Video Archive

Mehrsa Baradaran discusses How the Other Half Banks:

Ethan B. Katz discusses The Burdens of Brotherhood:

In this excerpt from the 2012 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures collected in Six Drawing Lessons, visual artist William Kentridge asks whether, through art, we can escape who we really are.

In The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding, Eric Nelson argues for a radical new understanding of the American Revolution.

Thomas Piketty describes the dynamics driving the accumulation and distribution of capital, which he analyzes in Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

In Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe, Matthew Pratt Guterl describes a fading star’s political quest to make a family from the troublesome material of race.

In The Americanization of Narcissism, author Elizabeth Lunbeck tracks the decades-long transformation of narcissism from a complex Freudian concept to a master term of 1970s social critique.

In The Fissured Workplace: Why Work Became So Bad for So Many and What Can Be Done to Improve It, David Weil details the proliferation of organizational layers between employers and workers.

In Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals across Empire, Kris Manjapra describes the fateful 19th and 20th century period in which German and Indian thinkers came to see themselves in each other.

In The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman, Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert introduce non-Indians to the shamanic way.

Lila Abu-Lughod describes the Western “crusade” she challenges in Do Muslim Women Need Saving?

Sunil S. Amrith outlines the layered pasts he unearths in Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants.

In Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation, Estelle B. Freedman describes the forces that have shaped the meaning of sexual violence in the U.S.

In The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler, historian Ben Urwand reveals the compromises Hollywood made to maintain its business in 1930s Germany.

Algerian Chronicles, introduced by Alice Kaplan, represents Albert Camus’ final attempt to address “the Algerian question.”

John Edward Huth discusses The Lost Art of Finding Our Way.

In The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite, Mark S. Mizruchi explains the diminished social and politcal leadership of the chiefs of major American corporations.

In The People’s Car: A Global History of the Volkswagen Beetle, Bernhard Rieger traces the VW Beetle’s improbable rise from failed prestige project of the Third Reich to global icon.

In Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self, Gish Jen describes competing modes of selfhood and how they can influence art.

Walter Johnson places the Cotton Kingdom at the center of worldwide webs of exchange and exploitation in River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom.

In American Umpire, Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman offers a powerful new framework for assessing America’s role in the world.

Thane Gustafson on Wheel of Fortune: The Battle for Oil and Power in Russia.

Monica Prasad discusses The Land of Too Much: American Abundance and the Paradox of Poverty.

Edward N. Luttwak questions the common conception of China’s inexorable ascent, as laid out in The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy.

Craig B. Stanford describes the threats facing the great apes, our closest primate relatives, and the tragic prospect of a Planet Without Apes.

W. Jeffrey Bolster describes his focus in The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail: the changes that humans have caused in the sea.

Angus Burgin discusses neoliberal consideration of the ethical role the marketplace, as laid out in The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression.

In Underdogs: The Making of the Modern Marine Corps, Aaron B. O’Connell outlines how a strong sense of identity has enabled the Corps to exert a powerful influence on American politics and culture.

George E. Vaillant discusses Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study, which details the late-life findings of the the longest longitudinal study of human development ever undertaken.

James Q. Whitman explains his argument in The Verdict of Battle: The Law of Victory and the Making of Modern War—that the unbridled bloodshed of pitched battle actually served to contain the violence of war.

Paul Lockhart, author of Measurement, discusses the pleasures and frustrations—but mostly the pleasures—of doing math.

Editor Mark Ford describes the process of collecting the most evocative, representative, and iconic poetry about London for London: A History in Verse.

Kenneth W. Mack, author of Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer, describes the paradox of being expected to represent one’s race while also standing apart from it.

Editor Andrew J. Bacevich describes the impetus behind The Short American Century: A Postmortem, a new collection of essays on the age of reputed American preeminence.

Eliga H. Gould presents his argument in Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire—that the founding of the United States was a bid for inclusion in the community of nations as it existed in 1776.

Joan Houston Hall, Chief Editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English, and Erin McKean, founder of Wordnik, explain the history and significance of this authoritative record of American English.

Robin D.G. Kelley describes how Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times, a collective biography of four jazz musicians from the U.S. and Africa, helps us to understand how musical convergences and crossings altered the politics and culture of both continents.

Rebecca J. Scott outlines the multigenerational quest for freedom and respect that she presents with co-author Jean M. Hébrard in Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak explains the radical reorientation in her thinking presented in An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, her new collection of essays on theory, translation, Marxism, gender, and world literature.

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