Bøger udgivet af Harvard University Press

Henry James rebelled against the tyranny and banality of plots. Believing a life to have many potential paths and a self to hold many destinies, he hung the evocative shadow of what might have been over much of what he wrote. Yet James also realized that no life can be lived - and no story written - except by submission to some outcome. In this study of James's work, Millicent Bell explores this oscillation between hope and fatalism, indeterminacy and form, and uncertainty and meaning. In the process Bell provides fresh insight into how we read and interpret fiction.

We generally suppose that it is our right to freedom that allows us to make the choices that shape our lives. The right to have an abortion is called "freedom of choice" because, it is said, a woman should be free to choose between giving birth and not doing so. Freedom of speech protects us whether we want to salute the flag or burn it. There is a correlative principle: one choice is as good as another. Freedom is not a right that makes moral judgments. It lets us do what we want. John Garvey disputes both propositions. We should understand freedom, he maintains, as a right to act, not a right to choose; and furthermore, we should view freedom as a right to engage in actions that are good and valuable. This may seem obvious, but it inverts a central principle of liberalism - the idea that the right is prior to the good. Thus friendship is a good thing; and one reason the Constitution protects freedom of association is that it gives us the space to form friendships. This book casts doubt on the idea that freedoms are bilateral rights that allow us to make contradictory choices: to speak or remain silent, to believe in God or to disbelieve, to abort or to give birth to a child. Garvey argues that the goodness of childbearing does not entail the goodness of abortion; and if freedom follows from the good, then freedom to do the first does not entail freedom to do the second. Each action must have its own justification. Garvey holds that if the law is to protect freedoms it is permissible - indeed, it is necessary - to make judgments about the goodness and badness of actions.

Pairs is a student-led journal at Harvard University Graduate School of Design dedicated to design conversations. Pairs 04 features Danielle Auburt, Melanie Boehi, Fernanda Canales, Theaster Gates, Ryan W. Kennihan, Yasmeen Lari, Maeling Lokko, Sergio Lopez-Pineiro, Sharon Mattern, Jeffrey Shaw, Kate Wagner, and others.

"Here, in a grand narrative spanning 1,800 years of European history, a distinguished political philosopher firmly rejects Western liberalism's usual account of itself: its emergence in opposition to religion in the early modern era. Larry Siedentop argues instead that liberal thought is, in its underlying assumptions, the offspring of the church. Beginning with a moral revolution in the first centuries CE, when notions about equality and human agency were first formulated by St. Paul, Siedentop follows these concepts in Christianity from Augustine to the philosophers and canon lawyers of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, and ends with their reemergence in secularism--another of Christianity's gifts to the West"--Jacket.

When Louis XVI gave Ben Franklin a diamond-encrusted snuffbox, the gift troubled Americans: it threatened to corrupt him by clouding his judgment. By contrast, in 2010 the Supreme Court gave corporations the right to spend unlimited money to influence elections. Zephyr Teachout shows that Citizens United was both bad law and bad history.

For constitutionalists, regulation of hate speech violates the First Amendment and damages a free society. Waldron rejects this view, and makes the case that hate speech should be regulated as part of a commitment to human dignity and to inclusion and respect for members of vulnerable minorities.

While teaching at an all-Black middle school in Atlanta, Levinson realized that her students individual self-improvement would not necessarily enable them to overcome their historical marginalization. In order to overcome their civic empowerment gap, students must learn how to reshape power relationships through public political and civic action."

After retiring from teaching literature, Patricia Meyer Spacks embarked on a year-long project of rereading dozens of novels: childhood favorites, young adult fiction, canonical works she didn t like, guilty pleasures. "On Rereading" records the surprising, fascinating results of her personal experiment and raises a number of intriguing questions.

"To Free a Family" tells the remarkable story of Mary Walker, who in August 1848 fled her owner for refuge in the North and spent the next seventeen years trying to recover her son and daughter. Her freedom, like that of thousands who escaped from bondage, came at a great price remorse at parting without a word, fear for her family s fate."

In 1896 a massive Ethiopian army routed an invading Italian force and brought Italy s conquest of Africa to an end. In defending its independence, Ethiopia cast doubt on the assumption that all Africans would fall under the rule of Europeans, and opened a breach that would lead to the continent s painful struggle for freedom from colonial rule.

Nezar AlSayyad narrates the many Cairos that have existed through time, offering a panorama unmatched in temporal and geographic scope, through an in-depth examination of the city's architecture and urban form. His narration illuminates how there can be "no one history of the city, but rather multiple, contested, and often invented histories."

Spreading democracy abroad or protecting business at home: this book offers a new look at the history of the contest between isolationism and internationalism that is as current as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and as old as America itself, with profiles of the people, policies, and events that shaped the debate.

Bruce Ackerman shows how the institutional dynamics of the last half-century have transformed the American presidency into a potential platform for political extremism, and proposes a series of reforms that will minimize, if not eliminate, the risks going forward.

Strange, deformed, and piercingly beautiful, the child acrobat Mignon sprang onto the public stage in 1795. No child at all, but a figment of Goethe's fiction, Mignon appeared and reappeared in countless forms and guises over the next century. The meaning of this compelling creature is at the center of Carolyn Steedman's book, a brilliant account of how nineteenth-century notions of childhood, like those expressed in the figure of Mignon, gave birth to the modern idea of a self. During the nineteenth century, a change took place in the way people in Western societies understood themselves--the way they understood the self and how it came into being. Steedman tracks this development through changing attitudes about children and childhood as these appear in literature and law, medicine, science, and social history. Moving from the world of German fiction to that of child acrobats and "street arabs" in nineteenth-century Britain, from the theories of Freud to those of Foucault, she shows how the individual and personal history that a child embodied came to represent human "insideness." Particularly important for understanding this change is the part that Freudian psychoanalysis played, between 1900 and 1920, in summarizing and reformulating the Victorian idea that the core of an individual's psychic identity was his or her own lost past, or childhood. Using the perspectives of social and cultural history, and the history of psychology and physiology, Strange Dislocations traces a search for the self, for a past that is lost and gone, and the ways in which, over the last hundred years, the lost vision has come to assume the form of a child.

Nandi Timmanäs Theft of a Tree recounts how Krishna stole the wish-granting p¿rij¿ta tree from the garden of Indra, king of the gods, to appease his wife Satyabhama. This is the first English translation of the poem, which prefigures the modern Telugu novel with its unprecedented narrative unity.

Oligarchy is a threat to the republic. Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath show that, for most of US history, Americans saw the Constitution as responding to that threat by imposing on legislators a duty to break up oligarchy, block corporate political power, and ensure a broad distribution of wealth and political power among ordinary Americans.

Randy Barnett and Evan Bernick return to the primary sources on the origin, drafting and adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment to better understand its original meaning. Arguing that it protected principles of Republican citizenship, fundamental rights and civic equality, they propose workable doctrines for implementing these principles in practice.

In his final work, Richard Rorty provides the definitive statement of his political thought. Rorty equates pragmatism with anti-authoritarianism, arguing that because there is no authority we can rely on to ascertain truth, we can only do so intersubjectively. It follows that we must learn to think and care about what others think and care about.

In the early hours of November 5, 1605, Guy Fawkes, an English Catholic who had served with the Spanish army in Flanders, was discovered in a storeroom under the Palace of Westminster--and with him, thirty-six barrels of gunpowder earmarked to obliterate England's royal family, top officials, and members of Parliament gathered for Parliament's opening day. Had it succeeded, this Gunpowder Plot--a Catholic conspiracy against the recently crowned Protestant King James I and his government--English history would have been shaped by a terrorist act of unprecedented proportions. Today Guy Fawkes--whose name has long stood for the conspiracy--is among the most notorious figures in English history; and Bonfire Night, observed every November 5th to memorialize the narrowly foiled Gunpowder Plot, is one of the country's most festive occasions. Why has the memory of this act of treason and terrorism persisted for 400 years? In Remember, Remember James Sharpe takes us back to 1605 and teases apart the tangled web of religion and politics that gave rise to the plot. And, with considerable wit, he shows how celebration of that fateful night, and the representation of Guy Fawkes, has changed over the centuries. James Sharpe's colorfully told story has wide implications. The plot of 1605 has powerful resonances today, in a time of heightened concern about ideological conflict, religious fanaticism, and terrorism. And his account of the festivities marking the momentous event comments on the role of rituals in constructing national histories.

In reproducing sixty-six letters in the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library, plus eight letters or portions of letters previously published, this book offers one of the best sources available for the last fourteen years of Browning's life. Written to a dear friend who was also a learned lady, the letters deal with Browning's poetry, his social life, and his friendships. They also give some of his views on the nature of poetry, of art, and of religion. The editor's introduction offers the reader a view of Mrs. Fitzgerald and her family, of the social background with which many of the letters are concerned, and of Browning, his sister, and his son. Notes clarify the many allusions that appear in the letters. An appendix by Marcelle Thiebaux includes careful bibliographical descriptions of the manuscripts and a classified list of the writing paper Browning used, information which should enable future editors to assign at least approximate dates to some of the letters Browning himself left undated.

At a time when science is seen as an engine of economic growth, Paula Stephan brings a keen understanding of the cost benefit calculations made by individuals and institutions as they compete for resources and reputation in scientific fields. She highlights especially the growing gap between the biomedical sciences and physics/engineering."

Drinking a glass of tap water, strolling in a park, hopping a train for the suburbs: some aspects of city life are so familiar that we don t think twice about them. But such simple actions are structured by complex relationships with our natural world. The contours of these relationships social, cultural, political, economic, and legal were established during America s first great period of urbanization in the nineteenth century, and Boston, one of the earliest cities in America, often led the nation in designing them. A richly textured cultural and social history of the development of nineteenth-century Boston, this book provides a new environmental perspective on the creation of America s first cities. "Eden on the Charles" explores how Bostonians channeled country lakes through miles of pipeline to provide clean water; dredged the ocean to deepen the harbor; filled tidal flats and covered the peninsula with houses, shops, and factories; and created a metropolitan system of parks and greenways, facilitating the conversion of fields into suburbs. The book shows how, in Boston, different class and ethnic groups brought rival ideas of nature and competing visions of a city upon a hill to the process of urbanization and were forced to conform their goals to the realities of Boston s distinctive natural setting. The outcomes of their battles for control over the city s development were ultimately recorded in the very fabric of Boston itself. In Boston s history, we find the seeds of the environmental relationships that for better or worse have defined urban America to this day. "

What equality means in three modern democracies, both to leaders of important groups and to challengers of the status quo, is the subject of this wide-ranging canvass of perceptions and policy. It is based on extensive questionnaire data gathered from leaders in various segments of society in each countrybusiness, labor unions, farm organizations, political parties, the media-as well as from groups that are seeking greater equalityfeminists, black leaders in the United States, leaders of the Burakumin in Japan. The authors describe the extent to which the same meanings of equality exist, both within and across nations, and locate the areas of consensus and conflict over equality. No other book has compared data of this sort for these purposes. The authors address several major substantive and theoretical issues: the role of values in relation to egalitarian outcomes; the comparison of values and perceptions about equality in economics (income equality) and politics (equality of influence); and the difference among the nations in the ways political institutions affect the incorporation of new demands for equality into the policymaking process. They pay particular attention to how policy is set on issues of gender equality. This book will be controversial, for some see no room in the understanding of political economy for the analysis of values. It will be consulted by a general audience interested in politics and culture as well as by social scientists. Elites and the Idea of Equality is an informative sequel to Equality in America by Sidney Verba and Gary R. Orren (Harvard University Press), which considers similar topics in a national context.