From Harvard University, one of the world s preeminent institutions of

liberal education, comes a collection of essays sampling topics at the forefront of academia in the twenty-first century. Written by faculty members at the cutting edge of their fields, including such luminaries as Steven Pinker, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and Harry R. Lewis, these essays offer a clear and accessible overview of disciplines that are shaping the culture, and even the world.

The authors, among the most respected members of Harvard s faculty, invite readers to explore subjects as diverse as religious literacy and Islam, liberty and security in cyberspace, medical science and epidemiology, energy resources, evolution, morality, human rights, global history, the dark side of the American Revolution, American literature and the environment, interracial literature, and the human mind. They summarize key developments in their fields in ways that will both entertain and edify those who seek an education beyond the confines of the classroom.

It is sometimes said that youth is wasted on the young. It could also be said that college, too often, is wasted on college students that only after graduating does a former student come to appreciate learning. To those wishing to revisit the college classroom as well as to those who never had the opportunity in the first place this book gives a taste of the modern course at Harvard. The essays are stimulating and informative, and the annotated bibliographies accompanying each chapter provide invaluable guidance to the life-long learner who wants to pursue these fascinating topics in depth.

The Nature of Difference documents how distinctions between people have been generated in and by the life sciences. Through insightful commentaries and a wide-ranging selection of primary documents by the editors, it charts the shifting boundaries of science and race through more than two centuries of American history. The documents, primarily writings by authoritative, eminent scientists intended for their professional peers, show how various sciences of race have changed their object of study over time: from racial groups to types to populations to genomes and beyond. The book's thematic and synthetic approach reveals the profoundly diverse array of practices--countless acts of observation, quantification, and experimentation--that enabled the consequential categorizations we inherit. The documents--most reproduced in their entirety--range from dictionary definitions of race published between 1886 and 2005 to an exchange of letters between Benjamin Baneker and Thomas Jefferson; from Samuel Cartwright's 1851 "Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race" to a 1950 UNESCO declaration that race is a social myth; from a 1928 paper detailing the importance of the glands in shaping human nature to a 2005 report of the discovery of a genetic basis for skin color. Such documents, given context by the editors' introductions to each thematic chapter, provide scholars, journalists, and general readers with the rich historical background necessary for understanding contemporary developments in racial science.

Evelynn M. Hammonds is Professor of the History of Science and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of Childhood's Deadly Scourge: The Campaign to Control Diphtheria in New York City, 1880-1930. Rebecca M. Herzig is Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Bates College and the author of Suffering for Science: Reason and Sacrifice in Modern America.