Harvard University Press: 1090 books

After World War II, the major powers faced social upheaval at home and anti-colonial wars around the globe. Alarmed by conflict in Korea that could change U.S.-Soviet relations from chilly to nuclear, ordinary people and policymakers created a fantasy of a bipolar Cold War world in which global and domestic order was paramount, Masuda Hajimu shows.

Laura Weinrib shows how a coalition of lawyers and activists made judicial enforcement of the Bill of Rights a defining feature of American democracy. Protection of civil liberties was a calculated bargain between liberals and conservatives to save the courts from New Deal attack and secure free speech for both labor radicals and businesses.

Michael Strevens makes three claims about rules for inferring physical probability. They are reliable. They constitute a key part of the physical intuition that allows us to navigate the world safely in the absence of scientific knowledge. And they played a crucial role in scientific innovation, from statistical physics to natural selection.

Scholars have long separated a few privileged “religions of the Book” from faiths lacking sacred texts, including ancient Roman religion. Looking beyond this distinction, Duncan MacRae delves into Roman treatises on the nature of gods and rituals to grapple with a central question: what was the significance of books in a religion without scripture?

Juliet Barker provides an account of the first great popular uprising in England and a fascinating study of medieval life in English towns and countryside. She tells how and why an unlikely group of ordinary men and women from every corner of England united in armed rebellion against church and state to demand a radical political agenda.

The Japanese Army committed numerous atrocities during its pitiless campaigns in China from 1931 to 1945. Focusing on the trials of Japanese war criminals, Barak Kushner analyzes the political maneuvering and propagandizing in both China and Japan that would roil East Asian relations throughout the Cold War, with repercussions still felt today.

What India’s founders derived from Western political traditions is widely understood. Less well-known is how India’s own rich knowledge traditions of 2,500 years influenced these men. Vajpeyi furnishes this missing account, showing how five founders turned to classical texts to fashion an original sense of Indian selfhood.

Exchange of goods and ideas among nations, cross-border pollution, global warming, and international crime pose formidable questions for international law. Two respected scholars provide an intellectual framework for assessing these problems from a rational choice perspective and describe conditions under which international law succeeds or fails.

Ronit Stahl traces the ways the U.S. military struggled with, encouraged, and regulated religious pluralism and scrambled to handle the nation’s deep religious, racial, and political complexity. Just as the state relied on religion to sanction combat missions and sanctify war deaths, so too did religious groups seek validation as American faiths.

Eugene Goldfield lays out principles of engineering found in the natural world, with a focus on how components of coordinated structures organize themselves into autonomous functional systems. This self-organizing capacity is one of many qualities which can be harnessed to design technologies that can interact seamlessly with human bodies.

Refusing to eradicate the death penalty, the U.S. has attempted to reform and rationalize capital punishment through federal constitutional law. While execution chambers remain active in several states, Carol Steiker and Jordan Steiker argue that the fate of the American death penalty is likely to be sealed by this failed judicial experiment.

Aggressive policing and draconian sentencing have disproportionately imprisoned millions of African Americans for drug-related offenses. Michael Javen Fortner shows that in the 1970s these punitive policies toward addicts and pushers enjoyed the support of many working-class and middle-class blacks, angry about the chaos in their own neighborhoods.

During the Battle of the Bulge, Waffen SS soldiers shot 84 American prisoners near Malmedy, Belgium—the deadliest mass execution of U.S. soldiers during World War II. Drawing on newly declassified documents, Steven Remy revisits the massacre and the most infamously controversial war crimes trial in American history, to set the record straight.

Outsiders view Russia as an aggressor, but Russians see themselves as surrounded by enemies, defensively fighting off invader after invader, or called upon by history to be the savior of Europe, or Christianity, or civilization itself, often at immense cost. As Gregory Carleton shows, war is the unifying thread of Russia’s national epic.