Through a series of essays by urban historians, economists, and designers, Makina/Medina examines the potential impact of cultural events on the revitalization of historic cities. The aim of this volume is to explore how the urban design set up for a cultural event could help improve access and legibility in this medieval city and to positively affect its economic and social development. The book also includes a series of hypothetical design projects for the Makina Square by Harvard Graduate School of Design students.

This book is about the ritual world of a group of rural settlements in Shanxi province in pre-1949 North China. The great festivals described in this book were their supreme collective achievements and were carried out virtually without assistance from local officials or educated elites, clerical or lay. Newly discovered liturgical manuscripts allow author David Johnston to reconstruct North Chinese temple festivals in unprecedented detail and prove that they are sharply different from the Daoist- and Buddhist-based communal rituals of South China.

Throughout Chinese history mountains have been integral components of the religious landscape. Early in Chinese history a set of five mountains were co-opted into the imperial cult and declared sacred peaks, yue, demarcating and protecting the boundaries of the Chinese imperium. James Robson’s analysis of these topics demonstrates the value of local studies and the emerging field of Buddho-Daoist studies in research on Chinese religion.

This book presents a diverse collection of perspectives on prosecutions in South Africa, including a foreword by playwright and actor John Kani. Throughout, it highlights the important themes related to any post-conflict prosecution scheme including rule-of-law concerns, questions of evenhandedness and moral relativism, competing priorities and resource allocation, the limits of a court-centered approach to justice, and the potential transformative power of prosecutions.

Following the end of World War II in Asia, the Allied powers repatriated over six million Japanese nationals from colonies and battlefields throughout Asia and deported more than a million colonial subjects from Japan to their countries of origin. Lori Watt analyzes how the human remnants of empire, those who were moved and those who were left behind, served as sites of negotiation in the process of the jettisoning of the colonial project and in the creation of new national identities in Japan. 

Seventeen years after the civil war in El Salvador came to an end, violence and insecurity continue to shape the daily lives of many Salvadorans. This book examines the phenomenon of youth gangs, as well as related police abuse, clandestine violence, and their collective impact on the rule of law. The book’s findings are based on primary research conducted in El Salvador between 2006 and 2008.

The years 1790 to 1793 marked the beginning of the American republic, a contentious period as the nation struggled to create a functioning government amid increasingly bitter factionalism. As usual, the Adams family found itself in the midst of it all. This volume offers both insight into the family and the frank commentary on life that readers have come to expect from the Adamses.

This book explores the Daoist encounter with modernity through the activities of Chen Yingning (1880–1969), a famous lay Daoist master, and his group in early twentieth-century Shanghai. In contrast to the usual narrative of Daoist decay, with its focus on monastic decline, clerical corruption, and popular superstitions, this study tells a story of Daoist resilience, reinvigoration, and revival. 

The Tang dynasty is often called China’s “golden age,” a period of commercial, religious, and cultural connections from Korea and Japan to the Persian Gulf, and a time of unsurpassed literary creativity. Mark Lewis captures a dynamic era in which the empire reached its greatest geographical extent under Chinese rule, painting and ceramic arts flourished, women played a major role both as rulers and in the economy, and China produced its finest lyric poets in Wang Wei, Li Bo, and Du Fu.

Eating Rice from Bamboo Roots charts the vicissitudes of a rural community of papermakers in Sichuan. The process of transforming bamboo into paper involves production-related and social skills, as well as the everyday skills that allowed these papermakers to survive in an era of tumultuous change. This book traces the changes in the distribution of knowledge that led to a massive transfer of technical control from villages to cities, from primary producers to managerial elites, and from women to men. It addresses the issue of how revolution, state-making, and marketization have changed rural China.

Clinging to a rugged hillside in the lush valley of Sparta lies Mistra, one of the most dramatically beautiful Byzantine cities in Greece, a place steeped in history, myth, and romance. Sir Steven Runciman, one of the most distinguished historians of the Byzantine period, traveled to Mistra on numerous occasions and became enchanted with the place. Now published in paperback for the first time, Lost Capital of Byzantium tells the story of this once-great city—its rise and fall and its place in the history of the Peloponnese and the Byzantine empire.

On the eve of World War I, Russia, not known as a nation of joiners, had thousands of voluntary associations. Joseph Bradley examines the crucial role of voluntary associations in the development of civil society in Russia from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century.

Drawn together in a comprehensive Introduction by Bernard Bailyn, these innovative essays include analyses of the climate and ecology that underlay the slave trade, pan-Atlantic networks of religion and commerce, as well as the inter-ethnic collaboration in the development of tropical medicine, science as a product of imperial relations, and the awareness of the Atlantic world in the mind of David Hume.

From the Iliad to Aristophanes, from the gospel of Matthew to Augustine, Greek and Latin texts are constellated with descriptive images of dreams. This cultural history of dreams in antiquity draws on both contemporary post-Freudian science and careful critiques of the ancient texts. Harris takes an elusive subject and writes about it with rigor and precision, reminding us of specificities, contexts, and changing attitudes through history.

During the seventeenth century, sea raiders known as buccaneers controlled the Caribbean. Buccaneers were not pirates but privateers, licensed to attack the Spanish by the governments of England, France, and Holland. Jon Latimer charts the exploits of these men who followed few rules as they forged new empires. From the crash of gunfire to the billowing sail on the horizon, Latimer brilliantly evokes the dramatic age of the buccaneers.

Marco Girolamo Vida (1485–1566), humanist and bishop, came to prominence as a Latin poet in the Rome of Leo X and Clement VII. It was Leo who commissioned his famous epic, the Christiad, a retelling of the life of Christ in the style of Vergil, which was eventually published in 1535. This translation, accompanied by extensive notes, is based on a new edition of the Latin text.

Jacopo Sannazaro (1456–1530) is most famous for having written, in Italian, the first pastoral romance in European literature, the Arcadia (1504). But after this early work, Sannazaro devoted himself entirely to Latin poetry modeled on his beloved Vergil. In addition to his epic The Virgin Birth (1526), which earned him the title of “the Christian Vergil,” he also composed Piscatory Eclogues, an innovative adaption of the eclogue form. This volume contains the first complete English translation of all of Sannazaro’s poetry in Latin, accompanied by extensive notes.

The renowned anthropologist and human rights advocate David Maybury-Lewis saw the Latin American frontiers as relatively unknown physical spaces as well as unexplored academic “territory.” The authors examine the narrative forms that stirred or rationalized expansion, and emphasize their impact on the native residents. The essays suggest a view of nationalism as a theoretical concept and of frontier expansion as a historical phenomenon.

A Socratic dialogue set in the court of King Mattias Corvinus of Hungary (ca. 1490), Aurelio Lippo Brandolini’s Republics and Kingdoms Compared depicts a debate between the king himself and a Florentine merchant at his court on the relative merits of republics and kingdoms. This is the first critical edition and the first translation into any language.

The author has assigned her royalties and subsidiary earnings to Interfaith Worker Justice (www.iwj.org) and its local affiliate in Athens, GA, the Economic Justice Coalition (www.econjustice.org).

Among the least-chronicled aspects of post–World War II European intellectual and cultural history is the story of the Russian intelligentsia after Stalin. Vladislav Zubok turns a compelling subject into a portrait as intimate as it is provocative. Zhivago’s children, the spiritual heirs of Boris Pasternak’s noble doctor, were the last of their kind—an intellectual and artistic community committed to a civic, cultural, and moral mission.

It has become commonplace these days to speak of “unpacking” texts. Voice and Vision is a book about packing that prose in the first place. This book is for those who wish to understand the ways in which literary considerations can enhance nonfiction writing. Stephen Pyne, an experienced and skilled writer himself, explores the many ways to understand what makes good nonfiction, and explains how to achieve it. His counsel and guidance will be invaluable to experts as well as novices in the art of writing serious and scholarly nonfiction.

“Are you an American, or are you not?” This is the question at the heart of Katherine Benton-Cohen’s provocative history, which ties that seemingly remote corner of the country to one of America’s central concerns: the historical creation of racial boundaries. By showing the multiple possibilities for racial meanings in America, Benton-Cohen’s insightful and informative work challenges our assumptions about race and national identity.

In a groundbreaking work, Klaus Mühlhahn offers a comprehensive examination of the criminal justice system in modern China, an institution deeply rooted in politics, society, and culture. Based on unprecedented research in Chinese archives and incorporating prisoner testimonies, witness reports, and interviews, this book is essential reading for understanding modern China.

When, in our turbulent day, we hear of a “clash of civilizations,” it’s easy to imagine an unbridgeable chasm between the Islamic world and Christendom stretching back through time. Two Faiths, One Banner shows how in Europe, Muslims and Christians were often comrades-in-arms, repeatedly forming alliances to wage war against their own faiths and peoples. This bold book reveals how the idea of a “Christian Europe” long opposed by a “Muslim non-Europe” grossly misrepresents the facts of a rich, complex, and—above all—shared history. 

Representations of Indian economic life have played an integral role in discourses about poverty, social policy, and cultural difference but have received surprisingly little attention. Daniel Usner dismantles ideological characterizations of Indian livelihood to reveal the intricacy of economic adaptations in American Indian history.

Paris is the most personal of cities. There is a Paris for the medievalist, and another for the modernist—a Paris for expatriates, philosophers, artists, romantics, and revolutionaries of every stripe. James H. S. McGregor brings these multiple perspectives into focus throughout this concise, unique history of the City of Light. Color maps, along with identifying illustrations, make the city accessible to visitors by foot, Metro, or riverboat.

In this engaging—and disturbing—book, a leading historian of the Court reveals the close fit between its decisions and the nation’s politics. Drawing on more than four decades of thinking about the Supreme Court and its role in the American political system, this book offers a new, clear, and troubling perspective on American jurisprudence, politics, and history.

The combined Dumbarton Oaks and Fogg collection of Byzantine seals is one of the largest in the world, containing 17,000 specimens. Volume 6 in the catalogue presents the seals of emperors and patriarchs of Constantinople. More than 250 seals are illustrated and accompanied—where appropriate—by a full commentary regarding each specimen’s date, biographical information on its owner, peculiarities of orthography, and iconographic features. 

Much more than an historical examination of liability, criminal law, torts, bail, possession and ownership, and contracts, The Common Law articulates the ideas and judicial theory of one of the greatest justices of the Supreme Court. The John Harvard Library presents a text that is, with occasional corrections of typographical errors, identical to that found in the first and all subsequent printings by Little, Brown.

No book more vividly explains the horror of American slavery and the emotional impetus behind the antislavery movement than Frederick Douglass’s Narrative. In an introductory essay, Robert Stepto re-examines the extraordinary life and achievement of a man who escaped from slavery to become a leading abolitionist and one of America's most important writers. The John Harvard Library text reproduces the first edition, published in Boston in 1845.

Joshua Fogel offers an incisive historical look at Sino-Japanese relations from three different perspectives. Introducing the concept of “Sinosphere” to capture the nature of Sino-foreign relations both spatially and temporally, Fogel presents an original and thought-provoking study on the long, complex relationship between China and Japan.

Africa has always played a role in black identity, but it was in the tumultuous period between the two world wars that black Americans first began to embrace a modern African American identity. Throwing off the legacy of slavery and segregation, black intellectuals, activists, and organizations sought a prouder past in ancient Egypt and forged links to contemporary Africa. Their consciousness of a dual identity anticipated the hyphenated identities of new immigrants in the years after World War II, and an emerging sense of what it means to be a modern American.

The Conservative Turn tells the story of postwar America’s political evolution through two fascinating figures: Lionel Trilling and Whittaker Chambers, who went on to intellectual prominence, sharing the questions, crises, and challenges of their generation. Kimmage argues that the divergent careers of these two men exemplify important developments in postwar American politics: the emergence of modern conservatism and the rise of moderate liberalism.

This is a reprint of the second revised edition of the text and translation of the De Administrando Imperio written and compiled by Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus in the tenth century. The edition includes general and critical introductions, an index of proper names, and an extensive glossary, as well as grammatical notes and an index of sources and parallel passages.

The Uyghurs, a Turkic group, account for half the population of the Xinjiang region in northwestern China. This ethnography presents a thick description of life in the Uyghur suburbs of Yining, a city near the border with Kazakhstan, and situates that account in a broader examination of Uyghur culture. The narrative is framed around the terms identity, community, and masculinity. As the author shows, Yining’s Uyghurs express a set of individual and collective identities organized around place, gender, family relations, friendships, occupation, and religious practice. 

Chinese officials put considerable effort into managing the fiscal and legal affairs of their jurisdictions, but they also devoted significant time and energy to performing religious rituals on behalf of the state. This groundbreaking study explores this underappreciated aspect of Chinese political life by investigating rainmaking activities organized or conducted by local officials in the Qing dynasty.

The papers in this volume are based on a 2006 Princeton University symposium in honor of Glen W. Bowersock on the occasion of his retirement from the faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study. The topics offered in East and West range throughout the ancient world from the second century bce to late antiquity, from Hellenistic Greece and Republican Rome to Egypt and Arabia, from the Second Sophistic to Roman imperial discourse, from Sulla’s self-presentation in his memoirs to charitable giving among the Manichaeans in Egypt.

The Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute commemorated the seventieth anniversary of the man-made famine inflicted on Ukraine and surrounding areas with a symposium in October 2003 titled “The Ukrainian Terror-Famine of 1932–1933: Revisiting the Issues and the Scholarship Twenty Years after the HURI Famine Project.” This volume contains some of the papers presented at the symposium (previously published in Harvard Ukrainian Studies volume 25, no. 3/4), including Sergei Maksudov’s large-scale demographic study drawing on available documents of the era; and Gijs Kessler’s study of events in the Urals region from the same period. 

One of the leading humanists of Quattrocento Italy, Lorenzo Valla (1406–1457) has been praised as a brilliant debunker of medieval scholastic philosophy. In this book Lodi Nauta seeks a more balanced assessment, presenting us with the first comprehensive analysis of the humanist’s attempt at radical reform of Aristotelian scholasticism.

Licentious Gotham, set in the streets, news depots, publishing houses, grand jury chambers, and courtrooms of the nation’s great metropolis, delves into the stories of the enterprising men and women who created a thriving transcontinental market for sexually arousing books and pictures. Donna Dennis offers a colorful, groundbreaking account of the birth of an indecent print trade and the origins of obscenity regulation in the United States. 

A Line Drawn in the Sand captures the determination of several African nations, including Botswana, Nigeria, Senegal, and Tanzania, in providing lifesaving antiretroviral therapies to their citizens. By emphasizing the dramatic results that investments in AIDS treatments in Africa can bring, the book provides lessons to nations about scaling up their own treatment responses, hope to individuals and communities confronted with the often devastating impact of AIDS, and inspiration to the international HIV/AIDS community.

In 1913, Russian imperial marines stormed an Orthodox monastery at Mt. Athos, Greece to haul off monks engaged in a dangerously heretical practice known as Name Worshipping. Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor take us on an exciting mathematical mystery tour as they unravel a bizarre tale of political struggles, psychological crises, sexual complexities, and ethical dilemmas. The men and women of the leading French and Russian mathematical schools are central characters in this absorbing tale that could not be told until now. Naming Infinity is a poignant human interest story that raises provocative questions about science and religion, intuition and creativity.

On July 10, 1940, by a 570 to 80 margin, the representatives in the French parliament voted full powers to Philippe Pétain, ending the Third Republic and paving the way for the collaborationist Vichy regime. Recreating the tense atmosphere of summer 1940, Olivier Wieviorka shows how pressures brought on by defeat could affect even the most hardened republicans. He illuminates the complex moral issues inherent in accommodation and collaboration in a time of crisis.

Pulitzer Prize–winner Steven Hahn’s provocative new book challenges deep-rooted views in the writing of American and African-American history. Moving from slave emancipations of the eighteenth century through slave activity during the Civil War and on to the black power movements of the twentieth century, he asks us to rethink African-American history and politics in bolder, more dynamic terms. Throughout, Hahn presents African Americans as central actors in the arenas of American politics, while emphasizing traditions of self-determination, self-governance, and self-defense.

Liu Zhi (ca. 1670–1724) was one of the most important scholars of Islam in traditional China. His Tianfang xingli (Nature and Principle in Islam), the Chinese-language text translated here, focuses on the roots or principles of Islam. The copious annotations to the translation explain Liu’s text and draw attention to parallels in Chinese-, Arabic-, and Persian-language works as well as differences.

Written by and about New Englanders, this book is relevant to those attempting to address conservation problems on a regional basis. The stories told here are of people using what they had, setting to work to remedy these conditions, and doing so successfully. At a time of growing concern for the environment both locally and globally, theirs is a story certain to inform and inspire the next generation of conservation leaders.

This book explores the impact of transport costs on trade in Latin America and the Caribbean, and argues that transport costs have assumed an unprecedented strategic importance to the region. It concludes that a broader and more balanced trade agenda would bring the long-neglected issue of transport costs to the center of the policy debate.

Grafton reveals the microdynamics of the scholarly life through a series of essays on institutions and on scholars ranging from early modern polymaths to modern intellectual historians to American thinkers and writers. When many of our fellow citizens seem to have forgotten why we collect books in the buildings we call libraries, Grafton’s engaging, erudite essays could be a rallying cry for the revival of the liberal arts.

In a masterful study Carl Richard explores how the Greek and Roman classics became enshrined in American antebellum culture. For the first time, knowledge of the classics extended beyond aristocratic males to the middle class, women, African Americans, and frontier settlers. The Civil War led to a radical alteration of the educational system in a way that steadily eroded the preeminence of the classics. 

This volume is a bilingual collection of shaman oral texts from the Bhuji Valley of Western Nepal, in the original Nepali and with line-by-line English translation. Accompanying the book is a DVD of audio recordings of the shaman oral texts, supplementary texts not included in the published volume, videos of shaman performances, and additional video and photographic documentation of the social context in which these shamans are found.

This book examines the revolution in Sanskrit poetics initiated by the ninth-century Kashmiri Anandavardhana. Anandavardhana replaced the formalist aesthetic of earlier poeticians with one stressing the unifunctionality of literary texts, arguing that all components of a work should subserve a single purpose—the communication of a single emotional mood (rasa). Attention was redirected from formal elements toward specific poems, viewed as aesthetically integrated wholes, thereby creating new literary critical possibilities.