclaiming themselves multiethnic. Why is this happening now? The Politics of Ethnicity: Indigenous Peoples in Latin American States, edited by David Maybury-Lewis, helps us understand the reasons and history behind these times of transition.

The book provides a valuable overview of current problems facing indigenous peoples in their relation with national states in Latin America, from the highlands of Mexico to the jungles of Brazil. The traditional, sometimes centuries old, relations between states and indigenous peoples are now changing and being rediscussed. The collection, authored by U.S. and Latin American anthropologists using interdisciplinary approaches, enables the reader to understand these recent developments in a comparative framework. An ambitious and quite thorough collection, it is brought together skillfully by one of the discipline’s maître penseurs.

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The Politics of German Child Welfare from the Empire to the Federal Republic
Edward Dickinson
Harvard University Press, 1996

The model of the development of child welfare policy presented here illuminates the complexity of the struggles from which modern social policy emerged, and accounts for the ways in which similar policies could be adapted to changing political systems--monarchical, republican, or fascist. Following a period of policy innovation, rapid institutional expansion, and intensifying ideological conflict before the First World War, Dickinson shows, the period from 1918 to 1961 saw a succession of efforts to reconcile competing policy agendas within different political contexts: the corporatist-democratic compromise worked out in the early years of the Weimar Republic, which broke down in the economic and political crisis at the end of the 1920s; the disastrous Nazi synthesis of authoritarianism and racism; and a revitalized corporatist-democratic framework, stabilized on the basis of the antitotalitarian consensus and of psychotherapeutic theory and practice, after 1949.

Historians of modern Germany and of the welfare state will find this a challenging and illuminating approach to important theoretical and historical questions.

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The Politics of Imagining Asia
Wang Hui
Harvard University Press, 2011

In this bold, provocative collection, Wang Hui confronts some of the major issues concerning modern China and the status quo of contemporary Chinese thought.

The book’s overarching theme is the possibility of an alternative modernity that does not rely on imported conceptions of Chinese history and its legacy. Wang Hui argues that current models, based largely on Western notions of empire and the nation-state, fail to account for the richness and diversity of pre-modern Chinese historical practice. At the same time, he refrains from offering an exclusively Chinese perspective and placing China in an intellectual ghetto. Navigating terrain on regional language and politics, he draws on China’s unique past to expose the inadequacies of European-born standards for assessing modern China’s evolution. He takes issue particularly with the way in which nation-state logic has dominated politically charged concerns like Chinese language standardization and “The Tibetan Question.” His stance is critical—and often controversial—but he locates hope in the kinds of complex, multifaceted arrangements that defined China and much of Asia for centuries.

The Politics of Imagining Asia challenges us not only to re-examine our theories of “Asia” but to reconsider what “Europe” means as well. As Theodore Huters writes in his introduction, “Wang Hui’s concerns extend beyond China and Asia to an ambition to rethink world history as a whole.”

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The Politics of Land Reform in Chile, 1950–1970
Public Policy, Political Institutions, and Social Change
Robert R. Kaufman
Harvard University Press, 1972

Displaced by the growth of cities and left impoverished by the inequities of an archaic land tenure system, peasants throughout Latin America are entering politics and upsetting the balance between social forces that had once been the sole competitors for governmental power. Still the largest occupational grouping in most countries, these peasants provide an important base of potential support for governments willing to undertake rural reform. In the light of this, Robert Kaufman's case study of Chilean land reform warrants careful consideration.

Focusing on the efforts of successive Chilean governments to pass and implement land reform legislation, Kaufman explores the way in which relatively high levels of social modernization and political institutionalization affect the emergence of the land reform issue, the timing and nature of the involvement of conflicting social groups, and the building of coalitions in support of various types of change.

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The Politics of Large Numbers
A History of Statistical Reasoning
Alain Desrosières
Harvard University Press, 1998

Statistics-driven thinking is ubiquitous in modern society. In this ambitious and sophisticated study of the history of statistics, which begins with probability theory in the seventeenth century, Alain Desrosières shows how the evolution of modern statistics has been inextricably bound up with the knowledge and power of governments. He traces the complex reciprocity between modern governments and the mathematical artifacts that both dictate the duties of the state and measure its successes.

No other work, in any language, covers such a broad spectrum--probability, mathematical statistics, psychology, economics, sociology, surveys, public health, medical statistics--in accurately synthesizing the history of statistics, with an emphasis on the conceptual development of social statistics, culminating in twentieth-century applied econometrics.

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The Politics of Mourning
Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery
Micki McElya
Harvard University Press, 2016

Pulitzer Prize Finalist
Winner of the John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize
Winner of the Sharon Harris Book Award
Finalist, Jefferson Davis Award of the American Civil War Museum


Arlington National Cemetery is one of America’s most sacred shrines, a destination for millions who tour its grounds to honor the men and women of the armed forces who serve and sacrifice. It commemorates their heroism, yet it has always been a place of struggle over the meaning of honor and love of country. Once a showcase plantation, Arlington was transformed by the Civil War, first into a settlement for the once enslaved, and then into a memorial for Union dead. Later wars broadened its significance, as did the creation of its iconic monument to universal military sacrifice: the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

As Arlington took its place at the center of the American story, inclusion within its gates became a prerequisite for claims to national belonging. This deeply moving book reminds us that many brave patriots who fought for America abroad struggled to be recognized at home, and that remembering the past and reckoning with it do not always go hand in hand.

“Perhaps it is cliché to observe that in the cities of the dead we find meaning for the living. But, as McElya has so gracefully shown, such a cliché is certainly fitting of Arlington.”
American Historical Review

“A wonderful history of Arlington National Cemetery, detailing the political and emotional background to this high-profile burial ground.”
Choice

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Politics of Nature
How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy
Bruno Latour
Harvard University Press, 2004

A major work by one of the more innovative thinkers of our time, Politics of Nature does nothing less than establish the conceptual context for political ecology—transplanting the terms of ecology into more fertile philosophical soil than its proponents have thus far envisioned. Bruno Latour announces his project dramatically: “Political ecology has nothing whatsoever to do with nature, this jumble of Greek philosophy, French Cartesianism and American parks.” Nature, he asserts, far from being an obvious domain of reality, is a way of assembling political order without due process. Thus, his book proposes an end to the old dichotomy between nature and society—and the constitution, in its place, of a collective, a community incorporating humans and nonhumans and building on the experiences of the sciences as they are actually practiced.

In a critique of the distinction between fact and value, Latour suggests a redescription of the type of political philosophy implicated in such a “commonsense” division—which here reveals itself as distinctly uncommonsensical and in fact fatal to democracy and to a healthy development of the sciences. Moving beyond the modernist institutions of “mononaturalism” and “multiculturalism,” Latour develops the idea of “multinaturalism,” a complex collectivity determined not by outside experts claiming absolute reason but by “diplomats” who are flexible and open to experimentation.

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The Politics of Progressive Education
The Odenwaldschule in Nazi Germany
Dennis Shirley
Harvard University Press, 1992

In March 1933, Nazi storm troopers seized control of the Odenwaldschule, a small German boarding school near Heidelberg. Founded in 1910 by educational reformer Paul Geheeb, the Odenwaldschule was a crown jewel of the progressive education movement, renowned for its emancipatory pedagogical innovations and sweeping curricular reforms. In the tumultuous year that followed that fateful spring, Geheeb moved from an initial effort to accommodate Nazi reforms to an active opposition to the Third Reich’s transformation of the school. Convinced at last that humanistic education was all but impossible under the new regime, he emigrated to Switzerland in March 1934. There he opened a new school, the Ecole d’Humanité, which became a haven for children escaping the horrors of World War II.

In this intimate chronicle of the collision between a progressive educator and fascist ideology during Hitler’s rise to power, Dennis Shirley explores how Nazi school reforms catalyzed Geheeb’s alienation from the regime and galvanized his determination to close the school and leave Germany. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished documents, such as Geheeb’s exhaustive correspondence with government officials and transcripts of combative faculty meetings, Shirley is able to reconstruct in detail the entire drama as it unfolded. Others have examined the intellectual antecedents of Nazism and the regime’s success at developing themes from popular culture for its political purposes; Shirley goes further by analyzing the many ways in which German educators could and did respond to Nazi reforms. In the process he identifies the myriad forces that led individuals to accept or resist the regime’s transformation of education.

The Politics of Progressive Education offers a richly rewarding examination of how education in general, and progressive education in particular, fared in the turbulent political currents of Nazi Germany. It brings to light a remarkable story, hitherto untold, of one individual’s successful attempt to uphold humanistic values in the darkest of circumstances.

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The Politics of Railroad Coordination, 1933–1936
Earl Latham
Harvard University Press

The prudent administrator clearly recognizes the differences between authority and power. The first is the right to wield power and the second is the actual exercise of power. Joseph B. Eastman, as federal coordinator of transportation, had the authority to require acts of railroad coordination but lacked the power. When he tried to exercise authority as though it were power, the railroads combined with the unions and deprived him of his authority.

Earl Latham, in this analysis of the politics of administration, makes use of hitherto unpublished letters and memoranda written by Eastman. Coming at a time when the railroad industry is suffering acutely from its chronic problem of excessive separatism, The Politics of Railroad Coordination is a thought-provoking application of power group analysis to a major problem of administration. It will be of particular interest to persons concerned with problems of the regulation of industry, public administration, the transportation industry, and the method of power group analysis.

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Politics, Persuasion, and Educational Testing
Lorraine M. McDonnell
Harvard University Press, 2004

In a story of reform and backlash, Lorraine McDonnell reveals the power and the dangers of policies based on appeals to voters' values. Exploring the political struggles inspired by mass educational tests, she analyzes the design and implementation of statewide testing in California, Kentucky, and North Carolina in the 1990s.

Educational reformers and political elites sought to use test results to influence teachers, students, and the public by appealing to their values about what schools should teach and offering apparently objective evidence about whether the schools were succeeding. But mass testing mobilized parents who opposed and mistrusted the use of tests, and left educators trying to mediate between angry citizens and policies the educators may not have fully supported. In the end, some testing programs were significantly altered. Yet despite the risks inherent in relying on values to change what students are taught, these tests and the educational ideologies behind them have modified classroom practice.

McDonnell draws lessons from these stories for the federal No Child Left Behind act, with its sweeping directives for high-stakes testing. To read this book is to witness the unfolding drama of America's educational culture wars, and to see hope for their resolution.

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The Politics Presidents Make
Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton, Revised Edition
Stephen Skowronek
Harvard University Press, 1997
Stephen Skowronek’s wholly innovative study demonstrates that presidents are persistent agents of change, continually disrupting and transforming the political landscape. In an afterword to this new edition, the author examines “third way” leadership as it has been practiced by Bill Clinton and others. These leaders are neither great repudiators nor orthodox innovators. They challenge received political categories, mix seemingly antithetical doctrines, and often take their opponents’ issues as their own.
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The Politics Presidents Make
Leadership from John Adams to George Bush, First Edition
Stephen Skowronek
Harvard University Press

THIS EDITION HAS BEEN REPLACED BY A NEWER EDITION.

Stephen Skowronek's wholly innovative study demonstrates that presidents are persistent agents of change, continually disrupting and transforming the political landscape. In an afterword to this new edition, the author examines "third way" leadership as it has been practiced by Bill Clinton and others. These leaders are neither great repudiators nor orthodox innovators. They challenge received political categories, mix seemingly antithetical doctrines, and often take their opponents' issues as their own. As the 1996 election confirmed, third way leadership has great electoral appeal. The question is whether Clinton in his second term will escape the convulsive end so often associated with the type.

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Politics, Science, and Dread Disease
A Short History of United States Medical Research Policy
Stephen P. Strickland
Harvard University Press, 1972

In 1927 the first bill to secure government support in the search for a cure for cancer was introduced to Congress. In 1971 Congress passed the Conquest of Cancer Act, which initiated a new and enlarged effort in the fight against cancer, including possible annual expenditures of up to one billion dollars. The forty-four years between these two dates have witnessed the evolution of medical research from a limited, private endeavor to a major national enterprise commanding substantial support from the federal government.

In this first historical analysis of national policy in biomedical research, Stephen Strickland examines the rise of the National Institutes for Health, tells of the recurrent struggle between elected public officials and science administrators over the pace and direction of cancer and heart disease research; analyzes the roles that key members of Congress have played in the development of medical research; and discusses the medical research lobby and its founder, Mrs. Albert D. Lasker. What emerges is a clear picture of how government officials actually formulate national policy, not only in medical research but in other areas as well.

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Politics, Self, and Society
A Theme and Variations
Heinz Eulau
Harvard University Press, 1986

How to deal with the relationship between the individual and society as it reveals itself through politics is the large theme of these erudite and stylish essays by a leading scholar whose lifelong concerns have included political behavior, decision-making by groups, and legislative deportment. Truly interdisciplinary in his approach, Heinz Eulau has drawn on all the social sciences in his thirty years of research into the political behavior of citizens in the mass and of legislative elites at the state and local levels of government.

Utilizing a variety of social and political theories—theories of reference group behavior, social role, organization, conflict, exchange functions and purposive action—he enriches the methodology of political science while tackling substantive issues such as social class behavior in elections, public policies in American cities, the structures of city councils, and the convergence of politics and the legal system. Eulau is ranked among the few scholars who have shaped the agenda of political science, and his latest work should also prove valuable for sociologists, social psychologists, and theorists of the social sciences.

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The Pollen Wasps
Ecology and Natural History of the Masarinae
Sarah Gess
Harvard University Press, 1996
The 25 color plates and 60 black-and-white illustrations offer readers a rare close look at this little-known and endangered group of insects. Three appendixes list all known flower-visiting records, all hymenopteran visitors to the flowers included in the pollination chapter, and all published species names for Masarinae. Pollen wasps are of interest to a wide range of scholars (including entomologists, ethologists, ecologists, and evolutionary biologists) because of their close associations with flowering plants and because of the ability of certain species to produce silk for nest building--an intriguing case of convergent evolution. For these readers, and for students of natural history and proponents of species preservation, The Pollen Wasps will prove an invaluable resource.
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Pollution, Politics, and Power
The Struggle for Sustainable Electricity
Thomas O. McGarity
Harvard University Press, 2019

The electric power industry has been transformed over the past forty years, becoming more reliable and resilient while meeting environmental goals. A big question now is how to prevent backsliding.

Pollution, Politics, and Power tells the story of the remarkable transformation of the electric power industry over the last four decades. Electric power companies have morphed from highly polluting regulated monopolies into competitive, deregulated businesses that generate, transmit, and distribute cleaner electricity. Power companies are investing heavily in natural gas and utility-scale renewable resources and have stopped building new coal-fired plants. They facilitate end-use efficiency and purchase excess electricity produced by rooftop solar panels and backyard wind turbines, helping to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

But these beneficial changes have come with costs. The once-powerful coal industry is on the edge of ruin, with existing coal-fired plants closing and coal mines shutting down. As a result, communities throughout Appalachia suffer from high unemployment and reduced resources, which have exacerbated a spiraling opioid epidemic. The Trump administration’s efforts to revive the coal industry by scaling back environmental controls and reregulating electricity prices have had little effect on the coal industry’s decline.

Major advances therefore come with warning signs, which we must heed in charting the continuing course of sustainable electricity. In Pollution, Politics, and Power, Thomas O. McGarity examines the progress made, details lessons learned, and looks to the future with suggestions for building a more sustainable grid while easing the economic downsides of coal’s demise.

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Poltava 1709
The Battle and the Myth
Serhii Plokhy
Harvard University Press, 2012

The Battle of Poltava has long been recognized as a crucial event in the geopolitical history of Europe and a decisive point in the Great Northern War between Sweden and the Russian Empire. The Russian victory at Poltava contributed to the decline of Sweden as a Great Power and was a major setback to Ukrainian independence. Hetman Ivan Mazepa, who joined forces with the Swedish king Charles XII against Tsar Peter I, remains a controversial figure even today.

In 2009, the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute gathered scholars from around the globe and from many fields of study—history, military affairs, philology, linguistics, literature, art history, music—to mark the 300th anniversary of the battle. This book is a collection of their papers on such topics as the international, Russian, and Ukrainian contexts of the battle; Mazepa in European culture; the language and literature of the period; art and architecture; history and memory; and fact, fiction, and the literary imagination. Mazepa himself is the focus of many of the articles—a hero to Ukrainians but a treacherous figure to Russians. This book provides a fresh look at this watershed event and sheds new light on the legacies of the battle’s major players.

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Pompeii
Public and Private Life
Paul Zanker
Harvard University Press, 1999

Pompeii's tragedy is our windfall: an ancient city fully preserved, its urban design and domestic styles speaking across the ages. This richly illustrated book conducts us through the captured wonders of Pompeii, evoking at every turn the life of the city as it was 2,000 years ago.

When Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D. its lava preserved not only the Pompeii of that time but a palimpsest of the city's history, visible traces of the different societies of Pompeii's past. Paul Zanker, a noted authority on Roman art and architecture, disentangles these tantalizing traces to show us the urban images that marked Pompeii's development from country town to Roman imperial city. Exploring Pompeii's public buildings, its streets and gathering places, we witness the impact of religious changes, the renovation of theaters and expansion of athletic facilities, and the influence of elite families on the city's appearance. Through these stages, Zanker adeptly conjures a sense of the political and social meanings in urban planning and public architecture.

The private houses of Pompeii prove equally eloquent, their layout, decor, and architectural detail speaking volumes about the life, taste, and desires of their owners. At home or in public, at work or at ease, these Pompeians and their world come alive in Zanker's masterly rendering. A provocative and original reading of material culture, his work is an incomparable introduction to urban life in antiquity.

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Pont-de-Montvert
Social Structure and Politics in a French Village
Patrice L.-R. Higonnet
Harvard University Press, 1971

Pont-de-Montvert is a small and shrunken Protestant village in an isolated part of the Cévennes mountains of Southern France. In 1700, the village was a complicated world where some fifteen hundred landless peasants, yeomen peasants, artisans, bourgeois, and nobles had unequal rights, unequal responsibilities, and different perceptions of politics. Today, Pont-de-Montvert is a much smaller, classless society, where social differences have little to do with politics and are due more to personal worth than to inherited wealth or status.

In the seventeenth century, both rich and poor of Pont-de-Montvert had their own politics; one century later, at the time of the French Revolution, the political differences had vanished though the social ones remained. During the nineteenth century, the social structure was transformed, as were its connections with politics.

In this book, P. L.-R. Higonnet explains these changes and describes the conditions of life for different people at different times in a village that is both a part of France and a world unto itself.

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The Poor Belong to Us
Catholic Charities and American Welfare
Dorothy M. Brown and Elizabeth McKeown
Harvard University Press, 1997

Between the Civil War and World War II, Catholic charities evolved from volunteer and local origins into a centralized and professionally trained workforce that played a prominent role in the development of American welfare. Dorothy Brown and Elizabeth McKeown document the extraordinary efforts of Catholic volunteers to care for Catholic families and resist Protestant and state intrusions at the local level, and they show how these initiatives provided the foundation for the development of the largest private system of social provision in the United States.

It is a story tightly interwoven with local, national, and religious politics that began with the steady influx of poor Catholic immigrants into urban centers. Supported by lay organizations and by sympathetic supporters in city and state politics, religious women operated foundling homes, orphanages, protectories, reformatories, and foster care programs for the children of the Catholic poor in New York City and in urban centers around the country.

When pressure from reform campaigns challenged Catholic child care practices in the first decades of the twentieth century, Catholic charities underwent a significant transformation, coming under central diocesan control and growing increasingly reliant on the services of professional social workers. And as the Depression brought nationwide poverty and an overwhelming need for public solutions, Catholic charities faced a staggering challenge to their traditional claim to stewardship of the poor. In their compelling account, Brown and McKeown add an important dimension to our understanding of the transition from private to state social welfare.

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Pope and Devil
The Vatican's Archives and the Third Reich
Hubert Wolf
Harvard University Press, 2010

The Vatican’s dealings with the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich have long been swathed in myth and speculation. After almost seventy years, the crucial records for the years leading up to 1939 were finally opened to the public, revealing the bitter conflicts that raged behind the walls of the Holy See. Anti-Semites and philo-Semites, adroit diplomats and dogmatic fundamentalists, influential bishops and powerful cardinals argued passionately over the best way to contend with the intellectual and political currents of the modern age: liberalism, communism, fascism, and National Socialism. Hubert Wolf explains why a philo-Semitic association was dissolved even as anti-Semitism was condemned, how the Vatican concluded a concordat with the Third Reich in 1933, why Hitler’s Mein Kampf was never proscribed by the Church, and what factors surrounded the Pope’s silence on the persecution of the Jews.

In rich detail, Wolf presents astonishing findings from the recently opened Vatican archives—discoveries that clarify the relations between National Socialism and the Vatican. He illuminates the thinking of the popes, cardinals, and bishops who saw themselves in a historic struggle against evil. Never have the inner workings of the Vatican—its most important decisions and actions—been portrayed so fully and vividly.

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The Pope, His Banker, and Venice
Felix Gilbert
Harvard University Press, 1980

This study of Renaissance adventures and struggles against fate brings to life a brilliant age and its exemplars. It is a story of how several men, including Julius II, worked, intrigued, and made business deals against the backdrop of an Italy invaded by continental countries and England. The future of the once great Republic of Venice was at stake as it was besieged and in desperate need of allies. The Papacy switched sides, breaking the seemingly invincible and mostly foreign League of Cambrai, and saw that Venice was offered a loan by Agostino Chigi, the richest man of his time. The Pope's banker, as daring as Julius II, negotiated with the formidable communal rulers of Venice and Italy was kept from further dismemberment.

As a dramatic account that brings together diplomacy, war, business, and politics, viewed through one long entrepreneurial venture, this book is unique. It juxtaposes differing institutional structures and the various political ways among Italy's city states; it also brings into sharp focus the new men of the Renaissance. Their dealings and lifestyles were original and bold. They were successful against great odds and flaunted their new wealth and position in society in building great palaces and estates and becoming patrons of art. Felix Gilbert is a master teacher of history, and his new work is as luminous as the men and events he tells about.

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Popular Annuals of Eastern North America, 1865–1914
Peggy Cornett Newcomb
Harvard University Press, 1985
Using the evidence of written documents, seed and plant lists, catalogues, and illustrations, the author attempts to show which annuals were popular and how they were used in the fifty-year period following the Civil War. Several commercial seed lists are reproduced to document the changing styles of gardening.
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Popular Bohemia
Modernism and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris
Mary Gluck
Harvard University Press, 2005

A radical reconceptualization of modernism, this book traces the appearance of the modern artist to the Paris of the 1830s and links the emergence of an enduring modernist aesthetic to the fleeting forms of popular culture. Contrary to conventional views of a private self retreating from history and modernity, Popular Bohemia shows us the modernist as a public persona parodying the stereotypes of commercial mass culture. Here we see how the modern artist—alternately assuming the roles of the melodramatic hero, the urban flâneur, the female hysteric, the tribal primitive—created his own version of an expressive, public modernity in opposition to an increasingly repressive and conformist bourgeois culture. And here we see how a specifically modern aesthetic culture in nineteenth-century Paris came about, not in opposition to commercial popular culture, but in close alliance with it.

Popular Bohemia revises dominant historical narratives about modernism from the perspective of a theoretically informed cultural history that spans the period between 1830 and 1914. In doing so, it reconnects the intellectual history of avant-garde art with the cultural history of bohemia and the social history of the urban experience to reveal the circumstances in which a truly modernist culture emerged.

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Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758-1834
Charles Tilly
Harvard University Press, 1995

Between 1750 and 1840 ordinary British people abandoned such time-honored forms of protest as collective seizures of grain, the sacking of buildings, public humiliation, and physical abuse in favor of marches, petition drives, public meetings, and other sanctioned routines of social movement politics. The change created--perhaps for the first time anywhere--mass participation in national politics.

Charles Tilly is the first to address the depth and significance of the transmutations in popular collective action during this period. As he unravels the story of thousands of popular struggles and their consequences, he illuminates the dynamic relationships of an industrializing, capitalizing, proletarianizing economy; a war-making, growing, increasingly interventionist state; and an internal history of contention that spawned such political entrepreneurs as Francis Place and Henry Hunt. Tilly's research rests on a catalog of more than 8,000 "contentious gatherings" described in British periodicals, plus ample documentation from British archives and historical monographs.

The author elucidates four distinct phases in the transformation to mass political participation and identifies the forms and occasions for collective action that characterized and dominated each. He provides rich descriptions not only of a wide variety of popular protests but also of such influential figures as John Wilkes, Lord George Gordon, William Cobbett, and Daniel O'Connell. This engaging study presents a vivid picture of the British populace during a pivotal era.

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Popular Entertainment, Class, and Politics in Munich, 1900–1923
Robert Eben Sackett
Harvard University Press, 1982

From the turn of the century until 1923, the year of the National Socialist putsch, popular entertainment in Munich reflected the sentiments and ideas of its largely middle-class audience. While industrialization, rapid urbanization, World War I, and the German Revolution of 1918–19 created an atmosphere of turbulent change, performances on Munich's popular stages gave voice to the continuity of several basic attitudes: patriotism; nostalgia for a preindustrial, rural community; hostility toward Jews; and increasing anxiety over social status. In songs, monologues, skits, and one-act plays, popular entertainers articulated views common to Munich's traditional middle class of tradesmen and shopkeepers and its “new” or white-collar middle class of clerks and minor officials. Folksingers Karl Valentin and Weiss Ferdl serve as examples of this relationship between politics and culture. They shared their audience's class background and sympathies, and in the cabarets and music halls their songs dealt with vexed social and political issues.

This intriguing book in cultural history adds to our understanding of social conditions preparing the way for political change. A model case study, it explores the roots of Nazism in a large urban setting.

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Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture
Dudley Andrew and Steven Ungar
Harvard University Press, 2005

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

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

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

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Popular Protest in China
Kevin J. O'Brien
Harvard University Press, 2008

Do our ideas about social movements travel successfully beyond the democratic West? Unrest in China, from the dramatic events of 1989 to more recent stirrings, offers a rare opportunity to explore this question and to consider how popular contention unfolds in places where speech and assembly are tightly controlled. The contributors to this volume, all prominent scholars of Chinese politics and society, argue that ideas inspired by social movements elsewhere can help explain popular protest in China.

Drawing on fieldwork in China, the authors consider topics as varied as student movements, protests by angry workers and taxi drivers, recruitment to Protestant house churches, cyberprotests, and anti-dam campaigns. Their work relies on familiar concepts—such as political opportunity, framing, and mobilizing structures—while interrogating the usefulness of these concepts in a country with a vastly different history of class and state formation than the capitalist West. The volume also speaks to “silences” in the study of contentious politics (for example, protest leadership, the role of grievances, and unconventional forms of organization), and shows that well-known concepts must at times be modified to square with the reality of an authoritarian, non-western state.

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The Popular Sources of Political Authority
Documents on the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780
Oscar Handlin
Harvard University Press

Rarely is it possible to hear the voice of the people in a revolution except as it filters through the writings of articulate individuals who may not really be representative. But on several occasions during the effort to draft a constitution for Massachusetts after 1776, the citizens of the Commonwealth were asked to convene in their 300 town meetings to debate and convey to the legislators their political theories, needs, and aspirations. This book presents the transcribed debates and the replies returned to Boston which constitute a unique body of material documenting the political thought of the ordinary citizen.

In an important, extended introduction, the editors, interpreting the American Revolution and its sustaining political framework in light of this material, analyze the forces that were singular and those that were universal in the shaping of American democracy. Comparisons are made with popular uprisings in other parts of the world and at other times, and the whole is integrated into a general discussion of the nature of revolution and its relationship to constitutional authority.

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Population, Disease, and Land in Early Japan, 645–900
William Wayne Farris
Harvard University Press

From tax and household registers, law codes, and other primary sources, as well as recent Japanese sources, William Wayne Farris has developed the first systematic, scientific analysis of early Japanese population, including the role of disease in economic development. This work provides a comprehensive study of land clearance, agricultural technology, and rural settlement. The function and nature of ritsuryō institutions are reinterpreted within the revised demographic and economic setting.

Farris’s text is illustrated with maps, population pyramids for five localities, and photographs and translations of portions of tax and household registers, which throw further light on the demography and economy of Japan in the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries.

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The Population History of England, 1541-1871
A Reconstruction
E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield
Harvard University Press, 1981

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Population in an Interacting World
William Alonso
Harvard University Press, 1987

The earth’s five billion people are linked in a complex web that serves to shape population movements and patterns of births and deaths. In this book, nine experts illuminate the nature of this interplay linking rich and poor countries.

The demographic experience of each nation occurs in a larger context of social, political, economic, cultural, religious, military, and biological forces. On the premise that local population trends cannot be understood apart from such structural and historical factors, the book explores both the highly visible and the more subtle forms of demographic interplay, from the large recent flows of migrants and refugees to smaller yet still important flows such as those of tourists and governments-in-exile, from international shifts in the terms of trade to international programs of population control. It examines the historical roots and contemporary trends of these developments and probes their likely future courses.

The distinguished contributors present here some of the best writing to date on the topic: William H. McNeill on population flows in premodern times, Orlando Patterson on interactions in the West Atlantic region, the late Hedley Bull on the relation between migration and present world structure, Aristide R. Zolberg on guestworker programs, Juergen B. Donges on trade policies and economic migration, William Alonso on changing definitions of the identity of populations, Hans-Joachim Hoffmann-Nowotny on social and cultural dilemmas facing northern Europe, Francis X. Sutton on government policy issues, Myron Weiner on emigration and Third World development. Also discussed are the effects of medical advances on population growth, the implications of differing fertility rates, and the impact of the post-1945 transition from colonial empires to nation-states.

Too often such issues have been treated in disconnected fashion and viewed only as problems of the moment. As this outstanding book shows, they are richly intertwined, both with one another and with the history of world development.

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Population Policies Reconsidered
Health, Empowerment, and Rights
Gita Sen
Harvard University Press, 1994
Population Policies Reconsidered brings together a rare combination of scholars, feminists, social activists, and policy-makers across many disciplines to critically reexamine the scientific foundation of contemporary population policies. This book explores population policy dilemmas based on the perspective of ethics, women’s empowerment and health, and human rights. The seventeen chapters are centered around the premise that the single-minded pursuit of demographic goals may not be the most effective means of achieving policy objectives—for such may lead to the abuse or violation of choice and human rights, especially of women. Rather, the book explores the alternative idea that population policies should focus on those ultimate aims of development that are linked to human reproduction—health, social empowerment, and human rights. If respectful of individuals, especially women, such policies are likely to promote better individual welfare and may well also result in desirable demographic outcomes.
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Populations, Species, and Evolution
An Abridgment of Animal Species and Evolution
Ernst Mayr
Harvard University Press, 1970

Representative of the international acclaim accorded Ernst Mayr’s Animal Species and Evolution, published in 1963, is Sir Julian Huxley’s description of it as “a magistral book…certainly the most important study of evolution that has appeared in many years—perhaps since the publication of On the Origin of Species.” In his extraordinary book, Mayr fully explored, synthesized, and evaluated man’s knowledge about the nature of animal species and the part they play in the process of evolution.

In this long-awaited abridged edition, Mayr’s definitive work is made available to the interested nonspecialist, the college student, and the general reader. The author has retained the dominant themes of his original study—themes now more widely accepted than they were in 1963: the species is the most important unit of evolution; individuals (and not genes) are the targets of natural selection, hence the fitness of “a” gene is a nebulous if not misleading concept; and the most important genetic phenomena in species are species-specific regulatory systems that give species internal cohesion.

Each of the twenty chapters of the original edition has been revised; six have been extensively reworked. Discussions of peripheral subjects and massive citations of the literature have been eliminated, but the glossary has been greatly expanded. The focal point of the volume is, naturally, the species—a reproductively isolated aggregate of interbreeding populations. Presenting an overview of evolutionary biology in Chapter 1, Mayr then considers the nature of species, their population structure, their biological interactions, the multiplication of species, and their role in evolution.

Because of the impossibility of experimenting with man and because an understanding of man’s biology is indispensable for safeguarding his future, emphasis throughout the book is placed on those findings from higher animals which are directly applicable to man. The last chapter, “Man as a Biological Species,” is of particular interest to the general reader. Mayr concludes that while modern man appears to be as well adapted for survival purposes as were his ancestors, there is much evidence to suggest that he is threatened by the loss of his most typically human characteristics.

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The Populist Response to Industrial America
Midwestern Populist Thought
Norman Pollack
Harvard University Press
Populism—progressive or retrogressive force? Posing this question, Norman Pollack draws on Populist manuscripts and newspapers, the best evidence for the movement's response to industrialism. In the words of farmers and workers, Populism springs to life, ceasing to be an abstraction. The author concludes that the movement, while primarily agrarian, had significant intellectual and labor support; accepting industrialization, it opposed capitalistic industrialism as alienating and degrading the individual. In this intellectual history—based on data most of which has been ignored—the author takes a first step toward a more comprehensive analysis of industrial America.
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Porphyry on Plotinus. Ennead I
Plotinus
Harvard University Press

Plato’s most influential disciple and proponent.

Plotinus (AD 204/5–270), possibly of Roman descent, but certainly a Greek in education and environment, was the first and greatest of Neoplatonic philosophers. Practically nothing is known of his early life, but at the age of 28 he went to Alexandria, and studied philosophy with Ammonius “Saccas” for eleven years. Wishing to learn the philosophy of the Persians and Indians, he joined the expedition of Gordian III against the Persians in 243, not without subsequent danger. Aged 40 he settled in Rome and taught philosophy there till shortly before his death. In 253 he began to write, and continued to do so till the last year of his life. His writings were edited by his disciple Porphyry, who published them many years after his master’s death in six sets of nine treatises each (the Enneads).

Plotinus regarded Plato as his master, and his own philosophy is a profoundly original development of the Platonism of the first two centuries of the Christian era and the closely related thought of the Neopythagoreans, with some influences from Aristotle and his followers and the Stoics, whose writings he knew well but used critically. There is no real trace of Oriental influence on his thought, and he was passionately opposed to Gnosticism. He is a unique combination of mystic and Hellenic rationalist. His thought dominated later Greek philosophy and influenced both Christians and Muslims, and is still alive today because of its union of rationality and intense religious experience.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Plotinus is in seven volumes.

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Portrait of a Giving Community
Philanthropy by the Pakistani-American Diaspora
Adil Najam
Harvard University Press, 2006

Portrait of a Giving Community is based on a nationwide survey of the giving habits of Pakistani-Americans. This study, the first of its kind, not only examines the history, demography, and institutional geography of Pakistani-Americans but also looks at how this immigrant community manages its multiple identities through charitable giving and volunteering. It provides a snapshot in time of a generous and giving community whose philanthropy has become increasingly “American” without being less “Pakistani.”

Who are the Pakistani-Americans? What is the extent of their diaspora giving to Pakistan? What can be done to increase and channel their philanthropy for more equitable development in Pakistan? How much do they give within the U.S. and to causes unrelated to Pakistan? How does this community manage the hyphen in “Pakistani-American”? These are some of the questions that motivate this book.

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Portrait of a Port
Boston, 1852–1914
W. H. Bunting
Harvard University Press, 1971

Two hundred and thirty-four striking photographs of the port of Boston combine with interpretive commentary to recapture the flavor, buoyancy, and excitement of the city’s years as one of the two or three great American ports. After the Civil War Boston underwent a radical and successful transformation from a declining mercantile home port to an important and competitive modern seaport. At the same time the transition from sail to steam was taking place. Photographic studies of deep water sail and steam vessels, naval ships, fishing boats, catboats, tugs, schooners, and sloops, and of the picturesque wharves—all create a kaleidoscopic visual history of these years of change.

The volume offers, as well, some of the most distinguished early work in photography, including the widest selection ever published of photographs by pioneer marine photographer Nathaniel Stebbins.

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A Portrait of Isaac Newton
Frank E. Manuel
Harvard University Press

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Portraits of an Invisible Country
The Photographs of Jorge Mario Múnera
José Luis Falconi
Harvard University Press

In 2003, Jorge Mario Múnera won the Latino and Latin American Art Forum Prize at Harvard University, which entitled him to produce and present an exhibit at Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. By this time, Múnera had already produced an important body of work, revealing even the farthest corners of his native Colombia through his photographs of people and their traditions.

Portraits of an Invisible Country
, which bears the name of the exhibit he presented at Harvard in 2004, is the culmination of a five-year collaboration between the photographer and the curator of the show, José Luis Falconi. It comprises a book of essays with insightful reflections on Múnera’s diverse body of work and a series of sixteen photo posters, which together highlight the photographer’s travels within Colombia and his careful depiction of his countrymen and women.

Renowned in Colombia as one of the most prolific and influential photographers of his generation, Múnera was the first recipient of the National Photography Award in Colombia in 1998. Since then, numerous international accolades have followed, chief among them as the first photographer to hold the Andrés Bello Chair of the King Juan Carlos Center at New York University.

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Portraits of John and Abigail Adams
Andrew Oliver
Harvard University Press

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Portraits of John Quincy Adams and His Wife
John Quincy Adams
Harvard University Press, 1970

The publication of Portraits of John Quincy Adams and His Wife makes available a record which both affords unique visual documentation of the most varied political career in American history and exemplifies the work of the principal American portraitists from the days of Copley and Stuart to the dawn of the Daguerrean era. Included in the volume's 159 illustrations are all the known life portraits, busts, and silhouettes of John Quincy and Louisa Catherine Adams, along with important replicas, copies, engravings, and representative likenesses of their siblings.

The book is organized into seven chapters which generally coincide with the major divisions of John Quincy Adams' political career. Within each chapter are discussed the artists, their relationships with the Adams's, and the provenance of each of their works. A comprehensive chronology of John Quincy Adams' life for each period accompanies the chapter to which it pertains. All important information about the size of each likeness, the inscriptions if any, the date executed, and present ownership where known is summarized in the List of Illustrations.

The Adams's, as they watched themselves age over the years in the marble, ink, or oil of the artists who portrayed them, recorded much by way of commentary on the artistic talent and process at hand. Andrew Oliver, in his detailed and lively discussions of each likeness, makes full use of the diaries and correspondence preserved in the Adams Papers, thus combining a learned appreciation with an intimate glimpse of Adams's as they saw themselves. The volume continues the record of Adams family portraiture begun with Portraits of John and Abigail Adams. The two volumes together constitute Series IV of the distinguished Adams Papers publications.

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Portraits of Learned Men
Paolo Giovio
Harvard University Press, 2023

The most complete translation available of these brief biographies of great European figures, written by one of the leading historians of the sixteenth century.

Portraits of Learned Men provides a fascinating synopsis of the contours, mentality, and trajectory of humanistic culture in Italy and Europe by one of the leading historians of the sixteenth century, Paolo Giovio (1483–1552). These brief biographies of 146 men of learning—from Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio in the fourteenth century to Erasmus, Thomas More, and Juan Luis Vives in the sixteenth—were meant to accompany accurate portrait paintings commemorating great figures in modern history. Presented together with the literary portraits in this volume, these paintings would be located in a purpose-built villa on Lake Como that would be open to the public. Giovio called this his musaeum, or home of the Muses, one of the first such institutions in European history. His museum would not only serve the traditional function of inspiring virtuous emulation but also provide a comprehensive, candid, and personal overview of the Republic of Letters as it had taken shape and flourished in Italy and Europe during the Renaissance.

This volume contains a fresh edition of the Latin text and a new, more complete translation than any now available in English.

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Portraiture
Richard Brilliant
Harvard University Press, 1991

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Possessing the Pacific
Land, Settlers, and Indigenous People from Australia to Alaska
Stuart Banner
Harvard University Press, 2007

During the nineteenth century, British and American settlers acquired a vast amount of land from indigenous people throughout the Pacific, but in no two places did they acquire it the same way. Stuart Banner tells the story of colonial settlement in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Tonga, Hawaii, California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska. Today, indigenous people own much more land in some of these places than in others. And certain indigenous peoples benefit from treaty rights, while others do not. These variations are traceable to choices made more than a century ago—choices about whether indigenous people were the owners of their land and how that land was to be transferred to whites.

Banner argues that these differences were not due to any deliberate land policy created in London or Washington. Rather, the decisions were made locally by settlers and colonial officials and were based on factors peculiar to each colony, such as whether the local indigenous people were agriculturalists and what level of political organization they had attained. These differences loom very large now, perhaps even larger than they did in the nineteenth century, because they continue to influence the course of litigation and political struggle between indigenous people and whites over claims to land and other resources.

Possessing the Pacific is an original and broadly conceived study of how colonial struggles over land still shape the relations between whites and indigenous people throughout much of the world.

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Possessions
The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley
Judith Richardson
Harvard University Press, 2003
The cultural landscape of the Hudson River Valley is crowded with ghosts--the ghosts of Native Americans and Dutch colonists, of Revolutionary War soldiers and spies, of presidents, slaves, priests, and laborers. Possessions asks why this region just outside New York City became the locus for so many ghostly tales, and shows how these hauntings came to operate as a peculiar type of social memory whereby things lost, forgotten, or marginalized returned to claim possession of imaginations and territories. Reading Washington Irving's stories along with a diverse array of narratives from local folklore and regional writings, Judith Richardson explores the causes and consequences of Hudson Valley hauntings to reveal how ghosts both evolve from specific historical contexts and are conjured to serve the present needs of those they haunt. These tales of haunting, Richardson argues, are no mere echoes of the past but function in an ongoing, contentious politics of place. Through its tight geographical focus, Possessions illuminates problems of belonging and possessing that haunt the nation as a whole.
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Post Scripts
The Writer’s Workshop
Vincent Kaufmann
Harvard University Press, 1994

We assume that words are posted (mailed or, in another sense, positioned) to communicate with others, to bridge distance and “wish you were here.” But Vincent Kaufmann discovers in his chosen letter writers the urgency not to communicate, to keep their correspondents away and, as it were, posted. The writer avoids real-life dialogue by way of letters, which then become proving grounds for the work to come. Whatever their intellectual, biographical, or aesthetic value—compare Flaubert’s passionate dogmatizing to Baudelaire’s peevish nagging for money—letters teach writers how to appreciate the sound of their own voice and how to make a workable literary space. Distance gives the relentless letter writer the chance to become a writer. Kaufmann, with Lacan, says that what characterizes the literary text is the ability to get beyond a particular other to address the Other, which must be no one in particular.

Kaufmann features several European writers, all of them avidly concerned about the destination of speech when it passes into writing. Among them: Kafka, obsessions spilling over, adoring his fiancee for her emptiness; Proust, master of suffering, with his interminable health bulletins, cancellations, and condolences; Flaubert, an extraordinary letter writer, abandoning his mistress for the more seductive Emma Bovary; Baudelaire, determined in squalor, writing letters almost exclusively about his debts, as if to practice the art of escape and defiance; Mallarmé, patron saint of littérateurs, whose vaunted Book disappears into salons and letters; Artaud, speaker in tongues, who wildly searched for authenticity through letters.

Unending attention has been devoted to these important writers, but they seem new again when viewed in Kaufmann’s epistolary mirror. What they share is a taste, or need, for distance and perversion; we see them becoming “inhuman” in order to textualize their lives. They are all modernists, and the definition of Modernism is thereby deepened. This book—rich in anecdote and humor—escorts literary theory into the no-man’s-land stretching between the life and the word.

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Postal Communication in China and Its Modernization, 1860-1896
Ying-wan Cheng
Harvard University Press, 1970

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Posterior Analytics. Topica
Aristotle
Harvard University Press

The philosopher’s toolkit.

Aristotle, great Greek philosopher, researcher, reasoner, and writer, born at Stagirus in 384 BC, was the son of a physician. He studied under Plato at Athens and taught there (367–347); subsequently he spent three years at the court of a former pupil in Asia Minor. After some time at Mitylene, in 343–342 he was appointed by King Philip of Macedon to be tutor of his teen-aged son Alexander. After Philip’s death in 336, Aristotle became head of his own school (of “Peripatetics”), the Lyceum at Athens. Because of anti-Macedonian feeling there after Alexander’s death in 323, he withdrew to Chalcis in Euboea, where he died in 322.

Nearly all the works Aristotle prepared for publication are lost; the priceless ones extant are lecture-materials, notes, and memoranda (some are spurious). They can be categorized as follows:

I Practical: Nicomachean Ethics; Great Ethics (Magna Moralia); Eudemian Ethics; Politics; Economics (on the good of the family); On Virtues and Vices.
II Logical: Categories; Analytics (Prior and Posterior); Interpretation; Refutations used by Sophists; Topica.
III Physical: Twenty-six works (some suspect) including astronomy, generation and destruction, the senses, memory, sleep, dreams, life, facts about animals, etc.
IV Metaphysics: on being as being.
V Art: Rhetoric and Poetics.
VI Other works including the Constitution of Athens; more works also of doubtful authorship.
VII Fragments of various works such as dialogues on philosophy and literature; and of treatises on rhetoric, politics, and metaphysics.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Aristotle is in twenty-three volumes.

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Posthomerica
Quintus Smyrnaeus
Harvard University Press, 2018

A late epic bridge between Homeric masterpieces.

Quintus Smyrnaeus’ Posthomerica, the only long mythological epic to survive in Greek from the period between Apollonius’ Argonautica (3rd century BC) and Nonnus’ Dionysiaca (5th century AD), fills in the whole story of the Trojan expedition between the end of Homer’s Iliad and the beginning of the Odyssey, which had been treated only episodically by earlier epic and dramatic poets. Composing sometime between the late second and mid-fourth centuries AD, Quintus boldly adapts Homeric diction and style to suit the literary, moral, religious, rhetorical, and philosophical culture of the high Roman Empire, and does not hesitate to diverge from the usual versions of the story in order to craft his own narrative vision.

This edition of the Posthomerica replaces the earlier Loeb Classical Library edition by A. S. Way (1913) with an updated text based on that of F. Vian, and fresh translation, introduction, and bibliography that take account of more than a century of intervening scholarship.

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The Postnatal Development of the Human Cerebral Cortex
J. LeRoy Conel
Harvard University Press
This eighth volume in a series begun by Dr. J. LeRoy Conel in 1939 extends his investigation of the human cerebral cortex to the six-year stage of development. As in the preceding volumes, several features of the microscopic structure of the cortex are described in great detail. In a concluding commentary, the author summarizes his findings and provides comparisons between the six-year and the four-year stages of development. Well-known to specialists, this important series of books lays a uniquely valuable foundation for further neurological research.
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The Postnatal Development of the Human Cerebral Cortex
J. LeRoy Conel
Harvard University Press

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The Postnatal Development of the Human Cerebral Cortex
J. LeRoy Conel
Harvard University Press

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The Postnatal Development of the Human Cerebral Cortex
J. LeRoy Conel
Harvard University Press

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The Postnatal Development of the Human Cerebral Cortex
J. LeRoy Conel
Harvard University Press

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The Postnatal Development of the Human Cerebral Cortex
J. LeRoy Conel
Harvard University Press

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The Postnatal Development of the Human Cerebral Cortex
J. LeRoy Conel
Harvard University Press

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The Postnatal Development of the Human Cerebral Cortex
J. LeRoy Conel
Harvard University Press
This is the first of a series of volumes in which the author will present the results of an extensive study of the postnatal development of the human cerebral cortex, beginning at the time of birth. Here he discusses the condition of the neurons in the cortex of the full-term fetus immediately after birth. No such comprehensive study of the development of the cerebral cortex has been heretofore attempted. The definitive cytoarchitectonic pattern of the cerebral cortex is already established in the normal full-term infant at the time of birth. Distinct regional differences in degree of development of the neurons and myelination of the fibers are clearly apparent. In general, the primary efferent area in the gyms centralis anterior, and the primary afferent areas in the gyms centralis posterior, the area striata, the hippocampus, gyrus temporalis transversus anterior, and the gyms cinguli are foci of development in their respective lobes, and in each lobe there is a gradual decrease in differentiation away from these centers.
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The Post-Revolutionary Self
Politics and Psyche in France, 1750–1850
Jan Goldstein
Harvard University Press, 2005

In the wake of the French Revolution, as attempts to restore political stability to France repeatedly failed, a group of concerned intellectuals identified a likely culprit: the prevalent sensationalist psychology, and especially the flimsy and fragmented self it produced. They proposed a vast, state-run pedagogical project to replace sensationalism with a new psychology that showcased an indivisible and actively willing self, or moi. As conceived and executed by Victor Cousin, a derivative philosopher but an academic entrepreneur of genius, this long-lived project singled out the male bourgeoisie for training in selfhood. Granting everyone a self in principle, Cousin and his disciples deemed workers and women incapable of the introspective finesse necessary to appropriate that self in practice.

Beginning with a fresh consideration of the place of sensationalism in the Old Regime and the French Revolution, Jan Goldstein traces a post-Revolutionary politics of selfhood that reserved the Cousinian moi for the educated elite, outraged Catholics and consigned socially marginal groups to the ministrations of phrenology. Situating the Cousinian moi between the fragmented selves of eighteenth-century sensationalism and twentieth-century Freudianism, Goldstein suggests that the resolutely unitary self of the nineteenth century was only an interlude tailored to the needs of the post-Revolutionary bourgeois order.

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Poverty and Poverty Alleviation Strategies in North America
Mary Jo Bane
Harvard University Press

This book is a dialogue about poverty in North America, especially in Mexico and the United States. Poverty has different roots and different manifestations, and requires different responses, whether in the Mississippi delta, in Native American reservations, among single-parent families in inner cities, or in Mexico’s rural southern states and in its urban areas.

In this book, twelve poverty scholars in Mexico and the United States contribute to the understanding of the roots of poverty and build knowledge about effective policy alleviation strategies. After setting the context of poverty and place in North America, the book focuses on three areas of policy response: macroeconomic policy, education policy, and safety nets. Within each section, the authors explore the dimensions of the poverty problem and alternative responses. A final chapter by the editors—from the United States and from Mexico—raises provocative questions about poverty in North America as a whole.

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Poverty and Progress
Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City
Stephan Thernstrom
Harvard University Press, 1964

Embedded in the consciousness of Americans throughout much of the country’s history has been the American Dream: that every citizen, no matter how humble his beginnings, is free to climb to the top of the social and economic ladder. Poverty and Progress assesses the claims of the American Dream against the actual structure of economic and social opportunities in a typical nineteenth century industrial community—Newburyport, Massachusetts.

Here is local history. With the aid of newspapers, census reports, and local tax, school, and savings bank records Stephan Thernstrom constructs a detailed and vivid portrait of working class life in Newburyport from 1850 to 1880, the critical years in which this old New England town was transformed into a booming industrial city. To determine how many self-made men there really were in the community, he traces the career patterns of hundreds of obscure laborers and their sons over this thirty year period, exploring in depth the differing mobility patterns of native-born and Irish immigrant workmen. Out of this analysis emerges the conclusion that opportunities for occupational mobility were distinctly limited. Common laborers and their sons were rarely able to attain middle class status, although many rose from unskilled to semiskilled or skilled occupations.

But another kind of mobility was widespread. Men who remained in lowly laboring jobs were often strikingly successful in accumulating savings and purchasing homes and a plot of land. As a result, the working class was more easily integrated into the community; a new basis for social stability was produced which offset the disruptive influences that accompanied the first shock of urbanization and industrialization.

Since Newburyport underwent changes common to other American cities, Thernstrom argues, his findings help to illuminate the social history of nineteenth century America and provide a new point of departure for gauging mobility trends in our society today. Correlating the Newburyport evidence with comparable studies of twentieth century cities, he refutes the popular belief that it is now more difficult to rise from the bottom of the social ladder than it was in the idyllic past. The “blocked mobility” theory was proposed by Lloyd Warner in his famous “Yankee City” studies of Newburyport; Thernstrom provides a thorough critique of the “Yankee City” volumes and of the ahistorical style of social research which they embody.

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Poverty, Equality, and Growth
The Politics of Economic Need in Postwar Japan
Deborah J. Milly
Harvard University Press, 1999
In striking contrast to the large indigent population in Japan in the 1950s, very few Japanese live in poverty today. This book explains the Japanese government's decision to respond to poverty by promoting equality as the basis for a social compromise. Milly argues that to account for why and how political actors crafted a program that won acceptance, we must look beyond them and identify how they relied on knowledge and normative arguments. This book straddles theoretical fault lines in comparative politics by exploring the interactions among choice, language, knowledge, and institutions in policy processes, and has implications for the ongoing debate between proponents of rational choice theory as a universal explanation for the decisions of political actors and those who focus on historically or culturally specific conditions.
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Power after Carbon
Building a Clean, Resilient Grid
Peter Fox-Penner
Harvard University Press, 2020

As the electric power industry faces the challenges of climate change, technological disruption, new market imperatives, and changing policies, a renowned energy expert offers a roadmap to the future of this essential sector.

As the damaging and costly impacts of climate change increase, the rapid development of sustainable energy has taken on great urgency. The electricity industry has responded with necessary but wrenching shifts toward renewables, even as it faces unprecedented challenges and disruption brought on by new technologies, new competitors, and policy changes. The result is a collision course between a grid that must provide abundant, secure, flexible, and affordable power, and an industry facing enormous demands for power and rapid, systemic change.

The fashionable solution is to think small: smart buildings, small-scale renewables, and locally distributed green energy. But Peter Fox-Penner makes clear that these will not be enough to meet our increasing needs for electricity. He points instead to the indispensability of large power systems, battery storage, and scalable carbon-free power technologies, along with the grids and markets that will integrate them. The electric power industry and its regulators will have to provide all of these, even as they grapple with changing business models for local electric utilities, political instability, and technological change. Power after Carbon makes sense of all the moving parts, providing actionable recommendations for anyone involved with or relying on the electric power system.

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Power and Culture
The Japanese–American War, 1941–1945
Akira Iriye
Harvard University Press, 1981

Power and Culture challenges existing assumptions about the war in the Pacific. By focusing on the interplay between culture and international relations, one of the world’s most distinguished scholars of United States–Japanese affairs offers a startling reassessment of what the war really meant to the two combatants. Akira Iriye examines the Japanese–American war for the first time from the cultural perspectives of both countries, arguing that it was more a search for international order than a ruthless pursuit of power.

His thesis is bold, for he convincingly demonstrates that throughout the war many Japanese leaders shared with their American counterparts an essentially Wilsonian vision of international cooperation. As the war drew to a close, these statesmen began to plan for a cooperative world structure that was remarkably similar to the ideas of American policymakers. Indeed, as Iriye shows, the stunning success of Japanese–American postwar relations can be understood only in the light of a deep convergence of their ideals.

Iriye has drawn his conclusions from original research, using official Japanese archives and recently declassified American documents. These offer a totally new perspective on the ways leaders in both countries actually viewed the war they were waging.

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Power and Decision
The Social Control of Reproduction
Gita Sen
Harvard University Press, 1994

This volume brings together feminist social and biomedical scholars from the Southern and Northern hemispheres to examine the aggregate forces that affect reproductive choice. Drawing on numerous case studies, this book examines the range of social, economic, and scientific policies which collectively impact on reproductive well being. Power and Decision offers an analysis of how disparate policies, seemingly unrelated to reproduction, are implicitly “pro-natalist” or “anti-natalist.” Moreover, these policies are imbued with gender, race, and class biases. The authors examine the reproductive impact of welfare and parental leave legislation, health services, adoption policies, biomedical research, the global transfer and regulation of reproductive technologies, and international family planning programs.

Offering a rare global feminist critique of social policy, this volume makes explicit the direction of current legislative, economic, and scientific trends, providing a basis for discussion, debate, and possible redress.

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Power and Protest
Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente
Jeremi Suri
Harvard University Press, 2005

In a brilliantly-conceived book, Jeremi Suri puts the tumultuous 1960s into a truly international perspective in the first study to examine the connections between great power diplomacy and global social protest. Profoundly disturbed by increasing social and political discontent, Cold War powers united on the international front, in the policy of detente. Though reflecting traditional balance of power considerations, detente thus also developed from a common urge for stability among leaders who by the late 1960s were worried about increasingly threatening domestic social activism.

In the early part of the decade, Cold War pressures simultaneously inspired activists and constrained leaders; within a few years activism turned revolutionary on a global scale. Suri examines the decade through leaders and protesters on three continents, including Mao Zedong, Charles de Gaulle, Martin Luther King Jr., Daniel Cohn-Bendit, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He describes connections between policy and protest from the Berkeley riots to the Prague Spring, from the Paris strikes to massive unrest in Wuhan, China.

Designed to protect the existing political order and repress movements for change, detente gradually isolated politics from the public. The growth of distrust and disillusion in nearly every society left a lasting legacy of global unrest, fragmentation, and unprecedented public skepticism toward authority.

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Power for a Price
The Purchase of Official Appointments in Qing China
Lawrence Zhang
Harvard University Press, 2022

The Qing dynasty office purchase system (juanna), which allowed individuals to pay for appointments in the government, was regarded in traditional Chinese historiography as an inherently corrupt and anti-meritocratic practice. It enabled participants to become civil and military officials while avoiding the competitive government-run examination systems.

Lawrence Zhang’s groundbreaking study of a broad selection of new archival and other printed evidence—including a list of over 10,900 purchasers of offices from 1798 and narratives of purchase—contradicts this widely held assessment and investigates how observers and critics of the system, past and present, have informed this questionable negative view. The author argues that, rather than seeing office purchase as a last resort for those who failed to obtain official appointments via other means, it was a preferred method for wealthy and well-connected individuals to leverage their social capital to the fullest extent. Office purchase was thus not only a useful device that raised funds for the state, but also a political tool that, through literal investments in their positions and their potential to secure status and power, tied the interests of official elites ever more closely to those of the state.

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Power for a Price
The Purchase of Official Appointments in Qing China
Lawrence Zhang
Harvard University Press, 2022

The Qing dynasty office purchase system (juanna), which allowed individuals to pay for appointments in the government, was regarded in traditional Chinese historiography as an inherently corrupt and anti-meritocratic practice. It enabled participants to become civil and military officials while avoiding the competitive government-run examination systems.

Lawrence Zhang’s groundbreaking study of a broad selection of new archival and other printed evidence—including a list of over 10,900 purchasers of offices from 1798 and narratives of purchase—contradicts this widely held assessment and investigates how observers and critics of the system, past and present, have informed this questionable negative view. The author argues that, rather than seeing office purchase as a last resort for those who failed to obtain official appointments via other means, it was a preferred method for wealthy and well-connected individuals to leverage their social capital to the fullest extent. Office purchase was thus not only a useful device that raised funds for the state, but also a political tool that, through literal investments in their positions and their potential to secure status and power, tied the interests of official elites ever more closely to those of the state.

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The Power of Creative Destruction
Economic Upheaval and the Wealth of Nations
Philippe Aghion, Céline Antonin, and Simon Bunel
Harvard University Press, 2021

Hayek Book Prize Finalist
An Economist Best Book of the Year
A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year


From one of the world’s leading economists and his coauthors, a cutting-edge analysis of what drives economic growth and a blueprint for prosperity under capitalism.

Crisis seems to follow crisis. Inequality is rising, growth is stagnant, the environment is suffering, and the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed every crack in the system. We hear more and more calls for radical change, even the overthrow of capitalism. But the answer to our problems is not revolution. The answer is to create a better capitalism by understanding and harnessing the power of creative destruction—innovation that disrupts, but that over the past two hundred years has also lifted societies to previously unimagined prosperity.

To explain, Philippe Aghion, Céline Antonin, and Simon Bunel draw on cutting-edge theory and evidence to examine today’s most fundamental economic questions, including the roots of growth and inequality, competition and globalization, the determinants of health and happiness, technological revolutions, secular stagnation, middle-income traps, climate change, and how to recover from economic shocks. They show that we owe our modern standard of living to innovations enabled by free-market capitalism. But we also need state intervention with the appropriate checks and balances to simultaneously foster ongoing economic creativity, manage the social disruption that innovation leaves in its wake, and ensure that yesterday’s superstar innovators don’t pull the ladder up after them to thwart tomorrow’s. A powerful and ambitious reappraisal of the foundations of economic success and a blueprint for change, The Power of Creative Destruction shows that a fair and prosperous future is ultimately ours to make.

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The Power of Creative Destruction
Economic Upheaval and the Wealth of Nations
Philippe Aghion, Céline Antonin, and Simon Bunel
Harvard University Press

Hayek Book Prize Finalist
An Economist Best Book of the Year
A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year
A Financial Times Summer Reading Favorite


“Sweeping, authoritative and—for the times—strikingly upbeat…The overall argument is compelling and…it carries a trace of Schumpeterian subversion.”
The Economist

“[An] important book…Lucid, empirically grounded, wide-ranging, and well-argued.”
—Martin Wolf, Financial Times

“Offers…much needed insight into the sources of economic growth and the kinds of policies that will promote it…All in Washington would do well to read this volume carefully.”
—Milton Ezrati, Forbes

Inequality is on the rise, growth stagnant, the environment in crisis. Covid seems to have exposed every crack in the system. We hear calls for radical change, but the answer is not to junk our economic system but to create a better form of capitalism.

An ambitious reappraisal of the foundations of economic success that shows a fair and prosperous future is ours to make, The Power of Creative Destruction draws on cutting-edge theory and hard evidence to examine today’s most fundamental economic questions: what powers growth, competition, globalization, and middle-income traps; the roots of inequality and climate change; the impact of technology; and how to recover from economic shocks. We owe our modern standard of living to innovations enabled by free-market capitalism, it argues, but we also need state intervention—with checks and balances—to foster economic creativity, manage social disruption, and ensure that yesterday’s superstar innovators don’t pull the ladder up after them.

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The Power of Market Fundamentalism
Karl Polanyi’s Critique
Fred Block and Margaret R. Somers
Harvard University Press, 2014

What is it about free-market ideas that give them tenacious staying power in the face of such manifest failures as persistent unemployment, widening inequality, and the severe financial crises that have stressed Western economies over the past forty years? Fred Block and Margaret Somers extend the work of the great political economist Karl Polanyi to explain why these ideas have revived from disrepute in the wake of the Great Depression and World War II, to become the dominant economic ideology of our time.

Polanyi contends that the free market championed by market liberals never actually existed. While markets are essential to enable individual choice, they cannot be self-regulating because they require ongoing state action. Furthermore, they cannot by themselves provide such necessities of social existence as education, health care, social and personal security, and the right to earn a livelihood. When these public goods are subjected to market principles, social life is threatened and major crises ensue.

Despite these theoretical flaws, market principles are powerfully seductive because they promise to diminish the role of politics in civic and social life. Because politics entails coercion and unsatisfying compromises among groups with deep conflicts, the wish to narrow its scope is understandable. But like Marx's theory that communism will lead to a "withering away of the State," the ideology that free markets can replace government is just as utopian and dangerous.

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The Power of News
Michael Schudson
Harvard University Press, 1995

Some say it's simply information, mirroring the world. Others believe it's propaganda, promoting a partisan view. But news, Michael Schudson tells us, is really both and neither; it is a form of culture, complete with its own literary and social conventions and powerful in ways far more subtle and complex than its many critics might suspect. A penetrating look into this culture, The Power of News offers a compelling view of the news media's emergence as a central institution of modern society, a key repository of common knowledge and cultural authority.

One of our foremost writers on journalism and mass communication, Schudson shows us the news evolving in concert with American democracy and industry, subject to the social forces that shape the culture at large. He excavates the origins of contemporary journalistic practices, including the interview, the summary lead, the preoccupation with the presidency, and the ironic and detached stance of the reporter toward the political world. His book explodes certain myths perpetuated by both journalists and critics. The press, for instance, did not bring about the Spanish-American War or bring down Richard Nixon; TV did not decide the Kennedy-Nixon debates or turn the public against the Vietnam War.

Then what does the news do? True to their calling, the media mediate, as Schudson demonstrates. He analyzes how the news, by making knowledge public, actually changes the character of knowledge and allows people to act on that knowledge in new and significant ways. He brings to bear a wealth of historical scholarship and a keen sense for the apt questions about the production, meaning, and reception of news today.

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Power of Place
The Religious Landscape of the Southern Sacred Peak (Nanyue 南嶽) in Medieval China
James Robson
Harvard University Press, 2009

Throughout Chinese history mountains have been integral components of the religious landscape. They have been considered divine or numinous sites, the abodes of deities, the preferred locations for temples and monasteries, and destinations for pilgrims. Early in Chinese history a set of five mountains were co-opted into the imperial cult and declared sacred peaks, yue, demarcating and protecting the boundaries of the Chinese imperium.

The Southern Sacred Peak, or Nanyue, is of interest to scholars not the least because the title has been awarded to several different mountains over the years. The dynamic nature of Nanyue raises a significant theoretical issue of the mobility of sacred space and the nature of the struggles involved in such moves. Another facet of Nanyue is the multiple meanings assigned to this place: political, religious, and cultural. Of particular interest is the negotiation of this space by Daoists and Buddhists. The history of their interaction leads to questions about the nature of the divisions between these two religious traditions. James Robson’s analysis of these topics demonstrates the value of local studies and the emerging field of Buddho–Daoist studies in research on Chinese religion.

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The Power of Public Ideas
Robert B. Reich
Harvard University Press, 1988
Edited and contributed to by one of America’s most respected political and economic thinkers, and containing essays by an impressive roster of experts, The Power of Public Ideas offers a controversial, timely, and incisive analysis of the impact of the public interest on governmental policy making.
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The Power of the Buddhas
The Politics of Buddhism during the Koryo Dynasty (918 - 1392)
Sem Vermeersch
Harvard University Press, 2008

Buddhism in medieval Korea is characterized as “State Protection Buddhism,” a religion whose primary purpose was to rally support (supernatural and popular) for and legitimate the state. In this view, the state used Buddhism to engender compliance with its goals. A closer look, however, reveals that Buddhism was a canvas on which people projected many religious and secular concerns and desires.

This study is an attempt to specify Buddhism’s place in Koryo and to ascertain to what extent and in what areas Buddhism functioned as a state religion. Was state support the main reason for Buddhism’s dominance in Koryo? How actively did the state seek to promote religious ideals? What was the strength of Buddhism as an institution and the nature of its relationship to the state? What role did Confucianism, the other state ideology, play in Koryo? This study argues that Buddhism provided most of the symbols and rituals, and some of the beliefs, that constructed an aura of legitimacy, but that there was no single ideological system underlying the Koryo dynasty’s legitimating strategies.

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The Power of Thetis and Selected Essays
Laura M. Slatkin
Harvard University Press, 2011
Laura Slatkin's influential and widely admired book, here published in a second edition together with six additional essays, explores the superficially minor role of Thetis in the Iliad. Highly charged allusions reverberate through the narrative and establish a constellation of themes that link the poem to other traditions. Slatkin uncovers alternative traditions about the power of Thetis and shows how an awareness of those myths brings a far greater understanding of Thetis's place in the thematic structure of the Iliad. The six additional essays included in this volume—some of them classics, some never before published—cover a broad range of topics in the study of the Greek Epic: the workings of genre in Hesiod and Homer; the poetics of exchange; and the nature of enmity and friendship. The volume also includes a study of the Hesiodic Catalog of Women and reflections on particular heroes, such as Diomedes and Odysseus.
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Power, Pleasure, and Profit
Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison
David Wootton
Harvard University Press, 2018

A provocative history of the changing values that have given rise to our present discontents.

We pursue power, pleasure, and profit. We want as much as we can get, and we deploy instrumental reasoning—cost-benefit analysis—to get it. We judge ourselves and others by how well we succeed. It is a way of life and thought that seems natural, inevitable, and inescapable. As David Wootton shows, it is anything but. In Power, Pleasure, and Profit, he traces an intellectual and cultural revolution that replaced the older systems of Aristotelian ethics and Christian morality with the iron cage of instrumental reasoning that now gives shape and purpose to our lives.

Wootton guides us through four centuries of Western thought—from Machiavelli to Madison—to show how new ideas about politics, ethics, and economics stepped into a gap opened up by religious conflict and the Scientific Revolution. As ideas about godliness and Aristotelian virtue faded, theories about the rational pursuit of power, pleasure, and profit moved to the fore in the work of writers both obscure and as famous as Hobbes, Locke, and Adam Smith. The new instrumental reasoning cut through old codes of status and rank, enabling the emergence of movements for liberty and equality. But it also helped to create a world in which virtue, honor, shame, and guilt count for almost nothing, and what matters is success.

Is our world better for the rise of instrumental reasoning? To answer that question, Wootton writes, we must first recognize that we live in its grip.

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Power to Dissolve
Lawyers and Marriages in the Courts of the Roman Curia
John T. Noonan Jr.
Harvard University Press, 1972

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Powerful and Brutal Weapons
Nixon, Kissinger, and the Easter Offensive
Stephen P. Randolph
Harvard University Press, 2007

As America confronts an unpredictable war in Iraq, Stephen Randolph returns to an earlier conflict that severely tested our civilian and military leaders. In 1972, America sought to withdraw from Vietnam with its credibility intact. As diplomatic negotiations were pursued in Paris, President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger hoped that gains on the battlefield would strengthen their position at the negotiating table--working against the relentless deadline of a presidential election year.

In retaliation for a major North Vietnamese offensive breaking over the Easter holidays, the President launched the all-out air campaign known as Linebacker--overriding his Secretary of Defense and clashing with the theater commander in whom he had lost all confidence. He intended to destroy the enemy with the full force of America's "powerful and brutal weapons" and thus shape the endgame of the war. Randolph's narrative, based not only on the Nixon White House tapes and newly declassified materials from the National Security Council, the Pentagon, and the White House but also on never before used North Vietnamese sources, re-creates how North Vietnam planned and fought this battle from Hanoi and how the U.S. planned and fought it from Washington.

Randolph's intimate chronicle of Nixon's performance as commander-in-chief gains us unprecedented access to how strategic assessments were made, transmitted through the field of command, and played out in combat and at the negotiating table. It is a compelling story about America's military decision-making in conflicts with nontraditional belligerents that speaks provocatively to our own time.

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Powerful Relations
Kinship, Status, and the State in Sung China (960–1279)
Beverly J. Bossler
Harvard University Press, 1998

The realignment of the Chinese social order that took place over the course of the Sung dynasty set the pattern for Chinese society throughout most of the later imperial era. This study examines that realignment from the perspective of specific Sung families, using data on two groups of Sung elites—the grand councilors who led the bureaucracy and locally prominent gentlemen in Wu-chou (in modern Chekiang).

By analyzing kinship relationships, Beverly Bossler demonstrates the importance of family relations to the establishment and perpetuation of social status locally and in the capital. She shows how social position was measured and acted upon, how status shaped personal relationships (and vice versa), and how both status and personal relationships conditioned—and were conditioned by—political success. Finally, in a contribution to the ongoing discussion of localism in the Sung, Bossler details the varied networks that connected the local elite to the capital and elsewhere.

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Powers of the Real
Cinema, Gender, and Emotion in Interwar Japan
Diane Wei Lewis
Harvard University Press, 2019

Powers of the Real analyzes the cultural politics of cinema's persuasive sensory realism in interwar Japan. Examining cultural criticism, art, news media, literature, and film, Diane Wei Lewis shows how representations of women and signifiers of femininity were used to characterize new forms of pleasure and fantasy enabled by consumer culture and technological media. Drawing on a rich variety of sources, she analyzes the role that images of women played in articulating the new expressions of identity, behavior, and affiliation produced by cinema and consumer capitalism. In the process, Lewis traces new discourses on the technological mediation of emotion to the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake and postquake mass media boom. The earthquake transformed the Japanese film industry and lent urgency to debates surrounding cinema's ability to reach a mass audience and shape public sentiment, while the rise of consumer culture contributed to alarm over rampant materialism and "feminization."

Demonstrating how ideas about emotion and sexual difference played a crucial role in popular discourse on cinema’s reach and its sensory-affective powers, Powers of the Real offers new perspectives on media history, the commodification of intimacy and emotion, film realism, and gender politics in the “age of the mass society” in Japan.

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Practical Idealists
Changing the World and Getting Paid
Alissa Wilson, Ann Barham, and John Hammock
Harvard University Press
Can you work for a better world without taking a vow of poverty? The authors’ answer is a resounding, “Yes!” This book draws on interviews with over forty practical idealists whose stories will inspire the reader and provide tools for making the choices necessary to succeed as a practical idealist. Through examples and exercises, Practical Idealists: Changing the World and Getting Paid explores how to clarify your values and passions, gain relevant skills, find work, use college and graduate school effectively, manage finances, and build a community of support. Practical idealists understand that personal change and social change are connected. They know that choices matter. This book will help you make the choices that matter and live your life as a practical idealist.
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Practical Induction
Elijah Millgram
Harvard University Press, 1997

Practical reasoning is not just a matter of determining how to get what you want, but of working out what to want in the first place. In Practical Induction Elijah Millgram argues that experience plays a central role in this process of deciding what is or is not important or worth pursuing. He takes aim at instrumentalism, a view predominant among philosophers today, which holds that the goals of practical reasoning are basic in the sense that they are given by desires that are not themselves the product of practical reasoning. The view Millgram defends is "practical induction," a method of reasoning from experience similar to theoretical induction.

What are the practical observations that teach us what to want? Millgram suggests they are pleasant and unpleasant experiences on the basis of which we form practical judgments about particular cases. By generalizing from these judgments--that is, by practical induction--we rationally arrive at our views about what matters. Learning new priorities from experience is necessary if we are to function in a world of ever-changing circumstances. And we need to be able to learn both from our own and from others' experience. It is this, Millgram contends, that explains the cognitive importance of both our capacity for pain and pleasure and our capacity for love. Pleasure's role in cognition is not that of a goal but that of a guide. Love's role in cognition derives from its relation to our trusting the testimony of others about what does and does not matter and about what merits our desire.

Itself a pleasure to read, this book is full of inventive arguments and conveys Millgram's bold thesis with elegance and force. It will alter the direction of current debates on practical reasoning.

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Practical Matter
Newton’s Science in the Service of Industry and Empire, 1687–1851
Margaret C. Jacob and Larry Stewart
Harvard University Press, 2006
Margaret Jacob and Larry Stewart examine the profound transformation that began in 1687. From the year when Newton published his Principia to the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, science gradually became central to Western thought and economic development. The book aims at a general audience and examines how, despite powerful opposition on the Continent, a Newtonian understanding gained acceptance and practical application. By the mid-eighteenth century the new science had achieved ascendancy, and the race was on to apply Newtonian mechanics to industry and manufacturing. They end the story with the temple to scientific and technological progress that was the Crystal Palace exhibition. Choosing their examples carefully, Jacob and Stewart show that there was nothing preordained or inevitable about the centrality awarded to science. "It is easy to forget that science might have been stillborn, or remained the esoteric knowledge of court elites. Instead, for better and for worse, science became a centerpiece of Western culture."
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Practical Pursuits
Takano Choei, Takahashi Keisaku, and Western Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Japan
Ellen Gardner Nakamura
Harvard University Press, 2005
The history of Western medicine in the late Tokugawa period is usually depicted as a prelude to modern medicine. By comparison to the Western medical science that was systematically introduced in the Meiji period, the Tokugawa study of Western learning is often seen as a hopelessly backward exercise in which inadequately equipped Japanese doctors valiantly struggled to make sense of outdated Dutch knowledge. In contrast, this book argues that the study of Western medicine was a dynamic activity that brought together doctors from all over the country in efforts to effect social change. Western knowledge was not simply the property of elite samurai doctors working for the Bakufu or domains but was shared even by commoner doctors working in local practices in rural backwaters. Through the examples of the doctors Takano Choei (1804-1850) and Takahashi Keisaku (1799-1875), this book explores the context into which local Japanese doctors incorporated Western ideas, the social networks through which they communicated them, and the geographical spaces that supported these activities. By examining the social impact of Western learning at the level of everyday life rather than simply its impact at the theoretical level, the book offers a broad picture of the way in which Western medicine, and Western knowledge, was absorbed and adapted in Japan.
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The Practical Visions of Ya'qub Sanu
Irene L. Gendzier
Harvard University Press
This study deals with one of the small group of unorthodox pioneers active in the early nationalist movement of the 1870's in Egypt. Sanu' was dedicated to the cause of Egyptian freedom, and used his considerable talents as playwright, clandestine organizer, and journalist to achieve his goals.
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Practice for Life
Making Decisions in College
Lee Cuba, Nancy Jennings, Suzanne Lovett, and Joseph Swingle
Harvard University Press, 2016

From the day they arrive on campus, college students spend four years—or sometimes more—making decisions that shape every aspect of their academic and social lives. Whether choosing a major or a roommate, some students embrace decision-making as an opportunity for growth, while others seek to minimize challenges and avoid risk. Practice for Life builds a compelling case that a liberal arts education offers students a complex, valuable process of self-creation, one that begins in college but continues far beyond graduation.

Sifting data from a five-year study that followed over two hundred students at seven New England liberal arts colleges, the authors uncover what drives undergraduates to become engaged with their education. They found that students do not experience college as having a clear beginning and end but as a continuous series of new beginnings. They start and restart college many times, owing to the rhythms of the academic calendar, the vagaries of student housing allocation, and other factors. This dynamic has drawbacks as well as advantages. Not only students but also parents and faculty place enormous weight on some decisions, such as declaring a major, while overlooking the small but significant choices that shape students' daily experience.

For most undergraduates, deep engagement with their college education is at best episodic rather than sustained. Yet these disruptions in engagement provide students with abundant opportunities for reflection and course-correction as they learn to navigate the future uncertainties of adult life.

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The Practice of Chinese Buddhism, 1900–1950
Holmes Welch
Harvard University Press
Based partly on unpublished documents and oral information obtained from monks who headed major monasteries on mainland China, Holmes Welch presents a detailed description of the modern practice of Chinese Buddhism. Focusing on the actual rather than the theoretical observances of the religion, he gives an exhaustive account of the monastic system and the style of life of both monk and layman. His study makes new information available for the Western reader and calls into question the whole concept of the moribund state of Chinese Buddhism.
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The Practice of Diaspora
Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism
Brent Hayes Edwards
Harvard University Press, 2003

A pathbreaking work of scholarship that will reshape our understanding of the Harlem Renaissance, The Practice of Diaspora revisits black transnational culture in the 1920s and 1930s, paying particular attention to links between intellectuals in New York and their Francophone counterparts in Paris. Brent Edwards suggests that diaspora is less a historical condition than a set of practices: the claims, correspondences, and collaborations through which black intellectuals pursue a variety of international alliances.

Edwards elucidates the workings of diaspora by tracking the wealth of black transnational print culture between the world wars, exploring the connections and exchanges among New York–based publications (such as Opportunity, The Negro World, and The Crisis) and newspapers in Paris (such as Les Continents, La Voix des Nègres, and L'Etudiant noir). In reading a remarkably diverse archive--the works of writers and editors from Langston Hughes, René Maran, and Claude McKay to Paulette Nardal, Alain Locke, W. E. B. Du Bois, George Padmore, and Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté--The Practice of Diaspora takes account of the highly divergent ways of imagining race beyond the barriers of nation and language. In doing so, it reveals the importance of translation, arguing that the politics of diaspora are legible above all in efforts at negotiating difference among populations of African descent throughout the world.

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The Practice of Justice
A Theory of Lawyers’ Ethics
William H. Simon
Harvard University Press, 1998

Should a lawyer keep a client's secrets even when disclosure would exculpate a person wrongly accused of a crime? To what extent should a lawyer exploit loopholes in ways that enable clients to gain unintended advantages? When can lawyers justifiably make procedural maneuvers that defeat substantive rights? The Practice of Justice is a fresh look at these and other traditional questions about the ethics of lawyering. William Simon, a legal theorist with extensive experience in practice, charges that the profession's standard approach to these questions is incoherent and implausible.

At the same time, Simon rejects the ethical approaches most frequently proposed by the profession's critics. The problem, he insists, does not lie in the profession's commitment to legal values over those of ordinary morality. Nor does it arise from the adversary system. Rather, Simon shows that the critical weakness of the standard approach is its reliance on a distinctive style of judgment--categorical, rule-bound, rigid--that is both ethically unattractive and rejected by most modern legal thought outside the realm of legal ethics. He develops an alternative approach based on a different, more contextual, style of judgment widely accepted in other areas of legal thought.

The author enlivens his argument with discussions of actual cases, including the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal and the Leo Frank murder trial, as well as fictional accounts of lawyering, including Kafka's The Trial and the movie The Verdict.

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The Practice of Moral Judgment
Barbara Herman
Harvard University Press, 1993
Barbara Herman argues for a radical shift in the way we perceive Kant's ethics. She convincingly reinterprets the key texts, at once allowing Kant to mean what he says while showing that what Kant says makes good moral sense. She urges us to abandon the tradition that describes Kantian ethics as a deontology, a moral system of rules of duty. She finds the central idea of Kantian ethics not in duty but in practical rationality as a norm of unconditioned goodness. This book both clarifies Kant's own theory and adds programmatic vitality to modern moral philosophy.
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Practices of the Sentimental Imagination
Melodrama, the Novel, and the Social Imaginary in Nineteenth-Century Japan
Jonathan E. Zwicker
Harvard University Press, 2006

The history of the book in nineteenth-century Japan follows an uneven course that resists the simple chronology often used to mark the divide between premodern and modern literary history.

By examining the obscured histories of publication, circulation, and reception of widely consumed literary works from late Edo to the early Meiji period, Jonathan Zwicker traces a genealogy of the literary field across a long nineteenth century: one that stresses continuities between the generic conventions of early modern fiction and the modern novel. In the literature of sentiment Zwicker locates a tear-streaked lens through which to view literary practices and readerly expectations that evolved across the century.

Practices of the Sentimental Imagination emphasizes both qualitative and quantitative aspects of literary production and consumption, balancing close readings of canonical and noncanonical texts, sophisticated applications of critical theory, and careful archival research into the holdings of nineteenth-century lending libraries and private collections. By exploring the relationships between and among Japanese literary works and texts from late imperial China, Europe, and America, Zwicker also situates the Japanese novel within a larger literary history of the novel across the global nineteenth century.

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Practitioners of the Divine
Greek Priests and Religious Officials from Homer to Heliodorus
Beate Dignas and Kai Trampedach
Harvard University Press, 2008
“What is a Greek priest?” The volume, which has its origins in a symposium held at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C., focuses on the question through a variety of lenses: the visual representation of cult personnel, priests as ritual experts, variations of priesthood, ideal concepts and their transformation, and the role of manteis. Each chapter looks at how priests and religious officials used a potential authority to promote themselves and their posts, how they played a role in conserving, shaping and reviving cult activity, how they acted behind the curtain of polis institutions, and how they performed as mediators between men and gods. It becomes clear that Greek priests had many faces, and that the factors that determined their roles and activities are political as well as historical, religious as well as economic, idealistic as well as pragmatic, personal as well as communal.
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Pragmatism
William James
Harvard University Press, 1975

"It is absolutely the only philosophy with no humbug in it," an exhilarated William James wrote to a friend early in 1907. And later that year, after finishing the proofs of his "little book," he wrote to his brother Henry: "I shouldn't be surprised if ten years hence it should be rated as 'epoch-making,' for of the definitive triumph of that general way of thinking I can entertain no doubt whatever—I believe it to be something quite like the protestant reformation."

Both the acclaim and outcry that greeted Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking helped to affirm James's conviction. For it was in Pragmatism that he confronted older philosophic methods with the "pragmatic" method, demanding that ideas be tested by their relation to life and their effects in experience. James's reasoning and conclusions in Pragmatism have exerted a profound influence on philosophy in this century, and the book remains a landmark.

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Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth
William James
Harvard University Press, 1978

Pragmatism is the most famous single work of American philosophy. Its sequel, The Meaning of Truth, is its imperative and inevitable companion. The definitive texts of both works are here available for the first time in one volume, with an introduction by the distinguished contemporary philosopher A. J. Ayer.

In Pragmatism, William James attacked the transcendental, rationalist tradition in philosophy and tried to clear the ground for the doctrine he called radical empiricism. When first published, the book caused an uproar. It was greeted with praise, hostility, ridicule. Determined to clarify his views, James collected nine essays he had written on this subject before he wrote Pragmatism and six written later in response to criticisms by Bertrand Russell and others. He published The Meaning of Truth in 1909, the year before his death.

These two works show James at his best full of verve and good humor. Intent upon making difficult ideas clear, he is characteristically vigorous in his effort to make them prevail.

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