Harvard University Press Blog

Celebrating University Press Week

In celebration of the tenth annual University Press Week, we are sharing the “famous last words” from ten of our most noteworthy books of the last ten years. This listicle represents the depth and breadth, not to mention the surprising variety, of titles we’ve published. Whether in the fields of philosophy, history, economics, art, education, or social science, the words of these authors are the final statement from their critically acclaimed works.

Sianne Ngai / Our Aesthetic Categories (2012) 

“By paying closer attention to the aesthetic categories that speak to the most significant objects and socially binding activities of late capitalist life—our affectively complicated relation to commodities, information, and performing, the ways in which we labor, exchange, and consume—one can at least make a start at closing the gulf between aesthetic theory and practice that began to open in the twentieth century, reenergizing the former by ensuring its continued relevance to the making, dissemination, and reception of culture in the present.”

Sunil S. Amrith / Crossing the Bay of Bengal (2013)

“Oceanic history is itself a kind of cartography. By foregrounding the Bay of Bengal—linked by journeys, memories, and the sinews of power—we can see beyond the borders of today’s nation- states, beyond the borders imposed by imperial mapmakers and immigration officials, to a more fluid, more uncertain world: a world that resembles our own. As the furies of nature grow clamorous, the fortunes of migrants are ever fickle.”

Thomas Piketty / Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014)

“To be sure, the principle of specialization is sound and surely makes it legitimate for some scholars to do research that does not depend on statistical series. There are a thousand and one ways to do social science, and accumulating data is not always indispensable or even (I concede) especially imaginative. Yet it seems to me that all social scientists, all journalists and commentators, all activists in the unions and in politics of whatever stripe, and especially all citizens should take a serious interest in money, its measurement, the facts surrounding it, and its history. Those who have a lot of it never fail to defend their interests. Refusing to deal with numbers rarely serves the interests of the least well-off.”

Pat Shipman / The Invaders (2015)

“We may be more successful at preserving biological diversity and truly wild places as we see more clearly the factors that diminish them. We may be able to envision more accurately humans’ place in nature, for the good of all. I think it is time we recognized ourselves for what we are: the invaders. If one day we can meet the enemy of the earth and he is not us, it will be a triumph. But a big change in our behavior must happen first.”

Viet Thanh Nguyen / Nothing Ever Dies (2016)

“I think back to my father’s father and what happened to his remains. The Vietnamese believe a person should be buried twice. The first time, in a field removed from home and village, the earth eats the flesh. The second time, the survivors must disinter what remains. If they have timed it correctly, there will only be bones. If they have timed it wrong, there will still be flesh. Regardless of what they find, they must wash the bones with their own hands. Then they bury the bones once more, this time closer to the living.”

Mehrsa Baradaran / The Color of Money (2017)

“Modernity will inevitably bring us closer together, which can lead to either greater resentment or greater cooperation. Perhaps more people will realize that what benefits a minority will also benefit the majority. Full racial integration will eventually remove pockets of blight, crime, and deprivation across the country. This will advance the entire American population. Integrated schools will improve education for all students, and increased equality will spur economic growth. We must shed the destructive myths that separate can equal, that a segregated economy will reach prosperity on its own, or that black banks can lead to black prosperity without fundamental economic changes. We cannot deflect the responsibility of economic equality onto black communities alone. W. E. B. Du Bois declared in 1948 that the problem of American democracy was that ‘we have not tried it.’ Perhaps it’s time to try.”

Donna Zuckerberg / Not All Dead White Men (2018)

“Feminists deserve a better internet. And future generations of readers deserve a better kind of discourse about the ancient world: one that is free of elitism and neither uncritically admiring nor rashly dismissive.”

 

 

Anthony Abraham Jack / The Privileged Poor (2019)

“My work at Midtown College and Renowned University provides strong evidence that the differences I have observed between the Privileged Poor and the Doubly Disadvantaged has to do with their disparate precollege experiences rather than with differences between them before high school. This work points out the shortcomings of treating lower-income undergraduates as a homogenous group of at-risk students. Studies that do so cannot properly measure the effects of inequality and poverty on college experiences, and as a result, they lead to biased understandings of how class and culture reproduce inequality in college. I have documented large differences between the Privileged Poor and the Doubly disadvantaged, and both groups are represented in increasing numbers at elite colleges and universities. It is important for scholars to fully explore and document their experiences and recognize their distinctiveness.”

Nicole R. Fleetwood / Marking Time (2020)

“Smith and other artists whose work interrogates incarceration are involved in relational practices that put them in conversation, in connection, in community with Ojore Lutalo, the Fariton collective, Tyra Patterson, Deal Gillispe, Lisette Oblitas, Eddie Kates, Tameca Cole, fathers and mothers, siblings and cousins, friends and activists, and others held in captivity, excluded from civil society, public life, family structures. The works of these artists and activists extend radical imaginaries and relational practices beyond the regulatory and isolating structures of imprisonment to envision and help create a world without human caging.”

Marie Favereau / The Horde (2021)

“There was as much a Jochid way of empire as there was a Roman way, an Ottoman way, and a British way. When we think about the legacy of empires, we of course recognize the cosmopolitan effects of the Mediterranean, European, and Ottoman powers that made the world smaller through practices of tolerance, coercion, exploitation, protection, investment, and conquest. These empires are credited with driving global history. But nomads drove global history, too, and none more so than the people of the Horde.”

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Alcibiades in the Shadow of Achilles

Alcibiades—the famously handsome Athenian, ward of Pericles, friend and pupil of Socrates, and charismatic general infamous for serial disloyalty—was one of the most remarkable figures of the Golden Age of Athens. In Nemesis: Alcibiades and the Fall of Athens, David Stuttard gives us a riveting account of the man and his age, “bringing to singing life,” per Paul Cartledge, “the mercurial, magnetic, passionate, and persuasive personality of this still hugely controversial Athenian aristocrat of the fifth century BC.” In what follows below, a slightly condensed version of his recent British Museum presentation on the book, Stuttard introduces us to one of ancient Greece’s most fascinating and slippery characters.

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I want to take you back just over 2,400 years to the high Anatolian plain of central Turkey. It’s the year 404 BC; it’s Autumn; and it’s the dark hours of the night. Alcibiades, perhaps the most controversial Greek of his generation, is living in exile in a compound at Melissa—probably modern Afyonkarahisar—where strange rock formations erupt out of the rolling plain, near the fabled Royal Road that runs from Sardis in the west to Susa, capital of Persia’s Empire, in the east. For now, everyone inside is sleeping, but then something awakens them. Perhaps the barking of a dog. Or perhaps the acrid smell of burning creeping through the rooms, or the ever-louder crackling of fire as brown smoke pours in beneath the door, and through the cracks beside the doorposts.

Here, from my book, is what happened next:

Fully awake now, fully alert, Alcibiades leapt out of bed and threw the door wide open. Outside, stacks of dried wood had been piled high, and the flames were already tearing through them. Shouting to the people in the house to help, he dragged out rugs and mattresses and blankets, and flung them on the fire. The flames were smothered. At least for the time being. But now the smoke was bellying, and tongues of fire were licking at the edges of the blankets, and the orange heat was growing more intense. And then the arrows came. From all directions. Thudding into walls and roof and earth. Anonymous and deadly. The only warning of their approach a soft sighing of air.

The household was panic-stricken as Alcibiades, his instincts kicking in, reached for his weapons. But they had disappeared. Somehow in the night someone had taken them. All that he had now was a short knife, which a comrade pressed into his hand. But no shield. No armour. Just a blanket wrapped around his left arm as he stood, poised on the threshold. And then, calling to his friend to follow him, he bellowed his war cry and ran, naked and exposed, out into the darkness. Silhouetted against the burning house, he made an easy target. From all around him javelins rained and arrows thumped like hail as first one, then another, then another found its mark. All Alcibiades could do was run into the night, and run, and keep on running while he could, until the night engulfed him.

That description’s based meticulously on ancient sources, but all seems so theatrical, so filmic, so larger than life. But political assassinations can be larger than life, and Alcibiades’ life was every bit as complex and nail-biting as any modern political thriller.

Alcibiades was born bang in the middle of the fifth century BC, in 452 in Athens, a city that nearly sixty years before had expelled a hated ruler and established the most radical participatory democracy the world had ever seen. His mother’s family and his father’s were wealthy aristocrats from powerful families whose members numbered famous politicians, winners in Olympic chariot races, decorated war heroes—and, go back far enough, even Homeric heroes of the Trojan War. And when Alcibiades’ father, Cleinias, was killed in battle, the five-year-old boy was looked after by the most powerful politician of his day, the equally aristocratic Pericles, whose policy shaped democratic Athens, whose dream inspired the Parthenon, whose ambition was for the Athenian Empire to rule the waves.

On Human Rights in an Unequal World

In the space of less than a decade, Samuel Moyn has defined—and largely created—the field of the history of human rights. With 2010’s radically revisionist The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, he revealed how our modern notion of human rights was birthed only in the 1970s, showing their rise to have been a precarious, contingent, and uneven development. Now, with Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World, Moyn places the history of the human rights project alongside the precisely concurrent ascendance of neoliberalism to consider how the age of human rights has been a golden age for the rich. In the exchange below we pose a few questions to Moyn about this new work that George Soros says “breaks new ground in examining the relationship between human rights and economic fairness.”

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Q: Your first book on human rights, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, was published in 2010. You begin Not Enough by noting that “no account of how the present emerged is definitive for long,” and point to the feeling that history is accelerating at a pace in our present age that makes that especially true. How would you characterize the ways in which the transformations of the years between these books have changed your perspective on the origins and achievements of the human rights movement?

Like so many others, I used to be primarily concerned about the viability of the liberal international order consecrated when the Cold War ended. I was curious how human rights became the moral lingua franca of international affairs at that moment, and my research for The Last Utopia took me into histories of ethics and politics as they led to an international order in which human rights matter and social movements pursue them. What was left out, however, was economics—even though I argued in The Last Utopia that, for most of modern times, socialism appealed to more people for far longer than international human rights principles. Already when I wrote up that first book in 2008-9, the global financial crisis was helping make its framing incomplete or even obsolete. Almost ten years later, in 2016-17, I wrote this sequel placing distributional justice and political economy much closer to the heart of the history of human rights than before. (I only hope the spike in populism that year has not made my new book incomplete or obsolete!)

Q: One way of describing Not Enough is that it’s a world history of how people have thought about the fair distribution of the good things in life—who should get what—and you track the shifting global focus from equality (a concern for the share of those good things enjoyed by the least fortunate with respect to the share going to the world’s most well off) to sufficiency (a concern for the share going to the least fortunate only with respect to some minimum level of provision). The philosopher Harry Frankfurt, among others, has argued that inequality shouldn’t concern us as long as sufficiency is satisfied, and Steven Pinker has of course just published another bestseller arguing that humankind has never been better off, in large part because of the steady improvements in absolute quality of life for many in the developing world. Make the case for equality.

Equality might matter as a moral principle in its own right, as many philosophers other than Frankfurt have contended. From the Jacobins in the French Revolution to John Rawls, some modicum of equality always has had a certain number of proponents, though they have debated what precisely requires equalization and how far to justify departures from perfect equality, as most did. But as a history book, instead of arguing directly on behalf of equality in response, I just try to show how many from the French Revolution through just a few decades ago have held out for a more ambitious equality in the face of less exacting obligations. Indeed, one of my goals in Not Enough is to locate the first thinker who contended that sufficient provision is all that morality requires of our institutions—I claim it was Thomas Paine.

I also track how early socialists slowly took on board distributional equality as a norm and, much later, postcolonial voices were the first to demand truly global equality. By the end, the goal is to show how unusual it is to have advocates of sufficiency alone as prominent as Frankfurt or Pinker, in the absence of egalitarian movements and politics, which were rife across modern history. It would have appalled many of our ancestors to see how many people today agree that it is morally acceptable how far the rich are allowed to tower over the rest as long as the poor are at least somewhat better off.

Making Sense of Neoliberalism

Most people would likely claim a general understanding of neoliberalism as a movement of laissez-faire principles aimed at ensuring free markets and an “unfettered” economy. In Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, one of the first intellectual histories of the movement, Quinn Slobodian shows that, in the beginning, neoliberalism was actually about shielding the economic world from the political world—about protecting the global economy, not freeing it. For Slobodian, neoliberalism is ultimately less a theory of the market or economics than of law and state, and his work gives us a much clearer sense of how the old world of empire gave way in the twentieth century not to a quasi-libertarian world of markets but to international institutions that were highly active in prescribing trade policies and rules about competition. Below, Slobodian introduces his study, and recounts its origins in a late-1990s moment when passion could often outpace understanding.

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If I had to give this book an origin point, it would be almost 20 years ago, at the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. For people who don’t know much about it, a famous coalition of “teamsters and turtles,” meaning environmentalists along with labor unions, students, anarchists, old hippies, and assorted others shut down the meeting and shook the organization to its core. Despite the director-general’s famous call to “re-brand” in the early 2000s, the WTO hasn’t completed a negotiating round since. So, the protest was a big deal.

I was a junior in college in Portland at the time, a few hours south of Seattle, and for reasons mostly to do with laziness and ennui, I didn’t go. I remember watching the protests on our small box TV with a coat hanger stuck in the back with the sinking feeling that “oh no, a world historical event is taking place that I passed on to watch some Lars von Trier movies on VHS.”

My friends and classmates felt activated, painting huge papier-mâché fists and strapping them to their backpacks, filled with certainty. Myself, I felt demobilized and filled mostly with disorientation.

The 1990s were a weird time to come of age. Middle class North American white kids like me were profiting from everything that went under the decade’s buzzword of globalization but also saw it as something ominous, sometimes verging on evil. We were the Adbusters generation. My sixteen-year-old sister was printing small stickers attacking McDonald’s viscerally. I wrote and photocopied a zine that said on the cover in block letters: OPEN YOUR EYES.

But open them to what exactly? The world economy was like the Nothing from my favorite childhood film, The Neverending Story, an anonymous, faceless force that seemed to swallow everything in its path, extinguishing particularity; it Coca-Colonized, to use a term of the time, squashed dreams of global modernization and turned the Third World back into a labor colony to make our stuff.

Before there was fake news there were what I saw then as fake needs, created by advertising and the mind control of the blizzard of logos—the swooshes and stripes that now adorn the cool kids in Berlin and Brooklyn. Back then we were all little Frankfurt Schoolers, or Frankfurt Pre-Schoolers, distrustful of irony though we were steeped in it, seeking elusive authenticity, wanting to unveil, unmask, expose, and upend—in my case, preferably from my desk, typewriter, and the warm chairs of the library.

So this book came out of a simple question that germinated at that time: why would anyone defend the great Nothing of the world economy, the power that forced the hands of democratically elected governments, anonymously imposed new rules and strictures and only rewarded us with what I saw in my adolescent mind as a disposable culture that would choke us all with plastic, garbage, and refuse before I even had a chance to die a natural death. (Capturing some of the melodrama of the time here).

Social Breakdown in Revolutionary Russia

In Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution: Mob Justice and Police in Petrograd, historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa offers a new perspective on the revolutionary year from March 1917 to March 1918 by examining a frightening rise in violent crime that threatened the daily life of ordinary citizens in the capital city. Through the lens of crime, police behavior, judiciary ineptitude, and public response, Hasegawa demonstrates how the breakdown of political and social institutions paralyzed the city and paved the way for the rise of a new kind of authoritarianism. Below, Hasegawa introduces his study of the violent, chaotic lived experience of the revolution, and considers some of its relevance for our world today.

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The catastrophic social breakdown of Petrograd, capital city of the Russian Empire, during the Russian Revolution of 1917 is an important aspect of the revolution that has been overlooked. There was euphoric excitement after the February Revolution, with people expecting immediate improvements to their lives. But life only got worse, and the city soon became paralyzed. Provision of electricity and water dwindled and soon stopped. Garbage piled up in the streets and courtyards, uncollected. The city stank so bad that newspapers commented that even an elephant would faint. Worst of all, basic food became scarcer. People had to stand for hours in long queues for a mere loaf of bread. Horses starved to death, and warnings were posted against their consumption. Dogs disappeared, ending up in people’s stomachs. Consequently, epidemics spread, filling the hospitals.

As horrible as this all was, the most frightening change in daily life was the sharp rise of crime, especially violent crime. The Tsar was gone, and the tsarist police were also annihilated. The newly created municipal police force was inexperienced and untrained, and infiltrated by former criminals. Pickpockets became muggers. Robbers became murderers. Faith in daily exchange suffered, as people believed that merchants were taking advantage of shortages and economic decline to soak a population already suffering from rationing and deprivation.

The old court system also became paralyzed, and the temporary new courts passed erratic verdicts without solid legal basis. Soon, even the temporary courts were abolished, leaving the citizens nowhere to go to lodge their daily complaints. The prison system broke down, leading to the mass escape of criminals back onto streets already riddled with crime.

Longing for the order and security that political authorities could not provide, people took the law into their own hands. Crowds turned to mob justice. When witnessing a crime, people attempted to catch the perpetrators, even petty thieves. They surrounded them there on the spot, beat them, sometimes even tearing them from limb to limb. They paraded them through the streets by tying them on carts, or threw them into the canals and rivers to enjoy watching them drown.

This brutal violence is, in my view, one of the most prominent, frightening, and often ignored aspects of the Russian Revolution. The revolution brought out the worst of human emotions—hatred, cruelty, brutality, and vengeance.

It is important to recognize that the Bolsheviks approved and often encouraged this breakdown of social order. Lenin in fact thought mob justice was the expression of justifiable popular anger against the bourgeois order.

But Lenin spoke too soon, because things went from bad to worse under the Bolsheviks. Both crime and mob justice grew in frequency and cruelty. Moreover, under the Bolsheviks a new element of mob violence was added: alcohol pogroms. Mobs attacked wine and vodka cellars in November and December. The most violent and notorious raid took place in the wine cellar of the Winter Palace, where many drowned to death. A Bolshevik high official helplessly observed that the Bolshevik power was drowning in a sea of wine and vodka.

Loebs New and New Again

June saw the publication of four new Loeb Classical Library volumes, a batch consisting of two revisions to earlier works and two new additions to the corpus. Below, General Editor Jeffrey Henderson introduces the offerings.

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Following the release in fall 2016 of the extraordinary Early Greek Philosophy in nine volumes (LCL 524–532), the Loeb Classical Library catalog for spring 2017 resumes a more typical pattern: two volumes of works new to the Library and two replacement volumes, one each of Latin and Greek. Yet this catalog is not so typical in longer historical perspective: each volume in its own way exemplifies significant adjustments to James Loeb’s original plan for the Library that have been developed over the past half-century in order to preserve the viability and maintain the vitality of his vision for new generations of readers.

Loeb aimed “to include all that is of value and of interest in Greek and Latin literature” and so imagined a moment when the Library would be complete, which almost came to pass in the 1970s as a solution (however unwelcome) to the financial challenges of that era. Instead, there were prospects for a new dawn: the roster of works that count as valuable and interesting is not an immutable or finite canon, but one that changes and expands in each successive generation. Nor are existing volumes immortal, as even the most solid ones inevitably grow outdated in one way or another. And so, the LCL embarked on a massive revaluation project to grade each existing edition for retention, revision, or replacement, and to add such new editions as would likely be received as valuable and interesting. Accordingly, new authors and works continue to be added, but revisions and replacements appear at an equal pace: over 25% of the Library’s editions have already been revised or replaced, and in many cases expanded by adding lesser-known or fragmentary works.

The idea of systematic revision was already in the air when General Editor Eric Warmington decided to revise Heseltine’s edition of Petronius in 1969 (LCL 15), as soon as the relaxation of obscenity laws in the US allowed (the UK had acted a decade earlier), and the de-bowdlerization of the Library has continued apace. Similarly for archaic or otherwise dated styles: Edmonds’ 1912 edition of the Greek Bucolic Poets, among other outdated features, claimed allegiance to the “fain/twain school” and used regional dialect or “colloquial suburban” to represent characters in the mimes, is virtually unreadable today and was finally replaced in 2015 by Neil Hopkinson’s fine and pellucid Theocritus. Moschus. Bion (LCL 28). By contrast, Way’s 1913 edition of Quintus Smyrnaeus (LCL 19), though it features a very stilted iambic pentameter translation, was deemed in the Loeb assessment of 1991 not to warrant replacement on the grounds that such a translation is “what this poetaster deserves” and that the existence of Vian’s sound text was “hardly sufficient to justify a new edition of this boring writer.” But here, as often, times and tastes have changed, so that Hopkinson’s replacement of the Way edition is scheduled to appear next year.

Many other factors come into play when deciding whether to revise or replace an edition, for example the existence of a better critical edition on which to base the text, the quality and currency of the scholarship, the level of annotation, or the adequacy of the front and back matter; the first volume of de Melo’s Plautus (LCL 60) has a 120-page Introduction versus the 8 pages offered by its predecessor, a decision prompted largely by the lack elsewhere of a similar overview for Anglophone readers.

Both new editions in the spring 2017 catalog contain works from the second century AD: the first volume of Michael Trapp’s edition of Aelius Aristides’ Orations (LCL 533), and Christopher P. Jones’ Apologia, Florida, and De Deo Socratis of Apuleius (LCL 534), which together with the Metamorphoses (LCL 44, 453) complete our coverage of that author’s genuine works. Although this era of the “Second Sophistic” was exceptionally prolific on both the Roman and the Greek sides, intellectually and artistically rich and varied, and crucially important in the transmission of classicism, it had been for the most part the preserve of specialists until a recent renewal of interest began to equip the rest of us to understand and appreciate its riches. These works by Aelius Aristides and Apuleius, two of the most distinctive and celebrated figures of their time, join other recent and forthcoming additions by Philostratus (LCL 521) and Galen (LCL 523, 535, 536) to help fill out our picture of an important era.

The other two volumes for spring 2017 replace existing volumes, which are thus retired from both the print and the digital Library: Emlyn Jones’ and Preddy’s new Plato, volume I (LCL 36) replaces Harold North Fowler’s edition of 1914, and J. C. Yardley’s new Livy, volume IX (LCL 295) replaces Evan T. Sage’s edition of 1935. The decision to revise or replace differs in each individual case and then depends on finding the right editor to (re-)do both text and translation. In both these cases, replacement was surely merited. Fowler’s Plato lacked a solid foundation for revision: its text had long been superseded, its translation was dated and often inaccurate, its 10-page introduction was minimal and unhelpful, there were no explanatory notes, and Phaedrus does not belong with Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. (Phaedrus is now slated to be included with two other dialogues on love and literature, Lysis and Symposium, in a forthcoming replacement of LCL 166.) Emlyn-Jones and Preddy, who had recently replaced our edition of Plato’s Republic (LCL 237, 276), were happily ready to repair these deficiencies, and continue to assist us in our long-term efforts to update our twelve volumes of Plato.

An even more massive replacement project is inaugurated by Yardley’s new volume of Livy, whose complete LCL edition is currently in fourteen volumes. Livy presents a special challenge insofar as his monumental History of Rome begins with the city’s foundation and continues down into his own era in the age of Augustus, thus requiring editorial expertise spanning multiple historical periods. Hence our original edition, begun in 1919 and completed in 1959, was divided among four editors: B. O. Foster for Books 1–22 (LCL 114, 133, 172, 191, 233), Frank Gardner Moore for Books 23–30 (LCL 355, 367, 381), the aforementioned Evan T. Sage for Books 31–42 (LCL 295, 301, 313, 332) and his collaborator on volume XII Alfred Cary Schlesinger for Books 43–45, etc. (LCL 396, 404). Each of these volumes is a product of its time, and needs updating for various reasons. Yardley’s LCL volumes of Livy’s third and fourth decades, based on Briscoe’s new critical edition, initiate our efforts to convey Livy’s meaning to the Anglophone reader more uniformly and accurately, with much fuller annotation in line with current scholarship. (We began with the fourth decade while we awaited the publication of the final books of Briscoe’s edition of the third.) Yardley, a veteran translator of Livy, is just the right scholar to set the overall tone for this undertaking, and even as his new LCL volumes will replace Sage’s, so too will replacements for the existing LCL volumes by Foster, Gardner Moore, and Schlesinger follow in due course.

Russia’s Story of War

As the role Russia plays on the world stage continues to face extreme scrutiny, from the ongoing investigation into their part in the American election to international impatience with Putin’s steadfast support for Assad in Syria, it becomes increasingly important to understand how Russians themselves see their place in the world. A new book from Gregory Carleton, Russia: The Story of War, examines this through the lens of violent conflict and the centuries-old part it plays in Russian culture and self-identity. As Carleton writes, “we cannot fully understand Russia without recognizing its experience of war and the resulting stories it tells of itself. We need not condone them, but to ignore them or, as is commonplace in the West, to dismiss them as ludicrous, as the product of delusional fantasy, handicaps our ability to understand how they have profoundly shaped Russia’s self-image and worldview.” In the excerpt below, Carleton looks at the Russian experience of war and how this feeds into a self-mythologizing idea of “exceptionalism,” so strong that it has continued through massive shifts in ideology and government over centuries.

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Bully. Bear. Insatiable aggressor. To many the words are inseparable from Russia itself. Wherever one looks support can be found for such epithets. The annexation of Crimea and military intervention in eastern Ukraine; the earlier flash war with Georgia and flattening of Chechen dreams for independence; the inward turn to authoritarianism and open assault on civil liberties—all push Russia onto the stage of international villainy.

The images, to be sure, enjoy little favor at home. There the titles one hears come as if from a parallel world where all is turned on its head. Allusions to Russia the defender, the protector, and even the savior or liberator permeate state media, academic tomes, religious manifestos, and popular histories. In spite of how far apart the two worldviews are, sustenance for these alter egos can be drawn from the same events and actions. The distance between the two is as unbridgeable as the values that define them. They share, perhaps, only one feature. Neither is new.

Russia has long borne this Janus-faced reputation, no matter what flag it has flown or ideology it has embraced. Its image as villain stretches back virtually unbroken for centuries. Other nations have at times taken the limelight, but none in the modern age has been such a consistent member of the cast, as if history permanently and purposefully assigned Russia that role.

War is where Russia’s contested legacy has been forged. For a millennium its lands, along with those of Belarus and Ukraine, have been among the world’s great battlefields. The scope, savagery, and frequency of conflicts that have ravaged this region are almost unprecedented. The largest armies, the biggest battles, the worst losses of life—all of these superlatives would rightfully, and tragically, point there.

As a consequence, war saturates Russian culture. Many of its churches have been built to honor its military heritage—some directly on battlefields with icons of warrior-saints adorning the walls while they continue service as the country’s heavenly guardians. Noted operas and ballets are devoted to war, while its dominance in cinema and television is unparalleled. The saturation runs so deep that Russia’s most famous writers, many of whom wore a uniform, cannot avoid the subject, whether in novel, verse, story, or essay.

The Idea of the Muslim World

President Trump’s weekend address in Saudi Arabia, a centerpiece of his first foreign trip since taking office, was billed as an address to the “Muslim world,” much in the same way as President Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo. Though Trump’s focus on the threat of Iran undercut the notion of Muslim singularity, the speech was both presented and received in the context of an imagined global Muslim unity. In The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History, Cemil Aydin asks how, despite “the obvious naïveté of categorizing one and a half billion people” as a single community, this idea’s become so entrenched. “How did we arrive at this point,” writes Aydin, “where a fantastical entity could be so present, so prevalent in political thinking? Why do so many Muslim and non-Muslim political leaders, intellectuals, and religious figures comfortably base many of their arguments and decisions on the idea of the Muslim world without reflecting on the accuracy of the generalization that this term signifies?” In the excerpt below, Aydin begins to trace the emergence of this imagined global unity during the peak of European hegemony in the late nineteenth century, when poor colonial conditions, European discourses of Muslim racial inferiority, and Muslims’ theories of their own apparent decline nurtured the first arguments for pan-Islamic solidarity.

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The idea of the Muslim world is inseparable from the claim that Muslims constitute a race. The distinction of the Muslim world and the Christian West began taking shape most forcefully in the 1880s, when the majority of Muslims and Christians resided in the same empires. The rendering of Muslims as racially distinct—a process that called on both “Semitic” ethnicity and religious difference—and inferior aimed to disable and deny their demands for rights within European empires. Muslim intellectuals could not reject the assumptions of irreducible difference but responded that they were equal to Christians, deserving of rights and fair treatment. The same conception of Muslim unity and difference justified appeals to Muslims as a global community during World War I and World War II. Racial assumptions also ensured that later subaltern and nationalist claims for rights would be framed in the idioms of Muslim solidarity and an enduring clash between Islam and the West, giving rise to the Islamism and Islamophobia of the 1980s and beyond.

It is thanks to this elaboration of both Muslim difference and Muslim unity that contemporary writing, scholarly and otherwise, tends to emphasize Muslim exceptionalism. The assumption is that Muslims, due to their piety and the nature of their faith, naturally resist the liberal international order of independent, pluralistic nation-states. Muslims’ attitudes toward politics are presumed different from those of Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, and Christians, whose societies need not be explained by reference to faith tradition or civilizational identity. However, this theory of Muslim exceptionalism is unsupported and unsubstantiated. The Ottoman Empire, Republican Turkey, British-ruled Indian Muslims, Afghanistan, the Saudi Kingdom, Pakistan, postcolonial Egypt, and Iran under the shah ardently supported the imperial and later nationalist world orders. The seeming importance of Islam in the contemporary politics of Muslim-majority societies derives not from theological requirements or a uniquely high level of Muslim piety but from the legacy of imperial racialization of Muslim-ness and from the particular intellectual and political strategies of Muslim resistance to this racialized identity.

The geography and technology of empire were essential to these processes of racialization and resistance in the second half of the nineteenth century. New transportation and communication technologies such as steamships and the telegraph fostered unprecedented levels of connection among Muslims, naturalizing the geopolitical concept of the Muslim world in Europe and its colonies. The networks enabled by these technologies were the medium of pan-Islamic thought born of confrontation with imperial racism.

Imperial racism, but not empire itself. Muslim leaders and thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were not, for the most part, anti-imperialists. Instead they sought fair treatment from the four major European empires: British, Dutch, French, and Russian. These were cosmopolitan arrangements, home to wide-ranging ethnic and religious groups. But racialized legal categorizations shared across European empires, the empowerment strategies of colonized Muslim subjects, and tactics employed in imperial rivalries confirmed rather than challenged Muslim difference, ensuring that Muslims would be a separate class within the imperial whole. The British ruled almost half of the world’s Muslims and therefore played an especially important role in guiding the development of pan-Islamic thought. British fears of rebellion and policies of oppression engendered specifically Muslim responses. At the same time, Muslims understood that their vast numbers and the reality of their overwhelming loyalty to the empire all owed them real clout.

The Cross in Contemporary Culture

As Easter approaches, and millions of Christians around the globe prepare to celebrate one of their most important religious holidays, we take a look at the symbol at the center of it all: the cross. A defining symbol of the Christian faith, the cross is recognized globally as a sign of love, loss, salvation and gratitude, and is depicted in churches and in art around the world. In The Cross: History, Art, and Controversy, Professor Robin Jensen examines the two thousand year history of the cross as an idea and artifact—from the graphic images of the crucifixion in the late Middle Ages, to the rejection of imagery during the Protestant Reformation, up to the more recent discovery of the so-called “Ground Zero Cross” in the wreckage of the World Trade Center. As Jensen notes, “The cross’s story is neither simple nor straightforward. Whether as sign, artifact, instrument, or character, the cross has been cast into a myriad of roles.” What role does the cross play today? In the extract below, Jensen concludes her study with a look at the cross in contemporary culture.

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Both ubiquitous and tenacious, the cross turns up in the most mundane contexts. Roadside crosses set up by private citizens compete with advertising billboards and mark the sites of traffic casualties—a sobering reminder of the death toll on highways. Shrines with crosses fill the landscape in some parts of the world. A hill in northern Lithuania, completely covered with votive crosses and crucifixes is a testimony to the persistence of Catholic Christianity in this former Soviet-occupied country. The subject of an extraordinarily popular cult, pilgrims flock to this place, climbing the hill on their knees and praying the stations of the cross. At the other end of the spectrum, gaudy rhinestone crosses turn up on denim jeans, handbags, or leather jackets—a fashion trend that may have little to do with religion.

Crosses in the public square can be perceived as communicating Christian triumphalism or religious intolerance. The fiery crosses of the Ku Klux Klan are an extreme example of the symbol being used to terrorize victims, incite racial hatred, and widely regarded as an emblem of hate-based terrorism, especially (although not exclusively) against African Americans. Klan spokespersons have argued, however, that the lighted cross (versus the “burning cross”) is not intended as an act of desecration but rather as a show of allegiance to Christ. This intimidating symbol may have been borrowed from the fiery crosses burned by Scottish clansmen, used to rouse their countrymen to repel the English armies during the Jacobite rising. Its sympathetic portrayal in D. W Griffith’s 1915 epic film, The Birth of a Nation, may have encouraged the Klan’s embrace of the figure. Despite the Klan’s justification of its use, recent Supreme Court decisions have judged the display of a burning cross to be a hate crime rather than an instance of freedom of expression when expressly used to intimidate or if motivated by racial, religious, or gender bias. James Cone’s important work, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, looks at the conflicted connections between the two powerful images of the cross and the tree, noting that some African Americans may find the cross to be a symbol of God’s solidarity with their suffering against the terrifying history of racial violence, perpetrated upon the “lynching tree.”

Jews objected to the placement of crosses at the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp in the 1980s, as they evoked painful memories of both ancient and modern persecution. Although the large cross at Auschwitz was originally set up for a convent of Carmelite nuns, and the subsequent placement of smaller crosses may have been intended to commemorate the death of Christians—including many Christian Roma—at that camp, Jews perceived their installation as profoundly disrespectful and demanded their removal. Conversely, the Chinese government’s removal of crosses from the exteriors of Chinese Christian churches, ostensibly only enforcing zoning ordinances, arguably has a different motivation. Journalists have reported that the authorities are targeting Christian churches because they regard their display of religious affiliation too excessive or “overly popular.”

One Line to Rule the World

Spring has arrived, and with it, daylight saving time. As the clocks go forward an hour in the UK, as they did earlier this month in the US, we’re taking a look at how Greenwich became the home of time. A new book by Geographer Royal for Scotland, Professor Charles Withers, asks the question, how did the prime meridian, a singular world-ruling feature, come to be sited in southeast London? Why was it chosen over Washington, Paris, or Beijing? The passage below, excerpted from the prologue of Zero Degrees: Geographies of the Prime Meridian, explains how the choice of Greenwich to mark 0° longitude would go on to solve complex problems of global measurement that had engaged geographers, astronomers, and mariners since ancient times.

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In November 1883, a sixty-seven-year-old English sailor addressed a letter to the world’s geographical societies. There are, he began, “some things that belong to all mankind.” What William Parker Snow had in mind was nothing less than a single prime meridian, a global base point or line to be used by all nations. From such an agreed point of terrestrial measurement, he reasoned, navigators and geographers could plot their voyages and align their maps, and perhaps astronomers could even chart the heavens, all using a standard point of earthly reference. One prime meridian for the world and only one, stressed Parker Snow, would be of “vast benefit to Science and Humanity.”

His appeal for a uniform base of measurement was rooted in personal experience. Born in 1817 in Poole, England, William Parker Snow was a sailor, an author, a sometime Patagonian colonist, a historian of the American Civil War, and, important to his own self-image, a veteran of Arctic exploration. He was also reputed to be psychic and lived, as one contemporary remarked, “on the edge of the Fourth Dimension.” Parker Snow’s supposed otherworldly powers, revealed in a dream in January 1850, convinced him (but few others) of the location of the ill-fated Franklin expedition that was lost in the Arctic in 1847–1848. As a young man, Parker Snow had himself nearly perished at sea during a storm when his vessel had a close encounter with another ship that had derived its mid-ocean position and course from an initial meridian different from his own.