Böcker utgivna av Harvard University Press

Despite claims that written exams narrowed the curriculum, ruined children’s health, and turned teachers into automatons, once tests took root in American schools their legitimacy was never seriously challenged. William Reese puts today’s battles over standards and benchmarks into perspective by showcasing the history of the pencil-and-paper exam.

Unlike his contemporaries, who saw Europe’s prosperity as confirmation of a utopian future, the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher Adam Ferguson saw a reminder of Rome’s lesson that egalitarian democracy could become a self-undermining path to dictatorship. This is a major reassessment of a critic overshadowed today by David Hume and Adam Smith.

Writing War examines over two hundred diaries, and many more letters, postcards, and memoirs, written by Chinese, Japanese, and American servicemen in the Pacific from 1937 to 1945. As he describes conflicts that have often been overlooked by historians, Aaron William Moore reflects on diaries as tools in the construction of modern identity.

In an era of anxiety about the safety and industrialization of the food supply, kosher food—with $12 billion in sales—is big business. Timothy Lytton tells a story of successful private-sector regulation: how independent certification agencies rescued U.S. kosher supervision from corruption and made it a model of nongovernmental administration.

Diem’s alliance with Washington has long been seen as a Cold War relationship gone bad, undone by either American arrogance or Diem’s stubbornness. Edward Miller argues that this misalliance was more than just a joint effort to contain communism. It was also a means for each side to shrewdly pursue its plans for nation building in South Vietnam.

Gregory Light and Marina Micari reject the view that science, technology, engineering, and mathematics are elite disciplines restricted to a small number with innate talent. Rich in concrete advice, Making Scientists offers a new paradigm of how scientific subjects can be taught at the college level to underrepresented groups.

Understanding “what something is” has long occupied philosophers, and no Western thinker has had more influence on the nature of being than Aristotle. Focusing on a reinterpretation of the concept of energeia as “activity,” Aryeh Kosman reexamines Aristotle’s ontology and some of our most basic assumptions about the great philosopher’s thought.

The Tragedy of a Generation is the story of a failed ideal: an autonomous Jewish nation in Europe. It traces the origins of two influential strains of Jewish thought—Yiddishism and Diaspora Nationalism—and documents the waning hopes and painful reassessments of their leading representatives against the rising tide of Nazism and the Holocaust.

In the “Thaw” following Stalin’s death, probing conversations about the nation’s violent past took place in the literary journal Novyi mir (New World). Readers’ letters reveal that discussion of the Terror was central to intellectual and political life during the USSR’s last decades. Denis Kozlov shows how minds change, even in a closed society.

Animal Kingdoms reveals the far-reaching cultural, political, and environmental importance of hunting in colonial India. Julie E. Hughes explores how Indian princes relied on their prowess as hunters of prized game to advance personal status, solidify power, and establish links with the historic battlefields and legendary deeds of their ancestors.

When Gandhi as a young lawyer in South Africa began fashioning the tenets of his political philosophy, he was absorbed by a seemingly unrelated enterprise: creating a newspaper, Indian Opinion. In Gandhi’s Printing Press Isabel Hofmeyr provides an account of how this footnote to a career shaped the man who would become the world-changing Mahatma.

Christian Joppke and John Torpey show how four liberal democracies—France, Germany, Canada, and the U.S.—have responded to the challenge of integrating Muslim populations. Demonstrating the centrality of the legal system to this process, they argue that institutional barriers to integration are no greater on one side of the Atlantic than the other.

Wenkai He shows why England and Japan, facing crises in public finance, developed the tools and institutions of a modern fiscal state, while China, facing similar circumstances, did not. He’s explanation for China’s failure at a critical moment illuminates one of the most important but least understood transformations of the modern world.

At his death in 2010, the Anglo-American analytic philosopher John Haugeland left an unfinished manuscript summarizing his life-long engagement with Heidegger’s Being and Time. As illuminating as it is iconoclastic, Dasein Disclosed is not just Haugeland’s Heidegger—this sweeping reevaluation is a major contribution to philosophy in its own right.

In the bloodiest conflict Europe had ever experienced, Amalia Elisabeth fought to save her tiny German state, her Calvinist church, and her children’s inheritance. Tryntje Helfferich reveals how this embattled ruler used diplomacy to play the European powers against one another, while raising one of the continent’s most effective fighting forces.

Recognized as modern China’s preeminent man of letters, Lu Xun (1881–1936) is revered as the nation’s conscience, a writer comparable to Shakespeare or Tolstoy. Gloria Davies’s vivid portrait gives readers a better sense of this influential author by situating the man Mao Zedong hailed as “the sage of modern China” in his turbulent time and place.

A leading interpreter of modernity argues that our culture of limitless self-fulfillment is making millions mentally ill. Training her analytic eye on manic depression and schizophrenia, Liah Greenfeld, in the culminating volume of her trilogy on nationalism, traces these dysfunctions to society’s overburdening demands for self-realization.

As Protestantism expanded across the Atlantic, most evangelists were not Anglo-Americans but were members of the groups that missionaries were trying to convert. Native Apostles reveals the way Native Americans, Africans, and black slaves redefined Christianity and addressed the challenges of slavery, dispossession, and European settlement.

The People’s Bank of China surpasses the Federal Reserve as the world’s biggest central bank. In the first comprehensive account of the evolution of central banking and monetary policy in reform China, Stephen Bell and Hui Feng show how the PBC’s authority grew from a Leninist party-state that once jealously guarded its control.

In an era of skyrocketing tuition and concern over whether college is “worth it,” Paying for the Party is an indispensable contribution to the dialogue assessing the state of American higher education. A powerful exposé of unmet obligations and misplaced priorities, it explains in detail why so many leave college with so little to show for it.

A Physics World Top Ten Book of 2010Steven Weinberg, considered by many to be the preeminent theoretical physicist alive today, continues the wide-ranging reflections that have also earned him a reputation as, in the words of New York Times reporter James Glanz, "e;a powerful writer of prose that can illuminate-and sting."e;

Hartog tells the heartbreaking stories of how families fought over the work of caring for the elderly, and its compensation, in a time before pensions, Social Security, and nursing homes filled this gap. As an explosive economy drew the young away from home, we see how the elderly used promises of inheritance to keep children at their side.

A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year A New Republic Best Book of the YearFinalist, National Jewish Book AwardSir Moses Montefiore (1784-1885) was the preeminent Jewish figure of the nineteenth century-and one of the first truly global celebrities. His story, told here in full for the first time, is a remarkable and illuminating tale.

One Quarter of Humanity presents evidence about historical and contemporary Chinese population behavior that overturns much of the received wisdom about the differences between China and the West. James Lee and Wang Feng argue that there has been effective regulation of population growth in China through a variety of practices that depressed marital fertility to levels far below European standards, and through the widespread practices of infanticide and abortion. These practices and other distinctive features of the Chinese demographic and social system, they argue, led to a different demographic transition in China from the one that took place in the West.

No historical event has left as deep an imprint on America's collective memory as the Civil War. In the war's aftermath, Americans had to embrace and cast off a traumatic past. David Blight explores the perilous path of remembering and forgetting, and reveals its tragic costs to race relations and America's national reunion.

Mountaineering has served as a metaphor for civilization triumphant. A fascinating study of the first ascents of the major Alpine peaks and Mt. Everest, The Summits of Modern Man reveals the significance of our encounters with the world's most forbidding heights and how difficult it is to imagine nature in terms other than conquest and domination.

There is more to the story of mass incarceration than civil rights backlash politics. It is also a religious story. Aaron Griffith points to the key role played by evangelical Christians, who worked for conversion of prisoners and pushed an anticrime agenda that, while ostensibly colorblind, exacerbated racial inequality in the justice system.

Economists say there is a limit to what we gain by buying consumer goods. Americans say they want to work less. Yet we continue toiling away and use the proceeds to buy, buy, buy. Why? Stephen Rosenberg offers a novel theory, arguing that workers have learned to treat goods as stores of potential free time, legitimating endless wage work.

It is no wonder literary criticism is so sullen. It is too philosophical, too much indebted to the dour Walter Benjamin, wedded to aestheticized helplessness. Lit crit needs new inspirations: the sober cheer of Wallace Stevens; the loving eye of Rembrandt; romance, melodrama, and wit. Let there be more poetry, Paul Bove says, and less cynicism.