Video Archive

Raymond Jonas explains the global historical significance of Ethiopia’s defeat of Italy in 1896, as detailed in The Battle of Adwa: African Victory in the Age of Empire

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst describes his new biography of Charles Dickens, Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist, as a “zero-to-hero” story

Evelynn M. Hammonds, Dean of Harvard College, explains the impetus for The Harvard Sampler: Liberal Education for the Twenty-First Century, a collection of essays on topics at the forefront of academia

David W. Blight describes American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era, his study of four American writers grappling with the memory of the Civil War during the American Centennial

Nicholas L. Tilney discusses Invasion of the Body: Revolutions in Surgery, in which he details surgery’s advance from the dangerous province of itinerant practitioners to a highly specialized discipline practiced in over 85,000 elective procedures each weekday in modern American hospitals

Ezra F. Vogel discusses Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China and the challenges Deng faced after taking his position as China’s pre-eminent leader

Serena Mayeri, author of Reasoning from Race: Feminism, Law, and the Civil Rights Revolution, describes how feminists borrowed rhetoric and legal arguments from the civil rights movement in the 1960s and ’70s

Brandon L. Garrett describes in Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong how DNA exonerations have shattered confidence in the criminal justice system by examining cases in which we have convicted the innocent and let the guilty walk free

Martha C. Nussbaum discusses the Capabilities Approach to human progress, as defined in Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach

Greta R. Krippner discusses Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance, in which she argues that the financialization of the U.S. economy was the largely inadvertent result of policymakers’ unwillingness to confront distributional crises

In Shi’ism: A Religion of Protest, Hamid Dabashi explains the soul of Shi’ism as a religion of protest—successful only when in a warring position, and losing its legitimacy when in power

Martha C. Nussbaum and Saul Levmore, co-authors of The Offensive Internet: Speech, Privacy, and Reputation, discuss the abuses made possible by the anonymity, freedom from liability, and lack of oversight that currently characterize the Internet

Daniel E. Lieberman describes some of the research included in The Evolution of the Human Head that will permanently change the study of human evolution and carry widespread ramifications for thinking about other branches of evolutionary biology

Tim Jones, Director of Design and Production at Harvard University Press, discusses his jacket design process for Robin Dunbar’s eclectic collection of essays, How Many Friends Does One Person Need?: Dunbar’s Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., co-editor of the Image of the Black in Western Art series, explains the history of this monumental research project and photo archive

An inside look at the design and production of HUP’s new annotated edition of Jane Austen’s classic novel, Pride and Prejudice

Tim Jones, Director of Design and Production at Harvard University Press, discusses his jacket design process for Susan Dunn’s study of FDR’s unprecedented battle to drive his foes out of his party, Roosevelt’s Purge: How FDR Fought to Change the Democratic Party

Robert R.M. Verchick outlines his prescriptions for better protecting our environment and communities from disasters, as detailed in Facing Catastrophe: Environmental Action for a Post-Katrina World

In Saturday Is for Funerals, Unity Dow and Max Essex show—in true-life stories of loss and quiet heroism, activism and scientific initiatives—how the experiences of battling HIV/AIDS in Botswana offer practical lessons along with the critical element of hope

Khalil Gibran Muhammad discusses The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, his disentangling of crime as a fact of the urban experience from crime as a theory of race in American history

Lindsay Waters, Executive Editor for the Humanities at Harvard University Press, describes A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors—a collection of more than two hundred original essays that presents a new, kaleidoscopic view of what “Made in America” means

Peter R. Last and John D. Stevens introduce the new edition of Sharks and Rays of Australia, their catalog of the greatest diversity of sharks and rays on Earth

Esther M. Sternberg, M.D., immerses us in the discoveries that have revealed a complicated working relationship between the senses, the emotions, and the immune system, in Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and Well-Being

Susanne Freidberg discusses Fresh: A Perishable History, in which she explains the curious story of the quality we call freshness

Mary Beard makes sense of the remains of Pompeii, offering us the big picture of the inhabitants of the lost city, in The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found

Barbara Dianne Savage describes Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion, her history of African American religion as the story of a powerful but ambivalent Christian legacy in African American life

Thomas G. Andrews discusses Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War, his award-winning study of the 1914 Ludlow Massacre and the “Great Coalfield War”

James M. Lang describes On Course: A Week-by-Week Guide to Your First Semester of College Teaching, which contains research-based advice for graduate students and new teaching faculty

The late Jon Latimer describes 1812: War with America, the first complete history of the War of 1812 to be written from a British perspective

David W. Blight discusses Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory and how a nation chose healing over justice