Featured series 
Tag: ” Books
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Nation & World
On Rumors
Rumors affect political outcomes, tarnish reputations, even ruin lives. Cass R. Sunstein delivers this treatise on how misinformation is easily accepted and rapidly spread, and how, in the Internet age, some stories can’t be undone.
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Nation & World
Justice for all
Michael Sandel, the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government, has authored a new book unpacking today’s most prevailing political and ethical quandaries.
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Nation & World
Longfellow online exhibition recognized by ACRL
The ACRL Rare Books and Manuscripts Section has selected the online exhibition “Public Poet, Private Man: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at 200” as a winner of the 2009 Katharine Kyes Leab and Daniel J. Leab “American Book Prices Current” Exhibition Award.
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Nation & World
How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment
Lamont tells all in this behind-the-scenes work on the mysterious underpinnings of academia. Be in the room when the greatest thinkers meet behind closed doors and talk about how excellent excellence is.
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Nation & World
Human Documents: Eight Photographers
Media maestro Robert Gardner presents this stunning array of photographs, or, “human documents,” which explore geography, culture, and our shared humanity through a universal visual language.
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Nation & World
Up Close, part 2
In the fast pace of our daily lives we may overlook the details which, collectively, create a stunning backdrop for all that happens within the University. Hundreds of historic volumes stand as individual works of art inside the Houghton and Widener Libraries.
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Nation & World
Child psychiatrist pens her past
Psychiatrist Nancy Rappaport uncovers a relationship with the mother she scarcely knew in her powerful familial memoir. Infused with accounts of treating her own teenage patients, Rappaport plumbs the bond between parents and children while closing in on healing.
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Nation & World
Shorenstein Center announces Rosenthal Writer-in-Residence Program
The Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy has created a new program for writers, named in honor of A.M. Rosenthal.
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Nation & World
Newsmakers
FAS CONFERS 17 MIND, BRAIN, AND BEHAVIOR CERTIFICATES; ‘REMEMBERING AWATOVI’ WINS INDEPENDENT PUBLISHER AWARD
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Nation & World
Jane Cheng ’09: Preserving art, making it public, passing it on
Talk about a grand entrance — on her first day of work at the Herzog August Bibliothek, the famed medieval studies library in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, Jane Cheng ’09 powered up her laptop and promptly shorted out the entire reading room.
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Nation & World
Two views of disparate cultures
Art historian Kellie Jones, the child of two writers, grew up in the 1960s and 1970s on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. It was a place of cultural ferment, creation, and comparative racial freedom. Jones is exploring new visual and literary ways to convey her personal history. Legal scholar Stacy Leeds, an expert in tribal law,…
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Nation & World
Evolution of a sacred text made visible at Houghton
When Jane Cheng ’09 arrived at Harvard four years ago, her interest in book conservation led to a job at the Weissman Preservation Center, and it was that job that led her to the medieval text that would become the subject of both her senior thesis and a new exhibition organized by Cheng at Houghton…
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Nation & World
Roughing it on Great Brewster
On the hot day of July 15, 1891, four women set off for the adventure of a lifetime in Boston Harbor. For nearly two weeks the quartet — well-educated, upper-class women from the Lowell area — “roughed it” in a quaint yet ramshackle cottage on remote Great Brewster Island, a place they considered “an enchanted…
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Nation & World
Harvard University Library awarded $5M grant from Arcadia Fund
Britain’s Arcadia Fund has awarded $5 million to the Harvard University Library. Arcadia’s five-year grant will provide flexible support for the library’s core functions: acquisitions, access, preservation, and dissemination.
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Nation & World
When Boston was the hub of the literary world
Matthew Pearl, author of “The Dante Club” and “The Poe Shadow,” wove an engaging tale of Boston’s literary legacy — one significantly and curiously shaped by 19th century copyright laws.
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Nation & World
The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-first Century
Jacqueline Olds and Richard S. Schwartz hold a microscope to loneliness, in part a symptom of our chaotic contemporary lifestyles, revealing the widespread effects of our disconnection and a culture that romanticizes autonomy.
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Nation & World
Moral dimensions of ‘the scientific life’
Scientific knowledge is reliable and it is authoritative. It is also often understood to be impersonal: The personal characteristics of a researcher are not thought to influence his or her findings. In recent work, historian Steven Shapin assumes the reliability and authority of scientific knowledge but illustrates how scientists’ personal characteristics and traits figure prominently…
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Nation & World
Power of the pen in early America
In 1747, three members of the Abenaki Native American tribe and their Mohawk ally posted a petition on a wall of an English fort in the Connecticut River Valley. The paper was small, but it spoke volumes.
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Nation & World
This month in Harvard history
Oct. 14, 1763 — At the College library in Old Harvard Hall, Ephraim Briggs, Class of 1764, checks out “The Christian Warfare Against the Deuill World and Flesh” by John Downame, one of several hundred books that John Harvard had bequeathed to the College in 1638.
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Nation & World
Harvard, MIT, Yale presses join forces to help rebuild Iraqi National Library
Last week, more than 5,700 books were shipped from TriLiteral, the warehouse that holds inventory for Harvard University Press, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Press, and Yale University Press, to help replenish the Iraqi National Library. The three presses have partnered with the Sabre Foundation, whose book donation program has a long history of…
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Nation & World
Heaney ‘catches the heart off guard’
Over the years, readings by poet Seamus Heaney have been so wildly popular that his fans are called “Heaneyboppers.” A reading this week at Sanders Theatre, sponsored by Harvard’s Department of English and American Literature and Language, was no exception. The event’s free tickets were gone weeks ago, within hours, and on Tuesday (Sept. 30)…
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Nation & World
Picture Perfect
We live in a world flooded with images. There has been an explosion of cell phone cameras, social networking sites, digital photography, blogs, and surveillance cameras, and we have a 24-hour news cycle that feeds on pictures.
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Nation & World
Houghton sets sights on reception
Houghton Library will host an opening reception on Tuesday (Sept. 16) from 5 to 7 p.m. for its major fall exhibition, “To Promote, to Learn, to Teach, to Please: Scientific Images in Early Modern Books.” The exhibition examines how images in early modern European books of science (1500-1750) not only were shaped by the needs…
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Nation & World
Sachs insists new technologies essential
Jeffrey Sachs, the internationally renowned economist, returned to his alma mater Monday (April 14) to give his prescription for saving the world. Sustainable development, he said, is the “central challenge of our time.”
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Nation & World
Columbia, Nieman name Lukas Prize Project Awards
The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University have announced this year’s winners of the Lukas Prize Project Awards. The awards, established in 1998, recognize excellence in nonfiction books that exemplify the literary grace and commitment to serious research and social concern that characterized the distinguished work…
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Nation & World
Self discusses gender, feminism, privacy
Brown University cultural historian Robert O. Self — a Radcliffe Fellow this year — made a name for himself with his book “American Babylon” (Princeton University Press, 2003). He was the first scholar to connect the civil rights struggle with postwar white flight to the suburbs, and the tax incentives that made suburbanization possible.
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Nation & World
Brandt awarded prestigious Bancroft Prize
“The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America,” by Amalie Moses Kass Professor of the History of Medicine Allan M. Brandt, has been selected to receive a Bancroft Prize from Columbia University.
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Nation & World
John Harvard Book Project wraps up at local schools
In October 2007, a group of Harvard College students proposed a novel way to commemorate the 400th anniversary of John Harvard’s birth — donate books. Their initial idea developed into the John Harvard Book Project, which ran from November through February and raised funds from students, faculty, and staff with the goal of purchasing books…
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Nation & World
Wisse explores mutations of Jewish power
If the Jewish rebellion led to a diaspora that lasted millennia, it also prompted a sea change in the nature of Judaism, said Ruth R. Wisse, Harvard College Professor and Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature. An energetic commentator on Jewish culture, Wisse delivered a Humanities Center lecture this week (March 17) summarizing her new…