Harvard University Press Reference Library

In 11 comprehensive essays and over 500 encyclopedic entries, an international cast of experts provides the latest scholarship and fresh perspectives on the history and culture of late antiquity, an era marked by the rise of two world religions, unprecedented political upheavals, and the creation of art of enduring glory.

This compact guide to the history and performance of music is an authoritative reference work, offering definitions of musical terms; succinct characterizations of the various forms of musical composition; entries that identify individual operas, oratorios, symphonic poems, and other works; illustrated descriptions of instruments; and capsule summaries of the lives and careers of composers, performers, and theorists. Like its distinguished parent volumes, The Harvard Concise Dictionary of Music and Musicians provides clearly written information on all periods in music history, with particularly comprehensive coverage of the twentieth century.

Ancient Greek thought is the essential wellspring from which the intellectual, ethical, and political civilization of the West draws and to which, even today, we repeatedly return. In more than sixty essays by an international team of scholars, this volume explores the full breadth and reach of Greek thought—investigating what the Greeks knew as well as what they thought about what they knew, and what they believed, invented, and understood about the conditions and possibilities of knowing.

This landmark guide covers research into every aspect of African-American life and work, offering a compendium of information and interpretation about almost 400 years of African-Americans’s experiences as an ethnic group and as Americans. A companion CD-ROM makes more than 15,000 bibliography entries available for computer searching.

This exhaustive resource offers information on everything from adolescent acne to menopause in the belief that better-informed women can have better partnerships with their physicians.

Religious beliefs and practices, which permeated all aspects of life in antiquity, traveled well-worn routes throughout the Mediterranean. New gods encountered by travelers abroad were sometimes taken home to be adapted and adopted. This first basic reference work on the topic offers an expansive, comparative perspective.

The United States has always been a nation of immigrants, shaped by successive waves of new arrivals. This comprehensive guide, edited and written by an interdisciplinary group of prominent scholars, provides an authoritative account of the most recent surge of immigrants. Based on the latest U.S. Census data and scholarly research, The New Americans is an essential reference for anyone curious about the changing face of America.

Covering more than 50 central terms and concepts in entries written by leading experts, this book offers an overview of this new subdiscipline of biology, providing the core insights and ideas that show how embryonic development relates to life-history evolution, adaptation, and responses to and integration with environmental factors.

From the earliest magical charms and mythical sagas to the brilliance and desolation of 20th-century fiction, poetry, and film, this illuminating reference book invites readers to experience the full range of German literary culture and to investigate for themselves its disparate and unifying themes.

This classic reference work, the best one-volume music dictionary available, has been brought completely up to date in this new edition. Combining authoritative scholarship and lucid, lively prose, the Fourth Edition of The Harvard Dictionary of Music is the essential guide for musicians, students, and everyone who appreciates music.

Did you know that you are more closely related to a mushroom than to a daisy? That dinosaurs are still among us? That the terms “fish” and “invertebrates” do not indicate scientific groupings? All this is the result of major changes in classification, whose methods have been totally revisited over the last thirty years. This book diagrams the tree of life according to the most recent methods of classification.

America is a nation making itself up as it goes along—a story of discovery and invention unfolding in speeches and images, letters and poetry, unprecedented feats of scholarship and imagination. In more than 200 original essays, this history brings together the nation’s many voices.

The legacy of ancient Greece and Rome has been imitated, resisted, misunderstood, and reworked by every culture that followed. In this volume, some five hundred articles by a wide range of scholars investigate the afterlife of this rich heritage in the fields of literature, philosophy, art, architecture, history, politics, religion, and science.