Harvard University Press: 1090 books

Brendan O’Flaherty brings the tools of economic analysis—incentives, equilibrium, optimization—to bear on racial issues. From health care, housing, and education, to employment, wealth, and crime, he shows how racial differences powerfully determine American lives, and how progress in one area is often constrained by diminishing returns in another.

America’s rise from revolutionary colonies to a world power is often treated as inevitable. But Charles N. Edel’s provocative biography of John Q. Adams argues that he served as the central architect of a grand strategy whose ideas and policies made him a critical link between the founding generation and the Civil War–era nation of Lincoln.

Why do self-proclaimed constitutional “originalists” so regularly reach decisions with a politically conservative valence? Do “living constitutionalists” claim a license to reach whatever results they prefer, without regard to the Constitution’s language and history? In confronting these...

Social scientists and campaign strategists approach voting behavior from opposite poles. Reconciling these camps through a merger of statistics and election experience, The American Political Landscape presents a full-scale analysis of U.S. electoral politics over the last quarter-century. It explains...

A controversial episode in the life of the Prophet Muhammad concerns an incident in which he allegedly mistook words suggested by Satan as divine revelation. Muslims now universally deny that the Satanic verses incident took place. But Muslims did not always hold this view. Shahab Ahmed uses this case to explore how religions establish truth.

Darwin is credited with discovering evolution through natural selection, but Alfred Russel Wallace saw the same process at work in nature and elaborated the same theory. Dispelling misperceptions of Wallace as a secondary figure, James Costa reveals the two naturalists as equals in advancing one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time.

Tracing the global trade and trafficking in animals that supplied U.S. zoos, Daniel Bender shows how Americans learned to view faraway places through the lens of exotic creatures on display. He recounts the public’s conflicted relationship with zoos, decried as prisons by activists even as they remain popular centers of education and preservation.

In The People’s Zion, Joel Cabrita tells the transatlantic story of Southern Africa’s largest popular religious movement, Zionism. It began in Zion City, a utopian community established in 1900 just north of Chicago. The Zionist church, which promoted faith healing, drew tens of thousands of marginalized...

For 60 million Americans a criminal record overshadows everything else about their identity. Citizens have a right to know when someone around them represents a threat. But convicted persons have rights too. James Jacobs examines the problem of erroneous records and proposes ways to eliminate discrimination for those who have been rehabilitated.

At a moment when Congress is viewed by a skeptical public as hyper-partisan and dysfunctional, Richard Fenno provides a variegated picture of American representational politics. The Challenge of Congressional Representation offers an up-close-and-personal look at the complex relationship between members of Congress and their constituents back home.

Manan Ahmed Asif shows that the Chachnama is a sophisticated work of political theory, embedded in both the Indic and Islamic ethos. His social and intellectual history of this text offers an important corrective to the divisions between Muslim and Hindu that so often define Pakistani and Indian politics today.

For 250 years the Turkic Muslims of Tibet, who call themselves Uyghurs today, have cultivated a sense of history and identity that challenges Beijing’s national narrative. The roots of this history run deeper than recent conflicts, Rian Thum says, to a time when manuscripts and pilgrimage along the Silk Road dominated understandings of the past.

The African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem are often dismissed as a fringe cult for their beliefs that African Americans are descendants of the ancient Israelites and that veganism leads to immortality. But John L. Jackson questions what "fringe" means in a world where cultural practices...

Hearing across media is the source of innovation in a uniquely African American sphere of art-making and performance, Brent Hayes Edwards writes. He explores this fertile interface through case studies in jazz literature—both writings informed by music and the surprisingly large body of writing by jazz musicians themselves.