Susan Wallace Boehmer

Harvard University Press is pleased to launch its yearlong Centennial celebration with an outstanding Spring list of authors and titles. A number of these books look back across the global landscape of the last century, to explore a variety of topics that resonate in our own time. Several of our authors examine little-known dimensions of the history behind familiar images from that period: the iconic Volkswagen Beetle, napalm, the American civil rights struggle, China’s Communist Revolution, the ascent of Everest and other summits, the splitting of atoms and discovery of subatomic particles, and the postwar creation of nation-states for Jews and for Muslims. Taking stock of devastation from two world wars and the dissolution of empires, our authors confront head-on the look and feel of a violent century, through the intermingled memories and reveries of a child inmate in Auschwitz, interviews with Japanese war criminals, Camus’ troubled chronicle of Algeria’s fight for independence, and FDR’s ambivalent actions on behalf of Europe’s imperiled Jews.

Our authors also investigate the United States’ ambiguous role as “umpire” in global disputes, the dramatic influence of cheap mobile phones on India’s social transformation, the failure of civic leadership among American corporate elites, the popular obsession with ancestry and family trees, and the documented absence of conservative professors on college campuses, which skews political discourse in the public arena whether the debate is about climate change, gun control, immigration, or same-sex marriage. Perennial topics ranging from ancient Greek and Roman heroes to slavery in the Mississippi Valley are boldly reinterpreted in ways that connect this rich history with the contemporary concerns of readers and scholars around the world.

We invite you to join HUP’s birthday celebration throughout the year, by visiting our website and blog, reading descriptions of new books in our seasonal catalogs and brochures, and clicking through excerpts from one hundred years of scholarship published by Harvard University Press, available at our Centennial website.