The Harvard Brief

00:47:52

Conspiracy: The History of a Political Obsession with...

The Harvard Brief ·

2026/10/06

Pundits, scholars, and the general public alike have argued that conspiratorial thinking is the greatest threat to liberal democracy. In Conspiracy: The History of a Political Obsession (Harvard UP, 2026), Dr. Nicolas Guilhot, however, challenges us to see conspiracy theories as a sign of the public’s desperation in light of liberal democracy’s failures. Conspiracism is widespread across the political spectrum, as citizens struggle with their disenfranchisement. How are we to imagine the future at

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00:59:46

Credit to the Nation: Eastern European Jewish...

The Harvard Brief ·

2026/10/02

From a leading historian, the story of how entrepreneurial Jewish immigrants transformed commercial banking and enabled the economic and social advancement of Jews in America.What are immigrants to do when business opportunities abound in their new home, but banks refuse essential financial support? How could they make the journey in the first place without helping hands? In this lively history, Rebecca Kobrin chronicles the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Jewish immigrants who stepped up by doing the

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01:04:30

How Girls Achieve

The Harvard Brief ·

2026/10/01

How Girls Achieve points out a simple and overlooked truth: most schools never had girls in mind to begin with. That is why the world needs what Dr. Sally Nuamah calls “feminist schools,” deliberately designed to provide girls with achievement-oriented identities. And she shows how these schools would help all students, regardless of their gender.Educated women raise healthier families, build stronger communities, and generate economic opportunities for themselves and their children. Yet millions of

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00:35:03

Audun Dahl, "Between Fixed and Fickle: Why Our Moral...

The Harvard Brief ·

2026/09/19

Between Fixed and Fickle: Why Our Moral Views Keep Changing(Harvard UP, 2026), apsychologist explains why—and how—moral views change across different life stages, situations, and historical eras.We like to believe that moral truths are obvious and unchangeable: cheating is wrong, killing is wrong, slavery is wrong. Yet people have often cheated, killed, and enslaved without regret. The acts that feel glaringly wrong to us in the here and now can seem fine to someone who is younger, or faces

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40:40

Mélanie Lamotte, "By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race,...

The Harvard Brief ·

2026/09/07

From the beginning of the seventeenth century, French colonies and trading posts sprawled across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. In the first pan-imperial history of the early French Empire in the English language, Mélanie Lamotte shows how an increasingly cohesive legal culture came to govern the lives of enslaved and free people of African, Malagasy, South Asian, and Native American descent. She also illuminates the important role played by these populations in the development of the empire, from

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60:05

An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in...

The Harvard Brief ·

2026/09/06

The story of Polish Jewry, pre-Holocaust Europe’s largest Jewish community, is often told as one of creativity and contestation. In his new book,An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland, University of Chicago professor Kenneth B. Moss traces instead a complex and painful story of Polish Jewish reckoning with diasporic vulnerability, nationalism’s terrible potencies, Zionism’s promises, and the necessity of choice. Moss examines the works of Polish Jewry’s most searching

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38:13

A. J. Murphy, "Pentagon Capitalism: How the Cold War...

The Harvard Brief ·

2026/08/21

The strategic landscape of the Cold War generated political support for a permanent US military force of unprecedented scale. Faced with the problem of managing this behemoth, leaders of the defense bureaucracy looked to private industry for inspiration: since the military now resembled a huge industrial conglomerate, they reasoned, it should be run like a business. InPentagon Capitalism: How the Cold War US Military Modeled Itself on Private Business(Harvard UP, 2026), Dr. A. J. Murphy explores the

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93:50

Emile Chabal, "The Age of Hobsbawm: The Life of a...

The Harvard Brief ·

2026/08/21

Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) was one of the foremost European intellectuals of the twentieth century. He published hundreds of articles on modern history and culture, and his books became canonical works and bestsellers on both sides of the Atlantic. His crystal-clear writing, vast erudition, and ability to make his Marxist analysis digestible to a wide audience brought him worldwide renown. Yet Hobsbawm was no academic hermit. Through his globetrotting journalism, he was embedded in an

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42:20

William Whyte, "The University: A History in Stone,...

The Harvard Brief ·

2026/08/11

We often idealize the university as a sanctuary for disinterested reason, where material concerns are set aside in favor of higher principles. Yet when we remember our own college experiences, what springs to mind are not just lofty concepts but also material realities: cramped dorm rooms and musty library stacks, gothic towers and freshly mowed quads. The University: A History in Stone, Silk, and Blood(Harvard University Press, 2026) puts such seemingly inconsequential details at the

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67:37

Ashton Lazarus, "Performing Transgression: Crowds and...

The Harvard Brief ·

2026/07/24

What happens when performance defies social and political boundaries? Performing Transgression: Crowds and Bodies in Heian Japan (Harvard University Press, 2026)offersa new cultural history of non-elite spectacle in Heian Japan (794–1185), uncovering how performances on the margins—boisterous dengaku music and dance, daring sangaku acrobatics, and the infectious lyrics of imayō songs—challenged and fascinated the aristocracy. Ashton Lazarus reveals how these unruly arts were documented by the

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36:57

Luna Sabastian, "Fascism in India: Race, Caste, and...

The Harvard Brief ·

2026/07/16

Fascism swept the world in the 1920s and 1930s, but not only because of the seductive rhetoric of Mussolini, Hitler, and their collaborators. In India as well, a distinctive brand of fascist thought emerged—influenced by Euro-American ideologies but also departing from them in critical ways. The first systematic examination of this political philosophy,Fascism in India: Race, Caste, and Hindutva(Harvard UP, 2025)revises our sense of what fascism can be, while demonstrating that it is very much

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42:04

Jay Belsky, "Nature of Nurture: Rethinking Why and...

The Harvard Brief ·

2026/07/13

Children who grow up in troubled circumstances―experiencing deprivation or instability, living in a dangerous neighborhood or an abusive family―are more prone to aggression, recklessness, and sexual promiscuity later in life. To most of us, the lesson is clear: adverse childhood conditions make human development go awry. In The Nature of Nurture:Rethinking Why and How Childhood Adversity Shapes Development (Harvard University Press, 2026), renowned developmental psychologist Jay Belsky

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54:01

Paul Osterman, "Disposable Workers: The...

The Harvard Brief ·

2026/07/05

A revealing look at the decline in formal employment in favor of hiring contractors, freelancers, temps, and marginal workers, who are excluded from traditional benefits and career ladders. Companies cannot exist without workers, but they are increasingly reluctant to have employees. Instead of providing the benefits and protections that have traditionally come with employee status, businesses are turning to tactics that let them treat people as interchangeable parts, to be used and discarded

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58:12

Weipin Tsai, "The Making of China's Post Office:...

The Harvard Brief ·

2026/06/03

How did a vast, nationwide institution like a modern postal system come into being in Qing China—right at the very end of the empire? In The Making of China’s Post Office: Sovereignty, Modernization, and the Connection of a Nation (Harvard University Press, 2024), Weipin Tsai takes up this question by tracing the origins and early development of China’s postal system. The book asks not only how such an institution was built, but why it emerged when it did and in the particular form it took

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3:45

Matthieu Felt, "Meanings of Antiquity: Myth...

The Harvard Brief ·

2026/05/25

Meanings of Antiquity: Myth Interpretation in Premodern Japan (Harvard UP, 2023) is the first dedicated study of how the oldest Japanese myths, recorded in the eighth-century texts Kojiki and Nihon shoki, changed in meaning and significance between 800 and 1800 CE. Generations of Japanese scholars and students have turned to these two texts and their creation myths to understand what it means to be Japanese and where Japan fits into the world order.As the shape and scale of the world explained by

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48:15

Alex Averbuch, "Furious Harvests" (Harvard UP, 2026)

The Harvard Brief ·

2026/05/22

Furious Harvests (Harvard University Press, 2026) transportsreaders to Alex Averbuch’s homeland of eastern Ukraine. Amid the bloody destruction brought by Russia’s war of aggression, the poet toils in fields of memory, reaping lyrics from family archives and mementos to amass testaments to the complex and painful histories of this place and its peoples. A family tree, letters to home, and the faint scent of a grandmother’s dress kept in the back of a closet speak to histories of inter-ethnic

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64:23

Raffaele Danna, "The Craft of Indo-Arabic Numerals:...

The Harvard Brief ·

2026/04/28

In the thirteenth-century Mediterranean, commerce transformed as merchants shifted from Roman to Indo-Arabic numerals—an alternative that better facilitated complex calculations. It has long been known that this transition stemmed from Europe’s increasing exchanges with India, Persia, and the Arabic world. Yet much remains to be understood about how Indo-Arabic numerals—and the practical arithmetic they enabled—actually spread across Europe. As Dr. Raffaele Danna shows in The Craft of Indo-Arabic

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65:19

Stephen F. Jones, "The First Social Democracy: The...

The Harvard Brief ·

2026/04/21

Following the collapse of the Russian Empire, the small nation of Georgia established its independence in May 1918. Its leaders surprised the world by creating the first social democratic state. Based on a combination of parliamentarianism and direct democracy, it was a representative government of the peasants and workers themselves, with ballots in their hands. The First Social Democracy: The Democratic Republic of Georgia, 1918–1921 (Harvard University Press, 2026) is the definitive history of a

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51:36

Jim Downs, "Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism,...

The Harvard Brief ·

2026/04/21

Jim Downs’ most recent book is Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine. Professor Downs is the Gilder Lehrman-National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Civil War Era Studies and History at Gettysburg College.The book offers a new history of epidemiology by shifting focus to the people behind the data points—people who were enslaved, imprisoned, or in some circles overlooked by conventional histories of epidemiology. The book shifts across locations and

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41:24

Rishi Rajpopat, "Panini's Perfect Rule: A Modern...

The Harvard Brief ·

2026/04/09

Panini’s Ashtadyayi is one of the most famous works in Sanskrit, a so-called “linguistic machine” that, through its 4,000 words, allows someone to generate words and grammar. Generations of commentators have tried to figure out exactly how to best interpret the work and explain its various contradictions and overlapping instructions.Then, in 2022, Rishi Rajpopat, a PhD student at Cambridge, said he’d figured out how to unravel Panini’s work to create a cohesive set of rules–and potentially wiped

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