Böcker utgivna av Harvard University Press

Are we alone in the universe? It is a captivating question, but one that historically eluded proper scientific investigation. The new discipline of astrobiology changes the game, introducing rigor to the quest for extraterrestrial life. Life in the Cosmos surveys the field, showing how cutting-edge research is closing in on the answers "out there."

The Greek war for independence (1821-1830) goes missing from the narrative of the Age of Revolutions, yet the overthrow of Ottoman rule was of profound political significance. The Greek Revolution offers short essays detailing the activities, personalities, intellectual underpinnings, and global resonances of a pivotal episode in modern history.

Tata is one of the world's most diversified companies, selling everything from salt to software. Mircea Raianu charts Tata's 150-year trajectory, through the eras of imperial free trade, protectionist nationalism, and market liberalization and asks what the future has in store for India's leading brand and for capitalism writ large.

Statistical graphing was born in the seventeenth century as a scientific tool, but it quickly escaped all disciplinary bounds. Today graphics are ubiquitous in daily life. Michael Friendly and Howard Wainer detail the history of data visualization and argue that it has not only helped us solve problems, but it has also changed the way we think.

Nancy Hill and Alexis Redding contest the accusation that today's young people are coddled and immature. Unearthing studies of college students five decades ago, the authors show that the behaviors now decried as markers of stalled development have long been typical of adolescents. Hill and Redding's advice for adults? Judge less, nurture more.

Guido Ruggiero brings readers back to Renaissance Florence, capturing how the Decameron sounded to fourteenth-century ears. Giovanni Boccaccio's masterpiece of love, sex, loyalty, and betrayal resonated amid the Black Death and the era's convulsive political change, reimagining truth and virtue in a moment both desperate and full of potential.

PHCC, 39 offers a wide range of articles on topics across the field of Celtic Studies and includes the Colloquium keynote given by Barbara Hillers on the literary use of Irish and international folklore in the Irish tale "Aislinge Meic Con Glinne" ("The Vision of Mac Con Glinne"). Other papers expand the scope as far as the early twentieth century.

Muslims in the Movies provides an introduction to the subject of Muslims and film for new readers while also serving as new works of critical analysis for scholars of cinema. This collection explores issues of identity, cultural production, and representation through the depiction of Muslims on screen and how audiences respond to these images.

Money did not become obsolete under Communism. The ruble remained a key feature of Soviet life. After World War II, money became an essential tool of the Soviet government. A strong ruble represented the nation's promise of future prosperity, but its failure to deliver improved purchasing power undermined popular confidence in Communism.

The eleventh-century monk Ekkehard IV's Fortune and Misfortune at Saint Gall chronicles the 880s to 972, near the end of the famous Swiss monastery's two-century-long golden age, bearing witness to the struggles of the tenth-century church reform movement. This volume publishes the Latin text alongside its first complete English translation.

The Byzantine Sinbad collects The Book of Syntipas the Philosopher, originally a Persian story, and the sixty-two tales of The Fables of Syntipas-both translated from Syriac in the late eleventh century by Michael Andreopoulos. This volume is the first English translation to include these texts alongside the Byzantine Greek originals.

The Renaissance was also the beginning of the Age of Empires, yet the Grand Duchy of Tuscany failed to secure overseas colonies. How did Tuscany retain its place in European affairs and intellectual life? Brian Brege explores the shrewd diplomatic moves and domestic investments that safeguarded the duchy's wealth and influence amid globalization.

Celestial Masters is the first book in any Western language devoted solely to the founding of Daoism. It traces the movement from the mid-second century CE through the sixth century, and provides a detailed analysis of ritual life within the movement, covering the roles of common believer or Daoist citizen, novice, and priest or libationer.

Alexander Des Forges reads shiwen from a literary perspective, showing how the examination essay redefined prose aesthetics, transformed the work of writing, and marked the aesthetic as a key arena for contestation of authority as candidates, examiners, and critics joined to form a dominant social class of literary producers.

Give and Take offers a new history of government in Tokugawa Japan (1600-1868), one that focuses on ordinary subjects: merchants, artisans, villagers, and people at the margins of society. Maren Ehlers explores how high and low people negotiated and collaborated with each other as they addressed the problem of poverty in early modern Japan.

Structures of the Earth is the first study of the emergent genre of geographical writing and the metageographies that structured its spatial thought during the "Age of Disunion" and continue to illuminate spatial complexities that have been incompatible with the imperial and nationalist ideal of a monolithic China at the center of the world.

To understand the 2008 financial crisis, Neil Fligstein looks to the business models of the big US banks. He shows how firms got hooked on mortgages-originating them, securitizing them, selling those securities, and even buying the same securities. In time their addiction nearly collapsed the economy.

In his reading of the Shishuo xinyu, the most important anecdotal collection of medieval China, Jack W. Chen presents an extended meditation on the anecdote form, both what it affords in terms of representing a social community and how it provides a space for the rehearsal of certain longstanding philosophical and cultural arguments.

When a young woman killed herself in the office she shared with her employer in 1920s Shanghai, the city reeled in shock. Xi Shangzhen became a symbol of the failures of the Chinese Republic as well as the broken promises of citizens' rights, gender equality, and financial prosperity that were betokened by liberal democracy and capitalism.

Esteemed philosopher Jocelyn Benoist argues for a renewed realism that takes seriously the context in which intention occurs. "What there is"-the traditional subject of metaphysics-can be determined only in context, Benoist contends, carving out a new path that rejects acontextual ontologies and approaches to the mind.

Bonnie Honig invigorates debate over the politics of refusal by insisting that withdrawal from unjust political systems be matched with collective action to change them. Historical and fictional characters from Muhammad Ali to the Bacchants of ancient Greek tragedy teach us how to turn rejection into transformative efforts toward self-governance.

UEmit Kurt explores causes and effects of the Armenian genocide in his hometown of Gaziantep, Turkey. He finds that local gentry and ordinary Turks were heavily motivated by the prospect of financial gain as Armenians were dispossessed. Newly enriched Turks then financed the young republic, elevating themselves to the status of a political elite.

Richard Pomfret documents European integration since WWII, showing that today's European Union is the product less of master planning than of responses to political and economic challenges. Nevertheless, the EU emerges as a world-historic achievement in cross-border cooperation, with a bright but challenging future.

Michael Breidenbach traces American secularism to an unexpected source: not Enlightenment liberalism but Catholic tradition. Suspected of dual loyalty, colonial American Catholics drew on the medieval doctrine of conciliarism to declare independence from the pope. Conciliarism inspired their push for toleration, shaping the nation at large.

Paris to New York shows how competition and cooperation between transatlantic designers and entrepreneurs built the groundwork of today's international fashion industry. Veronique Pouillard tells the story of the fashion business as a negotiation between art and commerce and explores the complex relationship between these iconic fashion centers.

Wordplay has been at the heart of Western literature for many centuries, and medieval riddles provide insights into the extraordinary and the everyday. The Old English and Anglo-Latin Riddle Tradition assembles, for the first time ever, an astonishing array of riddles composed before 1200 CE that continue to entertain and puzzle.

What would a plant do? It is an unusual question. But, as Beronda L. Montgomery shows, humans can learn a great deal from these organisms. Lessons from Plants unpacks the "senses" and skills of highly adaptive organisms that overcome immense challenges en route to flourishing.

Mark Edmundson finds in Walt Whitman's Song of Myself the evolution of a democratic spirit, for the individual and the nation. Breaking from the past literature he saw as "feudal"-obsessed with the noble and great-Whitman created a story of commonplace egalitarian selfhood, a story he lived as a hospital volunteer during the Civil War.

How does the outsider find community and a sense of place? Chad Bryant tells the stories of five ordinary people over two centuries who struggled to make lives in Prague, a city whose beauty masks a history of exclusionary nationalism. Exploring the tense interplay of cohesion and difference, Prague is a powerful meditation on the need to belong.

Jacqueline Mitton and Simon Mitton offer the first biography of Vera Rubin, an astronomer who made vital contributions to our understanding of dark matter. An outstanding scientist herself, Rubin also championed women in science, by mentoring, advocating for hiring women faculty, disseminating their research, and recognizing their achievements.