The Harvard Brief

Tokyo Boogie-Woogie: Japan's Pop Era and its Discontents (Harvard University Press, 2017) by Hiromu Nagahara is the first English-language history of the origins and impact of the Japanese pop music industry. The book connects the rise of mass entertainment, epitomized by ryūkōka (“popular songs”), with Japan’s transformation into a middle-class society in the years after World War II. With the ar...

Globalization is possibly the most important economic phenomenon of the past several decades. Opening borders, increasing trade and deepening integration has transformed our economies, our societies and our politics. Globalization changed establishment politics; the reaction against it transformed those against the establishment. But there’s a world of difference between Donald Trump and Bernie Sa...

Between 1940 and 1946, thousands of Jewish refugees from Poland lived and toiled in the harsh Soviet interior. They endured hard labor, bitter cold, and extreme deprivation. But out of reach of the Nazis, they escaped the fate of millions of their coreligionists in the Holocaust. In Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union (Harvard University Press, 2020), Eliyan...

Once a powerful figure who reversed the disintegration of China and steered the country to Allied victory in World War II, Chiang Kai-shek fled into exile following his 1949 defeat in the Chinese civil war. As attention pivoted to Mao Zedong’s communist experiment, Chiang was relegated to the dustbin of history. In Chiang Kai-shek’s Politics of Shame, Grace Huang reconsiders Chiang’s leadership an...

Statistical graphing was born in the seventeenth century as a scientific tool, but it quickly escaped all disciplinary bounds. Today graphics are ubiquitous in daily life. In their just-published A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication (Harvard UP, 2021), Michael Friendly and Howard Wainer detail the history of graphs and tables, how they help solve problems, and even changed the...

We think we know the history of China’s opening to the outside world. Maoist China was closed off, until Deng Xiaoping decided to reform the economy and open up to international trade, leading to the economic powerhouse we see today. Except Deng’s opening was built upon an existing foundation of international trade, as shown by Professor Jason Kelly’s Market Maoists: The Communist Origins of China...

In Lessons from Plants (Harvard University Press, 2021), Dr. Beronda Montgomery connects the science of plants to the behavior of people. She unpacks how their ability to who they are, where they are, and what they are supposed to do translates into good leadership. In the interview, Dr. Montgomery leads us on a quest for societal change through an understanding of plant physiology and ecology. We...

In Rotary International and the Selling of American Capitalism (Harvard University Press, 2021), Professor Brendan Goff traces the history of Rotary International from its origins in Chicago in 1905 to its rapid growth during the first four decades of the twentieth century. In doing so, Goff places U.S. power at the center of his analysis. He argues that Rotary International was able to succeed wh...

In her magnificent and lyrical new book, The Emperor Who Never Was: Dara Shukoh in Mughal India (Harvard UP, 2020), Supriya Gandhi reorients and adds unprecedented depth to our understanding of the much memorialized but less understood Mughal prince and thinker Dara Shukoh (d. 1659), and of his broader political and social milieu. Written with exceptional clarity and in dazzling narrative form, th...

Russia’s position between Europe and Asia has led to differing conceptions of “what Russia is” to its leaders. Russia’s vast holdings east of the Urals have often inspired those who led Russia to look eastward for national glory, whether through trade, soft power, or outright force. Yet these Russian “pivots to Asia” often ended soon after they began, with outcomes far more limited than what those...

Music from East Asia has recently been making its way round the world on waves created and mediated by new technologies and global interconnections. This may seem like something very novel, but as Andrew Jones shows in Circuit Listening: Chinese Popular Music in the Global 1960s (U Minnesota Press, 2020), popular music from this region – and here specifically varieties of Chinese music – has been...

Most of our understanding of the Mongol Empire begins and ends with Chinggis Khan and his sweep across Asia. His name is now included among conquerors whose efforts burn bright and burn out quick: Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and so on. Except the story doesn’t end with Chinggis’s death. As Professor Marie Favereau notes in The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World (Harvard University Press:...

The Mongols are widely known for one thing: conquest. Through the ages, word "horde" has entered the English lexicon with a negative connotation, conjuring up images of warriors on horseback, sweeping across the plain--a virtual human flood destroying everything in its path and then receding, leaving a wave of devastation and grief. Such is often the popular perception of the Mongol empire under C...

What does it mean to belong somewhere? For many of Prague's inhabitants, belonging has been linked to the nation, embodied in the capital city. Grandiose medieval buildings and monuments to national heroes boast of a glorious, shared history. Past governments, democratic and Communist, layered the city with architecture that melded politics and nationhood. Not all inhabitants, however, felt includ...

Dancing the Dharma: Religious and Political Allegory in Japanese Noh Theater (Harvard UP, 2020) examines the theory and practice of allegory by exploring a select group of medieval Japanese noh plays and treatises. Susan Blakeley Klein demonstrates how medieval esoteric commentaries on the tenth-century poem-tale Ise monogatari (Tales of Ise) and the first imperial waka poetry anthology Kokin waka...

Plato and the Mythic Tradition in Political Thought (Harvard UP, 2020) is an ambitious reinterpretation and defense of Plato’s basic enterprise and influence, arguing that the power of his myths was central to the founding of philosophical rationalism. Plato’s use of myths—the Myth of Metals, the Myth of Er—sits uneasily with his canonical reputation as the inventor of rational philosophy. Since t...

Matthew Karp is a historian of the U.S. Civil War era and its relationship to the nineteenth-century world. He received his Ph. D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011 and joined the Princeton faculty in 2013. The piece we are talking about is The Politics of a Second Gilded Age, published in February 2021 in The Jacobin. His first book, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at...

For most of the eighteenth century, the format, size, and price of the earliest novels meant that they would have been sold and bought alongside Protestant religious texts. In When Novels Were Books (Harvard UP, 2020) Jordan Alexander Stein brings the insights of book history into conversation with literary criticism. He explores the antecedents that stretch the story of the novel all the way to t...

In spite of Karl Marx's proclamation that money would become obsolete under Communism, the ruble remained a key feature of Soviet life. In fact, although Western economists typically concluded that money ultimately played a limited role in the Soviet Union, Kristy Ironside argues that money was both more important and more powerful than most histories have recognized. After the Second World War, m...

In the wake of the George Floyd killing, many Americans are engaging in a renewed debate about the role violence and especially police violence, plays in American society. In A Pattern of Violence: How the Law Classifies Crimes and What it Means for Justice (Harvard UP, 2020), David Alan Sklansky, the Stanley Morrison Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, argues that in order to think sensibly...

Being arguably each side’s most enduring international bond, the China-Korea relationship has long been of great practical and symbolic importance to both. Moreover, as Odd Arne Westad observes in his new book, this has in many ways also been a paradigmatic kind of tie between a large ‘empire’ and smaller (though by no means small) ‘nation’, and thus has much to teach us about past and present int...

Between the world wars, a generation of Jewish leftist poets reached out to other embattled peoples of the earth--Palestinian Arabs, African Americans, Spanish Republicans--in Yiddish verse. Songs in Dark Times examines the richly layered meanings of this project, grounded in Jewish collective trauma but embracing a global community of the oppressed. The long 1930s, Amelia M. Glaser proposes, gave...

Today I talked to Helen Sword about Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (Harvard UP, 2017). We talk about what not enough people talk about when the subject is writing. interviewer : "You offer the advice of forming a writing group, because writing groups are, well, just all-around terrific for helping people write as they want to." Helen Sword : "Exactly, and well, so I try...

Stella Ghervas's Conquering Peace: From the Enlightenment to the European Union (Harvard University Press, 2021) is a bold new look at war and diplomacy in Europe that traces the idea of a unified continent in attempts since the eighteenth century to engineer lasting peace. Political peace in Europe has historically been elusive and ephemeral. Stella Ghervas shows that since the eighteenth century...

Welcome to New Books in African American Studies, a channel on the New Books Network. I am your host, Adam McNeil. On today’s podcast, I am interviewing Dr. Jarvis R. Givens, Assistant Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Suzanne Young Murray Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Dr. Givens joins us to discuss Fugitive Ped...