The Harvard Brief

In Coconut Colonialism: Workers and the Globalization of Samoa (Harvard UP, 2022), Holger Droessler provides a novel history of the impact of globalization on Sāmoa and vice versa. Using a series of case studies, he shows how Samoan workers responded to the rise of capitalism and colonialism in the Pacific in the decades just before and after 1900. Ordinary Samoans -- some on large plantations, ot...

Yi Gu's Chinese Ways of Seeing and Open-Air Painting (Harvard UP, 2020) examines the rise of open-air painting in 20th-century China, showing how this emphatically new form of landscape painting precipitated and participated in an ocular turn. In its urgent embrace of Cartesian optics and its interrelationship with new technologies like photography, open-air painting taught Chinese artists (and ci...

Walt Whitman knew a great deal about democracy that we don’t. Most of that knowledge is concentrated in one stunning poem, Song of Myself. In Song of Ourselves: Walt Whitman and the Fight for Democracy (Harvard UP, 2021), esteemed cultural and literary thinker Mark Edmundson offers a bold reading of the 1855 poem, included here in its entirety. He finds in the poem the genesis and development of...

Popular representations of the past are everywhere in Japan, from cell phone charms to manga, from television dramas to video games to young people dressed as their favorite historical figures hanging out in the hip Harajuku district. But how does this mass consumption of the past affect the way consumers think about history and what it means to be Japanese? By analyzing representations of the fam...

Most stories of medical progress come with ready-made heroes. John Snow traced the origins of London's 1854 cholera outbreak to a water pump, leading to the birth of epidemiology. Florence Nightingale's contributions to the care of soldiers in the Crimean War revolutionized medical hygiene, transforming hospitals from crucibles of infection to sanctuaries of recuperation. Yet histories of individu...

It's easy to be pessimistic about inequality. We know it has increased dramatically in many parts of the world over the past two generations. No one has done more to reveal the problem than Thomas Piketty. Now, in this surprising and powerful new work, Piketty reminds us that the grand sweep of history gives us reasons to be optimistic. Over the centuries, he shows, we have been moving toward grea...

Prophets and Ghosts: The Story of Salvage Anthropology (Harvard UP, 2021) is a searching account of nineteenth-century salvage anthropology, an effort to preserve the culture of “vanishing” Indigenous peoples through dispossession of the very communities it was meant to protect. In the late nineteenth century, anthropologists, linguists, archaeologists, and other chroniclers began amassing Indigen...

Kim talks with Mercedes Trigos about eugenics. Mercedes references Francis Galton, who coined the term, preimplantation genetic profiling, and the failures of our ordinary progress narratives. If you are interested in reading more about the subject check out: -Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America, University of California Press, 2015 -Dan...

In The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community (Harvard University Press, 2022), Dr. Megan Brown details the surprising story of how Algeria joined and then left the postwar European Economic Community and what its past inclusion means for extracontinental membership in today’s European Union. On their face, the mid-1950s negotiations over European integration were aimed...

Kim talks with Chad Hegelmeyer about the institutional turn in literary studies. Chad references Jeremy Rosen’s article “The Institutional Turn” from the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. We also talk about: Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (Harper Collins, 1963), D.A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police (U California Press, 1989), Nancy Armstrong’s How Novels Think (Columbia UP, 2006), Mark Mc...

Red Silk: Class, Gender, and Revolution in China's Yangzi Delta Silk Industry (Harvard UP, 2020) is a history of China's Yangzi Delta silk industry during the wars, crises, and revolutions of the mid-twentieth century. Based on extensive research in Chinese archives and focused on the 1950s, the book compares two very different groups of silk workers and their experiences in the revolution. Male s...

There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation. – epigraph in The Long Land War by Jo Guldi (2021) Every political order contains within it tensions, contradictions, and vulnerabilities that at a ce...

Environmental restoration is a global pursuit and a major political concern. Governments, nonprofits, private corporations, and other institutions spend billions of dollars each year to remove invasive species, build wetlands, and reintroduce species driven from their habitats. But restoration has not always been so intensively practiced. It began as the pastime of a few wildflower enthusiasts and...

As modern empires rise and fall, ancient Rome becomes ever more significant. We yearn for Rome's power but fear Rome's ruin--will we turn out like the Romans, we wonder, or can we escape their fate? That question has obsessed centuries of historians and leaders, who have explored diverse political, religious, and economic forces to explain Roman decline. Yet the decisive factor remains elusive. In...

This is an age of crisis. That much we can agree on. But a crisis of what? And how do we get out of it? Many on the right call for tax cuts and deregulation. Others on the left rage against the top 1 percent and demand wholesale economic change. Voices on both sides line up against globalization: restrict trade to protect jobs. In The Wolf at the Door: The Menace of Economic Insecurity and How to...

At the end of the Second World War, about 600,000 Japanese soldiers were taken prisoner after the Soviet Union swept through Manchuria in the very final days of the war. Instead of returning them to Japan, the Soviet Union held them in prison camps in the Russian Far East for over a decade. The last group was released in 1956, eleven years after the Japanese surrender. Those eleven years are the s...

Oligarchy is a threat to the American republic. When too much economic and political power is concentrated in too few hands, we risk losing the “republican form of government” the Constitution requires. Today, courts enforce the constitution as if it had almost nothing to say about this threat. The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy (Harvard...

Here is a fun quiz question. What distinction does Charles Carroll (1737–1832) hold in American History? Answer: he was the longest-surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence and the only Catholic to have signed it. And therein lies a tale of religious prejudice against Catholics and the ingenious and determined efforts over decades of leaders like Carroll and the founding family of Maryl...

In the first decades after World War II, many newly independent Asian and African countries and established Latin American states pursued a socialist development model. In Ripe for Revolution: Building Socialism in the Third World (Harvard UP, 2022), Jeremy Friedman traces the socialist experiment over forty years through the experience of five countries: Indonesia, Chile, Tanzania, Angola, and Ir...

As we saw with the Ebola outbreak--and the disastrous early handling of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic--a lack of preparedness, delays, and system-wide problems with the distribution of critical medical supplies can have deadly consequences. Yet after every outbreak, the systems put in place to coordinate emergency responses are generally dismantled. One of America's top biomedical researchers,...

The border between Russia and China winds for 2,600 miles through rivers, swamps, and vast taiga forests. It's a thin line of direct engagement, extraordinary contrasts, frequent tension, and occasional war between two of the world's political giants. Franck Billé and Caroline Humphrey have spent years traveling through and studying this important yet forgotten region. Drawing on pioneering fieldw...

Long before Herodotus told the story of the Greeks, the ancient Mediterranean teemed with what the Greeks themselves would recognize as hallmarks of civilization: trade and commerce, cities and colonies, luxury goods and craftsmanship, cults and votives, inscriptions and their prerequisite, written language. Behind this vast network, stretching as it did across hundreds of miles and years, were a...

Seamlessly blending field research, on-the-ground interviews, and social theory, Asef Bayat shows how the practice of everyday life in Egypt and Tunisia was fundamentally altered by revolutionary activity. Women, young adults, the very poor, and members of the underground queer community can credit the Arab Spring with steps toward equality and freedom. In Bayat’s telling in Revolutionary Life: Th...

Adopted in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment profoundly changed the US constitution, giving the federal judiciary and Congress new powers to protect the fundamental rights of individuals from being violated by the states. In The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment: Its Letter and Spirit (Harvard University Press, 2022), Dr. Randy Barnett and Dr. Evan Bernick argue that the Supreme Court has...

Legend has it that the sixteenth-century Telugu poet Nandi Timmana composed Theft of a Tree, or Pārijātāpaharaṇamu, which he based on a popular millennium-old tale, to help the wife of Krishnadevaraya, king of the south Indian Vijayanagara Empire, win back her husband's affections. Theft of a Tree recounts how Krishna stole the pārijāta, a wish-granting tree, from the garden of Indra, king of the...