Bøger udgivet af Harvard University Press

Drawing on a range of hard evidence, Neil Van Leeuwen shows that the psychological mechanisms underlying religious belief are the same as those enabling imaginative play. He argues that we should therefore understand religious belief as a form of make-believe that people use to define their group identity and express the values sacred to them.

John D. Garrigus provides a profound historical corrective, showing that enslaved Blacks in Saint-Domingue were hardly complacent before the Haitian Revolution. While scholars have looked beyond the island's shores for the forces that inspired rebellion, Garrigus documents African resistance and political organizing decades before the 1791 revolt.

In the #MeToo age, US debate over licit sex has split into two camps: one insists that consent solves the problem of sexual coercion, while the other equates sexual pleasure with the patriarchal erotics of silence and mystery. Manon Garcia rejects both positions, arguing that consent is a faulty legal threshold but essential to the joy of good sex.

Today John Hancock is known for his signature, but during the revolutionary era, he was famed for his pragmatic statesmanship. Brooke Barbier explores Hancock¿s position as a revolutionary who nonetheless understood the value of compromise. By shunning political extremes, Hancock became hugely influential in the infant United States.

Diego Javier Luis tells the story of transpacific Asian movement to and through the Spanish Americas. On arrival in Mexico, diverse Asian peoples officially became "chinos" subject to the colonial caste system. Tracing Asian resistance and adaptation to New Spanish ideas of race, Luis presents a Pacific-focused narrative of the colonial Americas.

Joseph LeDoux argues that ideas like the self are increasingly barriers to discovery and understanding. He offers a new framework, theorizing four realms of existence¿bodily, neural, cognitive, and conscious. Together, these four realms operate continuously as an ¿ensemble of being¿ to make humans who and what we are.

The Op-Ed Novel follows a clutch of globally renowned Spanish novelists who swept into the political sphere via the pages of El Pais. Their literary sensibility transformed opinion journalism, and their weekly columns changed their novels, which became venues for speculative historical claims, partisan political projects, and intellectual argument.

Nostalgia, supposedly, is the sphere of the sentimentalist. But also, and most definitely, it is a force in the creation of the present and future and thus worth careful thought. Yesterday argues that nostalgiäs critics defend an idea of progress as naïve as the longing they denounce, while conflating nostalgia itself with historical whitewashing.

Enquiry into Plants and De Causis Plantarum by Theophrastus (c. 370-c. 285 BCE) are a counterpart to Aristotle's zoological work and the most important botanical work of antiquity now extant. In the former Theophrastus classifies and describes. His On Odours and Weather Signs are minor treatises.

Futurists are certain that humanlike AI is on the horizon, but in fact engineers have no idea how to program human reasoning. AI reasons from statistical correlations across data sets, while common sense is based heavily on conjecture. Erik Larson argues that hyping existing methods will only hold us back from developing truly humanlike AI.

The letters of Pliny the Younger (c. 61-c. 112 CE), a polished social document of his times, include descriptions of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE and the earliest pagan accounts of Christians. The Panegyricus is an expanded, published version of Pliny's oration of thanks to the Emperor Trajan in 100 CE.

Frank Sysyn examines the failure of Polish policy through the career of Adam Kysil. Based on extensive archival research in Poland and the USSR, Sysyn's study is a contribution not only to scholarship on Eastern Europe, but also to discussions on the preconditions and nature of early modern revolts and on the change of political and social elites.

Children's Chances urges a shift from focusing on survival to targeting children's full and healthy development. Drawing on comparative data on policies in 190 countries designed to combat poverty, discrimination, child labor, illiteracy, and child marriage, Heymann and McNeill tell what works to ensure equal opportunities for all children.

The R¿jy¿bhi¿eka Manual for the Coronation of King B¿rendra of Nepal contains the only extensive coronation manual available for a Hindu king. Long regarded as highly secret, it can now be presented, after the abolition of the monarchy in its entirety in 2008. This manual was checked and signed by the royal priests and religious advisors.

Inked is a social history of common soldiers of the Song dynasty, most of whom would have been recognized by their tattooed bodies. Overlooked in the historical record, tattoos were an indelible aspect of the Song world, and their ubiquity was tied to the rise of the penal-military complex, a vast system for social control, warfare, and labor.