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SOCIAL SCIENCE

The Fires of Vesuvius
Mary Beard
Hardcover November 2009
Exiles at Home
Shirley Elizabeth Thompson
Hardcover February 2009
How Free Is Free?
Leon F. Litwack
Hardcover February 2009
Love for Lydia
Edited by Nicholas D. Cahill
Hardcover February 2009
The Question of Animal Culture
Edited by Kevin N. Laland
Edited by Bennett G. Galef
Hardcover February 2009
Charisma and Compassion
C. Julia Huang
Hardcover January 2009
Civilization and Enlightenment
Albert M. Craig
Hardcover January 2009
The Latino Education Crisis
Patricia Gándara
Frances Contreras
Hardcover January 2009
Up from History
Robert J. Norrell
Hardcover January 2009
Why the Garden Club Couldn't Save Youngstown
Sean Safford
Hardcover January 2009
Beyond Terror and Martyrdom
Gilles Kepel
Hardcover November 2008
Hysterical Men
Mark S. Micale
Hardcover November 2008
Men of Letters within the Passes
Chang Woei Ong
Hardcover November 2008
Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 53/54, Spring and Autumn 2008
Edited by Francesco Pellizzi
Paperback November 2008
Stonehenge
Rosemary Hill
Hardcover November 2008
Stri
Kevin McGrath
Paperback November 2008
Your Spirits Walk Beside Us
Barbara Dianne Savage
Hardcover November 2008
Creating a Nation of Joiners
Johann N. Neem
Hardcover November 2008
Democracy Denied, 1905-1915
Charles Kurzman
Hardcover November 2008
Migration Miracle
Jacqueline Maria Hagan
Hardcover November 2008
Accidental Incest, Filial Cannibalism, and Other Peculiar Encounters in Late Imperial Chinese Literature
Tina Lu
Hardcover October 2008
Deliverance and Submission
Kelly H. Chong
Hardcover October 2008
Everyday Jihad
Bernard Rougier
Translated by Pascale Ghazaleh
As southern Lebanon becomes the latest battleground for Islamist warriors, Rougier plunges us into the heavily populated Palestinian refugee camp at Ain al-Helweh, which became a site for militant Sunni Islamists in the early 1990s. Rougier documents how Sunni fundamentalists, through their own interpretations of sacred texts and jihad, took root in this Palestinian milieu, and explains how radical religious allegiances overcome traditional nationalist sentiment in communities marked by poverty and despair.
Paperback October 2008
First Lady of the Confederacy
Joan E. Cashin
When Jefferson Davis became president of the Confederacy, his wife, Varina Howell Davis, reluctantly became the First Lady. Pro-slavery but also pro-Union, Varina Davis was inhibited by her role as Confederate First Lady and unable to reveal her true convictions. A century after Varina Davis's death in 1906, Joan E. Cashin offers the first definitive biography of this truly modern, but deeply conflicted, woman. In this path-breaking book, Cashin offers a splendid portrait of a fascinating woman who struggled with the constraints of her time and place.
Paperback October 2008
Off the Books
Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh
In this revelatory book, Sudhir Venkatesh takes us into Maquis Park, a poor black neighborhood on Chicago's Southside, to explore the desperate and remarkable ways in which a community survives. The result is a dramatic narrative of individuals at work, and a rich portrait of a community. But while excavating the efforts of men and women to generate a basic livelihood for themselves and their families, Off the Books offers a devastating critique of the entrenched poverty that we so often ignore in America, and reveals how the underground economy is an inevitable response to the ghetto's appalling isolation from the rest of the country.
Paperback October 2008
Practical Idealists
Alissa Wilson
Ann Barham
John Hammock
Paperback October 2008
Salsa Dancing into the Social Sciences
Kristin Luker
Hardcover October 2008
Seven Deadly Sins
Aviad Kleinberg
Translated by Susan Emanuel
Hardcover October 2008
Stealing Lincoln's Body
Thomas J. Craughwell
On the night of the 1876 presidential election, a gang of counterfeiters attempted to steal the entombed embalmed body of Abraham Lincoln and hold it for ransom. Craughwell returns to this bizarre, and largely forgotten, event with the first book to place the grave robbery in historical context. This rousing story of hapless con men, intrepid federal agents, and ordinary Springfield citizens offers an unusual glimpse into late-nineteenth-century America.
Paperback October 2008
What Blood Won't Tell
Ariela J. Gross
Hardcover October 2008
The Economy of Prestige
James F. English
This is a book about one of the great untold stories of modern cultural life: the remarkable ascendancy of prizes in literature and the arts. James F. English documents the dramatic rise of the awards industry and its complex role within what he describes as an economy of cultural prestige.
Paperback September 2008
Islamicate Sexualities
Edited by Kathryn Babayan
Edited by Afsaneh Najmabadi
Paperback September 2008
Managing the Metropolis
Edited by Eduardo Rojas
Edited by Juan R. Cuadrado-Roura
Edited by Jose Miguel Fernandez Guell
Translated by Sarah Schineller
Paperback September 2008
Men
Richard G. Bribiescas
What compels males to drive fast, act violently, and refuse to ask for directions? Men presents a new approach to understanding the human male by drawing upon life history and evolutionary theory. Richard Bribiescas proves that understanding human physiology requires global research in traditionally overlooked areas and that evolutionary and life history theory have much to offer toward this endeavor.
Paperback September 2008
A Nation by Design
Aristide R. Zolberg
In A Nation by Design, Aristide Zolberg explores American immigration policy from the colonial period to the present, discussing how it has been used as a tool of nation building. This is an authoritative account of American immigration history and the political and social factors that brought it about. Zolberg's book shows how America has struggled to shape the immigration process to construct the kind of population it desires.
Paperback September 2008
Paradise Earned
Yannis Tzifopoulos
This is a study of the twelve small gold lamellae from Crete that were tokens for entrance into a golden afterlife. The lamellae are placed within the context of a small corpus of similar texts, and published with extensive commentary on their topography, lettering and engraving, dialect and orthography, meter, chronology, and usage. This work adduces parallels to the texts on the lamellae from the Byzantine period and modern Greece to illuminate the everlasting and persistent human quest for "earning Paradise."
Paperback September 2008
Remembering Awatovi
Hester A. Davis
Remembering Awatovi is the engaging story of a major archaeological expedition on the Hopi Reservation in northern Arizona. Centered on the large Pueblo village of Awatovi, with its Spanish mission church and beautiful kiva murals, the excavations are renowned not only for the data they uncovered but also for the interdisciplinary nature of the investigations. In archaeological lore they are also remembered for the diverse, fun-loving, and distinguished cast of characters who participated in or visited the digs.
Hardcover September 2008 / Paperback September 2008
Saltwater Slavery
Stephanie E. Smallwood
This bold, innovative book promises to radically alter our understanding of the Atlantic slave trade, and the depths of its horrors. Stephanie E. Smallwood offers a penetrating look at the process of enslavement from its African origins through the Middle Passage and into the American slave market. Saltwater Slavery is animated by deep research and gives us a graphic experience of the slave trade from the vantage point of the slaves themselves. The result is both a remarkable transatlantic view of the culture of enslavement, and a painful, intimate vision of the bloody, daily business of the slave trade.
Paperback September 2008
The Two Princes of Calabar
Randy J. Sparks
In 1767, two "princes" of a ruling family in the port of Old Calabar, on the slave coast of Africa, were ambushed and captured by English slavers. The princes were themselves slave traders who were betrayed by African competitors--and so began their own extraordinary odyssey of enslavement. Their story, written in their own hand, survives as a rare firsthand account of the Atlantic slave experience. Sparks made the remarkable discovery of the princes' correspondence and has managed to reconstruct their adventures from it.
Paperback September 2008
Artistry of the Everyday
Lisa Bernasek
Photographs by Hillel S. Burger
Imazighen! Beauty and Artisanship in Berber Life presents the Peabody Museum's collection of arts from the Berber-speaking regions of North Africa. The book gives an overview of Berber history and culture, focusing on the rich aesthetic traditions of Amazigh (Berber) craftsmen and women. The book also tells the stories of the collectors--both world-traveling Bostonians and Harvard-trained anthropologists--who brought these objects to Cambridge in the early twentieth century.
Paperback August 2008
Becoming Brazuca
Edited by Clémence Jouët-Pastré
Edited by Leticia J. Braga
Brazilians in the United States are a relatively new wave of immigrants from South America. This volume offers a broad-ranging discussion of an understudied population and also brings insights into the core issues of immigration research: how immigration can complicate issues of social class, race, and ethnicity, how it intersects with the educational system, and how it fits into the assimilation paradigm.
Paperback July 2008
Americans All
Diana Selig
From the 1920s—a decade marked by racism and nativism—through World War II, hundreds of thousands of Americans took part in a vibrant campaign to overcome racial, ethnic, and religious prejudices. Progressive activists encouraged pluralism in homes, schools, and churches across the country.Selig tells the neglected story of the cultural gifts movement, which flourished between the world wars.
Hardcover June 2008
Free Riding
Richard Tuck
A proposition of contemporary economics and political science is that it would be an exercise of reason, not a failure of it, not to contribute to a collective project if the contribution is negligible, but to benefit from it nonetheless.Tuck makes careful distinctions between the prisoner’s dilemma problem, threshold phenomena such as voting, and free riding. He analyzes the notion of negligibility, and shows some of the logical difficulties in the idea—and how the ancient paradox of the sorites illustrates the difficulties.
Hardcover June 2008
American Mediterranean
Matthew Pratt Guterl
How did slave-owning Southern planters make sense of the transformation of their world in the Civil War era Guterl shows that they looked beyond their borders for answers and examines how the Southern elite connected—by travel, print culture, even the prospect of future conquest—with the communities of New World slaveholders as they redefined their world.
Hardcover June 2008
Emigrant Nation
Mark I. Choate
Between 1880 and 1915, thirteen million Italians left their homeland, launching the largest emigration from any country in recorded world history. In its discussion of immigrant culture, transnational identities, and international politics, this book not only narrates the grand story of Italian emigration but also provides important background to immigration debates that continue to this day.
Hardcover June 2008
In a Dark Time
Linda Isako Angst
Since Japanese sovereignty from American occupation in 1972, these islands have become the site of a complex colonial and postcolonial relationship of resistance and dependence between Okinawa, Japan, and the United States. Angst looks behind this historical and geopolitical experience by drawing upon diverse perspectives of Okinawa women from different generational and economic backgrounds.
Hardcover June 2008
Method and Meaning in Polls and Surveys
Howard Schuman
Schuman examines the question-answer process that is basic to polls and surveys. This book is less about the substance of wording effects and more about approaches to interpreting the respondent’s world, and how surveys can make that world understandable—though often in ways not anticipated by the researcher.
Hardcover June 2008
Security in Paraguay
James L. Cavallaro
Jacob Kopas
Yukyan Lam
Timothy Mayhle
Soledad Villagra de Biedermann
The perception of rising insecurity has plagued Paraguay over the past decade as the country has continued its transition from authoritarian to democratic rule. At the same time, reforms of the penal code and the code of criminal procedure have been implemented, leading many to attribute the rising sense of insecurity to the new, rights-based approach to criminal justice. In Security in Paraguay, the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School assesses the disparity between the sensation of insecurity and actual levels of urban crime.
Paperback June 2008
Understanding Privacy
Daniel J. Solove
Solove offers a comprehensive overview of the difficulties involved in discussions of privacy and ultimately provides a provocative resolution. He argues that no single definition can be workable, but rather that there are multiple forms of privacy, related to one another by family resemblances. His theory bridges cultural differences and addresses historical changes in views on privacy.
Hardcover May 2008
Beijing Time
Michael Dutton
Hsiu-ju Stacy Lo
Dong Dong Wu
Deeply immersed in the culture, everyday and otherworldly, this anthropological tour, from ancient cosmology to Communist kitsch, allows us to see as never before how the people of Beijing—and China—work and live.
Hardcover May 2008
Benjamin's -abilities
Samuel Weber
In this book, Weber, a leading theorist on literature and media, reveals a new and productive aspect of Benjamin’s thought by focusing the critical suffix “-ability” that Benjamin so tellingly deploys in his work. The result is an illuminating perspective on Benjamin’s thought by way of his language—and one of the most penetrating and comprehensive accounts of Benjamin’s work ever written.
Hardcover May 2008
Classic-Period Cultural Currents in Southern and Central Veracruz
Edited by Philip J. Arnold
Edited by Christopher A. Pool
This book explores the diverse traditions and dynamic interactions along the Mexican Gulf lowlands at the height of their cultural florescence. Best known for their elaborate ball game rituals and precocious inscriptions with long-count dates, these cultures served as a critical nexus between the civilizations of highland Mexico and the lowland Maya, influencing developments in both regions.
Hardcover May 2008
Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers?
Zygmunt Bauman
Bauman urges us to think in new ways about a newly flexible, newly challenging modern world. In an era of routine travel, where most people circulate widely, the inherited beliefs that aid our thinking about the world have become an obstacle. He challenges members of the “knowledge class” to overcome their estrangement from the rest of society.
Hardcover May 2008
El Niño, Catastrophism, and Culture Change in Ancient America
Edited by Daniel H. Sandweiss
Edited by Jeffrey Quilter
This book summarizes research on the nature of El Niño events in the Americas and details specific historic and prehistoric patterns in Peru and elsewhere.
Hardcover May 2008
Inheriting the City
Philip Kasinitz
John H. Mollenkopf
Mary C. Waters
Jennifer Holdaway
Behind the contentious politics of immigration lies the question of how well new immigrants are becoming part of American society. To address this question, Inheriting the City draws on the results of a ground-breaking study of young adults of immigrant parents in metropolitan New York to provide a comprehensive look at their social, economic, cultural, and political lives.
Hardcover May 2008
Measuring Up
Daniel Koretz
Measuring Up demystifies educational testing—from MCAS to SAT to WAIS. Bringing statistical terms down to earth, Koretz takes readers through the most fundamental issues that arise in educational testing and shows how they apply to some of the most controversial issues in education today, from high-stakes testing to special education.
Hardcover May 2008
Privatization for the Public Good?
Edited by Alberto Chong
Using unique household data sets for six Latin American countries, the essays collected in this volume put together a compelling picture of the effects of privatization.
Paperback May 2008
Unmaking the Public University
Christopher Newfield
Unmaking the Public University is the story of how conservatives have maligned and restructured public universities in a campaign to end public education’s democratizing influence on American society.
Hardcover May 2008
Al Qaeda in Its Own Words
Edited by Gilles Kepel
Edited by Jean-Pierre Milelli
Translated by Pascale Ghazaleh
Introduction and notes by Thomas Hegghammer
Introduction and notes by Stephane Lacroix
Introduction and notes by Jean-Pierre Milelli
Introduction and notes by Omar Saghi
To reveal Al Qaeda’s inner workings, Gilles Kepel and his collaborators, all scholars of Arabic and Islam, have collected and brilliantly annotated key texts of the major figures from whom the movement has drawn its beliefs and direction. The resulting volume offers an unprecedented glimpse into the assumptions of the salafist jihadists who have reshaped political life at the beginning of the third millennium.
Hardcover April 2008
Degrees of Freedom
Rebecca J. Scott
As Louisiana and Cuba emerged from slavery in the late nineteenth century, each faced the question of what rights former slaves could claim. Degrees of Freedom compares and contrasts these two societies in which slavery was destroyed by war, and citizenship was redefined through social and political upheaval. Both Louisiana and Cuba were rich in sugar plantations that depended on an enslaved labor force. But by the beginning of the twentieth century, they diverged sharply in the meanings attributed to race and color in public life and in the boundaries placed on citizenship.
Paperback April 2008
The Faithful
James M. O'Toole
Shaken by the ongoing clergy sexual abuse scandal, and challenged from within by social and theological division, Catholics in America are at a crossroads. O’Toole tells the story of this ancient church from the perspective of ordinary Americans, the lay believers who have kept their faith despite persecution from without and clergy abuse from within.
Hardcover April 2008
Primeval Kinship
Bernard Chapais
In this account of the dawn of human society, Chapais shows that our knowledge about kinship and society in nonhuman primates supports, and informs, ideas first put forward by the distinguished social anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss. Chapais contends that only a few evolutionary steps were required to bridge the gap between the kinship structures of our closest relatives—chimpanzees and bonobos—and the human kinship configuration.
Hardcover April 2008
Violence over the Land
Ned Blackhawk
In this ambitious book that ranges across the Great Basin, Ned Blackhawk places Native peoples at the center of a dynamic story as he chronicles two centuries of Indian and imperial history that profoundly shaped the American West. Violence over the Land is a passionate reminder of the high costs that the making of American history occasioned for many indigenous peoples, written from the vantage point of an Indian scholar whose own family history is intimately bound up in its enduring legacies.
Paperback April 2008
The Averaged American
Sarah E. Igo
Americans today "know" that a majority of the population supports the death penalty, that half of all marriages end in divorce, and that four out of five prefer a particular brand of toothpaste. But remarkably, such data--now woven into our social fabric--became common currency only in the last century. With a bold and sophisticated analysis, Sarah Igo demonstrates the power of scientific surveys to shape Americans' sense of themselves as individuals, members of communities, and citizens of a nation.
Paperback April 2008
Born in Flames
Howard Hampton
Twenty years as an outsider scouring the underbelly of American culture has made Howard Hampton a uniquely hardnosed guide to the heart of pop darkness. Bridging the fatalistic, intensely charged space between Apocalypse Now Redux and Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," his writing breaks down barriers of ignorance and arrogance that have segregated art forms from each other and from the world at large. Born in Flames is a headlong plunge into the passions and disruptive power of art.
Paperback April 2008
Chutes and Ladders
Katherine S. Newman
Now that the welfare system has been largely dismantled, the fate of America's poor depends on what happens to them in the low-wage labor market. In this timely volume, Katherine S. Newman explores whether the poorest families benefited from the tight labor markets and good economy in the late 1990s. More than a story of the shifting fortunes of the labor market, Chutes and Ladders asks probing questions about the motivations of low-wage workers, the dreams they have, and their understanding of the rules of the game.
Paperback April 2008
Persons and Things
Barbara Johnson
In Persons and Things, Johnson begins with the most elementary thing we know: deconstruction calls attention to gaps and reveals that their claims upon us are fraudulent. Johnson revolutionizes the method by showing that the inanimate thing exposed as a delusion is central to fantasy life, that fantasy life, however deluded, should be taken seriously, and that although a work of art “is formed around something missing,” this “void is its vanishing point, not its essence. The new aesthetics should restore fluidities between persons and things. In pursuing it, Johnson calls upon Ovid, Keats, Poe, Plath, and others who have inhabited this in-between space.
Hardcover April 2008
Radical Hope
Jonathan Lear
Shortly before he died, Plenty Coups, the last great Chief of the Crow Nation, said, "When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened." In Jonathan Lear's view, Plenty Coups' story raises a profound ethical question that transcends his time and challenges us all: how should one face the possibility that one's culture might collapse? Radical Hope is a deeply moving, philosophical inquiry into a peculiar vulnerability that goes to the heart of the human condition.
Paperback April 2008
The Southern Past
W. Fitzhugh Brundage
Since the Civil War whites and blacks have struggled over the meanings and uses of the Southern past. The Southern Past argues that these battles are ultimately about who has the power to determine what we remember of the past, and whether that remembrance will honor all Southerners or only select groups.
Paperback April 2008
Gendering Modern Japanese History
Edited by Barbara Molony
Edited by Kathleen Uno
The sixteen chapters in this volume treat men as well as women, theories of sexuality as well as gender prescriptions, and same-sex as well as heterosexual relations in the period from 1868 to the present. Together, these essays construct a history informed by the idea that gender matters because it was part of the experience of people and because it often has been a central feature in the construction of modern ideologies, discourses, and institutions. Separately, each chapter examines how Japanese have (en)gendered their ideas, institutions, and society.
Paperback March 2008
Lost Soul
John Makeham
Since the mid-1980s, Taiwan and mainland China have witnessed a sustained resurgence of academic and intellectual interest in ruxue—“Confucianism”—variously conceived as a form of culture, an ideology, a system of learning, and a tradition of normative values. This study aims to show how ruxue has been conceived in order to assess the achievements of this enterprise.
Hardcover March 2008
Kebara Cave, Mt. Carmel, Israel
Edited by Ofer Bar-Yosef
Edited by Liliane Meignen
The recent excavations at Kebara Cave in Israel have provided data crucial for understanding the cognitive and behavioral differences between archaic and modern humans. In this first of two volumes, the authors discuss site formation processes, subsistence strategies, land-use patterns, and intrasite organization. The research at Kebara Cave allows archaeologists to document the variability observed in the strategies of the Late Middle and early Upper Paleolithic periods in the Levant.
Paperback March 2008
Making Dead Birds
Robert Gardner
This detailed and candid account of the process of making Gardner’s classic Dead Birds is more than the chronicle of a single work. Gardner’s classic Dead Birds is one of the most highly acclaimed and controversial documentary films ever made. It is also a thoughtful examination of what it meant to record the moving and violent rituals of warrior-farmers in the New Guinea highlands and to present to the world a graphic story of their behavior as a window onto our own. This book not only addresses the art and practice of filmmaking, but also explores issues of representation and the discovery of meaning in human lives.
Paperback March 2008
The Sixties Unplugged
Gerard J. DeGroot
This book revisits the Sixties we forgot or somehow failed to witness. In a kaleidoscopic global tour of the decade, DeGroot reminds us that the “Ballad of the Green Beret” outsold “Give Peace a Chance,” that the Students for a Democratic Society were outnumbered by Young Americans for Freedom, that revolution was always a pipe dream, and that the Sixties belong to Reagan and de Gaulle more than to Kennedy and Dubcek.
Hardcover March 2008
Fatal Misconception
Matthew Connelly
Fatal Misconception is the disturbing story of our quest to remake ourselves by policing national borders and breeding better people. Supported by affluent countries, foundations, and non-governmental organizations, the population control movement experimented with ways to limit population growth. With its transnational scope and exhaustive research into such archives as Planned Parenthood and the newly opened Vatican Secret Archives, Connelly’s critique uncovers the cost inflicted by a humanitarian movement gone terribly awry and urges renewed commitment to the reproductive rights of all people.
Hardcover March 2008
Death by a Thousand Cuts
Timothy Brook
Jérôme Bourgon
Gregory Blue
In a public square in Beijing in 1904, multiple murderer Wang Weiqin was executed before a crowd of onlookers. He was among the last to suffer the extreme punishment known as lingchi. Called by Western observers “death by a thousand cuts” or “death by slicing,” this penalty was reserved for the very worst crimes in imperial China. Death by a Thousand Cuts is the first book to explore the history, iconography, and legal contexts of Chinese tortures and executions from the tenth century until lingchi’s abolition in 1905.
Hardcover March 2008
Hot and Bothered
Judith A. Houck
How did menopause change from being a natural (and often welcome) end to a woman's childbearing years to a deficiency disease in need of medical and pharmacological intervention? By examining the history of menopause over the course of the twentieth century, Houck shows how the experience and representation of menopause has been profoundly influenced by biomedical developments and by changing roles for women and the changing definition of womanhood.
Paperback March 2008
Roots Too
Matthew Frye Jacobson
In the 1970s, white ethnics mobilized around a new version of the epic tale of plucky immigrants making their way in the New World through the sweat of their brow. Although this turn to ethnicity was for many an individual search for familial and psychological identity, Roots Too establishes a broader white social and political consensus arising in response to the political language of the Civil Rights movement.
Paperback March 2008
Staging Race
Karen Sotiropoulos
Drawing extensively on black newspapers and commentary of the period, Karen Sotiropoulos shows how black performers and composers participated in a politically charged debate about the role of the expressive arts in the struggle for equality. Despite the racial violence, disenfranchisement, and the segregation of virtually all public space, they used America's new businesses of popular entertainment as vehicles for their own creativity and as spheres for political engagement.
Paperback March 2008
Some Assembly Required
Calvin Chen
One linchpin of China’s expansion has been township and village enterprises (TVEs), a vast group of firms with diverse modes of ownership and structure. Based on the author’s fieldwork in Zhejiang, this book explores the emergence and success of rural enterprises. This study also examines how ordinary rural residents have made sense of and participated in the industrialization engulfing them in recent decades.
Hardcover March 2008
When Our Eyes No Longer See
Gregory Golley
As industrial and scientific developments in early-twentieth-century Japan transformed the meaning of “objective observation,” modern writers and poets struggled to capture what they had come to see as an evolving network of invisible relations joining people to the larger material universe. For these artists, literary modernism was a crisis of perception before it was a crisis of representation. When Our Eyes No Longer See portrays an extraordinary moment in the history of this perceptual crisis and in Japanese literature during the 1920s and 1930s.
Hardcover March 2008
The Middle East Garden Traditions
Edited by Michel Conan
This book unites new information and surprising results from the last fifteen years of garden research, at a remove from the clichés of Orientalism. Garden archaeology reveals the economic importance of Judean gardens in Roman times and the visual complexity of gardens created and transformed in Moorish Spain. More contemporary approaches unravel the cultural continuities, variations, and differences between gardens in the Middle East since Roman times and in the Islamic world.
Paperback February 2008
Bones and Ochre
Marianne Sommer
When ochre-stained bones were unearthed by William Buckland in a Welsh cave in 1823, they raised many unsettling questions regarding their origin, and inspired the casting and recasting of the character who became known as the Red Lady. Her biography reflects the personal, professional, and national ambitions of those who studied her, and echoes the era in which each bit of research was conducted. In telling her story, Sommer reveals how paleoanthropology has emerged as an international, interdisciplinary, and thoroughly modern science.
Hardcover February 2008
Learning a New Land
Carola Suárez-Orozco
Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco
Irina Todorova
One child in five in America is the child of immigrants, and their numbers increase each year. Based on an extraordinary interdisciplinary study that followed 400 newly arrived children from the Caribbean, China, Central America, and Mexico for five years, this book provides a compelling account of the lives, dreams, academic journeys, and frustrations of these youngest immigrants.
Hardcover February 2008
Maimonides after 800 Years
Edited by Jay M. Harris
Moses Maimonides was the most significant Jewish thinker, jurist, and doctor of the Middle Ages, and author of a monumental code of Jewish law, and the most influential and controversial work of Jewish philosophy. The essays in this volume were written to mark the 800th anniversary of Maimonides' death in 1204. Written by the leading scholars in the field, they cover all aspects of Maimonides' work and influence.
Hardcover February 2008
The Other Latinos
Edited by José Luis Falconi
Edited by José Antonio Mazzotti
Contributions by Michael Jones-Correa
Contributions by Helen B. Marrow
Contributions by Arturo Arias
Contributions by Nestor Rodriguez
Contributions by Juan Zevallos-Aguilar
Contributions by Claret Vargas
Contributions by Edmundo Paz-Soldán
Contributions by Debra Castillo
Contributions by Teresa Sales
Contributions by Maxine Margolies
Contributions by Ana Cristina Braga Martes
Contributions by Luciano Tosta
The Other Latinos addresses an important topic: the presence in the United States of Latin American and Caribbean immigrants from countries other than Mexico, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. Focusing on the Andes, Central America, and Brazil, the book brings together essays by a number of accomplished scholars, hoping that this introductory work will inspire others to construct a more complete understanding of the realities of Latin American migration into the United States.
Paperback February 2008
Police Interrogation and American Justice
Richard A. Leo
"Read him his rights." We all recognize this line from cop dramas. But what happens afterward? In this book, Leo sheds light on a little-known corner of our criminal justice system--the police interrogation. An important study of the criminal justice system, this book provides interesting answers and raises some unsettling questions.
Hardcover February 2008
The Reaper's Garden
Vincent Brown
What did people make of death in the world of Atlantic slavery? In The Reaper's Garden, Brown asks this question about Jamaica, the staggeringly profitable hub of the British Empire in America--and a human catastrophe. Popularly known as the grave of the Europeans, it was just as deadly for Africans and their descendants. Yet among the survivors, the dead remained both a vital presence and a social force.
Hardcover February 2008
The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan
Edited by Robert D. Crews
Edited by Amin Tarzi
The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan explores the paradox at the center of a challenging phenomenon: how has a seemingly anachronistic band of religious zealots managed to retain a tenacious foothold in the struggle for Afghanistan's future? Grounding their analysis in a deep understanding of the country's past, leading scholars of Afghan history, politics, society, and culture show how the Taliban was less an attempt to revive a medieval theocracy than a dynamic, complex, and adaptive force rooted in the history of Afghanistan and shaped by modern international politics.
Hardcover February 2008
Transpacific Imaginations
Yunte Huang
Transpacific Imaginations is a study of how American literature is enmeshed with the literatures of Asia. The book begins with Western encounters with the Pacific, with Huang discussing such titles as Moby Dick as Pacific works. Huang then turns to Asian American encounters with the Pacific, concentrating on the "Angel Island" poems and works by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Araki Yasusada.
Hardcover February 2008
Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 52, Fall 2007
Edited by Francesco Pellizzi
Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, among others.
Paperback February 2008
Brand New China
Jing Wang
One part riveting account of fieldwork and one part rigorous academic study, Brand New China offers a unique perspective on the advertising and marketing culture of China. Wang's experiences in the disparate worlds of Beijing advertising agencies and the U.S. academy allow her to share a unique perspective on China during its accelerated reintegration into the global market system.
Hardcover January 2008
Identification for Prediction and Decision
Charles F. Manski
This book is a full-scale exposition of Manski's new methodology for analyzing empirical questions in the social sciences. He recommends that researchers ask first what can be learned from data alone, and then what can be learned when data are combined with credible weak assumptions. Each chapter juxtaposes developments of methodology with empirical or numerical illustrations.
Hardcover January 2008
Kourion
Edited by A. H. S. Megaw
More than fifty years after the earthquake of 365 destroyed Kourion, the seat of the Roman administration of Cyprus, a Christian basilica was built upon the remains of its pagan predecessor. Replete with mosaics and revetment, the basilica was the center of the ecclesiastical administration until its destruction in the late seventh century. In this long-awaited report, Megaw and colleagues present in full the results of excavations from the 1930s, 1950s, and 1970s.
Hardcover January 2008
Pain and Its Transformations
Sarah Coakley, Editor
Kay Kaufman Shelemay, Editor
Pain remains a deep mystery for sufferers, their physicians, and researchers. As neuroscientific research shows, even the immediate sensation of pain is shaped by psychological state and interpretation. At the same time, many individuals and cultures find meaning, particularly religious meaning, even in chronic and inexplicable pain. This interdisciplinary book includes not only essays but also discussions among a wide range of specialists.
Hardcover January 2008
Valuing Children
Nancy Folbre
While parents spend significant time as well as money on children, most estimates of the "cost" of children ignore the value of this time. Folbre provides a startlingly high but entirely credible estimate of the value of parental time per child by asking what it would cost to purchase a comparable substitute for it.
Hardcover January 2008
Variations in the Expressions of Inka Power
Edited by Richard L. Burger
Edited by Craig Morris
Edited by Ramiro Matos
Until recently, little archaeological investigation has been dedicated to the Inka, the last great culture to flourish in Andean South America before the sixteenth-century arrival of the Spaniards. Using a range of theoretical and methodological approaches, scholars from the sciences, social sciences, and humanities provide a new understanding of Inka culture and history.
Hardcover January 2008
Holon
Michael Chazan
Liora Kolska Horwitz
Excavations at the open-air site of Holon, carried out by Tamar Noy between 1963 and 1970, were some of the first successful salvage projects in the region. This volume brings together the results of interdisciplinary research on the site of Holon--geology, dating, archaeology, paleontology, taphonomy, and spatial analysis--by a team of leading international researchers. This book will be an essential point of reference for students and specialists working in the archaeology of human evolution.
Paperback January 2008
Are Women Human?
Catharine A. MacKinnon
More than half a century after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights defined what a human being is and is entitled to, Catharine MacKinnon asks: Are women human yet? She exposes the consequences and significance of the systematic maltreatment of women and its systemic condonation as she points toward fresh ways of targeting its toxic orthodoxies. A critique of the transnational status quo that also envisions the transforming possibilities of human rights, this bracing book makes us look as never before at an ongoing war too long undeclared.
Paperback November 2007
Islamic Law in Contemporary Indonesia
Edited by R. Michael Feener
Edited by Mark E. Cammack
Although often neglected in the literature on Islamic law, contemporary Indonesia is an especially rich source of insight into the Islamic legal tradition. The essays in this volume provide focused examinations of the internal dynamics of intellectual and institutional Islamic law in modern Indonesia, together offering a substantive introduction to important developments in both the theory and practice of law in the world's most populous Muslim society.
Hardcover November 2007
Twin Tollans
Edited by Cynthia Kristan-Graham
Edited by Jeff Kowalski
This volume had its beginnings in the colloquium, "Rethinking Chichen Itza, Tula and Tollan," that was held at Dumbarton Oaks. The selected essays revisit long-standing questions regarding the nature of the relationship between Chichen Itza and Tula. These essays place the cities in the context of the emerging social, political, and economic relationships that took shape during the transition from the Epiclassic period in Central Mexico, the Terminal Classic period in the Maya region, and the succeeding Early Postclassic period.
Hardcover November 2007
The Betrayal of Faith
Emma Anderson
Anderson uses one man's compelling story to explore the collision of Christianity with traditional Native religion in colonial North America. Pastedechouan's story illuminates key struggles to retain and impose religious identity on both sides of the seventeenth-century Atlantic, even as it has a startling relevance to the contemporary encounter between native and nonnative peoples.
Hardcover October 2007
Clinging to Mammy
Micki McElya
Loving, hating, pitying, or pining for mammy became a way for Americans to make sense of shifting economic, social, and racial realities. Assertions of black contentment with servitude alleviated white fears while reinforcing racial hierarchy. McElya's stories expose the power and reach of this myth, not only in advertising, films, and literature about the South, but also in national monument proposals, child custody cases, New Negro activism, anti-lynching campaigns, and the civil rights movement.
Hardcover October 2007
Feeling Backward
Heather Love
Feeling Backward weighs the costs of the contemporary move to the mainstream in lesbian and gay culture. While the widening tolerance for same-sex marriage and for gay-themed media brings clear benefits, gay assimilation entails other losses--losses that have been hard to identify or mourn, since many aspects of historical gay culture are so closely associated with the pain and shame of the closet.
Hardcover October 2007
The Singing Neanderthals
Steven Mithen
In The Singing Neanderthals, Steven Mithen draws together strands from archaeology, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience and musicology to explain why we are so compelled to make and hear music. Mithen explores music as a fundamental aspect of the human condition, encoded into the human genome during the evolutionary history of our species. The result is a fascinating work--and a succinct riposte to those who have dismissed music as a functionless evolutionary byproduct.
Paperback October 2007
Worrying about China
Gloria Davies
What can we do about China? Davies pursues this inquiry through a wide range of contemporary topics, including the changing fortunes of radicalism, the peculiarities of Chinese postmodernism, shifts within official discourse, attempts to revive Confucianism for present-day China, and the historically problematic engagement of Chinese intellectuals with Western ideas.
Hardcover October 2007
The Virtual Life of Film
D. N. Rodowick
As almost every aspect of making and viewing movies is replaced by digital technologies, even the notion of "watching a film" is fast becoming an anachronism. With the likely disappearance of celluloid film stock as a medium, and the emergence of new media, what will happen to cinema--and to cinema studies? In the first of two books exploring this question, Rodowick considers the fate of film and its role in the aesthetics and culture of the twenty-first century.
Hardcover October 2007 / Paperback October 2007
Creativity and Tradition
Israel Ta-Shma
This volume brings together sixteen of Ta-Shma's outstanding studies originally written in English, four of which are published here for the first time. Set in Germany, northern France, Italy, Poland, and Spain, these essays focus on leading rabbinic scholars and their writings, as well as important issues of Jewish intellectual history, such as the nature of halakhah and aggadah, kabbalah and spirituality, childhood, and popular religion.
Hardcover September 2007
From the Puritans to the Projects
Lawrence J. Vale
From the almshouses of seventeenth-century Puritans to the massive housing projects of the mid-twentieth century, the struggle over housing assistance in the United States has exposed a deep-seated ambivalence about the place of the urban poor. Lawrence J. Vale's groundbreaking book is both a comprehensive institutional history of public housing in Boston and a broader examination of the nature and extent of public obligation to house socially and economically marginal Americans during the past 350 years.
Paperback September 2007
The Moral Resonance of Arab Media
Flagg Miller
The Moral Resonance of Arab Media studies contemporary Arab political poetry, providing insights into how modern Arab media forms are shaped by language and culture. Through an examination of the lives and works of individual poets, singers, and audiences, it shows how tribalism becomes a resource for critical reform when expressed in tropes of community, place, person, and history.
Paperback September 2007
Strategies of Commitment and Other Essays
Thomas C. Schelling
All of the essays in this new collection by Thomas Schelling convey his unique perspective on individuals and society. Schelling, a 2005 Nobel Prize winner, has been one of the four or five most important social scientists of the past fifty years, and this collection shows why.
Paperback September 2007
The Murder of Regilla
Sarah B. Pomeroy
Born to an illustrious Roman family in 125 BCE, Regilla was married at the age of fifteen to Herodes, a wealthy Roman. Twenty years later--and eight months pregnant with her sixth child--Regilla died under mysterious circumstances, after a blow to the abdomen delivered by Herodes's freedman. Though Herodes was charged, he was acquitted. Pomeroy's investigation suggests that despite Herodes's erection of numerous monuments to his deceased wife, he was in fact guilty of the crime.
Hardcover September 2007
Stories of Freedom in Black New York
Shane White
This book re-creates the experience of black New Yorkers as they moved from slavery to freedom. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, New York City's black community strove to realize what freedom meant, to find a new sense of itself, and, in the process, created a vibrant urban culture.
Paperback September 2007
We Who Are Dark
Tommie Shelby
We Who Are Dark provides the first extended philosophical defense of black political solidarity. Tommie Shelby argues that we can reject a biological idea of race and agree with many criticisms of identity politics yet still view black political solidarity as a needed emancipatory tool. In developing his defense of black solidarity, he draws on the history of black political thought, focusing on the canonical figures of Martin R. Delany and W. E. B. Du Bois.
Paperback September 2007
Feeding the Ancestors
Anne-Marie Victor-Howe
Foreword by Rosita Worl
Photographs by Hillel S. Burger
Feeding the Ancestors presents an exquisite group of carved spoons from the Pacific Northwest that resides in the collections of Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Hillel Burger's beautiful color photographs reveal every nuance of the carvers' extraordinary artistry. Anne-Marie Victor-Howe provides a fascinating glimpse into these aboriginal subsistence cultures as she explains the manufacture and function of traditional spoons. This is a valuable contribution to our knowledge of Pacific Northwest Coast peoples and their art.
Paperback June 2007
Her Day in Court
Maya Shatzmiller
This book is a study of the historical record of the property rights and equity of Muslim women. Based on Islamic court documents of fifteenth-century Granada--documents that show a high degree of women's involvement--the book examines women's legal entitlements to acquire property, as well as the social and economic significance of these rights to Granada's female population and, by extension, to women in other Islamic societies.
Hardcover June 2007
Diasporas and Development
Edited by Barbara J. Merz
Edited by Lincoln C. Chen
Edited by Peter F. Geithner
Just as trade, finance, information, and technologies are moving rapidly across borders, so too are labor markets and transnational migrant communities, with migrants sending large quantities of money and knowledge back to their native countries as philanthropy, remittances, and commercial investments. Merz examines the positive--and sometimes negative--impacts of this transactional engagement in studies of Africa, Asia, Central America, and the Caribbean.
Paperback May 2007
Sexual Reckonings
Susan K. Cahn
This is the engaging tale of adolescent girls coming of age in the South during its most explosive decades. Focusing on the period from 1920 to 1960, Cahn reveals how both the life of the South and the meaning of adolescence underwent enormous political, economic, and social shifts, with the modern awareness of female sexuality clashing mightily against the white supremacist and patriarchal legacies of the old South.
Hardcover May 2007
Becoming Free in the Cotton South
Susan Eva O'Donovan
This book challenges our most basic ideas about slavery and freedom in America. Instead of seeing emancipation as the beginning or the ending of the story, as most histories do, O'Donovan explores the perilous transition between these two conditions, offering a unique vision of both the enormous changes and the profound continuities in black life before and after the Civil War.
Hardcover May 2007
Everyday Jihad
Bernard Rougier
Translated by Pascale Ghazaleh
As southern Lebanon becomes the latest battleground for Islamist warriors, Rougier plunges us into the heavily populated Palestinian refugee camp at Ain al-Helweh, which became a site for militant Sunni Islamists in the early 1990s. Rougier documents how Sunni fundamentalists, through their own interpretations of sacred texts and jihad, took root in this Palestinian milieu, and explains how radical religious allegiances overcome traditional nationalist sentiment in communities marked by poverty and despair.
Hardcover May 2007
A Principality of its Own
Edited by José Luis Falconi
Edited by Gabriela Rangel
Foreword by Patricia Phelps de Cisneros
This collection of critical essays examines distinctive moments of the Americas Society's visual art program and its impact on the formation of a Latin American market in the United States. Founded in 1965, the Americas Society has played a pivotal role in Latin American art, from Pre-Colombian to modernism. A Principality of Its Own explores the achievements and experiments that modeled the institution from the Cold War to the present.
Paperback May 2007

See also: All Books in SOCIAL SCIENCE.