This country's most challenging writer on education presents here a distillation, for the general reader, of half a decade's research and reflection. His theme is dual: how children learn, and how they can best be helped to learn--how they can be brought to the fullest realization of their capacities.

Mr. Bruner, Harper's reports, has "stirred up more excitement than any educator since John Dewey." His explorations into the nature of intellectual growth and its relation to theories of learning and methods of teaching have had a catalytic effect upon educational theory. In this...

Two massive systems of unfree labor arose, a world apart from each other, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The American enslavement of blacks and the Russian subjection of serfs flourished in different ways and varying degrees until they were legally abolished in the mid-nineteenth century. Historian Peter Kolchin compares and contrasts the two systems over time in this magisterial book, which clarifies the organization, structure, and dynamics of both social entities, highlighting their basic similarities while pointing out important differences discernible only in...

This masterly study has a grand sweep. It ranges over centuries, with a long look backward over several millennia. Yet the history it unfolds is primarily the story of individuals: thinkers and dreamers who envisaged an ideal social order and described it persuasively, leaving a mark on their own and later times.

The roster of utopians includes men of all stripes in different countries and eras--figures as disparate as More and Fourier, the Marquis de Sade and Edward Bellamy, Rousseau and Marx. Fascinating character studies of the major figures are among the delights of the...

When John Millington Synge and Molly Allgood fell in love, he was thirty-five, she nineteen. Neither knew that he had Hodgkin's disease, of which he was to die in three years. Synge had already achieved recognition as a playwright--translations of two of his plays had been performed in Berlin and Prague--and he was codirector, with Yeats and Lady Gregory, of the Irish National Theatre Society. Molly had started her acting career the year before, in the newly opened Abbey Theatre, with a walk-on part in Synge's Well of the Saints. She had been promoted from crowd scenes to bit parts...

Representative of the international acclaim accorded Ernst Mayr's Animal Species and Evolution, published in 1963, is Sir Julian Huxley's description of it as "a magistral book... certainly the most important study of evolution that has appeared in many years--perhaps since the publication of The Origin of Species." In his extraordinary book, Mr. Mayr fully explored, synthesized, and evaluated man's knowledge about the nature of animal species and the part they play in the process of evolution.

Now, in this long-awaited abridged edition, Mr. Mayr's definitive work is...

The monumental Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups is the most authoritative single source available on the history, culture, and distinctive characteristics of ethnic groups in the United States. The Dimensions of Ethnicity series is designed to make this landmark scholarship available to everyone in a series of handy paperbound student editions. Selections in this series will include outstanding articles that illuminate the social dynamics of a pluralistic nation or masterfully summarize the experience of key groups.

Written by the best-qualified scholars in each...

First published in 1902, and illustrated by Jacob Epstein, this evocation of the spiritual and cultural life of Yiddish New York remains fresh and relevant, and an invaluable commentary on one aspect of the formation of modern America.

To an extent unequaled by any outsider before him, Hutchins Hapgood, a descendant of generations of New England Yankees, succeeded in penetrating the inner life of an American immigrant community. Hapgood did not set out to reform and cleanse the ghetto. His aim was to understand and interpret it, to find and know its poets, scholars, dramatists,...

Upon publication in the late 1970s this book was the first major historical analysis of twentieth-century Cuba. Focusing on the way Cuba has been governed, and in particular on the way a changing elite has made claims to legitimate rule, it carefully examines each of Cuba's three main political eras: the first, from Independence in 1902 to the Presidency of Gerardo Machado in 1933; the second, under Batista, from 1934 until 1958; and finally, Castro's revolution, from 1959 to the present.

Jorge Dominguez discusses the political roles played by interest groups, mass organizations, and...