Harvard University Press imprint: 1080 books

When the Abbasids overthrew the Umayyads in 750 CE and ushered in Islam’s Golden Age, ideas about gender and sexuality were central to the process by which the caliphate achieved self-definition and articulated its systems of power and thought. Nadia Maria El Cheikh’s study reveals the importance of women to the writing of early Islamic history.

In the tenth century Shiˀa scholars assembled accounts of twelve imams’ lives, portraying them as miracle workers who were betrayed. These biographies invoked shared cultural memories, shaped communal responses and ritual practices of mourning, and inspired Shiˀa identity and religious imagination for centuries to come, Matthew Pierce shows.

In this story of one man’s encounter with an indigenous people of Peru, Michael Brown guides his readers upriver into a contested zone of the Amazonian frontier, where more than 50,000 Awajún—renowned for pugnacity and fierce independence—use hard-won political savvy, literacy, and digital skills to live life on their own terms, against long odds.

Why do so many evangelicals follow leaders with dubious credentials when they have other options in their own faith? Exploring intellectual authority within evangelicalism, the authors reveal how the concept of anointing—being chosen by God to speak for him—established a conservative evangelical leadership isolated from secular arts and sciences.

In the first comprehensive history of American evangelicalism to appear in a generation, Matthew Sutton shows how charismatic Protestant preachers, anticipating the end of the world, paradoxically transformed it. Narrating the story from the perspective of the faithful, he shows how apocalyptic thinking influences the American mainstream today.

From the Vikings to the EU the Baltic has been a Nordic Mediterranean, a shared maritime zone with distinct patterns of trade, cultural exchange, and conflict. Covering a thousand years in a part of the globe where seas are more connective than land, Michael North’s overview transforms the way we think about one of the world’s great waterways.

This illuminating work examines the social, cultural, political, and economic dimensions of the Communist takeover of China. Instead of dwelling on elite politics and policy-making processes, Dilemmas of Victory seeks to understand how the 1949-1953 period was experienced by various groups, including...

Maoism at the Grassroots challenges state-centered views of China under Mao, providing insights into the lives of citizens across social strata, ethnicities, and regions. It reveals how ordinary people risked persecution and imprisonment in order to assert personal beliefs and identities, despite political repression and surveillance.

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.

The twenty-first century has been dubbed the Asian Century. Highlighting diverse thinker-politicians rather than billionaire businessmen, Makers of Modern Asia presents eleven leaders who theorized and organized anticolonial movements, strategized and directed military campaigns, and designed and implemented political systems.

Baghdad: The City in Verse captures the essence of life lived in one of the world's enduring metropolises. This unusual anthology offers original translations of 170 Arabic poems from Bedouin, Muslim, Christian, Kurdish, and Jewish poets--most for the first time in English--from Baghdad's founding in the eighth century to the present day.

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.

Patrick Iber tells the story of left-wing Latin American artists, writers, and scholars who worked as diplomats, advised rulers, opposed dictators, and even led nations during the Cold War. Ultimately, they could not break free from the era’s rigid binaries, and found little room to promote their social democratic ideals without compromising them.

This succinct book is timely reading for anyone who wishes to understand the maze of science and secrecy at the heart of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Writing for the general reader, Jeremy Bernstein draws on his knowledge as a physicist to elucidate the scientific principles and technical hurdles involved in creating nuclear reactors and bombs.