The Harvard Brief

So many history books take for granted that a story about the past needs to focus on change (gradual or dramatic, transformative or subtle) as its motivating narrative and argumentative core. In A Sense of Place: The Political Landscape in Late Medieval Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2013), David Spafford...

In Russia’s collective memory, the Stalin terror is often remembered and referred to by its most grueling year: “1937.” Following Stalin’s death and the shocking revelations about his regime exposed by his successor Nikita Khrushchev, Soviet citizens began to remember and rethink the turbulent first half of the twentieth century...

When historians think oceanically, when they populate their books with characters that include seas and monsoons along with human beings, what results is a very different way of thinking about time, space, and the ways that their interactions shape human and terrestrial history. In Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (Harvard University Press, 2013), Sunil S. Amrith has produced an elegant, sensitively-wrought account of hundreds of years in the life of the Bay of Bengal. This history of the Bay is also history of the movements and circulations it has engendered, from ocean currents to Tamil migrants, from steamships to Indian laborers, from paper passports to trickles of dammed water, from pails of liquid rubber to wheels on US automobiles. Crossing the Bay of Bengal is simultaneously a political, social, cultural and environmental history: at the same time that it carefully contextualizes the emergence of boundaries (be they the disciplines of area studies or the forms of modern citizenship that follow the emergence of nation-states), it urges readers to transcend those boundaries to produce more integrated narratives of forms of modern life. This wonderful book will be of special import to readers interested in the histories of empire, commerce, labor, migration, the environment, and the maritime world, but it will reward attention regardless of a reader’s background or expertise.

Many have argued in recent years that the U.S. constitutional system exalts individual rights over responsibilities, virtues, and the common good. Answering the charges against liberal theories of rights, James Fleming and Linda McClain develop and defend a civic liberalism that takes responsibilities and virtues–as well as rights–seriously. In Ordered Liberty: Rights, Responsibilities, and Virtues (Harvard University Press, 2013), they provide an account of ordered liberty that protects basic liberties stringently, but not absolutely, and permits government to encourage responsibility and inculcate civic virtues without sacrificing personal autonomy to collective determination.The battle over same-sex marriage is one of many current controversies the authors use to defend their understanding of the relationship among rights, responsibilities, and virtues. Against accusations that same-sex marriage severs the rights of marriage from responsible sexuality, procreation, and parenthood, they argue that same-sex couples seek the same rights, responsibilities, and goods of civil marriage that opposite-sex couples pursue. Securing their right to marry respects individual autonomy while also promoting moral goods and virtues. Other issues to which they apply their idea of civic liberalism include reproductive freedom, the proper roles and regulation of civil society and the family, the education of children, and clashes between First Amendment freedoms (of association and religion) and antidiscrimination law. Articulating common ground between liberalism and its critics, Fleming and McClain develop an account of responsibilities and virtues that appreciates the value of diversity in our morally pluralistic constitutional democracy.

How does colonial power, both discursive and institutional, transform the normative boundaries and horizons of religious identities? Teena Purohit, Assistant Professor of Religion at Boston University, examines this question in The Aga Khan Case: Religion and Identity in Colonial India (Harvard University Press, 2012). This book is clearly written and carefully researched straddling multiples fields and disciplinary approaches. The crux of the study is the transformation of Khoja Isma’ili identity in colonial India. The title refers to a case in 1866 lodged by the Khojas of Bombay against the then Aga Khan over the ownership and control of their property. However, this ostensible property dispute spiraled into a much larger debate over religion and religious identity. Through a dazzling analysis of novel historical and textual archives, Professor Purohit demonstrates that the Aga Khan case of 1866 indelibly transformed the nature and boundaries of Isma’ili religious identity in South Asia, often in ways that remain highly relevant even today. In our conversation, we discussed the major themes and arguments of the book. We also talked about the broader theoretical and conceptual interventions of this book in the fields of Religion, Islamic Studies, and South Asian Studies.

We all know that the “victors” generally write history. The “losers,” then, often get a bum rap. Such was the case with King James II. He’s got a pretty poor reputation, largely due to the purveyors of the “Whig Interpretation of History.” They claimed that James II was a tyrant who tried to impose Catholicism on the United Kingdom. But, as Scott Sowerby shows in his new book Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution (Harvard UP, 2013), James II was really no such thing. Actually, he was the head of a movement to repeal many of religious restrictions (the “Test Act”) put in place after the Civil War. He favored toleration, at least of a limited sort. Listen to Scott tell his story and that of the “repealers.”

One of the basic rules of human behavior is that people generally want to do what their peers do. If your friends like jazz, you’ll probably like jazz. If your friends want to go to the movies, you’ll probably want to go to the movies. If your friends enjoy comic books, you’ll probably enjoy comic books.The force of peer pressure is likely strongest in high school, but college is not far behind. In their eye-opening book Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality (Harvard UP, 2013), Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Laura T. Hamilton examine how peer groups and the pressure they create move college students into specific tracks. Though students’ aspirations at the time of entry matter to some extent, the peer groups they join matter much more in terms of outcomes, that is, how they do during their college experience. College students mold themselves to the expectations of their groups. Armstrong and Hamilton also note a distinctive class element in the process of peer group formation and entry. Not everyone gets to belong to any group. Listen in and find out how these groups–which, it should be said,are largely hidden from administrators and professors–maintain socio-economic inequality.

Why is it that the United States continues to enforce the death penalty when the rest of the Western world abolished its use a little over three decades ago? That question, along with many other equally important questions, is at the heart of Dr. David Garland‘s recent book Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition (Harvard University Press, 2010). His provocative study highlights the uneven application of capital punishment America–a phenomenon widely discussed but rarely understood–and offers a succinct and thoughtful analysis of the historical roots of this contemporary problem.Comparing the modern form of state execution (lethal injection) with original, brutal, forms of state execution (pressing, dismemberment, burning, beheading), Garland dissects the sociocultural and political uses of capital punishment and how they changed over the centuries, evolving to meet the needs of a modern liberal democracy. These liberal adaptations, as Garland explains, forced executions from the public gallows into private rooms within prisons, created a mandatory legal procedure of “super due-process,” and sought to diminish cruel and unusual bodily harm to the offender. But have these adaptations nullified its original purposes? For instance, various studies have shown that the death penalty does not act a deterrent to criminals or serve retributive purposes to the victims and their families. Given these facts, what purposes does it serve, if any? Do these reasons justify retention of the practice? Listen in for more!Dr. Garland is Arthur T. Vanderbilt Professor of Law and Professor of Sociology at New York University. Peculiar Institution is the recipient of numerous awards including: 2012 Michael J. Hindelang Award (American Society of Criminology), 2012 Edwin H. Sutherland Award (American Society of Criminology), 2011 Barrington Moore Book Award (American Sociological Association), Co-Winner 2011 Mary Douglas Prize (American Sociological Association), A Times Literary Supplement Best Book of 2011, and the 2010 Association of American Publishers PROSE Award for Excellence.

T. J. Hinrichs and Linda L. Barnes have produced a volume that will change the way we learn about and teach the history of health and healing in China and beyond. Chinese Medicine and Healing: An Illustrated History (Harvard University Press, 2012) collects ten chronologically-organized chapters that each explore practices of health and healing in...

Scholars have pointed to various historical ingredients they see as necessary for the development of modern sport: political changes that allowed people to form associations, the rise of competitive capitalism, an emphasis on calculation and measurement, the advance of secularization. But this attention to economic, social, and political factors has...