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Defensive Positions
The Politics of Maritime Security in Tokugawa Japan
Noell Wilson
Harvard University Press
Defensive Positions focuses on the role of regional domains in early modern Japan’s coastal defense, shedding new light on this system’s development. This examination, in turn, has significant long-term political implications for the involvement of those domains in Tokugawa state formation. Noell Wilson argues that domainal autonomy in executing maritime defense slowly escalated over the course of the Tokugawa period to the point where the daimyo ultimately challenged Tokugawa authorities as the primary military interface with the outside world. By first exploring localized maritime defense at Nagasaki and then comparing its organization with those of the Yokohama and Hakodate harbors during the treaty port era, Wilson identifies new, core systemic sources for the collapse of the shogunate’s control of the monopoly on violence. Her insightful analysis reveals how the previously unexamined system of domain-managed coastal defense comprised a critical third element—in addition to trade and diplomacy—of Tokugawa external relations. Domainal control of coastal defense exacerbated the shogunate’s inability to respond to important military and political challenges as Japan transitioned from an early modern system of parcelized, local maritime defense to one of centralized, national security as embraced by world powers in the nineteenth century.
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Heart of Europe
A History of the Holy Roman Empire
Peter H. Wilson
Harvard University Press, 2020

An Economist and Sunday Times Best Book of the Year

“Deserves to be hailed as a magnum opus.”
—Tom Holland, The Telegraph


“Ambitious…seeks to rehabilitate the Holy Roman Empire’s reputation by re-examining its place within the larger sweep of European history…Succeeds splendidly in rescuing the empire from its critics.”
Wall Street Journal

Massive, ancient, and powerful, the Holy Roman Empire formed the heart of Europe from its founding by Charlemagne to its destruction by Napoleon a millennium later. An engine for inventions and ideas, with no fixed capital and no common language or culture, it derived its legitimacy from the ideal of a unified Christian civilization—though this did not prevent emperors from clashing with the pope for supremacy.

In this strikingly ambitious book, Peter H. Wilson explains how the Holy Roman Empire worked, why it was so important, and how it changed over the course of its existence. The result is a tour de force that raises countless questions about the nature of political and military power and the legacy of its offspring, from Nazi Germany to the European Union.

“Engrossing…Wilson is to be congratulated on writing the only English-language work that deals with the empire from start to finish…A book that is relevant to our own times.”
—Brendan Simms, The Times

“The culmination of a lifetime of research and thought…an astonishing scholarly achievement.”
The Spectator

“Remarkable…Wilson has set himself a staggering task, but it is one at which he succeeds heroically.”
Times Literary Supplement

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Iron and Blood
A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples since 1500
Peter H. Wilson
Harvard University Press, 2023

From the author of the acclaimed The Thirty Years War and Heart of Europe, a masterful, landmark reappraisal of German military history, and of the preconceptions about German militarism since before the rise of Prussia and the world wars.

German military history is typically viewed as an inexorable march to the rise of Prussia and the two world wars, the road paved by militarism and the result a specifically German way of war. Peter Wilson challenges this narrative. Looking beyond Prussia to German-speaking Europe across the last five centuries, Wilson finds little unique or preordained in German militarism or warfighting.

Iron and Blood takes as its starting point the consolidation of the Holy Roman Empire, which created new mechanisms for raising troops but also for resolving disputes diplomatically. Both the empire and the Swiss Confederation were largely defensive in orientation, while German participation in foreign wars was most often in partnership with allies. The primary aggressor in Central Europe was not Prussia but the Austrian Habsburg monarchy, yet Austria’s strength owed much to its ability to secure allies. Prussia, meanwhile, invested in militarization but maintained a part-time army well into the nineteenth century. Alongside Switzerland, which relied on traditional militia, both states exemplify the longstanding civilian element within German military power.

Only after Prussia’s unexpected victory over France in 1871 did Germans and outsiders come to believe in a German gift for warfare—a special capacity for high-speed, high-intensity combat that could overcome numerical disadvantage. It took two world wars to expose the fallacy of German military genius. Yet even today, Wilson argues, Germany’s strategic position is misunderstood. The country now seen as a bastion of peace spends heavily on defense in comparison to its peers and is deeply invested in less kinetic contemporary forms of coercive power.

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The Thirty Years War
Europe’s Tragedy
Peter H. Wilson
Harvard University Press, 2011

A deadly continental struggle, the Thirty Years War devastated seventeenth-century Europe, killing nearly a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to towns and countryside alike. Peter Wilson offers the first new history in a generation of a horrifying conflict that transformed the map of the modern world.

When defiant Bohemians tossed the Habsburg emperor’s envoys from the castle windows in Prague in 1618, the Holy Roman Empire struck back with a vengeance. Bohemia was ravaged by mercenary troops in the first battle of a conflagration that would engulf Europe from Spain to Sweden. The sweeping narrative encompasses dramatic events and unforgettable individuals—the sack of Magdeburg; the Dutch revolt; the Swedish militant king Gustavus Adolphus; the imperial generals, opportunistic Wallenstein and pious Tilly; and crafty diplomat Cardinal Richelieu. In a major reassessment, Wilson argues that religion was not the catalyst, but one element in a lethal stew of political, social, and dynastic forces that fed the conflict.

By war’s end a recognizably modern Europe had been created, but at what price? The Thirty Years War condemned the Germans to two centuries of internal division and international impotence and became a benchmark of brutality for centuries. As late as the 1960s, Germans placed it ahead of both world wars and the Black Death as their country’s greatest disaster.

An understanding of the Thirty Years War is essential to comprehending modern European history. Wilson’s masterful book will stand as the definitive account of this epic conflict.

For a map of Central Europe in 1618, referenced on page XVI, please visit this book’s page on the Harvard University Press website.

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A Brief History of the Harvard University Cyclotrons
Richard Wilson
Harvard University Press, 2004
In 1937, Harvard University built its first cyclotron, which was subsequently requisitioned by the U.S. Army and taken to Los Alamos in 1943. The second cyclotron, one of the world's longest-running accelerators, was finished in 1949 and operated until 2002. In its first 20 years, the cyclotron's primary use was for nuclear physics, particularly for understanding the interaction between two nucleons. During the next 30 years, the emphasis switched to treating patients with proton radiotherapy. A total of 9,115 patients were treated by this method and the treatment has been copied all over the world. This book describes the work of the Harvard cyclotron during its 50 years of operation and includes references to about 500 publications and 40 student theses from the work.
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Risk-Benefit Analysis
Second Edition
Richard Wilson
Harvard University Press, 2001
Over the centuries, mankind has slowly reduced the risks and hazards that even as recently as a century ago kept life expectancy to a mere 45 years. Our average lifespan has improved to 77 years by remarkable progress in public health and safety. But with this improvement has come a demand for greater efforts to improve both life expectancy and the quality of life. The first edition of this book, published in 1982, was a pioneer in the development of logical, yet simple, analytic tools for discussion of the risks which we all face. This new edition, revised, expanded, and illustrated in detail, should be of value both to professionals in the field and to those who wish to understand these vital issues.
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Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted
An American Poetics
Rob Wilson
Harvard University Press, 2009

“Be always converting, and be always converted; turn us again, O Lord,” Thomas Shepard urged his Cambridge congregation in the 1640s. This mandate coming down from American Puritan times to New Age seekers, to be “always converting, and always converted,” places a radical burden on the self as site of renewal and world-change, even as conversion becomes surrounded by deconversion (rejection of prior beliefs) and counterconversion (turns to alternative beliefs) across global modernity.

Rob Wilson’s reconceptualization of the American project of conversion begins with the story of Henry ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia, the first Hawaiian convert to Christianity, “torn from the stomach” of his Native Pacific homeland and transplanted to New England. Wilson argues that ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia’s conversion is both remarkable and prototypically American, because he dared to redefine himself via this drive to rebirth.

By mapping the poetics and politics of conversion and counterconversion, Wilson returns conversion to its central place in the American literature, history, and psyche. Through ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia’s story, and through the works of the Tongan social scientist and fiction writer Epeli Hau‘ofa, Wild West poet Ai, and the mercurial Bob Dylan, Wilson demonstrates that conversion—seemingly an anachronistic concern in this secular age—is instead a global, yet deeply American subject, less about “salvation” or finality than about “experimentation” and the quest for modern beatitude.

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Learning on the Job
When Business Takes On Public Schools
Steven F. Wilson
Harvard University Press, 2006

Entrepreneurial creativity, private investment, and competition have been among America's great strengths. Can they be harnessed to improve troubled public schools? Or is private management of public schools at best a gimmick, and at worst an undemocratic sellout?

In the 1990s, some failing school systems turned to private education management organizations to manage their schools. The EMOs promised academic improvement to families and profits to their investors. Wall Street and foundations lavished hundreds of millions of dollars on for-profit and nonprofit start-ups, and thousands of students' educations began to be directed not by school officials, but by private companies.

In Learning on the Job, industry insider Steven Wilson, the founder and CEO of Advantage Schools, looks back on the first tumultuous decade of this social experiment. Digging deep into the academic, financial, logistic, and political records of seven leading EMOs, including his own, he reveals the potential and pitfalls of their business and educational models, and their actual successes in the classrooms and the boardrooms. Have they given their students a better education? Can they succeed as businesses? Can businesses in fact run better public schools than school districts?

With remarkable honesty and fairness on an ideologically charged topic, Wilson describes the follies and wisdom, overreaching and real accomplishment, of the first education entrepreneurs. Acknowledging that they had much to learn about the real-world challenges of running schools, he passionately defends the promise of private involvement in public schooling.

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On Sacred Grounds
Culture, Society, Politics, and the Formation of the Cult of Confucius
Thomas A. Wilson
Harvard University Press, 2002

The sacred landscape of imperial China was dotted with Buddhist monasteries, Daoist temples, shrines to local deities, and the altars of the mandarinate. Prominent among the official shrines were the temples in every capital throughout the empire devoted to the veneration of Confucius. Twice a year members of the educated elite and officials in each area gathered to offer sacrifices to Confucius, his disciples, and the major scholars of the Confucian tradition.

The worship of Confucius is one of the least understood aspects of Confucianism, even though the temple and the cult were highly visible signs of Confucianism's existence in imperial China. To many modern observers of traditional China, the temple cult is difficult to reconcile with the image of Confucianism as an ethical, humanistic, rational philosophy. The nine essays in this book are an attempt to recover the meaning and significance of the religious side of Confucianism. Among other subjects, the authors analyze the social, cultural, and political meaning attached to the cult; its history; the legends, images, and rituals associated with the worship of Confucius; the power of the descendants of Confucius, the main temple in the birthplace of Confucius; and the contemporary fate of temples to Confucius.

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Bioluminescence
Living Lights, Lights for Living
Thérèse Wilson
Harvard University Press, 2013

Bioluminescence is everywhere on earth—most of all in the ocean, from angler fish in the depths to the flashing of dinoflagellates at the surface. Here, Thérèse Wilson and Woody Hastings explore the natural history, evolution, and biochemistry of the diverse array of organisms that emit light.

While some bacteria, mushrooms, and invertebrates, as well as fish, are bioluminescent, other vertebrates and plants are not. The sporadic distribution and paucity of luminous forms calls for explanation, as does the fact that unrelated groups evolved completely different biochemical pathways to luminescence. The authors explore the hypothesis that many different luciferase systems arose in the early evolution of life because of their ability to remove oxygen, which was toxic to life when it first appeared on earth. As oxygen became abundant and bioluminescence was no longer adequate for oxygen removal, other antioxidant mechanisms evolved and most luminous species became extinct. Those light-emitting species that avoided extinction evolved uses with survival value for the light itself. Today’s luminous organisms use bioluminescence for defense from predators, for their own predatory purposes, or for communication in sexual courtship.

Bioluminescence was earlier viewed as a fascinating feature of the living world, but one whose study seemed unlikely to contribute in any practical way. Today, bioluminescence is no longer an esoteric area of research. Applications are numerous, ranging from the rapid detection of microbial contamination in beef and water, to finding the location of cancer cells, to working out circuitry in the brain.

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Strangers to Ourselves
Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious
Timothy D. Wilson
Harvard University Press, 2004

"Know thyself," a precept as old as Socrates, is still good advice. But is introspection the best path to self-knowledge? What are we trying to discover, anyway? In an eye-opening tour of the unconscious, as contemporary psychological science has redefined it, Timothy D. Wilson introduces us to a hidden mental world of judgments, feelings, and motives that introspection may never show us.

This is not your psychoanalyst's unconscious. The adaptive unconscious that empirical psychology has revealed, and that Wilson describes, is much more than a repository of primitive drives and conflict-ridden memories. It is a set of pervasive, sophisticated mental processes that size up our worlds, set goals, and initiate action, all while we are consciously thinking about something else.

If we don't know ourselves—our potentials, feelings, or motives—it is most often, Wilson tells us, because we have developed a plausible story about ourselves that is out of touch with our adaptive unconscious. Citing evidence that too much introspection can actually do damage, Wilson makes the case for better ways of discovering our unconscious selves. If you want to know who you are or what you feel or what you're like, Wilson advises, pay attention to what you actually do and what other people think about you. Showing us an unconscious more powerful than Freud's, and even more pervasive in our daily life, Strangers to Ourselves marks a revolution in how we know ourselves.

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Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings
Piecewise Approximations to Reality
William C. Wimsatt
Harvard University Press, 2007

Analytic philosophers once pantomimed physics: they tried to understand the world by breaking it down into the smallest possible bits. Thinkers from the Darwinian sciences now pose alternatives to this simplistic reductionism.

In this intellectual tour--essays spanning thirty years--William Wimsatt argues that scientists seek to atomize phenomena only when necessary in the search to understand how entities, events, and processes articulate at different levels. Evolution forms the natural world not as Laplace's all-seeing demon but as a backwoods mechanic fixing and re-fashioning machines out of whatever is at hand. W. V. Quine's lost search for a "desert ontology" leads instead to Wimsatt's walk through a tropical rain forest.

This book offers a philosophy for error-prone humans trying to understand messy systems in the real world. Against eliminative reductionism, Wimsatt pits new perspectives to deal with emerging natural and social complexities. He argues that our philosophy should be rooted in heuristics and models that work in practice, not only in principle. He demonstrates how to do this with an analysis of the strengths, the limits, and a recalibration of our reductionistic and analytic methodologies. Our aims are changed and our philosophy is transfigured in the process.

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The Next Shift
The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America
Gabriel Winant
Harvard University Press, 2021

Winner of the Frederick Jackson Turner Award
Winner of the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize
Winner of the C. L. R. James Award
A ProMarket Best Political Economy Book of the Year


Men in hardhats were once the heart of America’s working class; now it is women in scrubs. What does this shift portend for our future?

Pittsburgh was once synonymous with steel. But today most of its mills are gone. Like so many places across the United States, a city that was a center of blue-collar manufacturing is now dominated by the service economy—particularly health care, which employs more Americans than any other industry. Gabriel Winant takes us inside the Rust Belt to show how America’s cities have weathered new economic realities. In Pittsburgh’s neighborhoods, he finds that a new working class has emerged in the wake of deindustrialization.

As steelworkers and their families grew older, they required more health care. Even as the industrial economy contracted sharply, the care economy thrived. Hospitals and nursing homes went on hiring sprees. But many care jobs bear little resemblance to the manufacturing work the city lost. Unlike their blue-collar predecessors, home health aides and hospital staff work unpredictable hours for low pay. And the new working class disproportionately comprises women and people of color.

Today health care workers are on the front lines of our most pressing crises, yet we have been slow to appreciate that they are the face of our twenty-first-century workforce. The Next Shift offers unique insights into how we got here and what could happen next. If health care employees, along with other essential workers, can translate the increasing recognition of their economic value into political power, they may become a major force in the twenty-first century.

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The Next Shift
The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America
Gabriel Winant
Harvard University Press

Winner of the Frederick Jackson Turner Award
Winner of the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize
Winner of the C. L. R. James Award
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
A ProMarket Best Political Economy Book of the Year


“The Next Shift is an original work of serious scholarship, but it’s also vivid and readable…Eye-opening.”
—Jennifer Szalai, New York Times

“A deeply upsetting book…Winant ably blends social and political history with conventional labor history to construct a remarkably comprehensive narrative with clear contemporary implications.”
—Scott W. Stern, New Republic

“Terrific…A useful guide to the sweeping social changes that have shaped a huge segment of the economy and created the dystopian world of contemporary service-sector work.”
—Nelson Lichtenstein, The Nation

Pittsburgh was once synonymous with steel, but today most of its mills are gone. Like so many places across the United States, a city that was a center of blue-collar manufacturing is now dominated by health care, which employs more Americans than any other industry. Gabriel Winant takes us inside the Rust Belt to show how America’s cities have weathered new economic realities.

As steelworkers and their families grew older, they required more health care. Even as the industrial economy contracted sharply, the care economy thrived. But unlike their blue-collar predecessors, home health aides and hospital staff work unpredictable hours for low pay. Today health care workers—mostly women and people of color—are on the front lines of our most pressing crises, yet we have been slow to appreciate that they are the face of our twenty-first-century workforce. The Next Shift offers unique insights into how we got here and what could happen next.

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The Church of the Panaghia tou Arakos at Lagoudhera, Cyprus
The Paintings and Their Painterly Significance
David Winfield
Harvard University Press, 2003
The monastery church at Lagoudhera, Cyprus, is notable for an almost complete decoration of Byzantine wall painting, dated to 1192. These paintings present the finest surviving example of the elegant linear style of the second half of the twelfth century. In this work, David and June Winfield discuss the language of Byzantine church decoration, methods of plastering, proportional rules, system of coloring, and the working methods of the Byzantine painter.
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Flag Wars and Stone Saints
How the Bohemian Lands Became Czech
Nancy M. Wingfield
Harvard University Press, 2007

In a new perspective on the formation of national identity in Central Europe, Nancy Wingfield analyzes what many historians have treated separately--the construction of the Czech and German nations--as a larger single phenomenon.

Czech and German nationalism worked off each other in dynamic ways. As external conditions changed, Czech and German nationalists found new uses for their pasts and new ways to stage them in public spaces for their ongoing national projects. These grassroots confrontations transformed public culture by reinforcing the centrality of nationality to everyday life and by tying nationalism to the exercise of power. The battles in the public sphere produced a cultural geography of national conflict associated with the unveiling of Joseph II statues that began in 1881, the Badeni Language Ordinances of 1897, the 1905 debate over a Czech-language university in Moravia, and the celebration of the emperor's sixtieth jubilee in 1908. The pattern of impassioned national conflict would be repeated for the duration of the monarchy and persist with even more violence into the First Czechoslovak Republic.

Numerous illustrations show how people absorbed, on many levels, visual clues that shaped how they identified themselves and their groups. This nuanced analysis is a valuable contribution to our understanding of Central European history, nationalism, and the uses of collective memory.

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The Fatal History of Portuguese Ceylon
Transition to Dutch Rule
George Davison Winius
Harvard University Press, 1971

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Nexus
Strategic Communications and American Security in World War I
Jonathan Reed Winkler
Harvard University Press, 2008

In an illuminating study that blends diplomatic, military, technology, and business history, Jonathan Reed Winkler shows how U.S. officials during World War I discovered the enormous value of global communications.

At the outbreak of war in 1914, British control of the cable network affected the Americans’ ability to communicate internationally, and the development of radio worried the Navy about hemispheric security. The benefits of a U.S. network became evident during the war, especially in the gathering of intelligence. This led to the creation of a peacetime intelligence operation, later termed the “Black Chamber,” that was the forerunner of the National Security Agency.

After the war, U.S. companies worked to expand network service around the world but faced industrial limitations. Focused on security concerns, the Wilson administration objected to any collaboration with British companies that might alleviate this problem. Indeed, they went so far as to create a radio monopoly and use warships to block the landing of a cable at Miami.

These efforts set important precedents for later developments in telephony, shortwave radio, satellites—even the internet. In this absorbing history, Winkler sheds light on the early stages of the global infrastructure that helped launch the United States as the predominant power of the century.

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Invented Worlds
The Psychology of the Arts
Ellen Winner
Harvard University Press, 1982

Cave paintings of our prehistoric ancestors, elaborate ritual dances of preliterate tribesmen, long lines at the movies, earnest scribbles of the three-year-old next door—evidence of human preoccupation with art is everywhere, and it is overwhelming. But unlike other human universals—language, tool use, the family—art makes no material contribution to mankind’s survival. What impels the artist to the lonely effort at self-expression? What moves the audience to resonate to the work of a master? What accounts for the child’s inherent fascination with pictures and stories and songs?

These questions are among the deepest we can ask about human nature. Freud deemed some of them forever unanswerable, but modern psychology has made new inroads into these old mysteries. Invented Worlds provides a complete, authoritative account of this progress. Dealing with the three major art forms—painting, music, and literature—Ellen Winner shows how the artist fashions a symbolic world that transforms the experience of the observer. She probes the adult’s ability to create and respond to works of art. In addition, she examines children’s art for what it can reveal about the artistic impulse before adult convention becomes a shaping force. Finally, in order to reach a better understanding of the biological bases of artistry, Winner discusses the art of the mentally disturbed and the neurologically impaired patient.

The sum of these discussions is more than an up-to-date handbook to the field; it is nothing less than a new synthesis of our understanding of man’s artistic nature. Written with admirable clarity, Invented Worlds is a book that can be used by professionals and students in psychology, education, and the arts, as well as anyone with reason to be curious about the processes that underlie the creation and enjoyment of art.

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The Point of Words
Children’s Understanding of Metaphor and Irony
Ellen Winner
Harvard University Press, 1988

A small child looks at a dripping faucet and says that it is drooling." Another calls a centipede a "comb." An older child notices the mess in his younger brother's room and says, "Wow, it sure is neat in here." Children's spontaneous speech is rich in such creative, nonliteral discourse. How do children's abilities to use and interpret figurative language change as they grow older? What does such language show us about the changing features of children's minds?

In this absorbing book, psychologist Ellen Winner examines the development of the child's ability to use and understand metaphor and irony. These, she argues, are the two major forms of figurative language and are, moreover, complementary. Metaphor, which describes and sometimes explains, highlights attributes of a topic. As such, it serves primarily a cognitive function. Irony highlights the speaker's attitude toward the subject arid presupposes an appreciation of that attitude by the listener. In contrast to metaphor, irony serves primarily a social function. Winner looks in detail at the ways these forms of language differ structurally and at the cognitive and social capacities required for each.

The book not only draws on the author's own empirical studies but also offers a valuable synthesis of research in the area: it is the first account that spans the realm of figurative language. Winner writes clearly and engagingly and enlivens her account with many vivid examples from children's speech. The book will appeal to developmental psychologists, educators, psychologists of language, early-language specialists, students of literature, indeed, anyone who is delighted by the fanciful utterances of young children.

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Psycho-Analytic Explorations
D.W. Winnicott
Harvard University Press, 1989
The editors of The Winnicott Trust have assembled into one volume ninety-two works by the brilliant writer, theoretician, and clinician. This fascinating volume includes, among many important topics, critiques of Melanie Klein's ideas and insights into the work of other psychoanalysts, as well as gems of thought on such concepts as play in the analytic situation, the fate of the transitional object, regression in psychoanalysis, and the use of silence in psychotherapy.
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Flaubert
Michel Winock
Harvard University Press, 2016

Michel Winock’s biography situates Gustave Flaubert’s life and work in France’s century of great democratic transition. Flaubert did not welcome the egalitarian society predicted by Tocqueville. Wary of the masses, he rejected the universal male suffrage hard won by the Revolution of 1848, and he was exasperated by the nascent socialism that promoted the collective to the detriment of the individual. But above all, he hated the bourgeoisie. Vulgar, ignorant, obsessed with material comforts, impervious to beauty, the French middle class embodied for Flaubert every vice of the democratic age. His loathing became a fixation—and a source of literary inspiration.

Flaubert depicts a man whose personality, habits, and thought are a stew of paradoxes. The author of Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education spent his life inseparably bound to solitude and melancholy, yet he enjoyed periodic escapes from his “hole” in Croisset to pursue a variety of pleasures: fervent friendships, society soirées, and a whirlwind of literary and romantic encounters. He prided himself on the impersonality of his writing, but he did not hesitate to use material from his own life in his fiction. Nowhere are Flaubert’s contradictions more evident than in his politics. An enemy of power who held no nostalgia for the monarchy or the church, he was nonetheless hostile to collectivist utopias.

Despite declarations of the timelessness and sacredness of Art, Flaubert could not transcend the era he abominated. Rejecting the modern world, he paradoxically became its celebrated chronicler and the most modern writer of his time.

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Godly Republicanism
Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill
Michael P. Winship
Harvard University Press, 2012

Puritans did not find a life free from tyranny in the New World—they created it there. Massachusetts emerged a republic as they hammered out a vision of popular participation and limited government in church and state, spurred by Plymouth Pilgrims. Godly Republicanism underscores how pathbreaking yet rooted in puritanism’s history the project was.

Michael Winship takes us first to England, where he uncovers the roots of the puritans’ republican ideals in the aspirations and struggles of Elizabethan Presbyterians. Faced with the twin tyrannies of Catholicism and the crown, Presbyterians turned to the ancient New Testament churches for guidance. What they discovered there—whether it existed or not—was a republican structure that suggested better models for governing than monarchy.

The puritans took their ideals to Massachusetts, but they did not forge their godly republic alone. In this book, for the first time, the separatists’ contentious, creative interaction with the puritans is given its due. Winship looks at the emergence of separatism and puritanism from shared origins in Elizabethan England, considers their split, and narrates the story of their reunion in Massachusetts. Out of the encounter between the separatist Plymouth Pilgrims and the puritans of Massachusetts Bay arose Massachusetts Congregationalism.

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Misunderstanding Media
Brian Winston
Harvard University Press, 1986

Popular writing about the media resounds with rhetoric of techno-glory or apocalypse. Brian Winston argues that this “information revolution” is an illusion, a consequence of deep misunderstandings about electronic media, their development, diffusion, and present forms. Technology does not determine in an absolute way the course of human history; humans do. But we cannot hope to come to terms with the future impact of communications technologies without a clear understanding of our immediate technological past.

With lively and iconoclastic style, Winston explains the development and diffusion of four central technologies: telephones, television, computers, and satellites. On the basis of these historical accounts, he formulates a model of how communications technologies are introduced into society in such a way as to prevent their disruption of the status quo. He convincingly demonstrates that the radical potential of each new technology has been suppressed by its development for specific and narrowly defined applications. Powerful historical patterns emerge as Winston moves from one medium to the next in his compelling study. This provocative book demonstrates that technology in itself is not subversive: television cannot rot our brains or destroy our morals. But to the extent that we allow ourselves to feel overwhelmed by an imaginary information revolution, we relinquish our control over what could be if not liberating, at least very useful forms of communication.

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Red-Hot and Righteous
The Urban Religion of The Salvation Army
Diane Winston
Harvard University Press, 2000

In this engrossing study of religion, urban life, and commercial culture, Diane Winston shows how a (self-styled "red-hot") militant Protestant mission established a beachhead in the modern city. When The Salvation Army, a British evangelical movement, landed in New York in 1880, local citizens called its eye-catching advertisements "vulgar" and dubbed its brass bands, female preachers, and overheated services "sensationalist." Yet a little more than a century later, this ragtag missionary movement had evolved into the nation's largest charitable fund-raiser--the very exemplar of America's most cherished values of social service and religious commitment.

Winston illustrates how the Army borrowed the forms and idioms of popular entertainments, commercial emporiums, and master marketers to deliver its message. In contrast to histories that relegate religion to the sidelines of urban society, her book shows that Salvationists were at the center of debates about social services for the urban poor, the changing position of women, and the evolution of a consumer culture. She also describes Salvationist influence on contemporary life--from the public's post-World War I (and ongoing) love affair with the doughnut to the Salvationist young woman's career as a Hollywood icon to the institutionalization of religious ideals into nonsectarian social programs.

Winston's vivid account of a street savvy religious mission transformed over the decades makes adroit use of performance theory and material culture studies to create an evocative portrait of a beloved yet little understood religious movement. Her book provides striking evidence that, counter to conventional wisdom, religion was among the seminal social forces that shaped modern, urban America--and, in the process, found new expression for its own ideals.

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Bee Time
Lessons from the Hive
Mark L. Winston
Harvard University Press, 2014

Being among bees is a full-body experience, Mark Winston writes—from the low hum of tens of thousands of insects and the pungent smell of honey and beeswax, to the sight of workers flying back and forth between flowers and the hive. The experience of an apiary slows our sense of time, heightens our awareness, and inspires awe. Bee Time presents Winston’s reflections on three decades spent studying these creatures, and on the lessons they can teach about how humans might better interact with one another and the natural world.

Like us, honeybees represent a pinnacle of animal sociality. How they submerge individual needs into the colony collective provides a lens through which to ponder human societies. Winston explains how bees process information, structure work, and communicate, and examines how corporate boardrooms are using bee societies as a model to improve collaboration. He investigates how bees have altered our understanding of agricultural ecosystems and how urban planners are looking to bees in designing more nature-friendly cities.

The relationship between bees and people has not always been benign. Bee populations are diminishing due to human impact, and we cannot afford to ignore what the demise of bees tells us about our own tenuous affiliation with nature. Toxic interactions between pesticides and bee diseases have been particularly harmful, foreshadowing similar effects of pesticides on human health. There is much to learn from bees in how they respond to these challenges. In sustaining their societies, bees teach us ways to sustain our own.

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The Biology of the Honey Bee
Mark L. Winston
Harvard University Press, 1991

From ancient cave paintings of honey bee nests to modern science’s richly diversified investigation of honey bee biology and its applications, the human imagination has long been captivated by the mysterious and highly sophisticated behavior of this paragon among insect societies. In the first broad treatment of honey bee biology to appear in decades, Mark Winston provides rare access to the world of this extraordinary insect.

In a bright and engaging style, Winston probes the dynamics of the honey bee’s social organization. He recreates for us the complex infrastructure of the nest, describes the highly specialized behavior of workers, queens, and drones, and examines in detail the remarkable ability of the honey bee colony to regulate its functions according to events within and outside the nest. Winston integrates into his discussion the results of recent studies, bringing into sharp focus topics of current bee research. These include the exquisite architecture of the nest and its relation to bee physiology; the intricate division of labor and the relevance of a temporal caste structure to efficient functioning of the colony; and, finally, the life-death struggles of swarming, supersedure, and mating that mark the reproductive cycle of the honey bee.

The Biology of the Honey Bee not only reviews the basic aspects of social behavior, ecology, anatomy, physiology, and genetics, it also summarizes major controversies in contemporary honey bee research, such as the importance of kin recognition in the evolution of social behavior and the role of the well-known dance language in honey bee communication. Thorough, well-illustrated, and lucidly written, this book will for many years be a valuable resource for scholars, students, and beekeepers alike.

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Killer Bees
The Africanized Honey Bee in the Americas
Mark L. Winston
Harvard University Press, 1992

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Nature Wars
People vs. Pests
Mark L. Winston
Harvard University Press, 1997

On our side, a vast arsenal of chemical pesticides. On their side? They don't have a side, the pests who must do nature's bidding. This is our war, and should we win it, ours would be a sorry planet. With disturbing news from the front, Nature Wars sounds the alarm against our dangerous tactics for controlling the pests that are an annoying but integral part of our world.

Thirty years after Silent Spring woke us to the devastation wrought by DDT, chemical pesticides are as pervasive as ever, deployed at a rate of 4 pounds a year for every man, woman, and child in this country. This ongoing commitment to pesticides, Mark Winston argues, reflects our sense of place in nature: embattled, beleaguered, driven to aggression. His book, as sensible as it is wise, seeks to change this mindset, to show how a more measured and discriminating approach to pests, one based on management rather than eradication, might serve us and the natural world far better than our ill-fated all-out war.

Winston backs up this approach with a full battery of case studies that take us from lawns and kitchens to farms and orchards, from insects and weeds to rats and coyotes. Here we see the complex political, biological, economic, social, and personal interactions that lie behind each pest management decision. Against this background Winston considers diverse instances of past pest management that reveal a consistent pattern of mistakes and problems--and lead to realistic, workable proposals for reducing pesticide use.

A compelling book about ethics and choices, Nature Wars shows us the difference between protecting ourselves from real pests and poisoning ourselves and the planet. It turns us from our war on nature to our task as stewards of the environment.

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Travels in the Genetically Modified Zone
Mark L. Winston
Harvard University Press, 2002

With genetically modified crops we have entered uncharted territory—where visions of the triumph of biotechnology in agriculture vie with dire views of medical and environmental disaster. For two years Mark L. Winston traveled this fraught territory at home and abroad, listening to farmers, industry spokespeople, regulators, and researchers, canvassing high-security laboratories, environmentalist enclaves, and cyberspace, making a thorough survey of the facts, opinions, and practices deployed by opponents and proponents of transgenic crops.

Through his sympathetic portrayal of the passions on all sides, Winston brings a clear, unbiased perspective to this bewildering landscape. Traveling with Winston, we see the excitement and curiosity that pervade laboratories developing genetically modified crops, as well as the panic and outrage among dedicated opponents of agricultural biotechnology; the desperation of conventional farmers as they look to science for solutions to the problems driving them from their farms, as well as the deeply held values of organic farmers who dread the incursion of genetically modified crops into their expanding enterprise. And, Winston shows us, these contrasting attitudes transcend national borders, with troubling counterparts and consequences in the developing world.

As he seeks a middle ground where concerns about genetic engineering can be rationally discussed and resolved, Winston gives us, at long last, a full and balanced view of the forces at play in the chaotic debate over agricultural biotechnology.

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Rockets into Space
Frank H. Winter
Harvard University Press, 1990

Since ancient times, men and women have dreamed of soaring among the stars, but only in this century has that dream been realized. In Rockets into Space, Frank Winter tells the fascinating story of the modern launch vehicle, from the mythological musings of the Babylonians and Greeks to the present-day reality of manned and unmanned space flight.

In concise yet comprehensive chapters dense with anecdotal detail, Winter tracks the theoretical formulations and technological breakthroughs that have charted the evolution of rocket propulsion and vehicle design. He pays particular attention to the remarkable contributions of pioneers Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Robert Goddard, Hermann Oberth, Eugen Sänger, and Sergei Korolev, whose genius and vision paved the way for later innovation. He describes the clandestine development of the V-2 rocket in Germany, under the technical leadership of Wernher von Braun, and its dramatic impact on postwar rocket research and satellite development in the United States and the Soviet Union. He also chronicles the complex events of the last three decades, which have produced ever more sophisticated rockets capable of launching larger payloads, from weapons to weather and communications satellites. Finally, he surveys exotic propulsion systems—nuclear, electric, solar, photon, laser—that lie on the frontiers of science today but that will shape the spaceflight and space policy decisions of tomorrow.

Rockets into Space is an authoritative, entertaining guidebook for all who are interested in the history of space travel.

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The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630–1649
Abridged Edition
John Winthrop
Harvard University Press, 1996
The journal of Governor John Winthrop, one of the key documents of early New England history, records the first two crucial decades of the Bay Colony. Writing in a precise expository style, Winthrop details the myriad religious and political problems of the new settlement. The modernized abridgment incorporates about 40 percent of the text and includes a copy of Winthrop’s sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity.” This abridged edition, complete with introduction and annotations, also modernizes the governor’s spelling and punctuation.
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The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630–1649
John Winthrop
Harvard University Press, 1996

For 350 years Governor John Winthrop's journal has been recognized as the central source for the history of Massachusetts in the 1630s and 1640s. Winthrop reported events--especially religious and political events--more fully and more candidly than any other contemporary observer.

The governor's journal has been edited and published three times since 1790, but these editions are long outmoded. Richard Dunn and Laetitia Yeandle have now prepared a long-awaited scholarly edition, complete with introduction, notes, and appendices. This full-scale, unabridged edition uses the manuscript volumes of the first and third notebooks (both carefully preserved at the Massachusetts Historical Society), retaining their spelling and punctuation, and James Savage's transcription of the middle notebook (accidentally destroyed in 1825).

Winthrop's narrative began as a journal and evolved into a history. As a dedicated Puritan convert, Winthrop decided to emigrate to America in 1630 with members of the Massachusetts Bay Company, who had chosen him as their governor. Just before sailing, he began a day-to-day account of his voyage. He continued his journal when he reached Massachusetts, at first making brief and irregular entries, followed by more frequent writing sessions and contemporaneous reporting, and finally, from 1643 onward, engaging in only irregular writing sessions and retrospective reporting. Naturally he found little good to say about such outright adversaries as Thomas Morton, Roger Williams, and Anne Hutchinson. Yet he was also adept at thrusting barbs at most of the other prominent players: John Endecott, Henry Vane, and Richard Saltonstall, among others.

Winthrop built lasting significance into the seemingly small-scale actions of a few thousand colonists in early New England, which is why his journal will remain an important historical source.

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Pico della Mirandola’s Encounter with Jewish Mysticism
Chaim Wirszubski
Harvard University Press, 1989

Here is a major contribution to the history of Christian kabbalism by an eminent authority. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, a central figure in Lorenzo de' Medici's Platonic Academy, was the first notable Christian humanist to become learned in the Kabbalah; and the two sets of kabbalistic theses he wrote started Kabbalah on its Christian career. This is a study of those theses, their meaning, and their relation to the Hebrew texts Pico studied.

Chaim Wirszubski establishes which Hebrew texts Pico used and identifies the sources for individual theses. In the process he provides special insight into Jewish Kabbalah and its several schools. Pico's goal was to use Jewish Kabbalah to confirm Christian theology. In his analysis of Conclusiones Cabalisticae, Wirszubski elucidates this Christian kabbalistic doctrine and shows how it was tied to other currents in Renaissance thought, especially platonism and magic. This study will be valued by students of mysticism and of Renaissance thought.

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The Marriage of Contraries
Bernard Shaw’s Middle Plays
J. L. Wisenthal
Harvard University Press, 1974
This reading of Bernard Shaw focuses on his habit of seeing the world in terms of contraries, a habit related to his basic rejection of absolutes, his distaste for finality. The author examines nine of Shaw's finest plays: Man and Superman, Major Barbara, John Bull's Other Island, The Doctor's Dilemma, Pygmalion, Misalliance, Heartbreak House, Saint Joan, and Back to Methuselah. The book takes seriously Shaw's claim that all of his characters are “right from their several points of view.” We are compelled to respect the qualities and values of opposing and very different characters in these plays, and we also have a sense of their complementary defects. J. L. Wisenthal's commentary sheds light on Shaw's techniques of portrayal as well as his dialectical habit of mind. This finely written essay is for all lovers of Shaw and the theater.
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A Little Love in Big Manhattan
Two Yiddish Poets
Ruth R. Wisse
Harvard University Press, 1988

In the early decades of this century, the wave of immigration that brought nearly two million Jews from the Pale of Settlement to the United States included an extraordinary group of gifted Yiddish poets and writers, who came to be called Di Yunge (The Young). A Little Love in Big Manhattan tells the story of two of the Young’s most prominent figures—Mani Leib, a lyric poet intent on refining the hard facts of his life into works of enduring beauty, and Moishe Leib Halpern, for whom poetry had to be the expression of coarse and shattering reality.

Through a dual biography of these opposing personalities, Ruth Wisse describes the rich and vital cultural movement that embraced them both. She tells of the burst of creative energy exhibited by the young poets and intellectuals who, after a long day of manual labor, would congregate in the cafes of the Lower East Side for badinage, debate, and literary talk. They started literary journals and compiled anthologies of their writings, which found their way overseas and had a rejuvenating influence on Yiddish poetry abroad. Ironically, their achievement coincided with the decline of the language in which they wrote, so that Yiddish poetry came into its own in America at a time when the next generation could scarcely read it; there were no literary heirs.

Ruth Wisse presents modern Jews with a part of their lost inheritance, and also claims for the Yiddish poets a place in the American canon. The first book to present these poets as part of the history of immigrant Jews in America, A Little Love in Big Manhattan (the title is from a poem of Halpern’s) will appeal to readers of poetry and to people interested in facets of the intellectual and artistic atmosphere of the interwar period.

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Zero Degrees
Geographies of the Prime Meridian
Charles W. J. Withers
Harvard University Press, 2017

Space and time on earth are regulated by the prime meridian, 0°, which is, by convention, based at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich. But the meridian’s location in southeast London is not a simple legacy of Britain’s imperial past. Before the nineteenth century, more than twenty-five different prime meridians were in use around the world, including Paris, Beijing, Greenwich, Washington, and the location traditional in Europe since Ptolemy, the Canary Islands. Charles Withers explains how the choice of Greenwich to mark 0° longitude solved complex problems of global measurement that had engaged geographers, astronomers, and mariners since ancient times.

Withers guides readers through the navigation and astronomy associated with diverse meridians and explains the problems that these cartographic lines both solved and created. He shows that as science and commerce became more global and as railway and telegraph networks tied the world closer together, the multiplicity of prime meridians led to ever greater confusion in the coordination of time and the geographical division of space. After a series of international scientific meetings, notably the 1884 International Meridian Conference in Washington, DC, Greenwich emerged as the most pragmatic choice for a global prime meridian, though not unanimously or without acrimony. Even after 1884, other prime meridians remained in use for decades.

As Zero Degrees shows, geographies of the prime meridian are a testament to the power of maps, the challenges of accurate measurement on a global scale, and the role of scientific authority in creating the modern world.

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Heidegger on Being Uncanny
Katherine Withy
Harvard University Press, 2015

There are moments when things suddenly seem strange—objects in the world lose their meaning, we feel like strangers to ourselves, or human existence itself strikes us as bizarre and unintelligible. Through a detailed philosophical investigation of Heidegger’s concept of uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit), Katherine Withy explores what such experiences reveal about us. She argues that while others (such as Freud, in his seminal psychoanalytic essay, “The Uncanny”) take uncanniness to be an affective quality of strangeness or eeriness, Heidegger uses the concept to go beyond feeling uncanny to reach the ground of this feeling in our being uncanny.

Heidegger on Being Uncanny answers those who wonder whether human existence is fundamentally strange to itself by showing that we can be what we are only if we do not fully understand what it is to be us. This fundamental finitude in our self-understanding is our uncanniness. In this first dedicated interpretation of Heidegger’s uncanniness, Withy tracks this concept from his early analyses of angst through his later interpretations of the choral ode from Sophocles’s Antigone. Her interpretation uncovers a novel and robust continuity in Heidegger’s thought and in his vision of the human being as uncanny, and it points the way toward what it is to live well as an uncanny human being.

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The Accidental Republic
Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law
John Fabian Witt
Harvard University Press, 2004

In the five decades after the Civil War, the United States witnessed a profusion of legal institutions designed to cope with the nation’s exceptionally acute industrial accident crisis. Jurists elaborated the common law of torts. Workingmen’s organizations founded a widespread system of cooperative insurance. Leading employers instituted welfare-capitalist accident relief funds. And social reformers advocated compulsory insurance such as workmen’s compensation.

John Fabian Witt argues that experiments in accident law at the turn of the twentieth century arose out of competing views of the loose network of ideas and institutions that historians call the ideology of free labor. These experiments a century ago shaped twentieth- and twenty-first-century American accident law; they laid the foundations of the American administrative state; and they occasioned a still hotly contested legal transformation from the principles of free labor to the categories of insurance and risk. In this eclectic moment at the beginnings of the modern state, Witt describes American accident law as a contingent set of institutions that might plausibly have developed along a number of historical paths. In turn, he suggests, the making of American accident law is the story of the equally contingent remaking of our accidental republic.

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Patriots and Cosmopolitans
Hidden Histories of American Law
John Fabian Witt
Harvard University Press, 2007

Ranging widely from the founding era to Reconstruction, from the making of the modern state to its post-New Deal limits, John Fabian Witt illuminates the legal and constitutional foundations of American nationhood through the little-known stories of five patriots and critics. He shows how law and constitutionalism have powerfully shaped and been shaped by the experience of nationhood at key moments in American history.

Founding Father James Wilson's star-crossed life is testament to the capacity of American nationhood to capture the imagination of those who have lived within its orbit. For South Carolina freedman Elias Hill, the nineteenth-century saga of black citizenship in the United States gave way to a quest for a black nationhood of his own on the West African coast. Greenwich Village radical Crystal Eastman became one of the most articulate critics of American nationhood, advocating world federation and other forms of supranational government and establishing the modern American civil liberties movement. By contrast, the self-conscious patriotism of Dean Roscoe Pound of Harvard Law School and trial lawyer Melvin Belli aimed to stave off what Pound and Belli saw as the dangerous growth of a foreign administrative state.

In their own way, each of these individuals came up against the power of American national institutions to shape and constrain the directions of legal change. Yet their engagements with American nationhood remade the institutions and ideals of the United States even as the national tradition shaped and constrained the course of their lives.

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Beyond Justice
The Auschwitz Trial
Rebecca Wittmann
Harvard University Press, 2012

In 1963, West Germany was gripped by a dramatic trial of former guards who had worked at the Nazi death camp Auschwitz. It was the largest and most public trial to take place in the country and attracted international attention. Using the pretrial files and extensive trial audiotapes, Rebecca Wittmann offers a fascinating reinterpretation of Germany’s first major attempt to confront its past.

Evoking the courtroom atmosphere, Wittmann vividly recounts the testimony of survivors, former SS officers, and defendants—a cross-section of the camp population. Attorney General Fritz Bauer made an extraordinary effort to put the entire Auschwitz complex on trial, but constrained by West German murder laws, the prosecution had to resort to standards for illegal behavior that echoed the laws of the Third Reich. This provided a legitimacy to the Nazi state. Only those who exceeded direct orders were convicted of murder. This shocking ruling was reflected in the press coverage, which focused on only the most sadistic and brutal crimes, allowing the real atrocity at Auschwitz—mass murder in the gas chambers—to be relegated to the background.

The Auschwitz trial had a paradoxical result. Although the prosecution succeeded in exposing SS crimes at the camp for the first time, the public absorbed a distorted representation of the criminality of the camp system. The Auschwitz trial ensured that rather than coming to terms with their Nazi past, Germans managed to delay a true reckoning with the horror of the Holocaust.

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Katha Aranyaka
Critical Edition with a Translation into German and an Introduction
Michael Witzel
Harvard University Press
Dating to the first half of the first millennium BCE, the Katha Aranyaka is a ritualistic and speculative text that deals with a dangerous Vedic ritual that provides its sponsor with a new body after death. In a new, never-before-published critical edition, Michael Witzel, using available manuscripts and, primarily, a color facsimile of a restored five-hundred-year-old Kashmiri birch bark manuscript preserved at Tübingen since 1895, presents this work which transitions the Vedic ritual into the philosophy of the Upanishads. The text is preceded by an extensive introduction in English dealing with Vedic ritualism and followed by a German translation as well as detailed variant readings and a verse index.
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The Rājyābhiṣeka Manual for the Coronation of King Bīrendra of Nepal (1975)
Introduction and Facsimile Edition
Michael Witzel
Harvard University Press
The Rājyābhiṣeka Manual for the Coronation of King Bīrendra of Nepal contains the only extensive coronation manual available for a Hindu king. It was used in the Rājyābhiṣeka rituals of King Bīrendra in February 1975. Long regarded as highly secret, it can now be presented, after the abolition of the monarchy in its entirety in 2008. This manual was checked and signed by the royal priests and religious advisors.
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The Veda in Kashmir, Volume I
History and Present State of Vedic Tradition in the Western Himalayas
Michael Witzel
Harvard University Press
The Veda in Kashmir presents a detailed history and the current state of Veda tradition in Kashmir. It traces the vicissitudes of Vedic texts and rituals and their survival during some 400 years of Muslim rule. The peculiarities of the Śākalya Ṛgveda, Kaṭha Yajurveda, and Paippalāda Atharvaveda texts are discussed in great detail. The rituals from birth to death of the Pandits, the Kashmiri Brahmins, are depicted and explained, including current interpretation. This two-volume work includes a DVD that contains additional texts, rituals, sound recordings, and films taken in 1973 and 1979.
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The Two Oldest Veda Manuscripts
Facsimile Edition of Vājasaneyi Saṃhitā 1–20 (Saṃhitā- and Padapāṭha) from Nepal and Western Tibet (c. 1150 CE)
Michael Witzel
Harvard University Press
This volume offers unexpected insights into the history of the Veda, the earliest texts of South Asia, and their underlying oral transmission. In side-by-side facsimiles, Michael Witzel and Qinyuan Wu present the two oldest known Veda manuscripts, the Vājasaneyi Saṃhitā of the White Yajurveda and its contemporaneous sister text, a Vājasaneyi Padapāṭha, recently found in western Tibet. These two manuscripts have retained an unusual style of representing the pitched accents, and their juxtaposition in this edition invites comparison between the oral Veda transmission of a thousand years ago and the recitation still maintained today. Both manuscripts are important testimonies for the history of the Vedas, their medieval transmission, and their first codification in writing. As such, they are of great interest to historians, Indologists, and scholars studying the interface of oral and written traditions.
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Chernyshevskii
The Man and the Journalist
William F. Woehrlin
Harvard University Press, 1971

N. G. Chernyshevskii (1828-1889), a pivotal figure in the protest movement that developed in Russia after the Crimean War, was esteemed by both Marx and Lenin. Alienated from Russia's traditional values, institutions, and power structure, he nevertheless rejected the economic doctrines and political goals of the more advanced nations of his day, seeing in the operation of laissez-faire economics a form of exploitation as vicious as serfdom, and in political liberalism a hypocritical attempt to divorce the concept of legal rights from the more basic issue of material security, without which freedom is meaningless.

He adopted instead an admixture of liberal and socialist theory, which could be roughly characterized as utopian socialist, but which simultaneously was part of a larger populist tradition. His radicalism attached itself to no particular political form, but was sustained by a belief that the inadequacies of society could be corrected only by its complete overhaul, which in turn could be accomplished only by the destruction of traditional autocratic power. This blend of ideas ultimately provided the basis for those radicals seeking to take advantage of Russia's economic backwardness by eliminating the phase of capitalism and proceeding directly to a socialist form of organization.

By contributing to the radical orientation of the protest movement, Chernyshevskii encouraged a polarization of views in Russian public opinion, which led to the abandonment of moderate reforms, to governmental reaction, and to his own tragic imprisonment and exile to Siberia. But through his diverse writings he had succeeded as no other writer before him in popularizing the idea of revolution.

This first thorough treatment of Chernyshevskii in English constitutes both a biography and a presentation of his views on philosophy, aesthetics and literary criticism, economics and social relations, politics and revolution.

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The Generation of 1914
Robert Wohl
Harvard University Press, 1979

The generation of 1914 holds a special place in memory, affection, and myth. In this irresistible and moving book, Robert Wohl rescues it from the shadows of legend and brings it fully into the realm of understanding. He tells the story of the young men--the middle class elite of five European countries, France, Germany, England, Spain, and Italy, to recreate the generational consciousness that united them as well as the unique national experience that made them different.

These were men born at the end of the nineteenth century when the world of reason was disintegrating into a world of irrationality. They were destined to rule but their lives were interrupted by the greatest of wars, leaving them searching for identity and historical continuity. Wohl recaptures this search through novels, poems, autobiographies, memoirs, sociological treatises, philosophical essays, university lectures, political speeches, conversations when recorded, letters, personal notebooks, and newspaper articles. His book is a brilliant study of European mentalities, both collective and individual.

Probing behind ideas to find the experience that inspired them, Wohl illuminates in unexpected ways the origins of World War I and its impact on its participants. His exploration of the consciousness of generational unity and the power of the generational bond enables him to place in a novel context the spread of pessimism and despair, the waning of liberal and humanitarian values, the rise of Communist and Fascist movements, and the sudden eruption of violence in Europe's progressive countries between the two world wars.

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Colors Between Two Worlds
The Florentine Codex of Bernardino de Sahagún
Gerhard Wolf
Harvard University Press, 2012

For half a century the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún (1499–1590), often described as the first anthropologist of the New World, worked with his indigenous colleagues at the Collegio Imperial at Tlatelolco (now Mexico City) on an encyclopedic compendium of the beliefs, rituals, language, arts, and economy of the vanishing culture of the Aztecs. Colors Between Two Worlds examines the most richly illustrated manuscript of this great ethnographic work, the Florentine Codex, which is in the collection of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, through the issue of color.

The Codex reveals how the colors the Aztecs used in their artistic production and in everyday life, as well as the names they gave each color, illuminate their understanding of the world around them, from the weather to the curing of disease. The pigments and dyes that indigenous artists used to illustrate the Codex reflect a larger dialogue between native and European cultures, which the Florentine Codex records more fully than any surviving document from colonial New Spain.

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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 Braid of Literature
Children’s Worlds of Reading
Shelby Anne Wolf
Harvard University Press, 1992

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Walter B. Cannon, Science and Society
Elin L. Wolfe
Harvard University Press, 2000

This second volume completes the story begun in Walter B. Cannon: The Life and Times of a Young Scientist (Belknap Press, 1987), tracing the middle and late years of one of America’s most distinguished medical scientists.

It resumes during World War II with Cannon’s battlefield work on traumatic shock in England and France, and follows him to Harvard Medical School as he investigated the workings of the sympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system, reaffirmed his emergency theory of the sympathico-adrenal system, and developed his now-famous concept of homeostasis and pioneer contributions to the newly emerging field of neuroendocrinology. This volume also recounts Cannon’s work with society on a broader scale, including defending the practice of animal experimentation, the rescue of European medical émigrés fleeing the Nazis and Fascists, and providing medical aid to the Spanish Loyalists and to China. Moreover, as a senior statesman of science, Cannon helped guide policies and programs that shaped the future of medical research, practice, and education.

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Big Time College Athletics
Creating Congruence with the Purpose of Higher Education
Richard Wolfe
Harvard University Press

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Bach
Essays on His Life and Music
Christoph Wolff
Harvard University Press, 1991

Johann Sebastian Bach holds a singular position in the history of music. A uniquely gifted musician, he combined outstanding performing virtuosity with supreme creative powers and remarkable intellectual discipline. More than two centuries after his lifetime, Bach’s work continues to set musical standards.

The noted Bach scholar Christoph Wolff offers in this book new perspectives on the composer’s life and remarkable career. Uncovering important historical evidence, the author demonstrates significant influences on Bach’s artistic development and brings fresh insight on his work habits, compositional intent, and the musical traditions that shaped Bach’s thought. Wolff reveals a composer devoted to an ambitious and highly individual creative approach, one characterized by constant self-criticism and self-challenge, the absorption of new skills and techniques, and the rethinking of riches from the musical past.

Readers will find illuminating analyses of some of Bach’s greatest music, including the B Minor Mass, important cantatas, keyboard and chamber compositions, the Musical Offering, and the Art of Fugue. Discussion of how these pieces “work” will be helpful to performers—singers, players, conductors—and to everyone interested in exploring the conceptual and contextual aspects of Bach’s music. All readers will find especially interesting those essays in which Wolff elaborates on his celebrated discoveries of previously unknown works: notably the fourteen “Goldberg” canons and a collection of thirty-three chorale preludes.

Representing twenty-five years of scholarship, these essays—half of which appear here in English for the first time—have established Christoph Wolff as one of the world’s preeminent authorities on J. S. Bach. All students, performers, and lovers of Bach’s music will find this an engaging and enlightening book.

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The String Quartets of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven
Studies of the Autograph Manuscripts
Christoph Wolff
Harvard University Press, 1980
This volume represents the proceedings of an international musicological colloquium held at Harvard in March 1979. The broad spectrum of papers and extensive scholarly debate focuses on a quintessential repertoire of musical works from the classical era. The autograph sketches, drafts, and scores of various kinds are shown to be central sources for our understanding of the genesis and history, as well as for the analysis and performance, of the compositions. Contributors are Lewis Lockwood, Laszlo Somfai, Jens Peter Larsen, James Webster, Georg Feder, Ludwig Finscher, Marius Flothuis, Alan Tyson, Christoph Wolff, Richard Kramer, Robert Winter, Sieghard Brandenburg, and Martin Staehelin, scholars working on the frontiers of current research in Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven studies. An appendix provides chronological tables, a catalog of the extant autograph manuscripts, and an extensive bibliography.
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A Century of Wealth in America
Edward N. Wolff
Harvard University Press, 2017

Understanding wealth in the United States—who has it, how they acquired it, and how they preserve it—is crucial to addressing the economic and political challenges facing the nation. But until now we have had little reliable information. Edward Wolff, one of the world’s great experts on the economics of wealth, offers an authoritative account of patterns in the accumulation and distribution of wealth since 1900.

A Century of Wealth in America demonstrates that the most remarkable change has been the growth of per capita household wealth, which climbed almost eightfold prior to the 2007 recession. But overlaid on this base rate are worrying trends. The share of personal wealth claimed by the richest one percent almost doubled between the mid-1970s and 2013, concurrent with a steep run-up of debt in the middle class. As the wealth of the average family dropped precipitously—by 44 percent—between 2007 and 2013, with black families hit hardest, the debt-income ratio more than doubled. The Great Recession also caused a sharp spike in asset poverty, as more and more families barely survived from one paycheck to the next. In short, the United States has changed from being one of the most economically equal of the advanced industrialized countries to being one of the most unequal.

At a time of deep uncertainty about the future, A Century of Wealth in America provides a sober bedrock of facts and astute analysis. It will become one of the few indispensable resources for contemporary public debate.

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Disunion within the Union
The Uniate Church and the Partitions of Poland
Larry Wolff
Harvard University Press, 2020

Between 1772 and 1795, Russia, Prussia, and Austria concluded agreements to annex and eradicate the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania. With the partitioning of Poland, the dioceses of the Uniate Church (later known as the Greek Catholic Church) were fractured by the borders of three regional hegemons.

Larry Wolff's deeply engaging account of these events delves into the politics of the Episcopal elite, the Vatican, and the three rulers behind the partitions: Catherine II of Russia, Frederick II of Prussia, and Joseph II of Austria. Wolff uses correspondence with bishops in the Uniate Church and ministerial communiqués to reveal the nature of state policy as it unfolded.

Disunion within the Union adopts methodologies from the history of popular culture pioneered by Natalie Zemon Davis (The Return of Martin Guerre) and Carlo Ginzburg (The Cheese and the Worms) to explore religious experience on a popular level, especially questions of confessional identity and practices of piety. This detailed study of the responses of common Uniate parishioners, as well as of their bishops and hierarchs, to the pressure of the partitions paints a vivid portrait of conflict, accommodation, and survival in a church subject to the grand designs of the late eighteenth century’s premier absolutist powers.

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The Balkans in Our Time
First Edition
Robert Lee Wolff
Harvard University Press

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Kant's Theory of Mental Activity
A Commentary on the Trascendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason
Robert Paul Wolff
Harvard University Press

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The Discovery of Talent
Dael Wolfle
Harvard University Press

Finding the talented, encouraging their advancement, making known their potentialities"--to these aims many of the twentieth century's most distinguished psychologists have turned their attention. In this book, Terman, Paterson, Burt, Strong, Guilford, Wolfie, Stalnaker, MacKinnon, Ghiselli, Mackworth, and Vernon, each with his own particular emphasis, discuss these issues as lecturers in a series set up by their colleague, Walter Van Dyke Bingham. In sum, they present a cross section of psychological thought at mid-century, each man writing about the set of problems on which his interest has centered.

Assuming that the concept of intelligence is essential to the study of talent, they give their attention to other variables--health, physical energy and work habits, maturation, education, parental advantage, and the like. Terman, for example, discusses the personality traits that make for success, while Strong describes his and others' efforts to measure vocational interests. Burt looks at the inheritance of emotional and temperamental qualities that affect the way one works and the amount one achieves. MacKinnon, Chiselli, and Mackworth concentrate on important kinds of ability that are not well measured by any of the available tests of "intelligence."

Today, these pioneering scholars stand high on the list of those who have advanced the discovery and development of talent. Many of these articles are already classics, and their publication in one volume will provide a ready reference and an important impetus to further work in their area of interest. These eleven lectures, provided for by the late Walter Van Dyke Bingham and presented at a different university each year, were delivered between 1956 and 1965.

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Crescas’ Critique of Aristotle
Problems of Aristotle’s Physics in Jewish and Arabic Philosophy
Harry Austryn Wolfson
Harvard University Press
Hesdai Crescas was a true representative of the interpretation of the Arabic and Hebrew philosophic traditions. This volume reprints Harry Austryn Wolfson’s now classic study of Crescas’ Or Adonai, a historical and critical investigation of the main problems of Aristotle’s Physics and De Caelo.
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Philo
Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
Harry Austryn Wolfson
Harvard University Press
In this authoritative study Professor Wolfson’s purpose is to trace the processes of reasoning by which Philo Judaeus of Alexandria arrived at his philosophic principles. These principles later became the common foundations of Jewish, Christian, and Moslem philosophy, and in the 17th century were made the target of attack by Spinoza. This comprehensive work will be indispensable to all serious students of Philo’s thought.
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Philo
Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
Harry Austryn Wolfson
Harvard University Press
In this authoritative study Professor Wolfson’s purpose is to trace the processes of reasoning by which Philo Judaeus of Alexandria arrived at his philosophic principles. These principles later became the common foundations of Jewish, Christian, and Moslem philosophy, and in the 17th century were made the target of attack by Spinoza. This comprehensive work will be indispensable to all serious students of Philo’s thought.
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Philo
Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: Structure and Growth of Philosophical Systems from Plato to Spinoza, 2, Fourth printing, revised 1962
Harry Austryn Wolfson
Harvard University Press

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Philosophy of Spinoza
Unfolding the Latent Process of His Reasoning
Harry Austryn Wolfson
Harvard University Press
The object of this work is to apply the historico-critical method to Spinoza’s Ethics. Starting with the assumption that the Ethics is primarily a criticism of the fundamental problems of mediaeval philosophy, the work proceeds to analyze these problems, to set forth their salient features, to construct hypothetically the arguments of which the criticism is made up, and to show how these arguments and criticism underlie the statements which we have before us in the Ethics. The Ethics thus emerges as a logically constructed work, throughout which there is order and sequence and continuity; propositions apparently disconnected group themselves into unified and coherent chapters; words, phrases, and passages, apparently meaningless or commonplace, assume meaning and significance; and the philosophy of Spinoza, as a systematic whole and in all its fullness of detail, appears in a new light and in its true historical setting. Within the framework of this study of the Ethics are woven interpretations of relevant passages from the other writings of Spinoza.
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The Philosophy of the Church Fathers
Volume 1: Faith, Trinity, Incarnation, Third Revised Edition
Harry Austryn Wolfson
Harvard University Press

Harvard University Press takes pride in publishing the third edition of a work whose depth, scope, and wisdom have gained it international recognition as a classic in its field. Harry Austryn Wolfson, world-renowned scholar and most lucid of scholarly writers, here presents in ordered detail his long-awaited study of the philosophic principles and reasoning by which the Fathers of the Church sought to explain the mysteries of the Trinity and the Incarnation.

Professor Wolfson first discusses the problem of the relation of faith and reason. Starting with Paul, who, differentiating between the wisdom of God and the wisdom of the world, averred that he was not going to adorn his teachings with persuasive arguments based on the wisdom of the world, Professor Wolfson describes the circumstances and influences which nevertheless brought about the introduction of philosophy into matters of faith and analyzes the various attitudes of the Fathers towards philosophy.

The Trinity and the Incarnation are Professor Wolfson’s next concern. He analyzes the various ways in which these topics are presented in the New Testament, and traces the attempts on the part of the Fathers to harmonize these presentations. He shows how the ultimate harmonized formulation of the two doctrines was couched in terms of philosophy; how, as a result of philosophic treatment, there arose with regard to the Trinity the problem of three and one and with regard to the Incarnation the problem of two and one; and how, in their attempts to solve these problems, the Fathers drew upon principles which in philosophy were made use of in the solution of certain aspects of the problem of the one and the many. In the final part of this volume, entitled “The Anathematized,” he deals with Gnosticism and other heresies which arose during the Patristic period with regard to the Trinity and the Incarnation.

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The Philosophy of the Kalam
Harry Austryn Wolfson
Harvard University Press, 1976

Harry Wolfson was renowned throughout the world for the depth, scope, and wisdom of his monumental volumes on the structure and growth of philosophic systems from Plato to Spinoza. It was not only his extraordinary erudition that commanded respect, his awesome mastery of all the primary sources, Greek, Christian, Judaic, and Muslim; it was also his penetrating insight and his original and groundbreaking interpretations.

In this long-awaited volume, on which he worked for twenty years, Wolfson describes the body of doctrine known as the Kalam. Kalam, an Arabic term meaning "speech" and hence "discussion," was applied to early attempts in Islam to adduce philosophic proofs for religious beliefs. It later came to designate a system of religious philosophy which reached its highest point in the eleventh century; the masters of Kalam, known as Mutakallimum, were in many respects the Muslim equivalent of the Christian Church Fathers. Wolfson studies the Kalam systematically, unfolding its philosophic origins and implications and observing its repercussions in other religions. He scrutinizes the texts of Muslim writers for their treatment of such crucial problems as the attributes of God, the Creation, causality, predestination and free will. In the process he shows how the teachings of the Koran were constantly interwoven with ideas from Greek and Oriental philosophies, Judaism, and Christianity as Islamic thought developed.

As lucidly written and intellectually stimulating as all the author's earlier books, this volume is a fitting capstone to a notable career.

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Religious Philosophy
A Group of Essays
Harry Austryn Wolfson
Harvard University Press

As Harry Austryn Wolfson deftly isolates and analyzes some of the most vital and often the most enigmatic ideas developed by the religious philosophers of the West, a cumulative and thoughtful continuity emerges from his interpretations. Philo, for example, appears as a dominant force throughout the sixteen centuries that preceded Spinoza's critique of his basic principles.

The ten essays which constitute the critical sequence of this penetrating book are derived from lectures, and from separate publications many of which are not readily available now. They include discussions of Immortality and Resurrection in the Philosophy of the Church Fathers; St. Augustine and the Pelagian Controversy; Causality and Freedom in Descartes, Leibniz and Hume. Wolfson concludes with a perceptive distillation of his personal wisdom in an essay contrasting the professed atheist with the “verbal theist.”

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Repercussions of the Kalam in Jewish Philosophy
Harry Austryn Wolfson
Harvard University Press, 1979

In his monumental Philosophy of the Kalam the late Harry Wolfson—truly the most accomplished historian of philosophy in our century—examined the early medieval system of Islamic philosophy. He studies its repercussions in Jewish thought in this companion book—an indispensable work for all students of Jewish and Islamic traditions.

Wolfson believed that ideas are contagious, but that for beliefs to catch on from one tradition to another the recipients must be predisposed, susceptible. Thus he is concerned here not so much with the influence of Islamic ideas as with Jewish elaboration, adaptation, qualification, and criticism of them. To this end he examines passages reflecting Kalam views by a wide variety of Jewish thinkers, including Isaac Israeli, Judah Halevi, Abraham ibn Ezra, and Maimonides. As always in Wolfson's work, two aspects are apparent: the special dimensions of Jewish thought as well as its relation to other traditions. And as always his prose is both graceful and precise.

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Studies in the History of Philosophy and Religion
Harry Austryn Wolfson
Harvard University Press, 1973
Readers familiar with the luminous scholarly contributions of Harry Austryn Wolfson will welcome this rich collection of essays that have been previously published in widely dispersed journals and books, The articles range over Aristotle and Plato; Philo; the Church Fathers; and Arabic, Jewish, and Christian philosophers of the Middle Ages: Averroes and Avicenna, Maimonides, and Thomas Aquinas. The twenty-eight pieces are arranged in such a manner that ideas develop and are pursued from one article to the next, forming a coherent whole. According to the editors, "This volume reflects the most basic biographical fact about Wolfson: his life has been one of unflagging commitment, uninterrupted creativity, and truly remarkable achievement...Wolfson's scholarship will be viewed with awe and admiration and his impact will be durable. He has added new dimensions to philosophical scholarship and illuminated wide areas of religious thought, plotting the terrain, blazing trails, and erecting guideposts for scores of younger scholars."
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Studies in the History of Philosophy and Religion
Harry Austryn Wolfson
Harvard University Press
Readers familiar with the luminous scholarly contributions of Harry Austryn Wolfson will welcome this rich collection of essays that have been previously published in widely dispersed journals and books, The articles range over Aristotle and Plato; Philo; the Church Fathers; and Arabic, Jewish, and Christian philosophers of the Middle Ages: Averroes and Avicenna, Maimonides, and Thomas Aquinas. The twenty-eight pieces are arranged in such a manner that ideas develop and are pursued from one article to the next, forming a coherent whole. According to the editors, "This volume reflects the most basic biographical fact about Wolfson: his life has been one of unflagging commitment, uninterrupted creativity, and truly remarkable achievement...Wolfson's scholarship will be viewed with awe and admiration and his impact will be durable. He has added new dimensions to philosophical scholarship and illuminated wide areas of religious thought, plotting the terrain, blazing trails, and erecting guideposts for scores of younger scholars."
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The Mind and Its Depths
Richard Wollheim
Harvard University Press, 1993
The mind as it is manifested in philosophy and art, in the moral life and psychoanalysis, has always been at the core of Richard Wollheim’s celebrated work. This book brings together Wollheim’s broad and abiding concerns to illuminate human thought at its furthest reaches of introspection and expression. Interweaving philosophy, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics, these essays reveal the critical connections between ideas and disciplines too often regarded as separate and distinct.
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On Art and the Mind
Richard Wollheim
Harvard University Press

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The Thread of Life
Richard Wollheim
Harvard University Press, 1984

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Or Orwell
Writing and Democratic Socialism
Alex Woloch
Harvard University Press, 2016

There have been many studies of George Orwell’s life and work, but nothing quite like this book by Alex Woloch—an exuberant, revisionary account of Orwell’s writing.

“Good prose is like a window-pane,” Orwell famously avers. But what kind of literary criticism is possible, face-to-face with Orwell’s plain-style prose? Too often this style has been either dismissed by a seemingly more savvy critical theory, or held up as a reprimand against the enterprise of theory. In a series of unusually close and intensive readings—focused on the unstable event of writing itself—Woloch recovers the radical and experimental energies of Orwell’s prose. Against accounts that would quickly naturalize Orwell’s truthfulness or reduce his window-pane prose to bad faith, Woloch’s study bears down on a propulsive irony and formal restlessness that have always been intertwined with Orwell’s plain-style. Such restlessness, far from diluting Orwell’s democratic and socialist politics, is at its aesthetic and conceptual core.

The first half of Or Orwell ranges across his nonfiction prose, including new readings of “A Hanging,” The Road to Wigan Pier, and Inside the Whale. The second half develops an extended analysis of a single writing project: Orwell’s eighty “As I Please” newspaper columns, written for the Socialist weekly Tribune. Moving through multiple forms and genres, testing the limits of each, Orwell emerges in Woloch’s fine-grained account as a boldly unconventional writer and a central figure in twentieth-century literature and political thought.

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Ethnicity and National Identity
Demographic and Socioeconomic Characteristics of Persons with Ukrainian Mother Tongue in the United States, 1970
Oleh Wolowyna
Harvard University Press

This is the first quantitative analysis of the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of a representative sample of Ukrainians in the United States. The studies are based on data from the 1970 U. S. population census (persons with Ukrainian mother tongue) with additional results from the 1980 census (persons of Ukrainian ancestry).

The volume consists of a selection of articles presented at a conference at Harvard University. Among the authors are such well-known demographers as Frances Kobrin, Basil Zimmer, and Charles Keely, as well as specialists on the Ukrainian-American community such as Myron Kuropas, Volodimir Bandera, and Wsevolod Isajiw.

The articles offer in-depth analyses of geographic distribution, fertility and marital status, socioeconomic characteristics, housing characteristics, and family structure. Here, for the first time, is a discussion of the present and future of Ukrainians in the United States and their role in American society that is based on solid statistical data.

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The Unnatural Nature of Science
Lewis Wolpert
Harvard University Press, 1993

How is it that nobody—except maybe scientists—sees science for what it is? In this entertaining and provocative book, Lewis Wolpert draws on the entire history of science, from Thales of Miletus to Watson and Crick, from the study of eugenics to the discovery of the double helix. The result is a scientist’s view of the culture of science, authoritative and informed and at the same time mercifully accessible to those who find cohabiting with this culture a puzzling experience.

Science is arguably the defining feature of our age. For anyone who hopes to understand its nature, this lively and thoughtful book provides the perfect starting point.

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Nature and Ideology
Nature and Garden Design in the Twentieth Century
Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn
Harvard University Press, 1997
This volume explores the broad range of ideas about nature reflected in twentieth-century concepts of natural gardens and their ideological implications. A possible definition—nature is ideology—suggests that nature can be seen as a systematic scheme of ideas held by particular social, political, and cultural groups, and that our definition of nature is a human intellectual construct. Historical and contemporary concepts of natural garden design provide evidence of these different concepts of nature. The desire to produce a natural garden design has fascinated many professional and amateur garden designers, and the essays in this volume investigate their use of earlier ideas of natural gardens and their relationship to the rich model that nature offers. The work of early twentieth-century natural garden advocates helped shape much of twentieth-century landscape architecture in both the United States and Europe, and the ideologies underlying the concepts of natural gardens show how political, economic, and social developments influenced design programs and decisions.
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Places of Commemoration
Search for Identity and Landscape Design
Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn
Harvard University Press, 2001

“Everyone is occupied, consciously or unconsciously, with identity—one’s origin and the question of one’s place in humankind and society of the past, present, and future. Identity and memory are not stable and objective things, but representations or constructions of reality related to a particular interest, such as class, gender, of power relations. Identity is problematic without history and without the commemoration of history, and of course such remembrance may distort historical events and facts. When dealing with gardens, a substantial part of our physical environment, there are always unspoken questions of identity.”

Places of Commemoration examines commemorative sites of different character, including gardens, landscapes, memorials, cemeteries, and sites of former Nazi concentration camps, detailing the ideas behind the creation of memorials and monuments and the struggles over the narratives they present.

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American Garden Literature in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection (1785–1900)
From the New England Farmer to Italian Gardens, An Annotated Bibliography
Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn
Harvard University Press, 1998
American Garden Literature in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection (1785–1900) offers insights into the holdings of the Garden Library at Dumbarton Oaks as well as the revolution of American garden culture and landscape architecture in the course of the nineteenth century.
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Hong Kong Takes Flight
Commercial Aviation and the Making of a Global Hub, 1930s–1998
John D. Wong
Harvard University Press, 2022
Commercial aviation took shape in Hong Kong as the city developed into a powerful economy. Rather than accepting air travel as an inevitability in the era of global mobility, John Wong argues that Hong Kong’s development into a regional and global airline hub was not preordained. By underscoring the shifting process through which this hub emerged, Hong Kong Takes Flight aims to describe globalization and global networks in the making. Viewing the globalization of the city through the prism of its airline industry, Wong examines how policymakers and businesses asserted themselves against international partners and competitors in a bid to accrue socioeconomic benefits, negotiated their interests in Hong Kong’s economic success, and articulated their expressions of modernity.
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Americans First
Chinese Americans and the Second World War
K. Scott Wong
Harvard University Press, 2005

World War II was a watershed event for many of America's minorities, but its impact on Chinese Americans has been largely ignored. Utilizing extensive archival research as well as oral histories and letters from over one hundred informants, K. Scott Wong explores how Chinese Americans carved a newly respected and secure place for themselves in American society during the war years.

Long the victims of racial prejudice and discriminatory immigration practices, Chinese Americans struggled to transform their image in the nation's eyes. As Americans racialized the Japanese enemy abroad and interned Japanese Americans at home, Chinese citizens sought to distinguish themselves by venturing beyond the confines of Chinatown to join the military and various defense industries in record numbers. Wong offers the first in-depth account of Chinese Americans in the American military, tracing the history of the 14th Air Service Group, a segregated unit comprising over 1,200 men, and examining how their war service contributed to their social mobility and the shaping of their ethnic identity.

Americans First pays tribute to a generation of young men and women who, torn between loyalties to their parents' traditions and their growing identification with America and tormented by the pervasive racism of wartime America, served their country with patriotism and courage. Consciously developing their image as a "model minority," often at the expense of the Japanese and Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans created the pervasive image of Asian Americans that still resonates today.

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Free Trade between the United States and Canada
The Potential Economic Effects
Ronald J. Wonnacott
Harvard University Press

This study is the first major attempt to estimate what would happen in Canada if all trade restrictions between that country and the United States were removed.

In an intensive and far-reaching examination, the authors begin by confronting the generally held assumption that the lowering or eliminating of tariff protection would be disastrous for Canadian manufacturing. On the contrary, their findings lead them to conclude that, given present wage and exchange rates, the Canadian industrial complex would benefit substantially. The basis for this conclusion is a detailed analysis of the growth prospects—in the event of free trade—of five Canadian regions along with thirteen similarly definable regions in the United States. Sixteen manufacturing sectors (food, paper, textiles, etc.) are covered.

The second part of the study explores resulting general equilibrium pressures on wages and exchange. The probability, the authors believe, is that the Canadian dollar would rise to parity, and Canadian wages would reach the U.S. average level although they would remain below wage rates in contiguous areas of the U.S. North. The adjustments would necessarily be of a long-term nature and would be contingent on an effective reorganization of Canadian industry.

The historical effects of protection on Canada are then considered. Inefficiencies in Canadian production are estimated by comparing recent Canadian costs with costs which would exist in a free-trade situation. (The auto industry is singled out for special treatment, and an analysis of recent developments in that industry is appended.) The conclusion is that Canadian per capita real income is 10 to 11 percent lower because of protection. Higher Canadian prices explain about 4 percent of this figure, and lower money incomes 6 to 7 percent.

Finally, the authors discuss the possible structure and implications of various alternative forms of economic integration (Free Trade Area, Customs Union, Common Currency Area); various means of staging tariff reductions; and proposals for adjustment assistance. The techniques they suggest, although focusing specifically on Canada and the United States, are applicable to other countries considering similar programs.

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The French Apanages and the Capetian Monarchy, 1224-1328
Charles T. Wood
Harvard University Press

An analytical study of the French apanages from their creation to the end of the Capetian period, this pioneering book offers an explanation of why the French kings began the practice of granting fiefs to their younger sons, and why they introduced the curious inheritance restrictions which limited succession in an apanage to direct heirs of the original holder. The author also examines the connection of the apanages with the royal government in terms of sovereignty, jurisdiction, administration, military obligations, and financial affairs, showing how difficult it was to draw distinctions between the two spheres of government.

Since the original apanages were granted from lands only recently conquered from the English, they had the important practical effect of introducing the notion of French royal authority into areas that had not known it for centuries. People living in these lands became used to the fact that "the king" was the king of France, not of England. A clear understanding of the relationship of the apanages to the monarchy, the author maintains, is at the same time a large step toward an understanding of how the monarchy gained control of France and,ultimately, made a nation out of her fragmented provinces.

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Music in Harvard Libraries
A Catalogue of Early Printed Music and Books on Music in the Houghton Library and the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library
David A. Wood
Harvard University Press, 1980

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Near Andersonville
Winslow Homer’s Civil War
Peter H. Wood
Harvard University Press, 2010

The admired American painter Winslow Homer rose to national attention during the Civil War. But one of his most important early images remained unknown for a century. The renowned artist is best known for depicting ships and sailors, hunters and fishermen, rural vignettes and coastal scenes. Yet he also created some of the first serious black figures in American art. Near Andersonville (1865–66) is the earliest and least known of these impressive images.

Peter Wood, a leading expert on Homer’s images of blacks, reveals the long-hidden story of this remarkable Civil War painting. His brisk narrative locates the picture in southwest Georgia in August 1864 and provides its military and political context. Wood underscores the agony of the Andersonville prison camp and highlights a huge but little-known cavalry foray ordered by General Sherman as he laid siege to Atlanta. Homer’s image takes viewers “behind enemy lines” to consider the utter failure of “Stoneman’s Raid” from the perspective of an enslaved black Southerner.

By examining the interplay of symbolic elements, Wood reveals a picture pregnant with meaning. He links it to Abraham Lincoln’s presidential campaign of 1864 and underscores the enduring importance of Homer’s thoughtful black woman. The painter adopted a bottom-up perspective on slavery and emancipation that most scholars needed another century to discover. By integrating art and history, Wood’s provocative study gives us a fresh vantage point on Homer’s early career, the struggle to end slavery, and the dramatic closing years of the Civil War.

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How Fat Works
Philip A. Wood
Harvard University Press, 2006
An experimental pathologist and molecular geneticist, Philip Wood uses gene-knockout technology to study the way mouse genes regulate the metabolism of fat—research that provides insights into the workings of fatty-acid metabolism in humans and what can happen when that metabolic balance goes awry. Based on the classes he regularly teaches to first- and second-year medical students, Wood's book reviews the individual and public health burden of obesity and clarifies often-used, but often inadequately explained, terms employed in the continuing cultural and scientific debate about excess fat. He explains the role of fat in the healthy body, how fat is made, stored, and burned, and demonstrates how excess fat can lead to an array of metabolic disorders and diseases, from hypercholesterolemia and insulin resistance to diabetes. He reviews what recent research can tell us about specific genes or groups of genes that can lead to specific metabolic disorders. He explains the science behind common weight-loss regimens and why those regimens might succeed or fail, and reviews the complex interplay of hormones, genes, and stress in the way our bodies deal with fat through the life cycle. How Fat Works is a concise, clear, and up-to-date primer on the workings of fat, and essential reading for professionals entering careers in medicine and public health administration or anyone wanting a better understanding of one of our most urgent health crises.
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Thucydides on the Nature of Power
A. Geoffrey Woodhead
Harvard University Press, 1970
The implications of Thucydides' hostility to full democracy have long been avoided by scholars. In this provocative study the author confronts and examines this aspect of Thucydides' thought in detail. A. Geoffrey Woodhead also discusses his controversial interpretation of Thucydides' view of the nature of power: that equally among states and individuals, the impulse toward power follows its own laws, which are not immoral but amoral, and which should be viewed for themselves without ethical or emotional confusion.
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Nature into Art
Cultural Transformations in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Carl Woodring
Harvard University Press, 1989

The nineteenth century began with reverence for nature and ended with the apotheosis of art. In this wide-ranging excursion through the literature, visual arts, and natural sciences of the era from Wordsworth to Wilde, Carl Woodring traces shifting ideas and attitudes concerning nature, art, and the relations between the two.

The veneration of nature as aesthetic model and ethical norm was gradually eroded not least by the study of biology, which revealed organic nature to be wasteful and murderous. Darwin’s work verified the growing perception of nature as amoral by stressing the role of chance in natural selection, a further blow to trust in natural law. Once nature was not worth imitating, art by the century’s close could be an end to itself, free of responsibility to the natural.

The author examines individual works by Romantic and Victorian poets; narrative prose from James Hogg and Mary Shelley to Conrad, James, and Stevenson; painters from Wilkie through the Pre-Raphaelites to Whistler—all within such general contexts as the picturesque, the sublime, natural theology, romantic irony, romantic Hellenism, realism, photography, aestheticism, arts and crafts, art nouveau, and decadence. Although Woodring focuses on events, movements, and creative minds in England, he also draws upon a range of seminal figures from the Continent and the United States: Alexander von Humboldt, Delacroix, Thomas Cole, and Hawthorne are prominent examples. Nature into Art will fascinate scholars and amateurs of movements in literature, art, science, and cultural history in the Western world after 1780.

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Politics in English Romantic Poetry
Carl Woodring
Harvard University Press, 1970

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American Congo
The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta
Nan Elizabeth Woodruff
Harvard University Press, 2003

This is the story of how rural Black people struggled against the oppressive sharecropping system of the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta during the first half of the twentieth century. Here, white planters forged a world of terror and poverty for Black workers, one that resembled the horrific deprivations of the African Congo under Belgium’s King Leopold II.

Delta planters did not cut off the heads and hands of their African American workers but, aided by local law enforcement, they engaged in peonage, murder, theft, and disfranchisement. As individuals and through collective struggle, in conjunction with national organizations like the NAACP and local groups like the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, Black men and women fought back, demanding a just return for their crops and laying claim to a democratic vision of citizenship. Their efforts were amplified by the two world wars and the depression, which expanded the mobility and economic opportunities of Black people and provoked federal involvement in the region.

Nan Woodruff shows how the freedom fighters of the 1960s would draw on this half-century tradition of protest, thus expanding our standard notions of the civil rights movement and illuminating a neglected but significant slice of the American Black experience.

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LBJ
Architect of American Ambition
Randall B. Woods
Harvard University Press

A Christian Science Monitor Best Nonfiction Book of the Year

“In his masterful new biography, Randall B. Woods convincingly makes the case for Johnson’s greatness—as the last American president whose leadership achieved truly revolutionary breakthroughs in progressive domestic legislation, bringing changes that have improved the lives of most Americans. In this compelling, massive narrative, Woods portrays Johnson fairly and fully in all his complexity, with adequate attention to flaws in his character and his tragic miscalculations in Vietnam.”—Nick Kotz, Washington Post Book World

“In writing LBJ: Architect of American Ambition, Woods has produced an excellent biography that fully deserves a place alongside the best of the Johnson studies yet to appear…Even readers familiar with the many other fine books on Johnson will learn a great deal from Woods…Among Woods’s many achievements in this fine biography is to allow us to see not only the enormous, tragic flaws in this extraordinary man, but also the greatness.”—Alan Brinkley, New York Times Book Review

A distinguished historian of twentieth-century America, Randall B. Woods offers a wholesale reappraisal and sweeping, authoritative account of the life of one of the most fascinating and complex U.S. presidents.

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Lost Modernities
China, Vietnam, Korea, and the Hazards of World History
Alexander Woodside
Harvard University Press, 2006

In Lost Modernities Alexander Woodside offers a probing revisionist overview of the bureaucratic politics of preindustrial China, Vietnam, and Korea. He focuses on the political and administrative theory of the three mandarinates and their long experimentation with governments recruited in part through meritocratic civil service examinations remarkable for their transparent procedures.

The quest for merit-based bureaucracy stemmed from the idea that good politics could be established through the "development of people"--the training of people to be politically useful. Centuries before civil service examinations emerged in the Western world, these three Asian countries were basing bureaucratic advancement on examinations in addition to patronage. But the evolution of the mandarinates cannot be accommodated by our usual timetables of what is "modern." The history of China, Vietnam, and Korea suggests that the rationalization processes we think of as modern may occur independently of one another and separate from such landmarks as the growth of capitalism or the industrial revolution.

A sophisticated examination of Asian political traditions, both their achievements and the associated risks, this book removes modernity from a standard Eurocentric understanding and offers a unique new perspective on the transnational nature of Asian history and on global historical time.

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Vietnam and the Chinese Model
A Comparative Study of Nguyen and Ch’ing Civil Government in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century
Alexander Woodside
Harvard University Press, 1971

Why did the Vietnamese accept certain Chinese institutions and yet explicitly reject others? How did Vietnamese cultural borrowings from China alter the dynamics of traditional relations between Vietnam, Siam, Laos, and Cambodia? How did Vietnam's smaller Southeast Asian environment modify and distort classical East Asian institutions?

Woodside has answered these questions in this well-received political and cultural study. This first real comparison of the civil governments of two traditional East Asian societies on an institution-by-institution basis is now reissued with a new preface.

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Vietnam and the Chinese Model
A Comparative Study of Vietnamese and Chinese Government in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century
Alexander Woodside
Harvard University Press, 1988

Why did the Vietnamese accept certain Chinese institutions and yet explicitly reject others? How did Vietnamese cultural borrowings from China alter the dynamics of traditional relations between Vietnam, Siam, Laos, and Cambodia? How did Vietnam’s smaller Southeast Asian environment modify and distort classical East Asian institutions?

Alexander Woodside has answered these questions in this well-received political and cultural study. This first real comparison of the civil governments of two traditional East Asian societies on an institution-by-institution basis is now reissued with a new preface.

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Battle for Bed-Stuy
The Long War on Poverty in New York City
Michael Woodsworth
Harvard University Press, 2016

Half a century after the launch of the War on Poverty, its complex origins remain obscure. Battle for Bed-Stuy reinterprets President Lyndon Johnson’s much-debated crusade from the perspective of its foot soldiers in New York City, showing how 1960s antipoverty programs were rooted in a rich local tradition of grassroots activism and policy experiments.

Bedford-Stuyvesant, a Brooklyn neighborhood housing 400,000 mostly black, mostly poor residents, was often labeled “America’s largest ghetto.” But in its elegant brownstones lived a coterie of home-owning professionals who campaigned to stem disorder and unify the community. Acting as brokers between politicians and the street, Bed-Stuy’s black middle class worked with city officials in the 1950s and 1960s to craft innovative responses to youth crime, physical decay, and capital flight. These partnerships laid the groundwork for the federal Community Action Program, the controversial centerpiece of the War on Poverty. Later, Bed-Stuy activists teamed with Senator Robert Kennedy to create America’s first Community Development Corporation, which pursued housing renewal and business investment.

Bed-Stuy’s antipoverty initiatives brought hope amid dark days, reinforced the social safety net, and democratized urban politics by fostering citizen participation in government. They also empowered women like Elsie Richardson and Shirley Chisholm, who translated their experience as community organizers into leadership positions. Yet, as Michael Woodsworth reveals, these new forms of black political power, though exercised in the name of poor people, often did more to benefit middle-class homeowners. Bed-Stuy today, shaped by gentrification and displacement, reflects the paradoxical legacies of midcentury reform.

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Et Tu, Brute?
A Short History of Political Murder
Greg Woolf
Harvard University Press, 2007

Why did Caesar have to die--and why did his death solve nothing? The plot was confused, the execution bungled, and within hours different versions of the event were circulating. It was the end of republican Rome and the beginning of the Roman Empire--and yet everything about it remains somewhat mysterious.

Beginning with this legendary political assassination, immortalized in art and literature through the ages, Greg Woolf delivers a remarkable meditation on Caesar's murder as it echoes down the corridors of history, affecting notions and acts of political violence to our day.

Assassins Brutus and Cassius dined with their fiercest enemies within days of the murder--and were then hunted down and killed. After the murder neither conspirators nor Caesar's partisans knew how to react. From these beginnings this book follows the normalization of assassination at Rome, cataloguing the murder of Caesar after Caesar and recording the means, methods, and motives of the perpetrators. How was the Roman Empire so untouched by these events? And how had the Republic contained such violence between friends for so long? Woolf shows how Caesar's death--and the puzzled reactions to it--points back to older ethics of tyrannicide.

When is it justified to kill a head of state? Does extra-judicial execution provide answers worth the cost of the ensuing chaos? Ranging among texts by Cicero, Suetonius, and Seneca, plays by Shakespeare and Corneille, and the ideas of Michel Foucault and Francis Fukuyama, Woolf pursues these questions through the ages. His book tells us not only how, but why, Caesar's Vast Ghost still holds us spellbound.

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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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Chimpanzee Cultures
Richard W. Wrangham
Harvard University Press, 1994
Do chimpanzees have something akin to culture? Bringing together studies of behavioral variation within and among chimpanzees and bonobos --the sibling species of the genus Pan--this book provides the basis for answering this question. In Chimpanzee Cultures, the world's leading authorities on chimpanzees and bonobos chronicle the animals' behaviors from one study site to the next, in both captive and wild groups, in laboratory and field settings.
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Managing Industrial Enterprise
Cases from Japan's Prewar Experience
William D. Wray
Harvard University Press, 1989

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Mitsubishi and the N.Y.K., 1870–1914
Business Strategy in the Japanese Shipping Industry
William D. Wray
Harvard University Press, 1984

William Wray presents an in-depth examination of the origins and institutional growth prior to World War I of Mitsubishi, today Japan's largest industrial group, and the Nippon Yusan Kaisha (N.Y.K.), now the world's leading shipping enterprise. Drawing heavily upon previously inaccessible archival material from Japanese and Western companies, Wray shows how Japanese business grew out of institutional change through conflict. Three major themes illustrate tension and conflict: the struggle by managers to retain company autonomy, the role of the government in planning and intervening in the economy, and internal company disputes between managers and stockholders over financial issues.

This study, however, is much more than the history of two companies. It provides extensive analysis of decisionmaking in the Meiji government, the finances of the Imperial House, trading strategies, international commercial diplomacy, imperialism, and the shipping industry's response to war.

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