Harvard University Press: 1090 books

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year In Minds on Fire, Mark C. Carnes shows how role-immersion games channel students’ competitive (and sometimes mischievous) impulses into transformative learning experiences. His discussion is based on interviews with scores of students and faculty who...

Nazis began detaining Jews in camps as soon as they came to power in 1933. Kim Wünschmann reveals the origin of these extralegal detention sites, the harsh treatment Jews received there, and the message the camps sent to Germans: that Jews were enemies of the state, dangerous to associate with and fair game for acts of intimidation and violence.

This is the first attempt to understand the full scope of the USSR’s offensive biological weapons research, from inception in the 1920s. Gorbachev tried to end the program, but the U.S. and U.K. never obtained clear evidence that he succeeded, raising the question whether the means for waging biological warfare could be present in Russia today.

We know the universe has a history, but does it also have a story of self-creation to tell? Yes, in Roy R. Gould’s account. Heoffers a compelling narrative of how the universe—with no instruction other than its own laws—evolved into billions of galaxies and gave rise to life, including humans...

As readers of Russian literature know, the nineteenth century was a time of pervasive financial anxiety. Russians of all classes were enmeshed in networks of credit and debt, and borrowing and lending shaped perceptions of material and moral worth. Sergei Antonov recreates this imperial world of borrowers, bankrupts, lenders, and loan sharks.

Abraham Drassinower presents a new way to balance the needs of creators and users of authored works. Disentangling copyright theory from its focus on the economic value of a work as a commodity, he views a work instead as a communicative act. Infringement, according to this perspective, is an unauthorized appropriation of another’s speech.

What is utopia if not a perfect impossible world? Anahid Nersessian reveals the basic misunderstanding of that ideal. Applying the lessons of art to the rigors of life on an imperiled planet, she enlists the Romantics to redefine utopia as an investment in limitation—not a perfect world but one where we get less than we hoped but more than we had.

This accessible and innovative essay on Aristotle, based on fresh translations of a wide selection of his writings, challenges received interpretations of his accounts of practical wisdom, action, and contemplation and of their places in the happiest human life.

John Medearis argues that democracies face challenges which go beyond civic lethargy and unreasonable debate. Democracy is inherently a fragile state of affairs because citizens create the very institutions that overwhelm them. Hostile threats are the product of their own collective activities, and preserving democracy will always entail struggle.

In the run-up to the Iraq invasion, a number of Americans thought the idea was crazy. Now everyone, except a few die-hards, thinks it was. So what was going through the minds of the talented and experienced men and women who planned and initiated the war? What were their assumptions? Overreach aims to recover those presuppositions.

No nation was more deeply affected by America’s rise to power than Japan. The price paid to end the most intrusive reconstruction of a nation in modern history was a cold war alliance with the U.S. that ensured American dominance in the region. Kenneth Pyle offers a thoughtful history of this relationship at a time when the alliance is changing.

The Nazis provided Franco’s Nationalists with planes, armaments, and tanks in their civil war against the Communists but behind this largesse was a Faustian bargain. Pierpaolo Barbieri makes a convincing case that the Nazis hoped to establish an economic empire in Europe, and in Spain they tested the tactics intended for future subject territories.

During the 1760s and 1770s, those who were sensitive and supposedly suffering made public show of their delicacy by going to the new establishments known as "restaurateurs' rooms" and sipping their bouillons there. However, the restaurants that had begun as purveyors of health food soon...

Drawing on medical records, surveys of prayer recipients, prospective clinical trials, and multiyear follow-up observations and interviews, Brown shows that the widespread perception of prayer’s healing power has demonstrable social effects which can in some cases produce improvements in health that can be scientifically verified.