This latest title in a strikingly beautiful series of collectable books turns our attention to the rich variety of art from the Ancient Americas. Beginning by asking what constitutes Ancient American art, Colin McEwan contextualizes this art in its complexity of form and meaning. The beauty of the smallest details is magnified and contextualized through accompanying essays written by experts in Ancient American art.

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.

Traditionally, the concept of quality of life has been viewed through objective indicators of living conditions, basic needs, or capabilities. In Beyond Facts, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) looks at quality of life through the perceptions of millions of Latin Americans. Using an enhanced version of the recently created Gallup World Poll that incorporates Latin America–specific questions, the IDB surveyed people from throughout the region and found that reality and perceptions of quality of life are often very different. Beyond Facts attempts to explain these differences and consider their implications for both politics and policy.

The vast majority of the global population acquires citizenship purely by accidental circumstances of birth. In The Birthright Lottery, Ayelet Shachar argues that birthright citizenship in an affluent society can be thought of as a form of property inheritance: that is, a valuable entitlement transmitted by law to a restricted group of recipients under conditions that perpetuate the transfer of this prerogative to their heirs. 

“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.

The androgynous, asexual Buddha of contemporary popular imagination stands in stark contrast to the muscular, virile, and sensual figure presented in Indian Buddhist texts. In this groundbreaking study of previously unexplored aspects of the early Buddhist tradition, John Powers skillfully adapts methodological approaches from European and North American historiography to the study of early Buddhist literature, art, and iconography, highlighting aspects of the tradition that have been surprisingly invisible in earlier scholarship. 

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. 

This study revolves around the career of Kobayashi Hideo (1902–1983), one of the seminal figures in the history of modern Japanese literary criticism, whose interpretive vision was forged amidst the cultural and ideological crises that dominated intellectual discourse between the 1920s and the 1940s. Although his interweaving of aesthetics and ideology exhibited elements of both resistance and complicity, his critical ethos served ultimately to undergird his wartime fascist stance by encouraging acquiescence to authority, championing patriotism, and calling for more vigorous thought control.

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. 

Contemporary Afro–American theatre is an exciting spectacle of an emerging black identity during a period when blacks have come to the forefront of political activity in the United States. Geneviève Fabre brings us the vast and rich production of black drama since 1945, placing it in historical and cultural context as a platform for political statement. Two strains emerge: the militant theatre of protest, and the ethnic theatre of black experience.

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.

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.

In The Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen, Stephen K. White contends that Western democracies face novel challenges demanding our reexamination of the role of citizens. White argues that the intense focus in the past three decades on finding general principles of justice for diversity-rich societies needs to be complemented by an exploration of what sort of ethos would be needed to adequately sustain any such principles. Accessible, pithy, and erudite, The Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen will appeal to a wide audience.

That rosy tomato perched on your plate in December is at the end of a great journey—not just over land and sea, but across a vast and varied cultural history. This is the territory charted in Fresh. Freidberg takes six common foods from the refrigerator to discover what each has to say about our notions of freshness. Local livelihoods; global trade; the politics of taste, community, and environmental change: all enter into this lively, surprising, yet sobering tale about the nature and cost of our hunger for freshness.

In Hope and Despair, Gerald Grant compares two cities—his hometown of Syracuse, New York, and Raleigh, North Carolina—in order to examine the consequences of the nation’s ongoing educational inequities. The result is an ambitious portrait—sometimes disturbing, often inspiring—of two cities that exemplify our nation’s greatest educational challenges, as well as a passionate exploration of the potential for school reform that exists for our urban schools today.

This book assesses the effects of spatially concentrated programs for housing and neighborhood improvement. These programs provide direct assistance to low–income property owners in an attempt to arrest neighborhood decline and encourage revitalization. 

Everyone in academia stresses quality. But what exactly is it, and how do professors identify it? Michèle Lamont observed deliberations for fellowships and research grants, and interviewed panel members at length. In How Professors Think, she reveals what she discovered about this secretive, powerful, peculiar world. Lamont aims to illuminate the confidential process of evaluation and to push the gatekeepers to both better understand and perform their role.

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.

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.

Mothers and Others finds the key in the primatologically unique length of human childhood. Renowned anthropologist Sarah Hrdy argues that if human babies were to survive in a world of scarce resources, they would need to be cared for, not only by their mothers but also by siblings, aunts, fathers, friends—and, with any luck, grandmothers. Out of this complicated and contingent form of childrearing, Hrdy argues, came the human capacity for understanding others. In essence, mothers and others teach us who will care, and who will not.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In The Program Era, Mark McGurl offers a fundamental reinterpretation of postwar American fiction, asserting that it can be properly understood only in relation to the rise of mass higher education and the creative writing program. An engaging and stylishly written examination of an era we thought we knew, The Program Era will be at the center of debates about postwar literature and culture for years to come.

This book is the first thorough account of the Jewish Naturalization Act of 1753, a notorious but little–understood episode in English history. Using a largely narrative form the author first discusses the position of the Jews in the mid-eighteenth century and explains why they sought and obtained passage of the bill. He then recounts the beginnings of opposition to it and discusses the religious, economic, political, and psychological reasons for the opposition. He describes in detail the propaganda campaign against the bill and the resultant effect on the election.

In this enlightening book, with a new preface and postscript for the Anglophone audience, Maurice Olender investigates the unsuspected links between erudition and race, showing the affinities between the social sciences and the concept of “race.” The book provides an accessible and lucid pathway through the labyrinth of race and erudition and examines how to deal with diversity without the problematic heritage of racial stereotypes.

The more than two dozen Rai languages in eastern Nepal, which make up the larger part of the Kiranti language family, are linguistically highly varied. This volume, which includes introductory chapters to Rai mythology and Rai grammar, for the first time brings together different variants of myths from various Rai languages, presenting them with linguistic glossings in interlinear translations. The book is of special interest to linguists, anthropologists, and folklorists with a focus on the Himalayas.

Authors Moorsteen and Abramowitz propose a plan of action for improving U.S.–China relations that should stimulate the American public as well as Washington decisionmakers. Dealing effectively with China requires both a long–term perspective and an approach that faces up to fundamental issues, going beyond “atmospherics” and gestures.