Böcker utgivna av Harvard University Press

Ira Berlin offers a framework for understanding slavery's demise in the United States. Emancipation was not an occasion but a century-long process of brutal struggle by generations of African Americans who were not naive about the price of freedom. Just as slavery was initiated and maintained by violence, undoing slavery also required violence.

The United States has two separate banking systems-one serving the well-to-do and another exploiting everyone else. Deserted by banks and lacking credit, many people are forced to wander through a Wild West of payday lenders and check-cashing services thanks to the effects of deregulation in the 1970s that continue today, Mehrsa Baradaran shows.

Headlines from France suggest that the country's Jews and Muslims are inevitably at odds. But the past tells a different story. In this sweeping history from World War I to the present, Ethan Katz shows that Jewish-Muslim relations were more complex, shaped by everyday encounters and perceptions of deeply rooted similarities as well as differences.

In a culture of the Self that has become progressively more skeptical and materialistic, we spare little thought for the great ideals--courage, contemplation, and compassion--that once gave life meaning. Here, Mark Edmundson makes an impassioned attempt to defend the value of these ancient ideals and to resurrect Soul in the modern world.

Tamar Herzog offers a road map to European law across 2,500 years that reveals underlying patterns and unexpected connections. By showing what European law was, where its iterations were found, who made and implemented it, and what the results were, she ties legal norms to their historical circumstances and reveals the law's fragile malleability.

During a 3-year 8-nation journey, Michael Ignatieff found that while human rights is the language of states and liberal elites, the moral language that resonates with most people is that of everyday virtues: tolerance, forgiveness, trust, and resilience. These ordinary virtues are the moral system of global cities and obscure shantytowns alike.

For many westerners, the veil is the ultimate sign of women's oppression. But Elizabeth Bucar's take on Muslim women's clothing is a far cry from this attitude. She invites readers to join her in three Muslim-majority nations as she surveys pious fashion from head to toe and shows how Muslim women approach the question What to wear? with style.

Focusing on ordinary Mexicans and Americans, Peter Guardino offers a clearer picture than we have ever had of the brief, bloody war that redrew the map of North America. He shows how dramatically U.S. forces underestimated Mexicans' patriotism, fierce resistance, and bitter resentment of American claims to national and racial superiority.

Paul Lockhart reveals arithmetic not as the rote manipulation of numbers but as a set of ideas that exhibit the surprising behaviors usually reserved for higher branches of mathematics. In this entertaining survey, he explores the nature of counting and different number systems-Western and non-Western-and weighs the pluses and minuses of each.

Idealization is a basic feature of human thought. We proceed as if our representations were true, while knowing they are not. Kwame Anthony Appiah defends the centrality of the imagination in science, morality, and everyday life and shows that our best chance for accessing reality is to open our minds to a plurality of idealized depictions.

When Europeans arrived in North America, the average global temperature had dropped to lows unseen in millennia and its effects-famine, starvation, desperation, and violence-were stark among colonists unprepared to fend for themselves. This history of the Little Ice Age in North America reminds us of the risks of a changing and unfamiliar climate.

In 1863 black communities owned less than 1 percent of total U.S. wealth. Today that number has barely budged. Mehrsa Baradaran pursues this wealth gap by focusing on black banks. She challenges the myth that black banking is the solution to the racial wealth gap and argues that black communities can never accumulate wealth in a segregated economy.

Policy is government's response to changing times, the key to its successful adaptation. It tackles problems as they arise, from foreign relations and economic affairs to race relations and family affairs. Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek take a close look at this well-known reality of modern governance: the expanded domain of the policy state."

For Raymond Geuss, philosophers' attempts to bypass normal ways of thinking-to point out that the question being asked is itself misguided-represents philosophy at its best. By provoking people to think differently, philosophers make clear that we are not fated to live within the stifling systems of thought we inherit. We can change the subject.

One of history's most multifaceted rulers but little known in the West, Queen Njinga rivaled Elizabeth I and Catherine the Great in political cunning and military prowess. Today, she is revered in Angola as a heroine and honored in folk religions. Her complex legacy forms a crucial part of the collective memory of the Afro-Atlantic world.

In 1918 the U.S. Army Signal Corps sent 223 women to France to help win World War I. Elizabeth Cobbs reveals the challenges these patriotic young women faced in a war zone where male soldiers resented, wooed, mocked, saluted, and ultimately celebrated them. Back on the home front, they fought the army for veterans' benefits and medals, and won.

Robert Thorson gives readers a Thoreau for the Anthropocene. The boatman and backyard naturalist was keenly aware of the way humans had altered the waterways and meadows of his beloved Concord River Valley. Yet he sought out for solace and pleasure those river sites most dramatically altered by human invention and intervention for better and worse.

The event known as the Boston Massacre is among the most familiar in U.S. history, yet one of the least understood. Eric Hinderaker revisits this dramatic episode, examining the facts of that fateful night, the competing narratives that molded public perceptions, and the long campaign to transform the tragedy into a touchstone of American identity.

In summer 1969, astronauts landed on the moon and hippie hordes descended on Woodstock two era-defining events that are not entirely coincidental. Neil M. Maher shows how NASA's celestial aspirations were tethered to terrestrial concerns of the time: the civil rights struggle, the antiwar movement, environmentalism, feminism, and the culture wars.

Yascha Mounk shows why a focus on personal responsibility is wrong and counterproductive: it distracts us from the larger economic forces determining aggregate outcomes, ignores what we owe fellow citizens regardless of their choices, and blinds us to key values such as the desire to live in a society of equals. In this book he proposes a remedy.

Cornelia Dean draws on her 30 years as a science journalist with the New York Times to expose the flawed reasoning and knowledge gaps that handicap readers when they try to make sense of science. She calls attention to conflicts of interest in research and the price society pays when science journalism declines and funding dries up.

Number concepts are a human invention developed and refined over millennia. They allow us to grasp quantities precisely: recent research shows that most specific quantities are not perceived in the absence of a number system. Numbers are not innate or universal; yet without them, the world as we know it would not exist.

Tera W. Hunter offers the first comprehensive history of African American marriage in the nineteenth century and into the Jim Crow era. She reveals the practical ways couples adopted, adapted, or rejected white Christian ideas of marriage, creatively setting their own standards for conjugal relationships under conditions of uncertainty and cruelty.

Little is known about sixth-century Arabia. Yet from this distant time and place emerged a faith and an empire that stretched from Iberia to India. G. W. Bowersock illuminates this obscure yet most dynamic period in Islam, exploring why arid Arabia proved to be fertile ground for Muhammad's message and why it spread so quickly to the wider world.

As Cemil Aydin explains in this provocative history, it is a misconception to think that the world's 1.5 billion Muslims constitute a single religio-political entity. How did this mistaken belief arise, why is it so widespread, and how can its grip be loosened so that a more fruitful discussion about politics in Muslim societies can begin?

Modern transparency dates to the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s--well before the Internet. Michael Schudson shows how the "right to know" has defined a new era for democracy--less focus on parties and elections, more pluralism and more players, year-round monitoring of government, and a blurring line between politics and society, public and private.

Historian David Moss adapts the case study method made famous by Harvard Business School to revitalize our conversations about governance and democracy and show how the United States has often thrived on political conflict. These 19 cases ask us to weigh choices and consequences, wrestle with momentous decisions, and come to our own conclusions.