Bøger udgivet af Harvard University Press

Explores Victorian life by examining theater, novels, and biographies of that period.

The vast empire that Alexander the Great left at his death in 323 BC has few parallels. For the next three hundred years the Greeks controlled a complex of monarchies and city-states that stretched from the Adriatic Sea to India. F. W. Walbank's lucid and authoritative history of that Hellenistic world examines political events, describes the different social systems and mores of the people under Greek rule, traces important developments in literature and science, and discusses the new religious movements.

For those who lived in the wake of the French Revolution, from the storming of the Bastille to Napoleon's final defeat, its aftermath left a profound wound that no subsequent king, emperor, or president could heal. Children of the Revolution follows the ensuing generations who repeatedly tried and failed to come up with a stable regime after the trauma of 1789. The process encouraged fresh and often murderous oppositions between those who were for, and those who were against, the Revolution's values. Bearing the scars of their country's bloody struggle, and its legacy of deeply divided loyalties, the French lived the long nineteenth century in the shadow of the revolutionary age. Despite the ghosts raised in this epic tale, Robert Gildea has written a richly engaging and provocative book. His is a strikingly unfamiliar France, a country with an often overwhelming gap between Paris and the provinces, a country torn apart by fratricidal hatreds and a tortured history of feminism, the site of political catastrophes and artistic triumphs, and a country that managed--despite a pervasive awareness of its own fall from grace--to fix itself squarely at the heart of modernity. Indeed, Gildea reveals how the collective recognition of the great costs of the Revolution galvanized the French to achieve consensus in a new republic and to integrate the tumultuous past into their sense of national identity. It was in this spirit that France's young men went to the front in World War I with a powerful sense of national confidence and purpose.

Who were the Gnostics? And how did the Gnostic movement influence the development of Christianity in antiquity? Is it true that the Church rejected Gnosticism? This book offers an illuminating discussion of recent scholarly debates over the concept of "Gnosticism" and the nature of early Christian diversity. Acknowledging that the category "Gnosticism" is flawed and must be reformed, David Brakke argues for a more careful approach to gathering evidence for the ancient Christian movement known as the Gnostic school of thought. He shows how Gnostic myth and ritual addressed basic human concerns about alienation and meaning, offered a message of salvation in Jesus, and provided a way for people to regain knowledge of God, the ultimate source of their being.Rather than depicting the Gnostics as heretics or as the losers in the fight to define Christianity, Brakke argues that the Gnostics participated in an ongoing reinvention of Christianity, in which other Christians not only rejected their ideas but also adapted and transformed them. This book will challenge scholars to think in news ways, but it also provides an accessible introduction to the Gnostics and their fellow early Christians.

Why did Caesar have to die--and why did his death solve nothing? The plot was confused, the execution bungled, and within hours different versions of the event were circulating. It was the end of republican Rome and the beginning of the Roman Empire--and yet everything about it remains somewhat mysterious. Beginning with this legendary political assassination, immortalized in art and literature through the ages, Greg Woolf delivers a remarkable meditation on Caesar's murder as it echoes down the corridors of history, affecting notions and acts of political violence to our day. Assassins Brutus and Cassius dined with their fiercest enemies within days of the murder--and were then hunted down and killed. After the murder neither conspirators nor Caesar's partisans knew how to react. From these beginnings this book follows the normalization of assassination at Rome, cataloguing the murder of Caesar after Caesar and recording the means, methods, and motives of the perpetrators. How was the Roman Empire so untouched by these events? And how had the Republic contained such violence between friends for so long? Woolf shows how Caesar's death--and the puzzled reactions to it--points back to older ethics of tyrannicide. When is it justified to kill a head of state? Does extra-judicial execution provide answers worth the cost of the ensuing chaos? Ranging among texts by Cicero, Suetonius, and Seneca, plays by Shakespeare and Corneille, and the ideas of Michel Foucault and Francis Fukuyama, Woolf pursues these questions through the ages. His book tells us not only how, but why, Caesar's Vast Ghost still holds us spellbound.

Imperial Geographies in Byzantine and Ottoman Space opens new and insightful vistas on the nexus between empire and geography. The volume redirects attention from the Atlantic to the space of the eastern Mediterranean shaped by two empires of remarkable duration and territorial extent, the Byzantine and the Ottoman. The essays offer a diachronic and comparative account that spans the medieval and early modern periods and reaches into the nineteenth century. Methodologically rich, the essays combine historical, literary, and theoretical perspectives. Through texts as diverse as court records and chancery manuals, imperial treatises and fictional works, travel literature and theatrical adaptations, the essays explore ways in which the production of geographical knowledge supported imperial authority or revealed its precarious mastery of geography.

In this story about one of the 19th century's most famous Americans, Benjamin Reiss uses P.T. Barnum's Joice Heth hoax to examine the contours of race relations in the antebellum North. Barnum's first exhibit as a showman, Heth was an elderly enslaved woman who was said to be the 161-year-old former nurse of the infant George Washington. Seizing upon the novelty, the newly emerging commercial press turned her act - and especially her death - into one of the first media spectacles in American history.

On Easter Monday 1916, while much of Dublin holidayed at the seaside and placed bets at the horse races, a disciplined group of Irish Volunteers seized the city's General Post Office in what would become the defining act of rebellion against British rule--and the most significant single event in modern Irish history. By week's end, the rebels had surrendered, and the siege had left the once magnificent GPO an empty shell--and turned it into the most famous and deeply symbolic building in all of Ireland. This book unravels the events in and around the GPO during the Easter Rising of 1916. Drawing on participant and eyewitness accounts, diaries, and newspaper reports, Clair Wills recreates the harrowing moments that transformed the GPO from an emblem of nineteenth-century British power and civil government, to an embattled barricade, and finally to a national symbol. What was it like to be trapped in the building? To watch, and listen to, the destruction of the city? Was the act meant as a bloody sacrifice or a military coup d'état? Exploring these questions as they were experienced and understood then and later, her book reveals the twists and turns that the myth of the GPO has undergone in the last century, as it has stood for sacrifice and treachery, national unity and divisive violence, the future and the past.

Much as an ancient hymnist carries a familiar subject into new directions of song, the contributors to A Californian Hymn to Homer draw upon Homeric scholarship as inspiration for pursuing new ways of looking at texts, both within the Homeric tradition and outside it. This set of seven original essays, accompanied by a new translation of the Homeric "Hymn to Apollo," considers topics that transcend traditional generic distinctions between epic and lyric, choral and individual, performed and literary. Treating subjects ranging from Aeschylus' reception of Homeric anger to the representation of mantic performance within Early Islamic texts, the collection presents a selection of imaginative critical work done on the West Coast by scholars of antiquity.

In September 1755, the most famous Indian in the world--a Mohawk leader known in English as King Hendrick--died in the Battle of Lake George. He was fighting the French in defense of British claims to North America, and his death marked the end of an era in Anglo-Iroquois relations. He was not the first Mohawk of that name to attract international attention. Half a century earlier, another Hendrick worked with powerful leaders in the frontier town of Albany. He cemented his transatlantic fame when he traveled to London as one of the "four Indian kings."Until recently the two Hendricks were thought to be the same person. Eric Hinderaker sets the record straight, reconstructing the lives of these two men in a compelling narrative that reveals the complexities of the Anglo-Iroquois alliance, a cornerstone of Britain's imperial vision. The two Hendricks became famous because, as Mohawks, they were members of the Iroquois confederacy and colonial leaders believed the Iroquois held the balance of power in the Northeast. As warriors, the two Hendricks aided Britain against the French; as Christians, they adopted the trappings of civility; as sachems, they stressed cooperation rather than bloody confrontation with New York and Great Britain.Yet the alliance was never more than a mixed blessing for the two Hendricks and the Iroquois. Hinderaker offers a poignant personal story that restores the lost individuality of the two Hendricks while illuminating the tumultuous imperial struggle for North America.

The Letters of Emily Dickinson collects, redates, and recontextualizes all of the poet's extant letters, including dozens newly discovered or never before anthologized. Insightful annotations emphasize not the reclusive poet of myth but rather an artist firmly embedded in the political and literary currents of her time.

Selected Stories by Franz Kafka offers new renderings of the author's finest work. Mark Harman's English translations convey the uniqueness of Kafka's German-the wit, irony, and cadence. Expert annotations illuminate Kafka's cultural allusions and wordplay, while a biographical introduction places the man and his work in historical context.

Zhou Enlai, China's first premier, is overshadowed by Mao, but Zhou's influence in his own time and since has been vast. Chen Jian shows Zhou using his political and bureaucratic skills and centralism to mitigate the damage caused by Mao's radicalism and argues that Zhou created conditions for the post-Mao reforms that have made China a superpower.

A successful business deal maximizes value for all parties. Drawing on diverse case studies and decades of experience, Michael Klausner and Guhan Subramanian show how contracting parties can reach that goal through rigorous attention to incentives, information asymmetries, exit terms, moral hazard, and opportunism.

The Sea of Separation, a new free verse translation of Tulsidas's beloved R¿mcaritm¿nas, presents renowned episodes from the Ramayana epic, including Ram's battles with demons, the kidnapping of his wife Sita, and the god Hanuman's heroic journey to Lanka to find her.

Setting wages isn¿t an exact science, but we like to think that our workplace performance provides an objective basis for pay. Yoüre Paid What Yoüre Worth offers a bold theory to the contrary, arguing that pay is decided in contests over interests and ideals¿that social conflicts, not economic metrics, determine who gets how much.

In 1739 Bordeaux's Royal Academy of Sciences held an essay contest seeking answers to a pressing question: What was the cause of Africans' black skin? Published here for the first time and translated into English, these early documents of scientific racism lay bare the Enlightenment origins of the phantom of racial hierarchy.

Blaise Pascal is a marquee name, yet little read outside France. Antoine Compagnon provides an ideal introduction to one of the great intellects, contextualizing Pascal in his own time and offering insightful readings of the Pensées and the Provincial Letters. Compagnon proves a welcoming guide to Pascal's challenging and rewarding thought.

Francis Cogliano revisits the relationship between Washington and Jefferson, arguing that their vaunted differences mask mutual investments in the Revolution itself. Their later divergence demonstrates how wartime unity gave way to competing visions for the new nation, making clear that there was no single founding ideal-only compromise.

Race is a social reality, not a biological one. Yet African Americans are poorly served by even advanced genetic medicine because it is built on European DNA. Constance Hilliard explores the benefits and drawbacks of racial heuristics in medicine and argues for nonessentializing methods of harnessing genomic science on behalf of people of color.

Largely forgotten today, the Second Mexican Empire was a transformative nineteenth-century moment. Raymond Jonas explores the conspiracy of European rulers and Mexican conservatives to erect an Old World empire on New World soil. Though quixotic, it was a scheme with a purpose: to contain both Mexican democracy and the rising United States.

Rising prosperity was supposed to bring democracy to China, yet the Communist Party's political monopoly endures. How? Minxin Pei looks to the surveillance state. Though renowned for high-tech repression, China's surveillance system is above all a labor-intensive project. Pei delves into the human sources of coercion at the foundation of CCP power.

In US foreign policy, conflict has replaced diplomacy. At home, wars on crime, drugs, immigration, and terrorism dissolve barriers between law enforcement and combat. Tracing the origins of militarized policy to post-Vietnam fears of waning US power, Osamah Khalil argues that it is time to discard forever wars and invest in political solutions.

Elizabeth Ingleson explores the roots of bilateral trade between the United States and China. Telling the story of the 1970s US activists and entrepreneurs who pressed for access to China's vast labor market, Ingleson shows how not just Chinese reform but also US deindustrialization fueled a dramatic, unanticipated shift in global capitalism.

In readings attuned to the textual, sexual and historical specificities of Ashbery's poetic project, from Some Trees through the vast summation of Flow Chart, Shoptaw introduces readers to the poet's processes of production. The first reader with full access to Ashbery's manuscripts and source materials, he is able to reveal the poet at work. He shows us, for instance, how Ashbery built Europe and The Skaters upon children's books picked up at a Paris quai and how he drew on his own unpublished lyrics for the long dialogue Fantasia on 'The Nut-Brown Maid'.

The events of the 1920s and 1930s were crucial in the evolution of modern Vietnam. Yet our knowledge of this complex period of student strikes, revolt against the patriarchal family, debates on women's emancipation, and the search for a new worldview to replace the bankrupt Confucian ideology has been distorted by a preoccupation with the eventual establishment of a Communist regime there.