Harvard University Press Blog

On Zion's Mount wins Parkman Prize

On the heels of the news that Thomas Andrews's Killing for Coal has won a Bancroft Prize comes word that another book in Western History published by HUP has won a prestigious award. Jared Farmer has been honored with the Francis Parkman Prize by The Society of American Historians for his 2008 book On Zion's Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape, which details how Mormon settlers in Utah endowed their new homeland with a spiritual geography -- how they made themselves "native" in a strange land -- and how their effort to confer meaning on their new dwelling place came at the expense of the Utes they displaced, people whom, ironically enough, they considered their "spiritual kin." Farmer, Assistant Professor of History at The State University of New York at Stony Brook, shows how this pattern, this imbuing of the American landscape with "Indian" lore that hadn't existed until Euro-American settlers showed up, was repeated time and time again across the United States, and how the legacy of these cultural acts remains with us today. It's a magnificent book; we're glad the committee shares our enthusiasm and most of all, congrats to Professor Farmer on being recognized in this way.

||| More on On Zion's Mount, including blurbs, reviews, excerpt and index.

Awesome photos of the world's great libraries

A mega photo post of libraries from around the world, many quite overwhelming both for their physical beauty and for our knowledge of their noble purpose. The Loker Reading Room at Widener is included, but we were especially enthused to spy in the photo of the Riggs Library at Georgetown what looks like a complete set of the Loeb Classical Library, as well as its cousin the I Tatti Renaissance Library ...

Many many thanks to Curious Expeditions for compiling this fantastic set of photos.

"Extreme publishing," or books in short order

Motoko Rich describes a trend toward quick turnaround on certain "of the moment" titles. It's true -- for certain manuscripts, it only makes sense to insert them into the conversation as it's happening.

An example -- Richard Posner, who in addition to cranking out esteemed books on the law at an astonishing clip, finds time to maintain a day job as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago (where, unlike many judges, he writes all his own opinions) as well as a well-regarded blog on legal matters, let us know that he wanted to do a quick book on the current economic crisis, to be called A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression, which could serve as concise and non-technical examination of this mother of all financial disasters -- you won't have to dig out your old macroeconomics textbooks to get through this one. This is a book where it makes sense to pull out all the stops, and we did -- we turned it around as fast as we possibly could and got galleys out there (Tyler Cowen is reading one), and will publish in May.

The only tricky thing with books like these, other than rearranging everyone's schedule, is to know where to stop. The event -- in this case, our ongoing financial crisis -- continues, but the book has got to end somewhere so that we can print the thing. This is where the internet, in all its flexible mutability, comes in -- author blogs are nothing new, but with books like this they acquire a real, important function and increase the book's effectiveness and utility for a reader.

U.S. food policy and the effort to alleviate hunger

...the scholarship of Dr. Robert Paarlberg, a born and raised Hoosier, has greatly advanced my understanding of food security issues. His book, Starved for Science, is a must read for anyone attempting to understand the global food dilemma and how political factors are creating obstacles to the scientific advancements necessary to meet rising demand for food.

So said Senator Richard Lugar, we're told, on Tuesday at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Global Food Security. The Committee heard from Dr. Paarlberg on how he feels the U.S. can better evaluate and respond to hunger throughout the world. Paarlberg's book, Starved for Science: How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa, takes aim at those who would deny African famers access to productive agricultural technologies in the name of a cultural aversion to farm science that has developed in the world's richest countries.

Paarlberg's statement to the committee is here (PDF link); Lugar's opening statement is here.

'09 a “very bloody” year, predict Taliban fighters

This as the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban agree to join forces in the face of the upcoming American troop increase, reports Carlotta Gall in today's New York Times.

As it happens, we're releasing a new paperback edition of Crews and Tarzi's The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan, a collection of essays in which leading scholars explore the ins and outs of the Taliban in an attempt to show how the movement, far from representing pure anachronism, in fact constitutes a dynamic, complex, and adaptive force rooted in the history of Afghanistan and shaped by modern international politics. Essential reading for those who wish to understand the region beyond the necessarily here-and-now picture established by even the best current affairs reporting.

||| The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan

Lipstick Traces gets a new look

Greil Marcus's seminal Lipstick Traces is getting a twentieth-anniversary edition later this year. Poster art legend Chuck Sperry has designed a new cover for this treasured tome; the poster version will debut at Book Expo in May, where you can get a silkscreened edition:

Meanwhile, the new edition of Lipstick Traces (link is to the current, "old" -- but still nice! -- edition) hits a shelf near you in November.

(UPDATE: here's the new one!)

Onward and upward with the Dictionary of American Regional English

An AP writer profiles our wicked awesome Dictionary of American Regional English, published in conjunction with a dedicated editorial team headed by Joan Houston Hall at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. DARE is the book that can tell you, among other things, where your vaguely Italian-themed sandwich is a "hoagie" and where it becomes a "hero" or "grinder."

You will learn from the article that DARE founding editor Frederic Cassidy was an awesome guy -- in 1965 he sent researchers to over a thousand US communities to record the inhabitants' speech. When they returned with the data, he and his editorial team set to work producing four mammoth volumes that, considering that they are at heart reference books, make incredibly fascinating reading (no less a wordsmith than Tom Wolfe says DARE is his favorite thing to read). Thirty-five years later, Cassidy died still awaiting completion of the fifth and final volume of DARE, to be published next year. But before Cassidy passed away, he made sure that people would know he kept his eye on the prize -- his tombstone reads "On to Z!"

||| PBS special on DARE

Killing for Coal wins Bancroft Prize

Great news -- Thomas Andrews, the author of Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War, has been awarded a Bancroft prize, three of which are awarded annually by the trustees of Columbia University. From the press release that went out earlier today:

One of the most coveted honors in the field of history, the Bancroft is awarded annually by the trustees of Columbia University to the authors of books of exceptional merit in the fields of American history, biography and diplomacy. The 2009 awards are for books published in 2008.

Columbia Provost Alan Brinkley will present the awards at a formal dinner next month at the university’s Low Memorial Library, hosted by the department of history and University Libraries. The Bancroft Prize, which includes an award of $10,000 to each author, is administered by James Neal, vice president for information services and University Librarian.

“Over 200 books were nominated for consideration by the Bancroft jury this year,” said Neal. “Once again, we were very impressed by the number of excellent submissions covering a broad range of themes, and are proud to honor this year’s winners. The Bancroft prize is a celebration and affirmation of historical scholarship, the library, the book, the academic press, and the reportedly threatened scholarly monograph.”

Big-time congratulations to Professor Andrews on winning this prestigious award. Killing for Coal is indeed fantastic; for a little more on the book and the Ludlow Massacre it details, see Caleb Crain's New Yorker review of January 19.

New open-access journal is winning plaudits

The first issue of the Journal of Legal Analysis appears to be well-received, with Brian Leiter writing that it's "better than just about every journal in the top ten" as voted by readers of his Law School Reports blog. The details on JLA are here; in a nutshell, it's a a new open-access law journal co-published by HUP and the John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics, and Business at Harvard Law School, which aims to become, in the words of Editor-in-Chief Mark Ramseyer, "the flagship journal for the law school faculty as a whole."

||| The Journal of Legal Analysis

A thrilling story about math

Not an oxymoron. As the Seminary Co-op's Front Table blog explains, to explore the development of set theory is to learn not only about "the set of integers N" and "the set of real numbers R" (also known by the disturbingly singular name "the Continuum"), but to learn of the men who made these abstract symbols mean something. Important also, they point out, to remember that not even mathematicians live in a vacuum -- people, politics, religion, they all come home to roost, even if you try to restrict yourself to the little matter of attempting to name and define a little thing called INFINITY.

The occasion for such musings is a review of Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor's Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity, over the course of which you'll be taken on a tour of the political struggles, psychological crises, sexual complexities, and ethical dilemmas inherent in the search for a satisfactory answer to one of the biggest math mysteries of the twentieth century.