The Harvard Brief

David A. Pietz‘s new book argues that China’s water challenges are historically grounded, and that these historical realities are not going to disappear anytime soon. Using a careful history of water and environmental management to inform our understanding of water-related challenges in contemporary China, Yellow River: The Problem of Water...

You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who knows anything about European history–and European diplomatic history in particular–who doesn’tknow a little something about the Congress of Vienna. That “little something” is probably that the Congress fostered a post-war (Napoleonic War, that is) settlement called the “Concert of Europe” that lasted, roughly, until the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Tha...

Byonghyon Choi‘s new book makes a key document of Korean and world history available in English in a volume that will be tremendously useful for both scholarship and teaching. The Annals of King T’aejo: Founder of Korea’s Choson Dynasty (Harvard University Press, 2014) translates an important excerpt from The Veritable...

Americans rightly think of the civil rights legislation of 1964 and ’65 as a social and legal revolution. InSharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South (Harvard University Press, 2013),Gavin Wright argues that it was an economic one, too. In clear and tightly organized prose, the eminent Stanford economic historianshows that after these pivotal years black...

Martyrdom, writes Emma Anderson, is anything but random. In beautiful prose and spectacular historical detail, The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs (Harvard University Press, 2013), takes readers on a journey of more than 300 years, exploring how a group of eight Frenchmen were selected from the amongst the thousands of victims of a brutal seventeenth-century encounter between nat...

Michael Kwass‘s new book, Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground is much more than an exciting biography of the notorious eighteenth-century smuggler whose name remains legendary in contemporary France. Focusing on the rise and fall of a mythic, early-modern French bandit, Kwass’s study moves between the micro- and the macro-historical, revealing the crucial role that smu...

A kind of biography of the town of Annamaboe, a major slave trading port on Africa’s Gold Coast, Randy J. Sparks‘s book Where the Negroes Are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade (Harvard University Press, 2014) focuses on the African women and men who were the crucial middle figures in the African slave trade, the largest forced migration of people in human history. The millions...

Hidden algorithms make many of the decisions that affect significant areas of society: the economy, personal and organizational reputation, the promotion of information, etc. These complex formulas, or processes, are thought by many to be unbiased and impartial and, therefore, good for automated decision-making. Yet, recent scandals, as well as information uncovered by researchers and investigativ...

Charles F. Walker‘s book The Tupac Amaru Rebellion (Harvard University Press, 2014) charts the rise, fall, and legacy of a massive uprising in colonial Peru. Indigenous societies in the Andes labored under heavy taxes, tributes, and discrimination imposed by the Spanish imperial state. Walker’s monograph follows the rebellion of a multiethnic group of indigenous, mestizo, and creole subjects, led...

In his fascinating new book, Rian Thum explores the craft, materiality, nature, and readership of Uyghur history over the past 300 years. The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History (Harvard University Press, 2014) argues that understanding Uyghur history in this way is crucial for understanding both Uyghur identity and continuing relationships...

Matthew Avery Sutton is the author of three books: Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (2007), Jerry Falwell and the Rise of the Religious Right: A Brief History with Documents (2012), and, most recently, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Harvard University Press, 2014), which is the subject of this interview with Raymond Haberski for New Books i...

Johanna Drucker‘s marvelous new book gives us a language with which to talk about visual epistemology. Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Harvard University Press, 2014) simultaneously introduces the nature and function of information graphics, awakens readers to the visual interfaces prevalent in our daily work, and considers how paying careful attention to visual interpretation can...

Michael Gibbs Hill‘s new translation renders into English, for the first time, the introduction and overview to Wang Hui‘s 4-volume Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (Xiandai Zhongguo sixiangde xingqi, 2004). China from Empire to Nation-State (Harvard University Press, 2014) thus makes available to an English-reading audience a fascinating perspective on...

Often when we think of missions to Native Americans or people of African descent, we think of white missionaries. In his book Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World (Harvard University Press, 2013), Dr. Edward E. Andrews challenges this view. Through his careful research, skilled use of anecdotes, and compelling narrative. Dr. Andrews shows how it was Native A...

How did we come to think of spaces for the storage and circulation of body parts as “banks,” and what are the consequences of that history for the way we think about human bodies as property today? Kara W. Swanson‘s wonderful new book traces the history of body banks in America from the nineteenth century to today, focusing especially on milk, blood, and sperm. Banking on the Body: The Market in B...

“All classes are sorta boring” (p. 19). This statement is one that college students might believe, along with many of their professors, but not Dr. Mark Carnes, author of Minds on Fire: How Role-Immersion Games Transform College (Harvard University Press, 2014). In Carnes’ book, he describes a new type of learning and classroom pedagogy called “Reacting”, where students take control of the class b...

Elizabeth Lunbeck has made a major contribution to the historical study of psychoanalysis with the publication of The Americanization of Narcissism (Harvard University Press, 2014). Exploring the concept of narcissism and how it is deployed at the level of culture, she has produced a multi-textured book that is one part history of ideas, one part history of psychoanalysis and one part cultural his...

Bruce Ackerman is the Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University. His book, We the People, Volume 3: The Civil Rights Revolution (Harvard UP, 2013) fills out the constitutional history of America’s “Second Reconstruction” period and makes a powerful argument that traditional understandings of the constitutional canon must be expanded to accurately reflect the American lawma...

Wensheng Wang‘s new book takes us into a key turning point in the history of the Qing empire, the Qianlong-Jiaqing reign periods. In White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates: Crisis and Reform in the Qing Empire (Harvard University Press, 2014), Wang re-evaluates how we understand this crucial period in...

“It is a commonplace of social criticism that America has become, over the past half century or so, a nation of narcissists.” From this opening, Elizabeth Lunbeck‘s new book proceeds to offer a fascinating narrative of how this came to be, exploring the entwined histories of narcissism, psychoanalysis, and modernity in 20th and 21st century America. Narcissism permeated 1970s discourse on America,...

Why do we study the history of science? Historians of science don’t just teach us about the past: along with philosophers of science, they also help us to understand the foundations and assumptions of scientific research, and guide us to reliable sources of information on which to base our policies and opinions. Jane Maienschein‘s new book is a model of the kind of careful, balanced, and beautiful...

1949 was a crucial year for modern China, marking the beginning of Communist rule on the mainland and the retreat of the Nationalist government to Taiwan. While many scholars of Chinese literature have written 1949 as a radical break, Xiaojue Wang‘s new book takes a different approach. Modernity with a...

When we’re faced with a choice between Door #1, Door #2, and Door #3, how do we infer correctly that there’s an equal chance of the prize being behind any of the doors? How is it that we are generally correct to choose the shorter of two checkout lines in the supermarket when we’re in a hurry? In his new book, Tychomancy: Inferring Probability from Causal Structure (Harvard University Press, 2013)...

Stephen C. Neff‘s Justice Among Nations: A History of International Law (Harvard UP, 2014) is a book of breathtaking scope, telling the story of the development of international law from Ancient times to the present. It moves across many different cultures and parts of the world, with the express ambition of being a comprehensive intellectual history of international law. It moves among names that...

In Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana (Harvard University Press, 2012), historian Miranda Spieler tells of the transformation of a slave plantation colony into a destination for metropolitan convicts in the eight decades following the French Revolution. Unlike the better-known case of British Australia, French Guiana failed to turn...