The Harvard Brief

Between Fixed and Fickle: Why Our Moral Views Keep Changing   (Harvard UP, 2026), a psychologist explains why—and how—moral views change across different life stages, situations, and historical eras. We like...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

What happens when performance defies social and political boundaries? Performing Transgression: Crowds and Bodies in Heian Japan (Harvard University Press, 2026) offers a new cultural history of non-elite spectacle...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Furious Harvests ( Harvard University Press, 2026) transports readers 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...

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...

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...