The Harvard Brief

Here is a fun quiz question. What distinction does Charles Carroll (1737–1832) hold in American History? Answer: he was the longest-surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence and the only Catholic to have signed it.And therein lies a tale of religious prejudice against Catholics and the ingenious and determined efforts over decades of leaders like Carroll and the founding family of Maryland, the Calverts, to prove their devotion to their country while not compromising on the tenets of their faith.In his fascinating 2021 book, Our Dear-Bought Liberty: Catholics and Religious Toleration in Early America (Harvard UP, 2021), Michael D. Breidenbach traces in detail the delicate balance Catholics in the period of roughly 1600-1832 had to maintain in order to secure basic civil and property rights in both Britain and the New World colonies while avoiding excommunication by the pope for swearing oaths to British rulers that often entailed denying certain rights the pope claimed.We read in the book about the crucial importance of the exact wording of a series of oaths crafted and argued about over centuries and the implications of even a slight change to each for the often persecuted Catholic minority on both sides of the Atlantic.A major contribution of this book is its discussion of the conciliar movement (or conciliarism) and its intellectual and political impact on American politicians of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Ranging back to medieval figures and then to John Locke and forward into the early years of the United States as a nation proper, Breidenbach illustrates the difference between religious toleration versus religious liberty and helps us see why the matter of bishops and even church architecture were matters of such contention in the founding era.This is a book not just for Catholics, but for all of us who care about and live under the protection of the First Amendment—and, as Breidenbach makes clear, under this part of Article 6 of the Constitution, “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” As we saw during the hearings for Amy Coney Barrett’s initial judicial appointment, this issue and anti-Catholic sentiment live with us still.Our Dear-Bought Liberty: Catholics and Religious Toleration in Early America makes intellectual, legal, religious and political history come alive. It is global history too, given its coverage of all these matters in locales such as Jamaica and Barbados.We see powerful and influential Catholics like the Carrolls (including John Carroll 1735 –1815, the first Roman Catholic bishop and archbishop in the United States) taking both brave public stands and maneuvering tirelessly and shrewdly behind the scenes with non-Catholic allies like James Madison and Benjamin Franklin on behalf of religious liberty. This is a work abounding in insights about heretofore little recognized but crucial players and modes of thinking that made us the freedom-focused country we became.Give a listen.Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher.

As we saw with the Ebola outbreak--and the disastrous early handling of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic--a lack of preparedness, delays, and system-wide problems with the distribution of critical medical supplies can have deadly consequences. Yet after every outbreak, the systems put in place to coordinate emergency responses are generally dismantled.One of America's top biomedical researchers, Dr. Pardis Sabeti, and her Pulitzer Prize-winning collaborator, Lara Salahi, argue that these problems are built into the ecosystem of our emergency responses. With an understanding of the path of disease and insight into political psychology, they show how secrecy, competition, and poor coordination plague nearly every major public health crisis and reveal how much more could be done to safeguard the well-being of caregivers, patients, and vulnerable communities. A work of fearless integrity and unassailable authority, Outbreak Culture: The Ebola Crisis and the Next Epidemic (Harvard UP, 2021) seeks to ensure that we make some urgently needed changes before the next pandemic.

Long before Herodotus told the story of the Greeks, the ancient Mediterranean teemed with what the Greeks themselves would recognize as hallmarks of civilization: trade and commerce, cities and colonies, luxury goods and craftsmanship, cults and votives, inscriptions and their prerequisite, written language. Behind this vast network, stretching as it did across hundreds of miles and years, were a group of canny Levantine urbanites, the Phoenicians. But, due to a dearth of surviving literature and, more directly, western investment in the charmed “miracle” of Greek civilization, this is a story few of us know.In an incisive study that ranges over as many miles and centuries as the Phoenicians themselves, Carolina López-Ruiz corrects the record. The Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean (Harvard University Press, 2021) puts the Phoenicians back into the spotlight where they belong. We see them as merchants and artisans who shaped—and were shaped by—the interconnected world of the Iron Age Mediterranean. It is an index of this study’s strength that López-Ruiz manages both to assert their agency in stitching together this Levantine “koine” and capture the unique contours of this hybridity everywhere it appeared—from Iberia to Sicily, Etruria to Assyria. The Phoenicians is thus not merely the history of a particularly industrious group of seafarers. It is also a glimpse into colonization and coexistence, indigenous response and adaptation, cultural innovation, and the foundations of a shared past.Jonathan Megerian is a doctoral candidate in history at Johns Hopkins University. He works on late medieval and Renaissance England. His dissertation explores the role of historiography in the formation of imperial ideologies in Renaissance England.

The border between Russia and China winds for 2,600 miles through rivers, swamps, and vast taiga forests. It's a thin line of direct engagement, extraordinary contrasts, frequent tension, and occasional war between two of the world's political giants. Franck Billé and Caroline Humphrey have spent years traveling through and studying this important yet forgotten region. Drawing on pioneering fieldwork, they introduce readers to the lifeways, politics, and history of one of the world's most consequential and enigmatic borderlands.It is telling that, along a border consisting mainly of rivers, there is not a single operating passenger bridge. Two different worlds have emerged. On the Russian side, in territory seized from China in the nineteenth century, defense is prioritized over the economy, leaving dilapidated villages slumbering amid the forests. For its part, the Chinese side is heavily settled and increasingly prosperous and dynamic. Moscow worries about the imbalance, and both governments discourage citizens from interacting. But as Billé and Humphrey show, cross-border connection is a fact of life, whatever distant authorities say. There are marriages, friendships, and sexual encounters. There are joint businesses and underground deals, including no shortage of smuggling. Meanwhile some indigenous peoples, persecuted on both sides, seek to "revive" their own alternative social groupings that span the border. And Chinese towns make much of their proximity to "Europe," building giant Russian dolls and replicas of St. Basil's Cathedral to woo tourists.Surprising and rigorously researched, On the Edge: Life Along the Russia-China Border (Harvard UP, 2021) testifies to the rich diversity of an extraordinary world haunted by history and divided by remote political decisions but connected by the ordinary imperatives of daily life.

Seamlessly blending field research, on-the-ground interviews, and social theory, Asef Bayat shows how the practice of everyday life in Egypt and Tunisia was fundamentally altered by revolutionary activity. Women, young adults, the very poor, and members of the underground queer community can credit the Arab Spring with steps toward equality and freedom.In Bayat’s telling in Revolutionary Life: The Everyday of the Arab Spring (Harvard University Press, 2021), the Arab Spring emerges as a paradigmatic case of “refolution”―revolution that engenders reform rather than radical change. Both a detailed study and a moving appeal, Revolutionary Life identifies the social gains that were won through resistance.Mehdi Sanglaji: Political Science; Middle East Studies; working on a PhD thesis, allegedly! Political violence, terrorism, and all in between. Find me at mehdi.haydari@gmail.com or @MehdiSanglaji on twitter. 

Legend has it that the sixteenth-century Telugu poet Nandi Timmana composed Theft of a Tree, or Pārijātāpaharaṇamu, which he based on a popular millennium-old tale, to help the wife of Krishnadevaraya, king of the south Indian Vijayanagara Empire, win back her husband's affections.Theft of a Tree recounts how Krishna stole the pārijāta, a wish-granting tree, from the garden of Indra, king of the gods. Krishna does so to please his favorite wife, Satyabhama, who is upset when he gifts his chief queen a single divine flower. After battling Indra, Krishna plants the tree for Satyabhama--but she must perform a rite temporarily relinquishing it and her husband to enjoy endless happiness. The poem's narrative unity, which was unprecedented in the literary tradition, prefigures the modern Telugu novel.Theft of a Tree is presented here in the Telugu script alongside the first English translation. Ujaan Ghosh is a graduate student at the Department of Art History at University of Wisconsin, Madison

Adopted in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment profoundly changed the US constitution, giving the federal judiciary and Congress new powers to protect the fundamental rights of individuals from being violated by the states. In The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment: Its Letter and Spirit (Harvard University Press, 2022), Dr. Randy Barnett and Dr. Evan Bernick argue that the Supreme Court has long misunderstood or ignored the original meaning of the amendment’s key clauses, covering the privileges and immunities of citizenship, due process of law, and the equal protection of the laws. In fact, they argue that “it is simply not the case that the Court’s current Fourteenth Amendment doctrine gives us everything that the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment promises.”Dr. Barnett and Dr. Bernick contend that the Fourteenth Amendment was the culmination of decades of debates about the meaning of the antebellum constitution. Antislavery advocates advanced arguments informed by natural rights, the Declaration of Independence, and the common law. They also utilised what is today called public-meaning originalism. Although their arguments lost in the courts, the Republican Party was formed to advance an antislavery political agenda, eventually bringing about abolition. Then, when abolition alone proved insufficient to thwart Southern repression and provide for civil equality, the Fourteenth Amendment was enacted. It went beyond abolition to enshrine in the Constitution the concept of Republican citizenship and granted Congress power to protect fundamental rights and ensure equality before the law. Finally, Congress used its powers to pass Reconstruction-era civil rights laws that tell us much about the original scope of the amendment.In this book, the authors identified the original meaning of the phrase “privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States” by examining the evidence from the Founding, from the antebellum period, from the drafting and ratification of the clause, and from the post-ratification interpretations in Congress and by courts and academic commentators. They argue that this mass of evidence shows that “privileges or immunities” encompassed civil rights, as distinguishes from “political” or “social” rights, and included the civil right to impartial treatment by civic institutions.” With attention to primary sources, the book shows how the principles of the Declaration eventually came to modify the Constitution and proposes workable doctrines for implementing the key provisions of Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

The Bible as we know it today is best understood as a process, one that begins in the tenth century BCE. In The Making of the Bible: From the First Fragments to Sacred Scripture (Harvard University Press, 2021), a world-renowned scholar of Hebrew scripture joins a foremost authority on the New Testament to write a new biography of the Book of Books, reconstructing Jewish and Christian scriptural histories, as well as the underappreciated contest between them, from which the Bible arose.Recent scholarship has overturned popular assumptions about Israel’s past, suggesting, for instance, that the five books of the Torah were written not by Moses but during the reign of Josiah centuries later. The sources of the Gospels are also under scrutiny. In this book, Dr. Konrad Schmid and Dr. Jens Schröter reveal the long, transformative journeys of these and other texts en route to inclusion in the holy books. The New Testament, the authors show, did not develop in the wake of an Old Testament set in stone. Rather the two evolved in parallel, in conversation with each other, ensuring a continuing mutual influence of Jewish and Christian traditions. Indeed, Schmid and Schröter argue that Judaism might not have survived had it not been reshaped in competition with early Christianity.The book argues that the Bible is the result of diverse developments that unfolded over many centuries. It is not a homogeneous document but reflects a multiplicity of different viewpoints on the God of Israel and his interventions in history. And finally, the Bible generated a rich history of reception and interpretation that Jews and Christians alike should keep constantly in mind when trying to understand the Bible, interpret it, and live with it and according to its precepts.A remarkable synthesis of the latest Old and New Testament scholarship, the book is the most comprehensive history yet told of the world’s best-known literature, revealing its buried lessons and secrets.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

In Gilded Age Manhattan, Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant leaders agonized over the fate of traditional religious practice amid chaotic and multiplying pluralism. Massive immigration, the anonymity of urban life, and modernity’s rationalism, bureaucratization, and professionalization seemingly eviscerated the sense of religious community.Yet fears of religion’s demise were dramatically overblown. Jon Butler finds a spiritual hothouse in the supposed capital of American secularism. By the 1950s Manhattan was full of the sacred. Catholics, Jews, and Protestants peppered the borough with sanctuaries great and small. Manhattan became a center of religious publishing and broadcasting and was home to august spiritual reformers from Reinhold Niebuhr to Abraham Heschel, Dorothy Day, and Norman Vincent Peale. A host of white nontraditional groups met in midtown hotels, while black worshippers gathered in Harlem’s storefront churches. Though denied the ministry almost everywhere, women shaped the lived religion of congregations, founded missionary societies, and, in organizations such as the Zionist Hadassah, fused spirituality and political activism. And after 1945, when Manhattan’s young families rushed to New Jersey and Long Island’s booming suburbs, they recreated the religious institutions that had shaped their youth.God in Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan (Harvard UP, 2020) portrays a city where people of faith engaged modernity rather than foundered in it. Far from the world of “disenchantment” that sociologist Max Weber bemoaned, modern Manhattan actually birthed an urban spiritual landscape of unparalleled breadth, suggesting that modernity enabled rather than crippled religion in America well into the 1960s.Jon Butler is Howard R. Lamar Emeritus Professor of American Studies, History, and Religious Studies at Yale University and Research Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. His books include the Los Angeles Times bestseller Becoming America and the prizewinning Awash in a Sea of Faith and The Huguenots in America. He is a past president of the Organization of American Historians.Justin McGeary is Directory of Christian Studies at John Witherspoon College and a graduate student at Union School of Theology, Wales.

In Soldiers of God in a Secular World: Catholic Theology and Twentieth-Century French Politics (Harvard University Press, 2021), Sarah Shortall examines the twentieth-century transformation of Roman Catholicism by tracing the origins and evolution of the so-called nouvelle théologie. Developed in the interwar years by French Jesuits and Dominicans, “new theology” reimagined the Church’s relationship to public life, encouraging political activism, engaging with secular philosophy, and inspiring doctrinal changes adopted by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. By recoding political statements in the ostensibly apolitical language of doctrine, priests were able to enter into debates over fascism and communism, democracy and human rights, and colonialism and nuclear war.Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser).