Search results for ""harvard university press""

The identical “Jim twins” were raised in separate families and met for the first time at age thirty-nine, only to discover that they both suffered tension headaches, bit their fingernails, smoked Salems, enjoyed woodworking, and vacationed on the same Florida beach. This example of the potential power of genetics captured widespread media attention in 1979 and inspired the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart. This landmark investigation into the nature-nurture debate shook the scientific community by demonstrating, across a number of traits, that twins reared separately are as alike as those raised together. As a postdoctoral fellow and then as assistant director of the Minnesota Study, Nancy L. Segal provides an eagerly anticipated overview of its scientific contributions and their effect on public consciousness. The study’s evidence of genetic influence on individual differences in traits such as personality (50%) and intelligence (70%) overturned conventional ideas about parenting and teaching. Treating children differently and nurturing their inherent talents suddenly seemed to be a fairer approach than treating them all the same. Findings of genetic influence on physiological characteristics such as cardiac and immunologic function have led to more targeted approaches to disease prevention and treatment. And indications of a stronger genetic influence on male than female homosexuality have furthered debate regarding sexual orientation.

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Frigid, dark, and energy-deprived, the deep sea was long considered hostile to life. However, new sampling technologies and intense international research efforts in recent decades have revealed a remarkably rich fauna and an astonishing variety of novel habitats. These recent discoveries have changed the way we look at global biodiversity. In Deep-Sea Biodiversity, Michael Rex and Ron Etter present the first synthesis of patterns and causes of biodiversity in organisms that dwell in the vast sediment ecosystem that blankets the ocean floor. They provide the most comprehensive analysis to date of geographic variation in benthic animal abundance and biomass. The authors document geographic patterns of deep-sea species diversity and integrate potential ecological causes across scales of time and space. They also review the most recent molecular population genetic evidence to describe how and where evolutionary processes have generated the unique deep-sea fauna. Deep-Sea Biodiversity offers a new understanding of marine biodiversity that will be of general interest to ecologists and is crucial to responsible exploitation of natural resources at the deep-sea floor.

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Much more than an historical examination of liability, criminal law, torts, bail, possession and ownership, and contracts, The Common Law articulates the ideas and judicial theory of one of the greatest justices of the Supreme Court. G. Edward White reminds us why the book remains essential reading not only for law students but also for anyone interested in American history. The text published is, with occasional corrections of typographical errors, identical with that found in the first and all subsequent printings by Little, Brown.

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From the earliest times, successive waves of foreign invaders have left their mark on Italy. Beginning with Germanic invasions that undermined the Roman Empire and culminating with the establishment of the modern nation, Girolamo Arnaldi explores the dynamic exchange between outsider and “native,” liberally illustrated with interpretations of the foreigners drawn from a range of sources. A despairing Saint Jerome wrote, of the Sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410, “My sobs stop me from dictating these words. Behold, the city that conquered the world has been conquered in its turn.” Other Christian authors, however, concluded that the sinning Romans had drawn the wrath of God upon them.Arnaldi traces the rise of Christianity, which in the transition from Roman to barbarian rule would provide a social bond that endured through centuries of foreign domination. Incursions cemented the separation between north and south: the Frankish conquerors held sway north of Rome, while the Normans settled in the south. In the ninth century, Sicily entered the orbit of the Muslim world when Arab and Berber forces invaded. During the Renaissance, flourishing cities were ravaged by foreign armies—first the French, who during the siege of Naples introduced an epidemic of syphilis, then the Spanish, whose control preserved the country’s religious unity during the Counter-Reformation but also ensured that Italy would lag behind during the Enlightenment.Accessible and entertaining, this outside-in history of Italy is a telling reminder of the many interwoven strands that make up the fabric of modern Europe.

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The sheer magnitude of the Holocaust has commanded our attention for the past sixty years. The extent of atrocities, however, has overshadowed the calculus Nazis used to justify their deeds.According to German wartime media, it was German citizens who were targeted for extinction by a vast international conspiracy. Leading the assault was an insidious, belligerent Jewish clique, so crafty and powerful that it managed to manipulate the actions of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. Hitler portrayed the Holocaust as a defensive act, a necessary move to destroy the Jews before they destroyed Germany.Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda, and Otto Dietrich’s Press Office translated this fanatical vision into a coherent cautionary narrative, which the Nazi propaganda machine disseminated into the recesses of everyday life. Calling on impressive archival research, Jeffrey Herf recreates the wall posters that Germans saw while waiting for the streetcar, the radio speeches they heard at home or on the street, the headlines that blared from newsstands. The Jewish Enemy is the first extensive study of how anti-Semitism pervaded and shaped Nazi propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust, and how it pulled together the diverse elements of a delusionary Nazi worldview. Here we find an original and haunting exposition of the ways in which Hitler legitimized war and genocide to his own people, as necessary to destroy an allegedly omnipotent Jewish foe. In an era when both anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories continue to influence world politics, Herf offers a timely reminder of their dangers along with a fresh interpretation of the paranoia underlying the ideology of the Third Reich.

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September 11, 2001, distinguished Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis argues, was not the first time a surprise attack shattered American assumptions about national security and reshaped American grand strategy. We've been there before, and have responded each time by dramatically expanding our security responsibilities.The pattern began in 1814, when the British attacked Washington, burning the White House and the Capitol. This early violation of homeland security gave rise to a strategy of unilateralism and preemption, best articulated by John Quincy Adams, aimed at maintaining strength beyond challenge throughout the North American continent. It remained in place for over a century. Only when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941 did the inadequacies of this strategy become evident: as a consequence, the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt devised a new grand strategy of cooperation with allies on an intercontinental scale to defeat authoritarianism. That strategy defined the American approach throughout World War II and the Cold War.The terrorist attacks of 9/11, Gaddis writes, made it clear that this strategy was now insufficient to ensure American security. The Bush administration has, therefore, devised a new grand strategy whose foundations lie in the nineteenth-century tradition of unilateralism, preemption, and hegemony, projected this time on a global scale. How successful it will be in the face of twenty-first-century challenges is the question that confronts us. This provocative book, informed by the experiences of the past but focused on the present and the future, is one of the first attempts by a major scholar of grand strategy and international relations to provide an answer.

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Precious snippets of ancient song.Bacchylides, nephew of Simonides and rival of Pindar, wrote choral poetry of many types. We have a number of his victory odes—poems celebrating victories in athletic contests—as well as dithyrambs and other hymns. He was a master of the captivating narrative. Also represented in this volume is the Boeotian Corinna, whose work, versions of local myths, survives in greater quantity than that of any other Greek woman poet except Sappho. Ancient authorities regarded Corinna as an older contemporary and mentor of Pindar; but some modern scholars place her later, in the third century BC. Other women are here too: Myrtis, also from Boeotia; Telesilla of Argos, famous for her military leadership as well as her hymns; the shadowy Charixena; and Praxilla of Sicyon, author of choral poems and drinking songs.David Campbell gives all the extant verse of these poets, along with the ancients’ accounts of their lives and works. This fourth volume of his much-praised edition of Greek lyric poetry also includes Timocreon of Rhodes, pentathlete and writer of invective; Diagoras of Melos, choral poet and alleged atheist; and Ion of Chios. Sophocles is represented by fragments of his paean Asclepius, Euripides by the few surviving lines of his ode for Alcibiades’ dazzling victory in the chariot race at Olympia.This is the fourth in a five-volume edition of Greek lyric poets. Sappho and Alcaeus, the illustrious singers of sixth-century Lesbos, are in the first. Volume II contains the work of Anacreon, composer of solo song; the Anacreontea; and the earliest writers of choral poetry, notably the seventh-century Spartans Alcman and Terpander. Stesichorus, Ibycus, Simonides, and other sixth-century poets are in Volume III. The last volume includes the new school of dithyrambic poets (mid-fifth to mid-fourth century), together with the anonymous poems: drinking songs, children’s songs, cult hymns, and others.

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Syncretistic exegesis.The philosopher Philo was born about 20 BC to a prominent Jewish family in Alexandria, the chief home of the Jewish Diaspora as well as the chief center of Hellenistic culture; he was trained in Greek as well as Jewish learning. In attempting to reconcile biblical teachings with Greek philosophy he developed ideas that had wide influence on Christian and Jewish religious thought. The Loeb Classical Library edition of the works of Philo is in ten volumes and two supplements, distributed as follows. Volume I: Creation; Interpretation of Genesis II and III. II: On the Cherubim; The Sacrifices of Abel and Cain; The Worse Attacks the Better; The Posterity and Exile of Cain; On the Giants. III: The Unchangeableness of God; On Husbandry; Noah's Work as a Planter; On Drunkenness; On Sobriety. IV: The Confusion of Tongues; The Migration of Abraham; The Heir of Divine Things; On the Preliminary Studies. V: On Flight and Finding; Change of Names; On Dreams. VI: Abraham; Joseph; Moses. VII: The Decalogue; On Special Laws Books I–III. VIII: On Special Laws Book IV; On the Virtues; Rewards and Punishments. IX: Every Good Man Is Free; The Contemplative Life; The Eternity of the World; Against Flaccus; Apology for the Jews; On Providence. X: On the Embassy to Gaius; indexes. Supplement I: Questions on Genesis. II: Questions on Exodus; index to supplements.

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The natural state of mankind.Aristotle, great Greek philosopher, researcher, reasoner, and writer, born at Stagirus in 384 BC, was the son of a physician. He studied under Plato at Athens and taught there (367–347); subsequently he spent three years at the court of a former pupil in Asia Minor. After some time at Mitylene, in 343–342 he was appointed by King Philip of Macedon to be tutor of his teen-aged son Alexander. After Philip’s death in 336, Aristotle became head of his own school (of “Peripatetics”), the Lyceum at Athens. Because of anti-Macedonian feeling there after Alexander’s death in 323, he withdrew to Chalcis in Euboea, where he died in 322.Nearly all the works Aristotle prepared for publication are lost; the priceless ones extant are lecture-materials, notes, and memoranda (some are spurious). They can be categorized as follows:I Practical: Nicomachean Ethics; Great Ethics (Magna Moralia); Eudemian Ethics; Politics; Economics (on the good of the family); On Virtues and Vices.II Logical: Categories; Analytics (Prior and Posterior); Interpretation; Refutations used by Sophists; Topica.III Physical: Twenty-six works (some suspect) including astronomy, generation and destruction, the senses, memory, sleep, dreams, life, facts about animals, etc.IV Metaphysics: on being as being.V Art: Rhetoric and Poetics.VI Other works including the Constitution of Athens; more works also of doubtful authorship.VII Fragments of various works such as dialogues on philosophy and literature; and of treatises on rhetoric, politics, and metaphysics.The Loeb Classical Library® edition of Aristotle is in twenty-three volumes.

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Austere apologetics.Q. Septimus Florens Tertullianus (ca. AD 150–222) was born a soldier’s son at Carthage, educated in Greek and Roman literature, philosophy, and medicine, and later studied law to became a pleader, remaining a clever and often tortuous arguer. At Rome he became a learned and militant Christian. After visiting churches in Greece (and Asia Minor?) he returned to Carthage and in his writings there founded a Christian Latin language and literature, toiling to fuse enthusiasm with reason; to unite the demands of the Bible with the practice of the Church; and to continue to vindicate the Church’s possession of the true doctrine in the face of unbelievers, Jews, Gnostics, and others. In some of his many works he defended Christianity, in others he attacked heretical people and beliefs; in others he dealt with morals. In this volume are his Apologeticus and De Spectaculis. Of Minucius, an early Christian writer of unknown date, we have only Octavius, a vigorous and readable debate between an unbeliever and a Christian friend of Minucius, the lawyer Octavius Ianuarius. Minucius himself acts as presiding judge. Octavius wins the argument. The whole work presents a picture of social and religious conditions in Rome, apparently about the end of the second century.

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The “Father of History.”Herodotus the great Greek historian was born about 484 BC, at Halicarnassus in Caria, Asia Minor, when it was subject to the Persians. He traveled widely in most of Asia Minor, Egypt (as far as Aswan), North Africa, Syria, the country north of the Black Sea, and many parts of the Aegean Sea and the mainland of Greece. He lived, it seems, for some time in Athens, and in 443 went with other colonists to the new city Thurii (in South Italy), where he died about 430. He was “the prose correlative of the bard, a narrator of the deeds of real men, and a describer of foreign places” (Murray). Herodotus’ famous history of warfare between the Greeks and the Persians has an epic dignity which enhances his delightful style. It includes the rise of the Persian power and an account of the Persian empire; a description and history of Egypt; and a long digression on the geography and customs of Scythia. Even in the later books on the attacks of the Persians against Greece there are digressions. All is most entertaining and produces a grand unity. After personal inquiry and study of hearsay and other evidence, Herodotus gives us a not uncritical estimate of the best that he could find. The Loeb Classical Library edition of Herodotus is in four volumes.

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The paramount historian of the early Roman empire.Tacitus (Cornelius), famous Roman historian, was born in AD 55, 56 or 57 and lived to about 120. He became an orator, married in 77 a daughter of Julius Agricola before Agricola went to Britain, was quaestor in 81 or 82, a senator under the Flavian emperors, and a praetor in 88. After four years' absence he experienced the terrors of Emperor Domitian's last years and turned to historical writing. He was a consul in 97. Close friend of the younger Pliny, with him he successfully prosecuted Marius Priscus. Works: (i) Life and Character of Agricola, written in 97–98, specially interesting because of Agricola's career in Britain. (ii) Germania (98–99), an equally important description of the geography, anthropology, products, institutions, and social life and the tribes of the Germans as known to the Romans. (iii) Dialogue on Oratory (Dialogus), of unknown date; a lively conversation about the decline of oratory and education. (iv) Histories (probably issued in parts from 105 onwards), a great work originally consisting of at least twelve books covering the period AD 69–96, but only Books 1–4 and part of Book 5 survive, dealing in detail with the dramatic years 69–70. (v) Annals, Tacitus's other great work, originally covering the period AD 14–68 (Emperors Tiberius, Gaius, Claudius, Nero) and published between 115 and about 120. Of sixteen books at least, there survive Books 1–4 (covering the years 14–28); a bit of Book 5 and all Book 6 (31–37); part of Book 11 (from 47); Books 12–15 and part of Book 16 (to 66). Tacitus is renowned for his development of a pregnant concise style, character study, and psychological analysis, and for the often terrible story which he brilliantly tells. As a historian of the early Roman empire he is paramount. The Loeb Classical Library edition of Tacitus is in five volumes.

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Meditative missives.Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, born at Corduba (Cordova) ca. 4 BC, of a prominent and wealthy family, spent an ailing childhood and youth at Rome in an aunt’s care. He became famous in rhetoric, philosophy, money-making, and imperial service. After some disgrace during Claudius’ reign he became tutor and then, in AD 54, advising minister to Nero, some of whose worst misdeeds he did not prevent. Involved (innocently?) in a conspiracy, he killed himself by order in 65. Wealthy, he preached indifference to wealth; evader of pain and death, he preached scorn of both; and there were other contrasts between practice and principle. We have Seneca’s philosophical or moral essays (ten of them traditionally called Dialogues)—on providence, steadfastness, the happy life, anger, leisure, tranquility, the brevity of life, gift-giving, forgiveness—and treatises on natural phenomena. Also extant are 124 epistles, in which he writes in a relaxed style about moral and ethical questions, relating them to personal experiences; a skit on the official deification of Claudius, Apocolocyntosis (in LCL 15); and nine rhetorical tragedies on ancient Greek themes. Many epistles and all his speeches are lost. The 124 epistles are collected in Volumes IV–VI of the Loeb Classical Library’s ten-volume edition of Seneca.

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Antiquity’s most influential account of life’s Supreme Good.Aristotle, great Greek philosopher, researcher, reasoner, and writer, born at Stagirus in 384 BC, was the son of a physician. He studied under Plato at Athens and taught there (367–347); subsequently he spent three years at the court of a former pupil in Asia Minor. After some time at Mitylene, in 343–342 he was appointed by King Philip of Macedon to be tutor of his teen-aged son Alexander. After Philip’s death in 336, Aristotle became head of his own school (of “Peripatetics”), the Lyceum at Athens. Because of anti-Macedonian feeling there after Alexander’s death in 323, he withdrew to Chalcis in Euboea, where he died in 322.Nearly all the works Aristotle prepared for publication are lost; the priceless ones extant are lecture-materials, notes, and memoranda (some are spurious). They can be categorized as follows:I Practical: Nicomachean Ethics; Great Ethics (Magna Moralia); Eudemian Ethics; Politics; Economics (on the good of the family); On Virtues and Vices.II Logical: Categories; Analytics (Prior and Posterior); Interpretation; Refutations used by Sophists; Topica.III Physical: Twenty-six works (some suspect) including astronomy, generation and destruction, the senses, memory, sleep, dreams, life, facts about animals, etc.IV Metaphysics: on being as being.V Art: Rhetoric and Poetics.VI Other works including the Constitution of Athens; more works also of doubtful authorship.VII Fragments of various works such as dialogues on philosophy and literature; and of treatises on rhetoric, politics, and metaphysics.The Loeb Classical Library edition of Aristotle is in twenty-three volumes.

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Some of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s finest and most famous essays, such as “Self-Reliance,” “Compensation,” and “The Over-Soul,” appeared in his Essays of 1841, published when he was thirty-seven years old. Preceded by the slim volume Nature, it was his first full-length book.The present edition provides for the first time an authoritative text of the Essays, together with an introduction, notes, and supplementary material of great value for the study of Emerson’s creative processes. A list of hundreds of parallel passages in his earlier journals and lectures makes it possible to examine in detail how he drew upon those manuscripts (now published), especially the voluminous journals, as grist for the twelve essays. His subsequent alterations of the essays, particularly in the revised edition of 1847, give evidence of the evolution of his thought and style at this stage of his career. While the text incorporates his revisions, so as to represent his final intention, the earlier versions are given at the end of the book.Introduction and Notes by Joseph SlaterText Established by Alfred R. Ferguson and Jean Ferguson Carr

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In countries and supranational entities around the globe, constitutional reform has transferred an unprecedented amount of power from representative institutions to judiciaries. The constitutionalization of rights and the establishment of judicial review are widely believed to have benevolent and progressive origins, and significant redistributive, power-diffusing consequences. Ran Hirschl challenges this conventional wisdom. Drawing upon a comprehensive comparative inquiry into the political origins and legal consequences of the recent constitutional revolutions in Canada, Israel, New Zealand, and South Africa, Hirschl shows that the trend toward constitutionalization is hardly driven by politicians' genuine commitment to democracy, social justice, or universal rights. Rather, it is best understood as the product of a strategic interplay among hegemonic yet threatened political elites, influential economic stakeholders, and judicial leaders. This self-interested coalition of legal innovators determines the timing, extent, and nature of constitutional reforms. Hirschl demonstrates that whereas judicial empowerment through constitutionalization has a limited impact on advancing progressive notions of distributive justice, it has a transformative effect on political discourse. The global trend toward juristocracy, Hirschl argues, is part of a broader process whereby political and economic elites, while they profess support for democracy and sustained development, attempt to insulate policymaking from the vicissitudes of democratic politics.

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How can higher education today create a community of critical thinkers and searchers for truth that transcends the boundaries of class, gender, and nation? Martha C. Nussbaum, philosopher and classicist, argues that contemporary curricular reform is already producing such “citizens of the world” in its advocacy of diverse forms of cross-cultural studies. Her vigorous defense of “the new education” is rooted in Seneca’s ideal of the citizen who scrutinizes tradition critically and who respects the ability to reason wherever it is found—in rich or poor, native or foreigner, female or male.Drawing on Socrates and the Stoics, Nussbaum establishes three core values of liberal education: critical self-examination, the ideal of the world citizen, and the development of the narrative imagination. Then, taking us into classrooms and campuses across the nation, including prominent research universities, small independent colleges, and religious institutions, she shows how these values are (and in some instances are not) being embodied in particular courses. She defends such burgeoning subject areas as gender, minority, and gay studies against charges of moral relativism and low standards, and underscores their dynamic and fundamental contribution to critical reasoning and world citizenship.For Nussbaum, liberal education is alive and well on American campuses in the late twentieth century. It is not only viable, promising, and constructive, but it is essential to a democratic society. Taking up the challenge of conservative critics of academe, she argues persuasively that sustained reform in the aim and content of liberal education is the most vital and invigorating force in higher education today.

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The Nazi conscience is not an oxymoron. In fact, the perpetrators of genocide had a powerful sense of right and wrong, based on civic values that exalted the moral righteousness of the ethnic community and denounced outsiders. Claudia Koonz's latest work reveals how racial popularizers developed the infrastructure and rationale for genocide during the so-called normal years before World War II. Her careful reading of the voluminous Nazi writings on race traces the transformation of longtime Nazis' vulgar anti-Semitism into a racial ideology that seemed credible to the vast majority of ordinary Germans who never joined the Nazi Party. Challenging conventional assumptions about Hitler, Koonz locates the source of his charisma not in his summons to hate, but in his appeal to the collective virtue of his people, the Volk. From 1933 to 1939, Nazi public culture was saturated with a blend of racial fear and ethnic pride that Koonz calls ethnic fundamentalism. Ordinary Germans were prepared for wartime atrocities by racial concepts widely disseminated in media not perceived as political: academic research, documentary films, mass-market magazines, racial hygiene and art exhibits, slide lectures, textbooks, and humor. By showing how Germans learned to countenance the everyday persecution of fellow citizens labeled as alien, Koonz makes a major contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust. The Nazi Conscience chronicles the chilling saga of a modern state so powerful that it extinguished neighborliness, respect, and, ultimately, compassion for all those banished from the ethnic majority.

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