The Harvard Brief

On January 28, 1918, just outside of town of Porvenir, Texas, US Army servicemen, Texas Rangers, and civilians murdered 15 unarmed Mexican men and boys. This massacre was not an aberration, writes Monica Muñoz Martinez, the Stanley J. Bernstein Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University and former Andrew Carnegie Fellow. In The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-M...

In his book, The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era (Harvard University Press, 2018), Jonathan Gienapp revisits the Founding Era to retell the story of America’s favorite document. Looking at the Constitution’s creation, Gienapp makes a compelling case for why we should reconceptualize just what this document meant to early Americans. By examining the debates whi...

Given our modern scientific view of the world, how is freedom of the will possible? That is the classical problem of free will. Strategies for addressing this problem include the flat denial of free will, as well as various attempts to render free will consistent with a physically deterministic world. Among these latter, there’s a tendency to redefine free will in a way that dissolves the apparent...

Josef Stalin’s death in 1953 marked a noticeable shift in Soviet attitudes towards the West. A nation weary of war and terror welcomed with relief the new regime of Nikita Khrushchev and its focus on peaceful cooperation with foreign powers. A year after Stalin’s death, author and commentator Ilya Ehrenburg published the novel that would give a name to this era, “The Thaw,” which probed the limits...

In our current moment marred by media monopolies and disinformation campaigns, it is easy to get caught up in the dizzying temporality of the news cycle and think these are new phenomena. Heidi Tworek’s impressive new book, News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900-1945 (Harvard University Press, 2019), is a necessary reminder that they have a longer history. News fr...

We often credit the Transcendentalists with introducing a revolutionary new appreciation for nature into American spirituality when they claimed that God could be found in the forests, mountains, and fields. In Church in the Wild: Evangelicals in Antebellum America (Harvard University Press, 2019), Brett Grainger reconsiders the history of the years leading up to the Civil War. He argues that it w...

Nara Milanich’s Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father (Harvard University Press, 2019) explains how fatherhood, long believed to be impossible to know with certainty, became a biological “fact” that could be ascertained with scientific testing. Though the advent of DNA testing might seem to make paternity less elusive, Milanich’s book invites readers to think about paternity not as a biologi...

The Mexican-American War was one of the pivotal moments in 19th-century American history. It bridged the Jacksonian period and the Civil War era and was a highly controversial and politically partisan conflict, the first American war to result in significant land acquisition for the young nation. In The Dead March: A History of the Mexican-American War(Harvard University Press, 2017), Indiana Univ...

Tracking the movement of finance capital toward far-flung investment frontiers, Noam Maggor, Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, re-conceives the emergence of modern capitalism in the United States. Brahmin Capitalism: Frontiers of Wealth and Populism in America's First Gilded Age (Harvard University Press, 2017) reveals the decisive role of established wealth in the transformation of the...

Maren A. Ehlers’s Give and Take: Poverty and the Status Order in Early Modern Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2018) examines the ways in which ordinary subjects—including many so-called outcastes and other marginalized groups—participated in the administration and regulation of society in Tokugawa Japan. Within this context, the book focuses on self-governing occupation-based and other stat...

When we think of the history of the British empire we tend to think big: oceans were crossed; colonies grew from small settlements to territories many times larger than England; entire Continents, each with substantial indigenous populations, were brought under British rule. Maps were an important part of rule in America, but from the point of view of the Board of Trade, the lack of ‘exact Surveys...

This is the centennial year of the birth of G.E.M. Anscombe, one of the major philosophical figures of the 20th century within the analytic tradition. A close associate of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Anscombe contributed fundamental insights in philosophy of mind, action theory, and ethics. In his new book No Morality, No Self: Anscombe's Radical Skepticism (Harvard University Press, 2018), James Doyle c...

John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) is widely recognised as the greatest epic poem in the English language – and it is buried in the commentary of thousands of other texts. William Poole, who is John Galsworthy Fellow and Tutor in English at New College, Oxford, has written what will be recognised as one of the most important contributions to this formidable body of scholarship. Milton and the Maki...

What does it take for all girls to achieve? What will it take to remove the seen and unseen barriers-- some a matter of policy and others cultural practice--to more girls achieving the equitable education that is their human right? Sally Nuamah has an answer to these questions. She is the author of How Girls Achieve(Harvard University Press, 2019). Nuamah is assistant professor at the Sanford Scho...

Mary Magdalene’s story of conversion from sinner to saint is one of Christianity’s most compelling and controversial stories. The identity of this woman, but more likely women, has been disputed since the early days of the Church, but her role as the first person to witness the resurrection of Christ makes her an astoundingly important figure in ways I was never privy to growing up. The Magdalene’...

In the twenty-first century, India and the United States are two closely connected states. Some of this is economic, and with it comes a concern that jobs in the United States are being outsourced to India. The two countries also face concerns over terrorism, engage in cultural dialogue with each other, and lay claim to being two of the largest and most powerful democracies in the world. However,...

The intersection of religion and politics in the United States is one of the nation's most enduring conversations. Christian: The Politics of a Word in America(Harvard University Press, 2018) by Dr. Matthew Bowman at Henderson State University, was recently named one of the five Best Books in Religion for 2018 by Publishers Weekly. It is out now from Harvard University Press. Please enjoy this con...

We know, perhaps too well, the innovation-centric history of personal computing. Yet, computer users were not necessarily microelectronics consumers from the get-go; rather, earlier efforts to expand mainframe computing as a public utility made elite information technology accessible to a wide audience. In A People's History of Computing in the United States (Harvard University Press, 2018), Joy L...

In American Sutra: A story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War (Harvard University Press, 2019), Duncan Ryūken Williams recenters the role of faith in the Japanese-American experience in WWII by showing how religious differences underlay the injustices that they suffered before, during, and after the war. American Sutra is also an inspiring account of how Japanese-Americans embodied faith...

Charles de Gaulle is one of the greatest figures of twentieth century history. If Sir Winston Churchill was (in the words of Harold Macmillan) the "greatest Englishman In history", then Charles de Gaulle was without a doubt, the greatest Frenchman since Napoleon Bonaparte. Why so? In the early summer of 1940, when France was overrun by German troops, one junior general who had fought in the trench...

The world that Alexander remade in his lifetime was transformed once more by his death in 323 BCE. In Age of Conquests: The Greek World from Alexander to Hadrian(Harvard University Press, 2018), Angelos Chaniotis, Professor of Ancient History and Classics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, examines how his successors reorganized Persian lands to create a new empire stretching from t...

49.91% of India’s population was below the age of 24 in the 2011 Census. By 2020 India will become the world’s youngest country with 64% of its population in the working age group of 15-64 years. This is India’s much touted “demographic dividend”. Economists anticipate the dividend to yield as much as an additional 2% to the GDP growth rate but this potential is hampered by poor education, plummet...

It wasn’t always this way. From the Theodore Roosevelt’s leadership on natural resource conservation to Richard Nixon’s creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and Ronald Reagan’s singing of the Montreal Protocol banning ozone-depleting chemicals, Republicans have a proud tradition of environmental stewardship. Why have they seemingly abandoned it? That question animates The Republican Rev...

Arabic script is astounding! Not only because it represents one of the most commonly spoken languages today –that is, the Arabic language– but because it has represented dozens of other languages over the course of human history from the Middle East to Asia, to Europe, and to the tip of South Africa. Letters of Light: Arabic Script in Calligraphy, Print, and Digital Design (Harvard University Pres...

Dr. Philip Lutgendorf is Retired Professor of Hindi and Modern Indian Studies at the University of Iowa. He is currently working on a seven-volume translation of the Hindi devotional text, the Rāmcaritmānas written by the sixteenth-century North Indian poet, Tulsīdās. The first four volumes of the translation, entitled The Epic of Ram (Harvard University Press, 2016-), are currently available as p...