Founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1636, Harvard University ranks as the oldest and arguably the nation’s most prestigious institution of higher learning. But in 1781, at the end of the Revolution, the college endured a challenging period with only five professors and two hundred students. From that modest beginning, Harvard has been a testament to visionary leadership that has resulted in one of the world’s leading institutions of learning. See the development and evolution of Harvard over the last century in this pictorial recollection of key events, landmark structures, generous benefactors, and the dedicated presidents who created the legacy. Nearly 200 photographs reproduced in vivid black-and-white, written and captioned by Dana Bonstrom, revisit the storied past of one of the world’s premier universities. A natural companion to the college annual of every alum, Historic Photos of Harvard University belongs in the library of every graduate and all those devoted to America’s favorite ivy-league school.

The history of anthropology at Harvard is told through vignettes about the people, famous and obscure, who shaped the discipline at Harvard College and the Peabody Museum. The role of amateurs and private funders in the early growth of the field is highlighted, as is the participation of women and of students and scholars of diverse ethnicities.

A collection of essays on Harvard arranged in six sections. Three major themes pervade the book: the myth of Harvard's independence, the myth of Harvard as a liberal-left institution, and Harvard's contribution to ethno-centrism and the "superiority" of the West.

A provocative new life restoring Agassiz--America's most famous natural scientist of the 19th century, inventor of the Ice Age, stubborn anti-Darwinist--to his glorious, troubling place in science and culture.

From 1921 until 1948, Paul J. Sachs (1878–1965) offered a yearlong program in art museum training, “Museum Work and Museum Problems,” through Harvard University’s Fine Arts Department. Known simply as the Museum Course, the program was responsible for shaping a professional field—museum curatorship and management—that, in turn, defined the organizational structure and values of an institution through which the American public came to know art. Conceived at a time of great museum expansion and public interest in the United States, the Museum Course debated curatorial priorities and put theory into practice through the placement of graduates in museums big and small across the land. In this book, authors Sally Anne Duncan and Andrew McClellan examine the role that Sachs and his program played in shaping the character of art museums in the United States in the formative decades of the twentieth century. The Art of Curating is essential reading for museum studies scholars, curators, and historians.

A riveting look at the extraordinary and tumultuous history of abortion rights in the United States from the 19th century to the landmark case of Roe v. Wade, by award-winning author and journalist Karen Blumenthal. Tracing the path to the pivotal decision in Roe v. Wade and the continuing battle for women's rights, Blumenthal examines, in a straightforward tone, the root causes of the current debate around abortion and its repercussions that have rippled through generations of American women. This urgent book is the perfect tool to facilitate discussion and awareness of a topic that affects each and every person in the United States.

A story of transgression in the face of religious ideology, a sexist scientific establishment, and political resistance to securing women’s right to vote. When Ohio newspapers published the story of Alice Chenoweth’s affair with a married man, she changed her name to Helen Hamilton Gardener, moved to New York, and devoted her life to championing women’s rights and decrying the sexual double standard. She published seven books and countless essays, hobnobbed with the most interesting thinkers of her era, and was celebrated for her audacious ideas and keen wit. Opposed to piety, temperance, and conventional thinking, Gardener eventually settled in Washington, D.C., where her tireless work proved, according to her colleague Maud Wood Park, "the most potent factor" in the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Free Thinker is the first biography of Helen Hamilton Gardener, who died as the highest-ranking woman in federal government and a national symbol of female citizenship. Hamlin exposes the racism that underpinned the women’s suffrage movement and the contradictions of Gardener’s politics. Her life sheds new light on why it was not until the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that the Nineteenth Amendment became a reality for all women. Celebrated in her own time but lost to history in ours, Gardener was hailed as the "Harriet Beecher Stowe of Fallen Women." Free Thinker is the story of a woman whose struggles, both personal and political, resound in today’s fight for gender and sexual equity.

A portrait of trailblazing astronomer Henrietta Leavitt and an illustrated exploration of the power of attention in scientific observation, artistic creation, and the making of meaning. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, has a diameter of about 100,000 light years—a figure we can calculate because of the work of Henrietta Leavitt (1868–1921), who spent decades studying glass plate photographs of the night sky. Visual artist and researcher Anna Von Mertens’s Attention Is Discovery is a fascinating portrait of this remarkable woman who laid the foundation for modern cosmology, as well as an exploration of the power of looking and its revelatory role at the center of scientific discovery. Ushering us into the scientific community of women who worked alongside Leavitt, now known as the Harvard Computers, Von Mertens describes the inventive methodologies Leavitt devised to negotiate the era’s emerging photographic technology. Interspersed with Von Mertens’s meticulously researched and lyrically written essays are collaborations with art historian Jennifer L. Roberts, cosmologist Wendy Freedman, astrophysicist João Alves, and novelist Rebecca Dinerstein Knight. Alongside Leavitt’s process, evident in her astronomical logbooks and ink notations on the glass plates, Von Mertens includes details of the hand-stitched quilts and graphite drawings she made in response to Leavitt’s legacy. Photographs made by Jennifer L. Roberts using a macro lens amplify the material richness of these artworks and archives. This interweaving of text and image engages and rewards the reader’s own close attention. Highlighting ways that subtle, repeated actions build meaning—whether skilled, technical observation, the crafting of an object, or the mundane tasks that construct our exquisite lives—Von Mertens’s pairing of close looking with close reading creates a layered portrait of Henrietta Leavitt that acknowledges the significance of her discovery and the richness of its inheritance.

Catalog of Catalogs provides a comprehensive index of nearly 2,300 publications documenting the exhibition of Judaica over the past 140 years. This vast corpus of material, ranging from simple leaflets to scholarly catalogs, contains textual and visual material as yet unmined for the study of Jewish art, religion, culture and history. Through highly-detailed, fully-indexed catalog entries, William Gross, Orly Tzion and Falk Wiesemann elucidate some 2,000 subjects, geographical locations and Judaica objects (ceremonial objects, illuminated manuscripts, printed books, synagogues, cemeteries et al.) addressed in these catalogs. Descriptions of the catalog's bibliographic components, contributors, exhibition history, and contents, all accessible through the volume's five indices, render this volume an unparalleled new resource for the study of Jewish Art, culture and history.