Harvard University Press - HISTORY

Americans All

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EDT

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

American Mediterranean

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EDT

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

Dumbarton Oaks

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Edited by Gudrun Bühl
Dumbarton Oaks houses the extraordinary art collection begun by Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss. In this book the museum publishes the specialist collections in Byzantine and Pre-Columbian art, along with examples from the Blisses’ superb European collection, for the first time.
Paperback June 2008

Emigrant Nation

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EDT

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

Euripides, VII, Fragments

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Euripides
Edited and translated by Christopher Collard
Edited and translated by Martin Cropp
The extant plays and the fragments together make Euripides by far the best known of the classic Greek tragedians. This edition offers the first complete English translation of the fragments together with a selection of testimonia bearing on the content of the plays. Each play is prefaced by a select bibliography and an introductory discussion of its mythical background, plot, and location of the fragments, general character, chronology, and impact on subsequent literary and artistic traditions.
Hardcover June 2008

In a Dark Time

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EDT

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

The Learned Banqueters, IV, Books 8-10.420e

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Athenaeus
Edited and translated by S. Douglas Olson
Athenaeus describes a series of dinner parties at which the guests quote extensively from Greek literature. The work (which dates to the very end of the second century CE) is amusing and of extraordinary value as a treasury of quotations from works now lost.
Hardcover June 2008

Nexus

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Jonathan Reed Winkler
In an illuminating study that blends diplomatic, military, technology, and business history, Winkler shows how U.S. officials during World War I discovered the enormous value of global communications. In this absorbing history, Winkler sheds light on the early stages of the global infrastructure that helped launch the United States as the predominant power of the century.
Hardcover June 2008

Normandy

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Olivier Wieviorka
Translated by M. B. DeBevoise
The Allied landings on the coast of Normandy on June 6, 1944, have assumed legendary status in the annals of World War II. But in overly romanticizing D-day, Wieviorka argues, we have lost sight of the full picture. Normandy offers a balanced, complete account that reveals the successes and weaknesses of the titanic enterprise.
Hardcover June 2008

Practitioners of the Divine

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Beate Dignas
Kai Trampedach
“What is a Greek priest?” The volume, which has its origins in a symposium held at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C., focuses on the question through a variety of lenses: the visual representation of cult personnel, priests as ritual experts, variations of priesthood, ideal concepts and their transformation, and the role of manteis.
Paperback June 2008

Beijing Time

Thu, 15 May 2008 00:00:00 EDT

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

Classic-Period Cultural Currents in Southern and Central Veracruz

Thu, 15 May 2008 00:00:00 EDT

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

Democracy's Prisoner

Thu, 15 May 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Ernest Freeberg
In 1920, socialist leader Eugene V. Debs ran for president while serving a ten-year jail term for speaking against America's role in World War I. In this book, Freeberg shows that the campaign to send Debs from an Atlanta jailhouse to the White House was part of a wider national debate over the right to free speech in wartime. In this story of democracy on trial, Freeberg excavates an extraordinary episode in the history of one of America's most prized ideals.
Hardcover May 2008

The Forbidden City

Thu, 15 May 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Geremie R. Barmé
The Forbidden City (Zijin Cheng) lying at the heart of Beijing formed the hub of the Celestial Empire for five centuries. Over the past century it has been celebrated and excoriated as a symbol of all that was magnificent and terrible in dynastic China’s legacy. In this book, Barmé provides a new and original history of the culture, politics, and architecture of the Forbidden City.
Hardcover May 2008

Ghettostadt

Thu, 15 May 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Gordon J. Horwitz
Ghettostadt is the terrifying examination of the Jewish ghetto’s place in the Nazi worldview. Exploring ghetto life in its broadest context, it deftly maneuvers between the perspectives and actions of Łódź’s beleaguered Jewish community, the Germans who oversaw and administered the ghetto’s affairs, and the “ordinary” inhabitants of the once Polish city.
Hardcover May 2008

Olympic Dreams

Thu, 15 May 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Guoqi Xu
Foreword by William C. Kirby
Already the world has seen the political, economic, and cultural significance of hosting the 2008 Olympics in Beijing—in policies instituted and altered, positions softened, projects undertaken. But will the Olympics make a lasting difference? This book approaches questions about the nature and future of China through the lens of sports—particularly as sports finds its utmost international expression in the Olympics.
Hardcover May 2008

Papers of John Adams, Volume 14, 27 October 1782 - 31 May 1783

Thu, 15 May 2008 00:00:00 EDT

John Adams
Gregg L. Lint, Volume editor
C. James Taylor, Volume editor
Hobson Woodward, Volume editor
Margaret A. Hogan, Volume editor
Mary T. Claffey, Volume editor
Sara B. Sikes, Volume editor
Judith S. Graham, Volume editor
John Adams reached Paris on October 26, 1782, for the final act of the American Revolution: the peace treaty. This volume chronicles his role in the negotiations and the decision to conclude a peace separate from France.
Hardcover May 2008

Privatization for the Public Good?

Thu, 15 May 2008 00:00:00 EDT

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

Woodrow Wilson and the American Myth in Italy

Thu, 15 May 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Daniela Rossini
Translated by Antony Shugaar
In 1918, Woodrow Wilson’s image as leader of the free world and the image of America as dispenser of democracy spread throughout Italy, filling an ideological void. American popularity, though, did not ensure mutual understanding. Rossini sets the Italian-American political confrontation within the full context of the two countries’ cultural perceptions of each other, different war experiences, and ideas about participatory democracy and peace.
Hardcover May 2008

Writings on Church and Reform

Thu, 15 May 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Nicholas of Cusa
Translated by Thomas M. Izbicki
Nicholas of Cusa(1401–1464), a polymath who studied canon law and became a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, was widely considered the most important original philosopher of the Renaissance. He wrote principally on speculative theology, philosophy, and church politics. This volume makes most of Nicholas’s other writings on Church and reform available in English for the first time.
Hardcover May 2008

Jerusalem

Wed, 14 May 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Simon Goldhill
Jerusalem is more than a tourist site—it is a city where every square mile is layered with historical significance, religious intensity, and extraordinary stories. It is a past marked by three great forces: religion, war, and monumentality. In this book, Goldhill takes on this peculiar archaeology of human imagination, hope, and disaster to provide a tour through the history of this most image-filled and ideology-laden city.
Hardcover May 2008

Essays and Dialogues

Thu, 1 May 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Bartolomeo Scala
Translated by Renée Neu Watkins
Introduction by Alison Brown
From humble beginnings, Scala (1430–1497) trained in the law and rose to prominence serving as secretary and treasurer to the Medicis and chancellor of the Guelf party before becoming first chancellor of Florence. This volume collects works from throughout his career that show his acquaintance with recently rediscovered ancient writers, and the influence of fellow humanists such as Marsilio Ficino, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II), and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.
Hardcover May 2008

History of Venice, Volume 2, Books V-VIII

Thu, 1 May 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Pietro Bembo
Edited and translated by Robert W. Ulery
Bembo (1470–1547), a Venetian nobleman, later a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, was the most celebrated Latin stylist of his day and was widely admired for his writings in Italian as well. Named official historian of Venice in 1529, Bembo began to compose in Latin his continuation of the city’s history in twelve books, covering the years from 1487 to 1513. The History of Venice was published after Bembo’s death. This edition, in a projected three volumes, makes it available for the first time in English translation.
Hardcover May 2008

Lives of the Popes, Volume 1, Antiquity

Thu, 1 May 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Bartolomeo Platina
Edited and translated by Anthony F. D'Elia
Imprisoned for conspiring against Pope Paul II Platina (1421–1481) returned to favor under Pope Sixtus IV, and composed his most famous work, a biographical compendium of the Roman popes from St. Peter down to his own time. The work critically synthesized a wide range of sources and became the standard reference work on papal history for early modern Europe. This edition contains the first complete translation into English and an improved Latin text.
Hardcover May 2008

Al Qaeda in Its Own Words

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EDT

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

City Between Worlds

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Leo Ou-fan Lee
Hong Kong is perched on the fault line between China and the West, a Special Administrative Region of the PRC. Lee offers an insider’s view of Hong Kong, capturing the history and culture that make his densely packed home city so different from its generic neighbors.
Hardcover April 2008

Degrees of Freedom

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EDT

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

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EDT

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

The Jewish Enemy

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Jeffrey Herf
The Jewish Enemy is the first extensive study of how anti-Semitism pervaded and shaped Nazi propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust, and how it pulled together the diverse elements of a delusionary Nazi worldview. In an era when both anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories continue to influence world politics, Jeffrey Herf offers a timely reminder of their dangers along with a fresh interpretation of the paranoia underlying the ideology of the Third Reich.
Paperback April 2008

On Zion's Mount

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Jared Farmer
On Zion’s Mount shows how, paradoxically, the Mormons created their homeland at the expense of the local Indians—and how they expressed their sense of belonging by investing Mt. Timpanogos with “Indian” meaning.
Hardcover April 2008

The Quest for Democracy in Iran

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Fakhreddin Azimi
The Constitutional Revolution of 1906 launched Iran as a pioneer in a broad-based movement to establish democratic rule in the non-Western world. In a book that provides essential context for understanding modern Iran, Azimi traces a century of struggle for the establishment of representative government.
Hardcover April 2008

Theodor W. Adorno

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Detlev Claussen
Translated by Rodney Livingstone
This book gives us our first clear look at how the man and his moment met to create “critical theory.” An intimate picture of the quintessential twentieth-century transatlantic intellectual, the book is also a window on the cultural ferment of Adorno’s day—and its ongoing importance in our own.
Hardcover April 2008

Venice from the Ground Up

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EDT

James H. S. McGregor
Venice came to life on mudflats at the edge of the habitable world. Protected in a tidal estuary from invaders and Byzantine overlords, the fishermen and traders who settled there crafted a way of life unlike anything the Roman Empire had ever known. In an astonishing feat of narrative history, James H. S. McGregor recreates this world, with its waterways rather than roads and its livelihood harvested from the sea. The narrative follows both a chronological and geographical organization, so that readers can trace the city's evolution by chapter and visitors can explore it by district on foot and by boat.
Paperback April 2008

Violence over the Land

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EDT

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 Origins of the Developmental State in Taiwan

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EDT

J. Megan Greene
The rapid growth of Taiwan’s postwar “miracle” economy is most frequently credited to the leading role of the state in promoting economic development. Megan Greene challenges this standard interpretation in the first in-depth examination of the origins of Taiwan’s developmental state.
Hardcover April 2008

American Protest Literature

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EDT

With a Foreword by John Stauffer and an Afterword by Howard Zinn
Edited by Zoe Trodd
Foreword by John Stauffer
Afterword by Howard Zinn
"I like a little rebellion now and then," wrote Thomas Jefferson to Abigail Adams, enlisting in a tradition that throughout American history has led writers to rage and reason, prophesy and provoke. American Protest Literature presents sources from eleven protest movements--political, social, and cultural--from the Revolution to abolition to gay rights to antiwar protest. In this impressive work, Trodd provides an enlightening and inspiring survey of this most American form of literature.
Paperback April 2008

The Averaged American

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EDT

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

Dunkirk

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Hugh Sebag-Montefiore
Paperback April 2008

The Scandal of Empire

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Nicholas B. Dirks
The Scandal of Empire reveals that the conquests and exploitations of the East India Company were critical to England's development in the eighteenth century and beyond. In this powerfully written critique, Nicholas Dirks shows how the empire projected its own scandalous behavior onto India itself. By returning to the moment when the scandal of empire became acceptable, we gain a new understanding of the modern culture of the colonizer and the colonized and the manifold implications for Britain, India, and the world.
Paperback April 2008

The Southern Past

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EDT

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

The Tokyo War Crimes Trial

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Yuma Totani
This book assesses the historical significance of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE)—commonly called the Tokyo trial—established as the eastern counterpart of the Nuremberg trial in the immediate aftermath of World War II.
Hardcover April 2008

The Word of the Lord Is Upon Me

Fri, 4 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Jonathan Rieder
Taking us deep into King’s backstage discussions with colleagues, his preaching to black congregations, his exhortations in mass meetings, and his crossover addresses to whites, Rieder tells a powerful story about the tangle of race, talk, and identity in the life of one of America’s greatest moral and political leaders.
Hardcover April 2008

Emplacing a Pilgrimage

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Barbara Ambros
The sacred mountain oyama (literally, “Big Mountain”) has loomed over the religious landscape of early modern Japan.Ambros provides a narrative history of the mountain and its place in contemporary society and popular religion by focusing on the development of the oyama cult and its religious, political, and socioeconomic contexts.
Hardcover March 2008

Gendering Modern Japanese History

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EDT

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

Life and Death in the Third Reich

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Peter Fritzsche
Fritzsche deciphers the puzzle of Nazism’s ideological grip. Its basic appeal lay in the Volksgemeinschaft—a “people’s community” that appealed to Germans to be part of a great project to redress the wrongs of the Versailles treaty, make the country strong and vital, and rid the body politic of unhealthy elements. Diaries and letters reveal Germans’ fears, desires, and reservations, while showing how Nazi concepts saturated everyday life.
Hardcover March 2008

Nature and History in American Political Development

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EDT

James W. Ceaser
Foreword by Theda Skocpol
In this inaugural volume of the Alexis de Tocqueville Lectures, James Ceaser traces the way certain "foundational" ideas--including nature, history, and religion--have been understood and used over the course of American history. Ceaser treats these ideas as elements of political discourse that provide the ground for other political ideas, such as liberty or equality. Three critical commentators challenge Ceaser's arguments, and a spirited debate about large and enduring questions in American politics ensues.
Paperback March 2008

Partisans of Allah

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Ayesha Jalal
Today, more than ever, jihad signifies the political opposition between Islam and the West. As the line drawn between Muslims and non-Muslims becomes more rigid, Jalal seeks to retrieve the ethical meanings of this core Islamic principle in South Asian history. Drawing on historical, legal, and literary sources, Jalal traces the intellectual itinerary of jihad through several centuries and across the territory connecting the Middle East with South Asia.
Hardcover March 2008

Policymaking in Latin America

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Edited by Ernesto Stein
Edited by Mariano Tommasi
Edited by Carlos Scartascini
Edited by Pablo Spiller
What determines the capacity of countries to design, approve, and implement effective public policies? To address this issue, this book builds on the results of a comparative study of political institutions, policymaking processes, and policy outcomes in eight Latin American countries. The volume benefits from both micro detail on the intricacies of policymaking in individual countries and a broad cross-country interdisciplinary analysis of the process in the region.
Paperback March 2008

Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Dudley Andrew
Steven Ungar
Andrew and Ungar apply an evocative "poetics of culture" to capture the complex atmospherics of Paris in the 1930s. Rather than a straight story of the Popular Front, they have produced something closer to the format of an illustrated newspaper whose multiple columns represent the breadth of urban life during this critical decade at the end of the Third French Republic.
Paperback March 2008

The Post-Revolutionary Self

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Jan Goldstein
In the wake of the French Revolution, as attempts to restore political stability to France repeatedly failed, a group of concerned intellectuals identified a likely culprit: the prevalent sensationalist psychology, and especially the flimsy and fragmented self it produced. They proposed a vast, state-run pedagogical project to replace sensationalism with a new psychology that showcased an indivisible and actively willing self, or moi. As conceived and executed by Victor Cousin, this long-lived project singled out the male bourgeoisie for training in selfhood --Cousin and his disciples deemed workers and women incapable of the introspective finesse necessary to appropriate that self in practice.
Paperback March 2008

Pyrrhic Victory

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Robert A. Doughty
As the driving force behind the Allied effort in World War I, France willingly shouldered the heaviest burden. In this masterful book, Robert Doughty explains how and why France assumed this role and offers new insights into French strategy and operational methods.
Paperback March 2008

The Road to Dallas

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EDT

David Kaiser
The assassination of President John F. Kennedy was an appalling and grisly conspiracy. In this unvarnished story, Kaiser shows that the events of November 22, 1963, cannot be understood without fully grasping the two larger stories of which they were a part: the U.S. government’s campaign against organized crime, which began in the late 1950s and accelerated dramatically under Robert Kennedy; and the furtive quest of two administrations to eliminate Fidel Castro. This book brings to light the complete, frequently shocking, story of the JFK assassination and its aftermath.
Hardcover March 2008

Tradition, Treaties, and Trade

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Kirk W. Larsen
Relations between the Choson and Qing states are often cited as the prime example of the operation of the “traditional” Chinese “tribute system.” In contrast, this work contends that the motivations, tactics, and successes (and failures) of the late Qing Empire in Choson Korea mirrored those of other nineteenth-century imperialists.
Hardcover March 2008

The Transatlantic Constitution

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Mary Sarah Bilder
Departing from traditional approaches to colonial legal history, Mary Sarah Bilder argues that American law and legal culture developed within the framework of an evolving, unwritten transatlantic constitution that lawyers, legislators, and litigants on both sides of the Atlantic understood. The central tenet of this constitution--that colonial laws and customs could not be repugnant to the laws of England but could diverge for local circumstances--shaped the legal development of the colonial world.
Paperback March 2008

The Travelers' World

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Harry Liebersohn
An unforgettable voyage filled with delightful characters, dramatic encounters, and rich cultural details, The Travelers' World heralds a moment of intellectual preparation for the modern global era. Harry Liebersohn examines the transformation of global knowledge during the great age of scientific exploration. We now travel effortlessly to distant places, but the questions about perception, truth, and knowledge that these intercontinental mediators faced still resonate.
Paperback March 2008

Visible Cities

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Leonard Blussé
The eighteenth century witnessed the rise of the China market and the changes that resulted in global consumption patterns, from opium smoking to tea drinking. In a valuable transnational perspective, Blussé chronicles the economic and cultural transformations in East Asia through three key cities—Canton, Nagasaki, and Batavia.
Hardcover March 2008

The Age of Visions and Arguments

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Kyu Hyun Kim
The Meiji Restoration of 1868 inaugurated a period of great change in Japan; it is seldom associated, however, with advances in civil and political rights. By studying parliamentarianism--the theories, arguments, and polemics marshaled in support of a representative system of government--Kim uncovers a much more complicated picture of this era than is usually given.
Hardcover March 2008

Outsiders?

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Economic and Social Progress in Latin America, 2008 Report
Edited by Gustavo Márquez
Despite decades of reform and global integration, many people in Latin America claim they are worse off. This book argues that democratization, macroeconomic stabilization, and globalization have disrupted the traditional labor-market-based paths of integration based on public and formal employment and made those left behind more vulnerable to the traditional forces of discrimination and exclusion.
Paperback March 2008

The Sixties Unplugged

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EDT

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

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EDT

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

China's Trapped Transition

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Minxin Pei
In a book sure to provoke debate, Minxin Pei examines the sustainability of the Chinese Communist Party's reform strategy--pursuing pro-market economic policies under one-party rule. Combining powerful insights with empirical research, China's Trapped Transition offers a provocative assessment of China's future as a great power.
Paperback March 2008

Death by a Thousand Cuts

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EDT

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

The Economic History of Byzantium

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Edited by Angeliki E. Laiou
Paperback March 2008

Freedom Is Not Enough

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Nancy MacLean
In this bold and groundbreaking work, Nancy MacLean shows how African-American and later Mexican-American civil rights activists and feminists concluded that freedom alone would not suffice: access to jobs at all levels is a requisite of full citizenship. Tracing the struggle to open the American workplace to all, MacLean chronicles the cultural and political advances that have irrevocably changed our nation over the past fifty years.
Paperback March 2008

Harvest of Despair

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Karel C. Berkhoff
Berkhoff provides a searing portrait of life in the Third Reich's largest colony. Under the Nazis, a blend of German nationalism, anti-Semitism, and racist notions about the Slavs produced a reign of terror and genocide. Berkhoff also shows how a pervasive Soviet mentality worked against solidarity, which helps explain why the vast majority of the population did not resist the Germans.
Paperback March 2008

Mao's Last Revolution

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Roderick MacFarquhar
Michael Schoenhals
The Cultural Revolution was a watershed event in the history of the People's Republic of China, the defining decade of half a century of communist rule. In a masterly book, Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals explain why Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, and show his Machiavellian role in masterminding it (which Chinese publications conceal). In its invaluable critical analysis of Chairman Mao and its brilliant portrait of a culture in turmoil, Mao's Last Revolution offers the most authoritative and compelling account to date of this seminal event in Chinese history.
Paperback March 2008

Rightward Bound

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Edited by Bruce J. Schulman
Edited by Julian E. Zelizer
Often considered a lost decade, a pause between the liberal Sixties and Reagan’s Eighties, the 1970s were indeed a watershed era when the forces of a conservative counter-revolution cohered. A critical decade in American history, Rightward Bound illuminates the seeds of both the successes and the failures of the conservative revolution.
Hardcover / Paperback March 2008

Roots Too

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EDT

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

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EDT

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

Studying the Jew

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Alan E. Steinweis
Studying the Jew investigates those German scholars who forged an interdisciplinary field to create a comprehensive portrait of the Jew, fabricating an empirical basis for Nazi antisemitic policies. In a chilling story of academics who perverted their talents and distorted their research in support of persecution and genocide, Studying the Jew explores the intersection of ideology and scholarship, the state and the university, the intellectual and his motivations, to provide a new appreciation of the use and abuse of learning and the horrors perpetrated in the name of reason.
Paperback March 2008

War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945-2005

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Franziska Seraphim
Japan has long wrestled with the memories of World War II. Franziska Seraphim traces the activism of five civic organizations to examine the ways in which diverse organized memories have secured legitimate niches within the public sphere. The history of these domestic conflicts--over the commemoration of the war dead, the manipulation of national symbols, the teaching of history, or the articulation of relations with China and Korea--is crucial to the current discourse about apology and reconciliation in East Asia, and provides essential context for the global debate on war memory.
Paperback March 2008

China during the Great Depression

Sat, 1 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST

Tomoko Shiroyama
The Great Depression was a global phenomenon: every economy linked to international financial and commodity markets suffered. The aim of this book is not merely to show that China could not escape the consequences of drastic declines in financial flows and trade but also to offer a new perspective for understanding modern Chinese history.
Hardcover March 2008

Crises of Memory and the Second World War

Sat, 1 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST

Susan Rubin Suleiman
In Crises of Memory and the Second World War, Susan Suleiman conducts a profound exploration of where individual memories converge with public remembrance of traumatic events. In this book she argues that memories of World War II transcend national boundaries, due not only to the global nature of the war but also to the increasingly global presence of the Holocaust as a site of collective memory.
Paperback March 2008

In Theory and in Practice

Sat, 1 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST

David C. Atkinson
Harvard University inaugurated The Center for International Affairs (CFIA) in 1958 as a new research center devoted to international relations. Atkinson’s history of the Center’s first twenty-five years explores the connection between knowledge and politics, beginning with the Center’s confident first decade and concluding with the second decade, which found the CFIA embroiled in Vietnam-era student protests.
Paperback March 2008

Popular Bohemia

Sat, 1 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST

Mary Gluck
This book revises dominant historical narratives about modernism from the perspective of a theoretically informed cultural history that spans the period between 1830 and 1914. In doing so, it reconnects the intellectual history of avant-garde art with the cultural history of bohemia and the social history of the urban experience to reveal the circumstances in which a truly modernist culture emerged.
Paperback March 2008

Some Assembly Required

Sat, 1 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST

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

Sat, 1 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST

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

Gardens and Cultural Change

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST

Edited by Michel Conan
Edited by Jeffrey Quilter
Five authors explore the variety of relationships between garden making and cultural change in Argentina, the Caribbean, Mexico, and the United States. They show how gardens express popular cultural invention and attempts at political manipulation, as well as provide places of cultural resistance by subjugated people.
Paperback February 2008

Big Enough to Be Inconsistent

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST

George M. Fredrickson
This book focuses on the most controversial aspect of Lincoln’s thought and politics—his attitudes and actions regarding slavery and race. Drawing attention to the limitations of Lincoln’s judgment and policies without denying his magnitude, the book provides the most comprehensive and even-handed account available of Lincoln’s contradictory treatment of black Americans in matters of slavery in the South and basic civil rights in the North.
Hardcover February 2008

Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST

Margaret Meserve
Drawing on political oratory, diplomatic correspondence, crusade propaganda, and historical treatises, Meserve shows how research into the origins of Islamic empires sprang from--and contributed to--contemporary debates over the threat of Islamic expansion in the Mediterranean. This groundbreaking book offers new insights into Renaissance humanist scholarship and long-standing European debates over the relationship between Christianity and Islam.
Hardcover February 2008

Faith on the Margins

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST

Charles H. Parker
In the wake of the 1572 revolt against Spain, the new Dutch Republic outlawed Catholic worship and secularized all church property. Calvinism prevailed as the public faith, yet Catholicism experienced a resurgence in the first half of the seventeenth century, with membership rivaling that of the Calvinist church. In a wide-ranging analysis of a marginalized yet vibrant religious minority, Parker examines this remarkable revival.
Hardcover February 2008

Fruits and Plains

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST

Philip J. Pauly
Plant engineering has a long history, and Pauly urges us to think of horticulturists as pioneer "biotechnologists," hacking their plants to create a landscape that reflects their ambitions and ideals. In telling the histories of Concord grapes and Japanese cherry trees, the problem of the prairie and the war on the Medfly, Pauly hopes to provide a new understanding of not only how horticulture shaped the vegetation around us, but how it influenced our experiences of the native, the naturalized, and the alien.
Hardcover February 2008

Lincoln and the Court

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST

Brian McGinty
In a meticulously researched and engagingly written narrative, McGinty rescues the story of Abraham Lincoln and the Supreme Court from long and undeserved neglect, recounting the compelling history of the Civil War president's relations with the nation's highest tribunal and the role it played in resolving the agonizing issues raised by the conflict.
Hardcover February 2008

The Reaper's Garden

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST

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

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST

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

Dilemmas of Victory

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST

Edited by Jeremy Brown
Edited by Paul G. Pickowicz
This illuminating work examines the social, cultural, political, and economic dimensions of the Communist takeover of China. Instead of dwelling on elite politics and policy-making processes, Dilemmas of Victory seeks to understand how the 1949-1953 period was experienced by various groups, including industrialists, filmmakers, ethnic minorities, educators, rural midwives, philanthropists, standup comics, and scientists.
Hardcover January 2008

The Fire Spreads

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST

Randall J. Stephens
Pentecostalism came to the South following the post-Civil War holiness revival, a northern-born crusade that emphasized sinlessness and religious empowerment. With the growth of southern Pentecostal denominations and the rise of new, affluent congregants, the movement slipped cautiously into the evangelical mainstream. By the 1980s the once-apolitical faith looked entirely different: while many still watched and waited for spectacular signs of the end, a growing number did so as active political conservatives.
Hardcover January 2008

Galileo's Glassworks

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST

Eileen Reeves
Galileo and the Dutch telescope have long enjoyed a durable connection in the popular mind, transforming a rather modest middle-aged scholar into the icon of the Copernican Revolution. And yet the speed with which the telescope changed the course of Galileo's life and early modern astronomy obscures his actual delayed encounter with the instrument. This book considers the lapse between the telescope's 1608 creation in The Hague and Galileo's acquaintance with such news ten months later. Along the way, Reeves offers a revised chronology of Galileo's life in this critical period.
Hardcover January 2008

Kourion

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST

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

The Notables and the Nation

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST

Vivian R. Gruder
The ending of absolute, centralized monarchy and the beginning of political combat between nobles and commoners make the years 1787 to 1788 the first stage of the French Revolution. In a detailed examination of this critical transition, Gruder examines how the French people became engaged in a movement of opposition that culminated in demands for the public's role in government.
Hardcover January 2008

On Religious Liberty

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST

James Calvin Davis
Banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for his refusal to conform to Puritan religious and social standards, Roger Williams established a haven in Rhode Island for those persecuted in the name of the religious establishment. Davis gathers together important selections from Williams's public and private writings on religious liberty, illustrating how this renegade Puritan radically reinterpreted Christian moral theology and the events of his day in a powerful argument for freedom of conscience and the separation of church and state.
Hardcover / Paperback January 2008

The Readability of the Past in Early Chinese Historiography

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST

Wai-yee Li
The past becomes readable when we can tell stories and make arguments about it. When we can tell more than one story or make divergent arguments, the readability of the past then becomes an issue. Therein lies the beginning of history, the sense of inquiry that heightens our awareness of interpretation. What are the possibilities and limits of historical knowledge? This book explores these issues through a study of the Zuozhuan, a foundational text in the Chinese tradition, whose rhetorical and analytical self-consciousness reveals much about the contending ways of thought unfolding during the period of the text's formation.
Hardcover January 2008

The Science of Culture in Enlightenment Germany

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST

Michael C. Carhart
In the late 1770s, as a wave of revolution and republican unrest swept across Europe, scholars looked with urgency on the progress of European civilization. Carhart examines their approaches to understanding human development by investigating the invention of a new analytic category, "culture."
Hardcover January 2008

Variations in the Expressions of Inka Power

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST

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

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST

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

Demons and Dancers

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST

Ruth Webb
Compared to the wealth of information available to us about classical tragedy and comedy, not much is known about the culture of pantomime, mime, and dance in late antiquity. Webb fills this gap in our knowledge of the ancient world and provides us with a detailed look at social life in the late antique period through an investigation of its performance culture.
Hardcover January 2008

The Mighty Wurlitzer

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST

Hugh Wilford
Wilford provides the first comprehensive account of the clandestine relationship between the CIA and its front organizations. Using an unprecedented wealth of sources, he traces the rise and fall of America's Cold War front network from its origins in the 1940s to its Third World expansion during the 1950s and ultimate collapse in the 1960s.
Hardcover January 2008

Symphonic Aspirations

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST

Karen Painter
Painter examines the politicization of musical listening in Germany and Austria, showing how nationalism, anti-Semitism, liberalism, and socialism profoundly affected the experience of serious music. Her analysis draws on a vast collection of writings on the symphony, particularly those of Mahler and Bruckner, to offer compelling evidence that music can and did serve ideological ends. She traces changes in critical discourse that reflected but also contributed to the historical conditions of various eras.
Hardcover January 2008

Beacon Fire and Shooting Star

Sun, 30 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST

Xiaofei Tian
The Liang dynasty (502-557) was one of the most brilliant and creative periods in Chinese history and is one of the most underestimated and misunderstood. This book is devoted to contextualizing the literary culture of this era, exploring not only the literary works themselves but also the processes of literary production and the intricate interactions of religion and literature.
Hardcover December 2007

Amid the Clouds and Mist

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST

John E. Herman
In 1200, what is now southwest China--Guizhou, Yunnan, and the southern portion of Sichuan--was home to an assortment of strikingly diverse cultures and ruled by a multitude of political entities. One purpose of this book is to examine how China's three late imperial dynasties--the Yuan, Ming, and Qing--conquered, colonized, and assumed control of the southwest. Another objective is to highlight the indigenous response to China's colonization of the southwest, particularly that of the Nasu Yi people of western Guizhou and eastern Yunnan, the only group to leave an extensive written record.
Hardcover November 2007

Articulating Citizenship

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST

Robert Culp
This book reconstructs civic education and citizenship training in secondary schools in the lower Yangzi region during the Republican era. It also analyzes how students used the tools of civic education introduced in their schools to make themselves into young citizens, and explores the complex social and political effects of educated youths' civic action.
Hardcover November 2007

The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST

Mark E. Neely
The Civil War is often portrayed as the most brutal war in America's history, a premonition of twentieth-century carnage. In challenging this view, Neely considers the war's destructiveness in a comparative context, revealing the sense of limit that guided the conduct of American soldiers and statesmen. The modern overemphasis on violence in Civil War literature has led many scholars to go too far in drawing close analogies with the twentieth century's "total war" and the grim guerrilla struggles of Vietnam.
Hardcover November 2007

The Conservative Ascendancy

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST

Donald T. Critchlow
In this provocative history of the Right in modern America, Critchlow finds a deep dilemma inherent in how conservative Republicans expressed their anti-statist ideology in an age of mass democracy and Cold War hostilities. As the Right moved forward with its political program, partisanship intensified and ideological division widened--both between the parties and across the electorate. This intensified partisanship reflects the vibrancy of a mature democracy, Critchlow argues, and a new level of political engagement despite its disquieting effect on American political debate.
Hardcover November 2007

The Crimea Question

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST

Gwendolyn Sasse
In the early to mid-1990s, the Western media, policymakers, and academics alike warned that Crimea was a potential center of unrest in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's dissolution. However, large-scale conflict in Crimea did not materialize. This book explores the factors that led to this largely peaceful transition, and places the situation in the larger context of conflict-prevention studies, explaining why conflict did not erupt despite a structural predisposition to ethnic, regional, and international enmity.
Hardcover November 2007

The Epic City

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST

Annette L. Giesecke
As Greek and Trojan forces battled in the shadow of Troy's wall, Hephaistos created a wondrous, ornately decorated shield for Achilles. Viewed as Homer's blueprint for an ideal, or utopian, social order, the Shield reveals that restraining and taming Nature would be fundamental to the Hellenic urban quest. It is this ideal that Classical Athens, with her utilitarian view of Nature, exemplified. This new ideal, vividly expressed through the domestication of Nature in villas and gardens and also through primitivist and Epicurean tendencies in Latin literature, informed the urban endeavors of Rome.
Paperback November 2007

Flaubert

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST

Frederick Brown
Brown brings his subject remarkably and fully to life, illuminating not only the novelist but also his milieu--the Paris and Normandy of the revolution of 1848 and of the Second Empire--with arresting clarity and a deepening sense of Flaubert's time and place. Flaubert is a sophisticated, thorough, and utterly absorbing re-creation of the life and times of the man who is arguably the architect of the modern novel.
Paperback November 2007

History of Venice, Volume 1, Books I-IV

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST

Pietro Bembo
Edited and translated by Robert W. Ulery
Pietro Bembo (1470-1547), a Venetian nobleman, later a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, was the most celebrated Latin stylist of his day and was widely admired for his writings in Italian as well. The History of Venice was published after Bembo's death, in Latin and in his own Italian version. This edition, in a projected three volumes, makes it available for the first time in English translation.
Hardcover November 2007

History of the Florentine People, Volume 3, Books IX-XII. Memoirs

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST

Leonardo Bruni
Edited and translated by James Hankins
Translated by D. J. W. Bradley
Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444) was the best-selling author of the fifteenth century. His History of the Florentine People is generally considered the first modern work of history. This third volume concludes the edition, the first to make the work available in English translation. It includes Bruni's Memoirs, an autobiographical account of the events of his lifetime, and cumulative indexes to the complete work.
Hardcover November 2007

Hunger

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST

James Vernon
Rigorously researched, Hunger: A Modern History draws together social, cultural, and political history, to show us how we came to have a moral, political, and social responsibility toward the hungry. Vernon forcefully reminds us how many perished from hunger in the empire and reveals how their history was intricately connected with the precarious achievements of the welfare state in Britain, as well as with the development of international institutions committed to the conquest of world hunger.
Hardcover November 2007

LBJ

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST

Randall B. Woods
A distinguished historian of twentieth-century America, Woods offers a wholesale reappraisal and sweeping, authoritative account of the life of one of the most fascinating and complex U.S. presidents.
Paperback November 2007

Possessing the Pacific

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST

Stuart Banner
Banner tells the story of colonial settlement in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Tonga, Hawaii, California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska. Possessing the Pacific is an original and broadly conceived study of how colonial struggles over land still shape the relations between whites and indigenous people throughout much of the world.
Hardcover November 2007

Twin Tollans

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST

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

Burning to Read

Fri, 23 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST

James Simpson
Amid present-day conflagrations, this illuminating book reminds us of the sources, and profound consequences, of Christian fundamentalism in the sixteenth century. Simpson focuses on the cultural transformation in early modern England that allowed common people to read the Bible for the first time. The last wave of fundamentalist reading in the West provoked 150 years of violent upheaval; as we approach a second wave, this powerful book alerts us to our peril.
Hardcover November 2007

Dumbarton Oaks Papers 60

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST

Edited by Alice-Mary Talbot
Volume 60 of this annual journal explores a range of Byzantine subjects: the classification of stamping objects, the date and purpose of the construction of Constantinople's church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus, the Coptic Church's literary construction of its identity in post-conquest Egypt, the evidence for the tenth-century revision of the so-called Chronicle of 811, an unusual development in the iconography of St. Menas, and versions of Niketas Choniates' History.
Hardcover November 2007

The Echo of Battle

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST

Brian McAllister Linn
From Lexington and Gettysburg to Normandy and Iraq, wars have defined the United States. But after the guns fall silent, the army searches the lessons of past conflicts, developing the strategies, weapons, doctrines, and commanders that it hopes will guarantee future victory. Linn surveys the past assumptions--and errors--that underlie the army's many visions of warfare up to the present day.
Hardcover November 2007

The Betrayal of Faith

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EDT

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

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EDT

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

Competition over Content

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Hilde De Weerdt
Analyzing textbooks, examination questions and essays, and official and private commentary, De Weerdt examines how occupational, political, and intellectual groups shaped curricular standards and examination criteria during the Southern Song dynasty (1127-1279), and how examination standards in turn shaped political and intellectual agendas. These questions reframe the debate about the civil service examinations and their place in the imperial order.
Hardcover October 2007

Flag Wars and Stone Saints

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Nancy M. Wingfield
In a new perspective on the formation of national identity in Central Europe, Wingfield analyzes what many historians have treated separately--the construction of the Czech and German nations--as a larger single phenomenon. Numerous illustrations show how people absorbed, on many levels, visual clues that shaped how they identified themselves and their groups.
Hardcover October 2007

Provincial Patriots

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Stephen R. Platt
From the Taiping Rebellion to the Chinese Communist movement, no province in China gave rise to as many reformers, military officers, and revolutionaries as did Hunan. Platt offers the first comprehensive study of why this province wielded such disproportionate influence. By putting provincial Hunan at the center of this narrative, Platt uncovers an unexpected and surprising story of modern China that sheds light on the current resurgence of regionalism in the country.
Hardcover October 2007

Washington from the Ground Up

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EDT

James H. S. McGregor
At the confluence of the Potomac and Anacostia rivers, President Washington chose a diamond-shaped site for the city that would bear his name, along with the burdens and blessings of democracy. Moving chronologically and geographically throughout the District, McGregor tells a tale of two cities: official Washington, whose stately neoclassical buildings expressed the government's power and global reach; and DC, whose minority communities, especially African Americans, lived in the shadows of poverty.
Hardcover October 2007

Witchfinders

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Malcolm Gaskill
In 1645, two obscure gentlemen, Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne, exploited the anxiety and lawlessness of the time and initiated a brutal campaign to drive out the presumed evil in their midst. Malcolm Gaskill retells the chilling story of the most savage witch-hunt in English history. By the autumn of 1647 at least 250 people--mostly women--had been captured, interrogated, and hauled before the courts, with more than a hundred hanged.
Paperback October 2007

Among Empires

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Charles S. Maier
This elegantly written book examines the structure and impact of empires and asks whether the United States shares their traits and behavior. Charles S. Maier outlines the essentials of empire throughout history, then explores the exercise of U.S. power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With learning, dispassion, and clarity, Among Empires offers bold comparisons and an original account of American power.
Paperback October 2007

Divided by Faith

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Benjamin J. Kaplan
Can people coexist in peace when their basic beliefs are irreconcilable? Kaplan responds by taking us back to early modern Europe, when the issue of religious toleration was no less pressing than it is today. Divided by Faith is both history from the bottom up and a much-needed challenge to our belief in the triumph of reason over faith. This compelling story reveals that toleration has taken many guises in the past and suggests that it may well do the same in the future.
Hardcover October 2007

The Middle East under Rome

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Maurice Sartre
Translated by Catherine Porter
Translated by Elizabeth Rawlings
Sartre has written a long overdue and comprehensive history of the Semitic Near East (modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel) from the eve of the Roman conquest to the end of the third century C.E. and the dramatic rise of Christianity. His broad yet finely detailed perspective takes in all aspects of this history, not just the political and military, but economic, social, cultural, and religious developments as well.
Paperback October 2007

Pull

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Pamela Walker Laird
In retelling success stories from Benjamin Franklin to Andrew Carnegie to Bill Gates, Laird goes beyond personality, upbringing, and social skills to reveal the critical common key--access to circles that control and distribute opportunity and information. She contrasts how Americans have prospered--or not--with how we have talked about prospering.
Paperback October 2007

The Roman Triumph

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Mary Beard
A radical reexamination of the most extraordinary of ancient ceremonies, this book explores the magnificence of the Roman Triumph--but also its darker side. The Triumph, Beard contends, prompted the Romans to question as well as celebrate military glory. Her richly illustrated work is a testament to the profound importance of the triumph in Roman culture--and for monarchs, dynasts and generals ever since.
Hardcover October 2007

The Wehrmacht

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Wolfram Wette
Translated by Deborah Lucas Schneider
This book is a profound reexamination of the role of the German army, the Wehrmacht, in World War II. Until very recently, the standard story avowed that the ordinary German soldier in World War II was a good soldier, distinct from Hitler's rapacious SS troops, and not an accomplice to the massacres of civilians. Wolfram Wette, a preeminent German military historian, explodes the myth of a "clean" Wehrmacht with devastating clarity.
Paperback October 2007

The Death of Socrates

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Emily Wilson
Socrates's death in 399 BCE has figured largely in our world ever since, shaping how we think about heroism and celebrity, religion and family life, state control and individual freedom, the distance of intellectual life from daily activity--many of the key coordinates of Western culture. In this book, Wilson analyzes the enormous and enduring power the trial and death of Socrates has exerted over the Western imagination.
Hardcover October 2007

Et Tu, Brute?

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Greg Woolf
Beginning with Caesar's legendary political assassination, immortalized in art and literature through the ages, Woolf delivers a remarkable meditation on Caesar's murder as it echoes down the corridors of history, affecting notions and acts of political violence to our day.
Hardcover October 2007

From Egypt to Babylon

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Paul Collins
For those who believe that globalization is a purely modern phenomenon, this book holds a startling and absorbing lesson. Readers are immersed in a world of exotic empires and states as they waxed and waned and interacted in a period of extraordinary internationalism—all before the rise of the Persian Empire.
Hardcover October 2007

The Highly Civilized Man

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Dane Kennedy
Though best remembered as an adventurer who entered Mecca in disguise and sought the source of the White Nile, Richard Burton contributed so forcefully to his generation that he provides us with a singularly panoramic perspective on the world of the Victorians. Engagingly written and vigorously argued, this book is an important contribution to our understanding of a remarkable man and a crucial era.
Paperback October 2007

Slicing the Silence

Mon, 1 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Tom Griffiths
From Scott and Shackleton to sled dogs and penguins, stories of Antarctica seize our imagination. In December 2002, environmental historian Tom Griffiths set sail with the Australian Antarctic Division to deliver the new team of winterers. In this beautifully written book, he reflects on the history of human experiences in Antarctica, taking the reader on a journey of discovery, exploration, and adventure in an unforgettable land.
Hardcover October 2007

Ancient Religions

Sun, 30 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Sarah Iles Johnston, General Editor
Religious beliefs and practices, which permeated all aspects of life in antiquity, traveled well-worn routes throughout the Mediterranean: itinerant charismatic practitioners peddled their skills as healers, purifiers, cursers, and initiators; and vessels decorated with illustrations of myths traveled with them. This collection of essays, drawn from the groundbreaking reference work Religion in the Ancient World, offers an expansive, comparative perspective on this complex spiritual world.
Paperback September 2007

Blood of Brothers

Sun, 30 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EDT

With New Afterword
Stephen Kinzer
Foreword by Merilee S. Grindle
Widely considered the best-connected journalist in Central America, Kinzer personally met and interviewed people at every level of the Somoza, Sandinistas and contra hierarchies, as well as dissidents, heads of state, and countless ordinary citizens. Blood of Brothers is Kinzer's dramatic story of the centuries-old power struggle that burst into the headlines in 1979 with the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship, as well as a vibrant portrait of the Nicaraguan people.
Paperback September 2007

From Comrade to Citizen

Sun, 30 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Merle Goldman
A leading scholar of China's modern political development examines the changing relationship between the Chinese people and the state. Correcting the conventional view of China as having instituted extraordinary economic changes but having experienced few political reforms in the post-Mao period, Merle Goldman details efforts by individuals and groups to assert their political rights.
Paperback September 2007

From Foot Soldier to Finance Minister

Sun, 30 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Richard J. Smethurst
From his birth into the lowest stratum of the samurai class to his assassination at the hands of right-wing militarists, Takahashi Korekiyo (1854-1936) lived through tumultuous times that shaped the course of modern Japan. This engaging biography underscores the profound influence of the charismatic seven-time finance minister on the political and economic development of Japan by casting new light on his unusual background, unique talents, and singular experiences.
Hardcover September 2007

Ireland

Sun, 30 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Gustave de Beaumont
Introduction by Tom Garvin
Introduction by Andreas Hess
In Ireland, Gustave de Beaumont chronicles the history of the Irish and offers up a national portrait on the eve of the Great Famine. This rediscovered masterpiece includes an introduction on Beaumont and his world. This volume also presents Beaumont's impassioned preface in which he portrays the appalling effects of the Great Famine. A classic of nineteenth-century political and social commentary, Beaumont's singular portrait offers the compelling immediacy of an eyewitness to history.
Paperback September 2007

Laws of Men and Laws of Nature

Sun, 30 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Tal Golan
Are scientific expert witnesses partisans, or spokesmen for objective science? This ambiguity has troubled the relations between scientists and the legal system for more than 200 years. With deep learning and wry humor, Tal Golan tells stories of courtroom drama and confusion and media jeering on both sides of the Atlantic, until the start of the twenty-first century, as the courts still search for ways that will allow them to distinguish between good and bad science.
Paperback September 2007

A New Deal for the World

Sun, 30 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Elizabeth Borgwardt
In a work of sweeping scope and luminous detail, Elizabeth Borgwardt describes how a cadre of World War II American planners inaugurated the ideas and institutions that underlie our modern international human rights regime. Borgwardt finds the key in the 1941 Atlantic Charter and its Anglo-American vision of "war and peace aims." In attempting to globalize what U.S. planners heralded as domestic New Deal ideas about security, the ideology of the Atlantic Charter redefined human rights and America's vision for the world.
Paperback September 2007

That Neutral Island

Sun, 30 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Clair Wills
When the world descended into war in 1939, few European countries remained neutral; but of those that did, none provoked more controversy than Ireland. Where previous histories of Ireland in the war years have focused on high politics, That Neutral Island mines deeper layers of experience. Stories, letters, and diaries illuminate this small country as it suffered rationing, censorship, the threat of invasion, and a strange detachment from the war.
Hardcover September 2007

That the World May Know

Sun, 30 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EDT

James Dawes
What can we do to prevent more atrocities from happening in the future, and to stop the ones that are happening right now? That the World May Know tells the powerful and moving story of the successes and failures of the modern human rights movement. Drawing on firsthand accounts from fieldworkers around the world, the book gives a painfully clear picture of the human cost of confronting inhumanity in our day.
Hardcover September 2007

The Murder of Regilla

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EDT

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

1812

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Jon Latimer
In the first complete history of the War of 1812 written from a British perspective, Latimer offers an authoritative and compelling account that places the conflict in its strategic context within the Napoleonic wars. Drawing on personal letters, diaries, and memoirs, Latimer describes events not merely through the eyes of generals, admirals, and politicians but through those of the soldiers, sailors, and ordinary people who were directly affected.
Hardcover September 2007

Maize and Grace

Sat, 15 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EDT

James C. McCann
Sometime around 1500 A.D., an African farmer planted a maize seed imported from the New World. That act set in motion the remarkable saga of one of the world's most influential crops--one that would transform the future of Africa and of the Atlantic world. The recent spread of maize has been alarmingly fast, with implications largely overlooked by the media and policymakers. McCann's compelling history offers insight into the profound influence of a single crop on African culture, health, technological innovation, and the future of the world's food supply.
Paperback September 2007

A Nation of Counterfeiters

Sat, 15 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Stephen Mihm
Prior to the Civil War, the United States did not have a single, national currency. Counterfeiters flourished amid this anarchy, putting vast quantities of bogus bills into circulation. Their success, Mihm reveals, is more than an entertaining tale of criminal enterprise: it is the story of the rise of a country defined by freewheeling capitalism and little government control. Mihm shows how eventually the older monetary system was dismantled, along with the counterfeit economy it sustained.
Hardcover September 2007

Normalization of U.S.-China Relations

Sat, 15 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Edited by William C. Kirby
Edited by Robert S. Ross
Edited by Gong Li
Relations between China and the United States have been of central importance to both countries over the past half-century, as well as to all states affected by that relationship. The eight chapters in this volume offer the first multinational, multi-archival review of the history of Chinese-American conflict and cooperation in the 1970s.
Paperback September 2007