The Harvard Brief

49.91% of India’s population was below the age of 24 in the 2011 Census. By 2020 India will become the world’s youngest country with 64% of its population in the working age group of 15-64 years. This is India’s much touted “demographic dividend”. Economists anticipate the dividend to yield as much as an additional 2% to the GDP growth rate but this potential is hampered by poor education, plummeting job opportunities and inadequate access to health care. But who are Indian youth? What do they really want? Journalist Snigdha Poonam takes a deep dive into north India's smaller cities in her first book Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing the World (Harvard University Press 2018), and returns with stories of hustle, aspiration and disenchantment.Poonam is a journalist with the national Indian daily Hindustan Times. Her work has appeared in Scroll.in, The Caravan, The Times of India, The New York Times, The Guardian, Granta and The Financial Times. Her article 'Lady Singham’s Mission Against Love' was runner-up in the Bodley Head / Financial Times Essay Prize, 2015. She won the 2017 Journalist of Change award of Bournemouth University for an investigation of student suicides that appeared on Huffington Post. Dreamers is her first book.Madhuri Karak holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her dissertation titled "Insurgent Difference: An Ethnography of an Indian Resource Frontier” analyzed resource extraction and development as mutually constitutive logics of rule in the bauxite-rich mountains of southern Odisha, India. She tweets @madhurikarak and more of her work can be found here.

It wasn’t always this way. From the Theodore Roosevelt’s leadership on natural resource conservation to Richard Nixon’s creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and Ronald Reagan’s singing of the Montreal Protocol banning ozone-depleting chemicals, Republicans have a proud tradition of environmental stewardship. Why have they seemingly abandoned it? That question animates The Republican Reversal: Conservatives and the Environment from Nixon to Trump (Harvard University Press, 2018), a collaborative effort by acclaimed environmental historians James Morton Turner and Andrew C. Isenberg—who have produced an accompanying website for educators. They draw from the latest scholarship on the rise of postwar conservatism to explore how corporate interest groups, libertarian think tanks, evangelicalism, and the GOP power center’s shift southward and westward encouraged frustration with the broadly popular legislative achievements of the 1970s and resistance to mounting a similarly robust federal response to subsequent environmental problems. The authors explore the party’s shifting positions on the management of federal lands, the protection of air and water quality, and the mitigation of climate change. They observe how discourse prizing local control, prioritizing economic concerns, and questioning scientific expertise and international cooperation grew louder and louder and helped produce a political landscape where environmental issues are defined less by technical data and more by voters’ values. But party leaders’ anti-environmentalist rhetoric has often found them out of step with their constituents, and Republican administrations from Reagan to Trump have had to scale back their assaults on the environmental state.James Morton Turner is Associate Professor of History at Wellesley College. His first book was the award-winning The Promise of Wilderness: American Environmental Politics since 1964 (University of Washington Press, 2012). Andrew C. Isenberg is the Hall Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of Kansas. His previous books includes Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life (Hill and Wang, 2013), Mining California: An Ecological History (Hill and Wing, 2005), and The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2000).Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin—Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects.

Arabic script is astounding! Not only because it represents one of the most commonly spoken languages today –that is, the Arabic language– but because it has represented dozens of other languages over the course of human history from the Middle East to Asia, to Europe, and to the tip of South Africa. Letters of Light: Arabic Script in Calligraphy, Print, and Digital Design (Harvard University Press, 2017) is a recent example of the scholarship on the aesthetics of Arabic script and what it communicates. Author J.R. Osborn writes, not quite a standard history, not quite a work of communication studies, not quite a linguistic study, but a combination of all three that tells the story of Arabic script over ten centuries: from the formation of the calligraphic tradition to the rise of Unicode.J.R. Osborn is an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University in the Communication, Culture, and Technology Program. His work explores media history, design, semiotics, communication technologies, and aesthetics with a regional focus of the Middle East and Africa. J.R. is also a self-described ‘experimentalist of communication’ who works across media forms: from text to film to digital interface design and curatorial projects. He holds Ph.D in Communication and a Certificate in Ethnographic Film from the University of California, San Diego. Letters of Light is his first book.Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing.

Dr. Philip Lutgendorf is Retired Professor of Hindi and Modern Indian Studies at the University of Iowa. He is currently working on a seven-volume translation of the Hindi devotional text, the Rāmcaritmānas written by the sixteenth-century North Indian poet, Tulsīdās. The first four volumes of the translation, entitled The Epic of Ram (Harvard University Press, 2016-), are currently available as part of the Murty Classical Library of India Series published by Harvard University Press and distributed in India by Penguin Books.Shandip Saha is associate professor of Religious Studies at Athabasca University, the world leader in the realm of distance education and open learning. His research interests focus on religion and politics in pre-modern North India and on the changing performance practices in devotional music in India and Pakistan.

The familiar narrative of American business development begins in the industrial North, where paternalistic factory owners, committed to a kind of Protestant ethic, scaled up their operations into ‘total institutions’—an effort to forestall labor turnover by providing housing and fulfilling community needs. Many of these firms were, of course, dependent on the availability of cotton from the South where, as Caitlin C. Rosenthal argues, modern management practices were expanded and refined through experimentation with enslaved workers. Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (Harvard University Press, 2018) resituates the development of scientific record-keeping and labor optimization practices within the Atlantic slave trade. The book pays close attention to how sophisticated reporting practices, emerging from the standard record books that circulated throughout the Atlantic world, allowed planters to rate and categorize enslaved people in a generalizable way. The book is an invitation to rethink the genealogy of business management, to disabuse professionals of a claim to moral distance from a time when unfettered legal control over a labor force—as capital—created hitherto unknown opportunities for knowledge production and experimentation with efficiency.Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He works on computing, quantification, communication, and governance in modern America.

In her new book, The Good Occupation: American Soldiers and the Hazards of Peace (Harvard University Press, 2016), Dr. Susan Carruthers, professor of American Studies at the University of Warwick, chronicles America’s transition from wartime combatant to post-war occupier in both Germany and Japan. This excellent book examines occupation by exploring the thoughts and feelings of ordinary servicemen and women who participated in the difficult task of rebuilding defeated nations. By examining occupation from the ground up, this book effectively tackles the mythology surrounding America’s occupation and demonstrates that the rebuilding of post-war Europe and Japan was a difficult and by no means straightforward.

Among the many personages associated with the Peloponnesian War, none are as colorful as the Athenian general Alcibiades. In Nemesis: Alcibiades and the Fall of Athens (Harvard University Press, 2018), David Stuttard recounts the dramatic life of this controversial figure. A scion of a wealthy family, Alcibiades was adopted by the statesman Pericles after his father died in battle. Growing up he demonstrated a flair for the dramatic, which in combination with his fortune made him a prominent figure at a young age. Yet Alcibiades desired more, and sabotaged the peace agreement with the Spartans orchestrated by Nicias in an effort to prolong the war so as to gain new opportunities for glory. The Sicilian Expedition presented him with just such an opportunity, though controversial actions attributed to Alcibiades and his friends undermined his standing. Faced with mounting opposition, Alcibiades defected, first to Sparta, then to Persia before being recalled and reinstated as an Athenian general. Though Alcibiades subsequently led the Athenians to victory in battle, he fled his home city again after his defeat at Notium, only to be assassinated at Phrygia in the final year of the war. 

Of all of the departments of the U.S. government you might expect to be implicated in the exercise of imperialism, the Department of the Interior might not be the first one that you would think of. Of course, Interior played a vital role in American empire, as a vehicle of American territorial expansion and settler colonialism, and later in overseeing overseas territories. Megan Black’s The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power (Harvard University Press, 2018) looks at the role of Interior in shepherding American empire, namely through the acquisition of mineral resources in overseas territories, and later, globally. In doing so, her book reveals another dimension of American empire.Black begins with the “closing” of the frontier and the Department of the Interior’s shift from managing biological resources over to mineral resources. The acquisition of territory in Alaska, the Caribbean, the Philippines, and several other Pacific holdings saw Interior work to develop mining operations, as well as articulating the concept of strategically vital minerals. As the United States began to grow closer to war in the late 1930s, this concern over vital minerals extended to other regions, particularly Latin America, as U.S. planners feared that their own stocks could be exhausted; they also argued that capital investment would develop infrastructure in these countries and help them develop. This fed neatly into the Cold War, which saw the U.S. extend its ambitions globally. Subsequent chapters analyze the role of Interior in developing the Continental Shelf and take a role in space, particularly through the Landsat satellite. Black concludes the book by discussing pushback from Native American tribes on mineral and energy rights, and the weakening of Interior under the Reagan Administration.Zeb Larson is a PhD Candidate in History at The Ohio State University. His research is about the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com.

After the U.S. presidential election in 2016, discussions about white nationalism, supremacists, and neo-Nazis went from being a niche topic to mainstream news. For those who hadn’t been keeping tabs on what we’re now calling the “alt-right,” it was as though they simply burst on to the national stage with the election of Donald Trump. The reality of course was that white power groups had been organizing for a long time, though many of their followers were dismissed as cranks, or if they acted violently, lone wolves. Much of the media coverage that they received actually helped them to remain under the radar by treating their activities as isolated and unique.Kathleen Belew’s new book, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Harvard University Press, 2018), traces the evolution of a paramilitary movement and the effect it had on white power advocates in the United States. The Vietnam War was particularly transformative in this regard. It culturally alienated many returning veterans from their government and left them feeling that they had been betrayed, but it also provided a certain amount of tactical instruction about how to organize their groups in an effective way. Groups became decentralized and organized around paramilitaries as their relationship with the U.S. government became increasingly hostile, eventually becoming committed to violent revolution. This new method of organizing into small cells went unrecognized in part by the government and segments of the press, which were inclined to treat violent incidents as isolated. This allowed the movement to grow in scope, culminating in part with the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.Zeb Larson is a PhD Candidate in History at The Ohio State University. His research is about the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com.

Nick Kapur’s Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo (Harvard University Press, 2018) is an ambitious look at the transformations of Japanese society after the massive protests against renewal of the US-Japan Security Treaty (abbreviated as “Anpo” in Japanese) in 1960. The treaty was renewed despite fifteen months...