logo for Harvard University Press
After Imperialism
The Search for a New Order in the Far East, 1921-1931
Akira Iriye
Harvard University Press

front cover of The Amazing Colossal Apostle
The Amazing Colossal Apostle
The Search for the Historical Paul
Robert M. Price
Signature Books, 2012
The story of Paul is one of irony, the New Testament depicting him at the martyrdom of Stephen holding the assassins' cloaks. Then this same Paul is transformed into the biblical archetype for someone suffering for their faith. He becomes so entrenched, it would appear that he had walked with the Christians all his life, that he was the one who defined the faith, eventually being called the “second founder of Christianity.” But much of what we think we "know" about Paul comes from Sunday school stories we heard as children. The stories were didactic tales meant to keep us reverent and obedient.

As adults reading the New Testament, we catch glimpses of a very different kind of disciple—a wild ascetic whom Tertullian dubbed “the second apostle of Marcion and the apostle of the heretics.” What does scholarship tell us about the enigmatic thirteenth apostle who looms larger than life in the New Testament? The epistles give evidence of having been written at the end of the first century or early in the second—too late to have been Paul’s actual writings. So who wrote (and rewrote) them? F. C. Baur, a nineteenth-century theologian, pointed persuasively to Simon Magus as the secret identity of “Paul.” Robert M. Price, in this exciting journey of discovery, gives readers the background for a story we thought we knew.
[more]

front cover of Aryan Cowboys
Aryan Cowboys
White Supremacists and the Search for a New Frontier, 1970–2000
By Evelyn A. Schlatter
University of Texas Press, 2006

During the last third of the twentieth century, white supremacists moved, both literally and in the collective imagination, from midnight rides through Mississippi to broadband-wired cabins in Montana. But while rural Montana may be on the geographical fringe of the country, white supremacist groups were not pushed there, and they are far from "fringe elements" of society, as many Americans would like to believe. Evelyn Schlatter's startling analysis describes how many of the new white supremacist groups in the West have co-opted the region's mythology and environment based on longstanding beliefs about American character and Manifest Destiny to shape an organic, home-grown movement.

Dissatisfied with the urbanized, culturally progressive coasts, disenfranchised by affirmative action and immigration, white supremacists have found new hope in the old ideal of the West as a land of opportunity waiting to be settled by self-reliant traditional families. Some even envision the region as a potential white homeland. Groups such as Aryan Nations, The Order, and Posse Comitatus use controversial issues such as affirmative action, anti-Semitism, immigration, and religion to create sympathy for their extremist views among mainstream whites—while offering a "solution" in the popular conception of the West as a place of freedom, opportunity, and escape from modern society. Aryan Cowboys exposes the exclusionist message of this "American" ideal, while documenting its dangerous appeal.

[more]

front cover of Black Nationalism
Black Nationalism
The Search for an Identity
E. U. Essien-Udom
University of Chicago Press, 1995
One of the first studies of the organization, life and meaning of the Nation of Islam and, by extension, all Black Nationalist movements, this classic work dispels the still common conception that the movement functioned primarily for political purposes. By observing the daily life of its members, Essien-Udom demonstrates that the Nation of Islam served primarily as a means for poor urban blacks to attain a national identity, a sense of ethnic consciousness, and empowerment in a society that denied them these privileges. Black Nationalism continues to hold profound implications for our understanding of the appeal of Black Nationalism as an ideology and a political force.

"An excellent standard treatment of black nationalist belief and practice in the 50's."—Michael Eric Dyson, New York Times Book Review

"This is an absorbing exercise in first class reporting. . . . In the light of his scrupulous fairness, the book is another illustration of how the press prejudges a story. And most provocatively, Essien-Udom has emphasized that even after the current campaigns for wide-scale integration are won, there will be an even wider chasm between the 'liberated' Negro middle class and the rootless Negro poor."—Nat Hentoff,Commonweal
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Bureaucratic Democracy
The Search for Democracy and Efficiency in American Government
Douglas Yates
Harvard University Press

Although everyone agrees on the need to make government work better, few understand public bureaucracy sufficiently well to offer useful suggestions, either theoretical or practical. In fact, some consider bureaucratic efficiency incompatible with democratic government.

Douglas Yates places the often competing aims of efficiency and democracy in historical perspective and then presents a unique and systematic theory of the politics of bureaucracy, which he illustrates with examples from recent history and from empirical research. He argues that the United States operates under a system of “bureaucratic democracy,” in which governmental decisions increasingly are made in bureaucratic settings, out of the public eye. He describes the rational, self-interested bureaucrat as a “minimaxer,” who inches forward inconspicuously, gradually accumulating larger budgets and greater power, in an atmosphere of segmented pluralism, of conflict and competition, of silent politics.

To make the policy process more competitive, democratic, and open, Yates calls for strategic debate among policymakers and bureaucrats and insists that bureaucrats should give a public accounting of their significant decisions rather than bury them in incremental changes. He offers concrete proposals, applicable to federal, state, and local governments, for simplifying the now-chaotic bureaucratic policymaking system and at the same time bolstering representation and openness.

This is a book for all political scientists, policymakers, government officials, and concerned citizens. It may well become a classic statement on the workings of public bureaucracy.

[more]

front cover of Critical Digital Humanities
Critical Digital Humanities
The Search for a Methodology
James E. Dobson
University of Illinois Press, 2019
Can established humanities methods coexist with computational thinking? It is one of the major questions in humanities research today, as scholars increasingly adopt sophisticated data science for their work. James E. Dobson explores the opportunities and complications faced by humanists in this new era. Though the study and interpretation of texts alongside sophisticated computational tools can serve scholarship, these methods cannot replace existing frameworks. As Dobson shows, ideas of scientific validity cannot easily nor should be adapted for humanities research because digital humanities, unlike science, lack a leading-edge horizon charting the frontiers of inquiry. Instead, the methods of digital humanities require a constant rereading. At the same time, suspicious and critical readings of digital methodologies make it unwise for scholars to defer to computational methods. Humanists must examine the tools--including the assumptions that went into the codes and algorithms--and questions surrounding their own use of digital technology in research. Insightful and forward thinking, Critical Digital Humanities lays out a new path of humanistic inquiry that merges critical theory and computational science.
[more]

front cover of History 4° Celsius
History 4° Celsius
Search for a Method in the Age of the Anthropocene
Ian Baucom
Duke University Press, 2020
In History 4° Celsius Ian Baucom continues his inquiries into the place of the Black Atlantic in the making of the modern and postmodern world. Putting black studies into conversation with climate change, Baucom outlines how the ongoing concerns of critical race, diaspora, and postcolonial studies are crucial to understanding the Anthropocene. He draws on materialist and postmaterialist thought, Sartre, and the science of climate change to trace the ways in which evolving political, cultural, and natural history converge to shape a globally destructive force. Identifying the quest for limitless financial gain as the primary driving force behind both the slave trade and the continuing increase in global greenhouse gas emissions, Baucom demonstrates that climate change and the conditions of the Black Atlantic, colonialism, and the postcolony are fundamentally entwined. In so doing, he argues for the necessity of establishing a method of critical exchange between climate science, black studies, and the surrounding theoretical inquiries of humanism and posthumanism.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Medical Care, Medical Costs
The Search for a Health Insurance Policy
Rashi Fein
Harvard University Press, 1986

front cover of Palestinians Born in Exile
Palestinians Born in Exile
Diaspora and the Search for a Homeland
By Juliane Hammer
University of Texas Press, 2005

In the decade following the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords, some 100,000 diasporic Palestinians returned to the West Bank and Gaza. Among them were children and young adults who were born in exile and whose sense of Palestinian identity was shaped not by lived experience but rather through the transmission and re-creation of memories, images, and history. As a result, "returning" to the homeland that had never actually been their home presented challenges and disappointments for these young Palestinians, who found their lifeways and values sometimes at odds with those of their new neighbors in the West Bank and Gaza.

This original ethnography records the experiences of Palestinians born in exile who have emigrated to the Palestinian homeland. Juliane Hammer interviews young adults between the ages of 16 and 35 to learn how their Palestinian identity has been affected by living in various Arab countries or the United States and then moving to the West Bank and Gaza. Their responses underscore how much the experience of living outside of Palestine has become integral to the Palestinian national character, even as Palestinians maintain an overwhelming sense of belonging to one another as a people.

[more]

front cover of Rising Ground
Rising Ground
A Search for the Spirit of Place
Philip Marsden
University of Chicago Press, 2016
In 2010, Philip Marsden, whom Giles Foden has called “one of our most thoughtful travel writers,” moved with his family to a rundown farmhouse in the countryside in Cornwall. From the moment he arrived, Marsden found himself fascinated by the landscape around him, and, in particular, by the traces of human history—and of the human relationship to the land—that could be seen all around him. Wanting to experience the idea more fully, he set out to walk across Cornwall, to the evocatively named Land’s End.
 
Rising Ground is a record of that journey, but it is also so much more: a beautifully written meditation on place, nature, and human life that encompasses history, archaeology, geography, and the love of place that suffuses us when we finally find home. Firmly in a storied tradition of English nature writing that stretches from Gilbert White to Helen MacDonald, Rising Ground reveals the ways that places and peoples have interacted over time, from standing stones to footpaths, ancient habitations to modern highways. What does it mean to truly live in a place, and what does it take to understand, and honor, those who lived and died there long before we arrived?
 
Like the best travel and nature writing, Rising Ground is written with the pace of a contemplative walk, and is rich with insight and a powerful sense of the long skein of years that links us to our ancestors. Marsden’s close, loving look at the small patch of earth around him is sure to help you see your own place—and your own home—anew.
[more]

front cover of The Search for a Socialist El Dorado
The Search for a Socialist El Dorado
Finnish Immigration to Soviet Karelia from the United States and Canada in the 1930s
Alexey Golubev and Irina Takala
Michigan State University Press, 2014
In the 1930s, thousands of Finns emigrated from their communities in the United States and Canada to Soviet Karelia, a region in the Soviet Union where Finnish Communist émigrés were building a society to implement their ideals of socialist Finland. To their new socialist home, these immigrants brought critically needed skills, tools, machines, and money. Educated and skilled, American and Canadian Finns were regarded by Soviet authorities as agents of revolutionary transformations who would not only modernize the economy of Soviet Karelia, but also enlighten its society. North American immigrants, indeed, became active participants of socialist colonization of what Bolshevik leaders perceived as dark, uneducated and backward Soviet ethnic periphery. The Search for a Socialist El Dorado is the first comprehensive account in English of this fascinating story. Using a vast body of documentary sources from archives in Petrozavodsk and Moscow, Russian- and Finnish-language press and literature from the 1930s, oral history interviews and secondary literature, Alexey Golubev and Irina Takala explore in depth the “Karelian fever” among Finnish Americans and Canadians, and the lives of immigrants in the Soviet Union, their contribution to Soviet economy and culture, and their fates in the Great Terror.
[more]

front cover of The Search for the Codex Cardona
The Search for the Codex Cardona
Arnold J. Bauer
Duke University Press, 2009
In The Search for the Codex Cardona, Arnold J. Bauer tells the story of his experiences on the trail of a cultural treasure, a Mexican “painted book” that first came into public view at Sotheby’s auction house in London in 1982, nearly four hundred years after it was presumably made by Mexican artists and scribes. On folios of amate paper, the Codex includes two oversized maps and 300 painted illustrations accompanied by text in sixteenth-century paleography. The Codex relates the trajectory of the Nahua people to the founding of the capital of Tenochtitlán and then focuses on the consequences of the Spanish conquest up to the 1550s. If authentic, the Codex Cardona is an invaluable record of early Mexico. Yet there is no clear evidence of its origin, what happened to it after 1560, or even where it is today, after its last known appearance at Christie’s auction house in New York in 1998.

Bauer first saw the Codex Cardona in 1985 in the Crocker Nuclear Laboratory at the University of California, Davis, where scholars from Stanford and the University of California were attempting to establish its authenticity. Allowed to gently lift a few pages of this ancient treasure, Bauer was hooked. By 1986, the Codex had again disappeared from public view. Bauer’s curiosity about the Codex and its whereabouts led him down many forking paths—from California to Seville and Mexico City, to the Firestone Library in Princeton, to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and Christie’s in New York—and it brought him in contact with an international cast of curators, agents, charlatans, and erudite book dealers. The Search for the Codex Cardona is a mystery that touches on issues of cultural patrimony, the workings of the rare books and manuscripts trade, the uncertainty of archives and evidence, and the ephemerality of the past and its remains.

[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter