Harvard University Press imprint: 1080 books

For 1,400 years, two colossal Buddhas overlooked the Bamiyan Valley on the Silk Road in Afghanistan. The Buddhas embodied the intersection of East and West, and their destruction by the Taliban in 2001 provoked international outrage. Morgan excavates the layers of meaning these vanished wonders hold for a fractured Afghanistan.

Barker tells the dramatic story of the thirty years when England ruled France at the point of a sword. Henry V’s second invasion of France in 1417 launched a campaign that would place the crown of France on an English head. The appearance of a visionary peasant girl, Joan of Arc, was able to halt the English advance, but not for long.

Robert Gildea’s penetrating history of France during World War II sweeps aside the French Resistance of a thousand clichés. Gaining a true understanding of the Resistance means recognizing how its image has been carefully curated through a combination of French politics and pride, ever since jubilant crowds celebrated Paris’s liberation in 1944.

"The finest one-volume life of de Gaulle in English." —Richard Norton Smith, Wall Street Journal In a definitive biography of the mythic general who refused to accept Nazi domination of France, Julian Jackson captures this titanic figure as never before. Drawing on unpublished letters,...

Looking beyond the view of the plague as unmitigated catastrophe, Herlihy finds evidence for its role in the advent of new population controls, the establishment of universities, the spread of Christianity, the dissemination of vernacular cultures, and even the rise of nationalism. This book, which...

Unn Falkeid considers the work of six fourteenth-century writers who waged literary war against the Avignon papacy’s increasing claims of supremacy over secular rulers—a conflict that engaged contemporary critics from every corner of Europe. She illuminates arguments put forth by Dante, Petrarch, William of Ockham, Catherine of Siena, and others.

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.

In the twentieth century, large companies employing many workers formed the bedrock of the U.S. economy. Today, on the list of big business's priorities, sustaining the employer-worker relationship ranks far below building a devoted customer base and delivering value to investors. As David Weil's...

Migrant Teachers investigates an overlooked trend in U.S. public schools today: the growing reliance on teachers trained overseas, as federal mandates require K-12 schools to employ qualified teachers or risk funding cuts. A narrowly technocratic view of teachers as subject specialists has led districts...

Economists make confident assertions in op-ed columns and on cable news—so why are their explanations at odds with equally confident assertions from other economists? And why are all economic predictions so rarely borne out? Harnessing his frustration with this contradiction, Schlefer set out to investigate how economists arrive at their opinions.

Judge Posner continues to react to the current economic crisis and reflect upon the impact on our views and reliance on capitalism. Posner helps non-technical readers understand business-cycle and financial economics, and financial and governmental institutions, practices, and transactions, while maintaining a neutrality impossible for persons professionally committed to one theory or another.

Monica Prasad’s powerful demand-side hypothesis addresses three questions: Why does the United States have more poverty than any other developed country? Why did it experience an attack on state intervention in the 1980s, known today as the neoliberal revolution? And why did it recently suffer the greatest economic meltdown in seventy-five years?

When Steven Burd, CEO of the supermarket chain Safeway, cut wages and benefits, starting a five-month strike by 59,000 unionized workers, he was confident he would win. But where traditional labor action failed, a novel approach was more successful. With the aid of the California Public Employees’...

Douglas Baird takes stock of the current state of contract doctrine and in the process reinvigorates the classic framework of Anglo-American contract law, showing that Oliver Wendell Holmes’s set of principles, properly understood, continue to provide the best guide to contracts for a new generation of students, practitioners, and judges.