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Habeas Corpus
From England to Empire
Paul D. Halliday
Harvard University Press, 2012

We call habeas corpus the Great Writ of Liberty. But it was actually a writ of power. In a work based on an unprecedented study of thousands of cases across more than five hundred years, Paul Halliday provides a sweeping revisionist account of the world’s most revered legal device.

In the decades around 1600, English judges used ideas about royal power to empower themselves to protect the king’s subjects. The key was not the prisoner’s “right” to “liberty”—these are modern idioms—but the possible wrongs committed by a jailer or anyone who ordered a prisoner detained. This focus on wrongs gave the writ the force necessary to protect ideas about rights as they developed outside of law. This judicial power carried the writ across the world, from Quebec to Bengal. Paradoxically, the representative impulse, most often expressed through legislative action, did more to undermine the writ than anything else. And the need to control imperial subjects would increasingly constrain judges. The imperial experience is thus crucial for making sense of the broader sweep of the writ’s history and of English law.

Halliday’s work informed the 2008 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Boumediene v. Bush on prisoners in the Guantánamo detention camps. His eagerly anticipated book is certain to be acclaimed the definitive history of habeas corpus.

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Hadrian
Empire and Conflict
Thorsten Opper
Harvard University Press, 2008

Even in the panoply of Roman history, Hadrian stands out. Emperor from 117 to 138 ad, he was at once a benevolent ruler and a ruthless military leader, known for his restless and ambitious nature, his interest in architecture, and his passion for Greek culture. This book moves beyond the familiar image of Hadrian to offer a new appraisal of this Emperor’s contradictory personality, his exploits and accomplishments, his rule, and his military role, against the backdrop of his twenty-one-year reign.

Lavishly illustrated with key works of art and objects, celebrated and little-known sculptures, bronzes, coins and medals, drawings, and watercolors from museums around the globe, the book conveys a vivid sense of the world Hadrian inhabited. Thorsten Opper shows the emperor from many angles—as a complex individual, as a military leader and strategist, as the amateur architect who created magnificent buildings such as his villa at Tivoli (an empire in miniature), as the lover who deified his male lover Antinous after his mysterious death in the Nile, and, finally, as the traveler who tirelessly roamed his empire and its boundaries.

From his place in Roman history to his legacy, which even makes its way into the popular culture of our day, the Hadrian who emerges from these pages is no longer larger than life; rather, he has all the depth and complexity, the color and shadings and detail of life itself.

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Heir to Empire
United States Economic Diplomacy, 1916-1923
Carl P. Parrini
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1969
In this book, Carl P. Parrini examines the evolution of United States economic diplomacy during a critical period in world history. After World War I, leaders were poised to begin “The American Century”, when the United States would assume the dominant role as the world's foremost political, economic and military power. This was to be achieved by establishing harmonic relations with other nations-allowing leverage on minor economic goals, while maintaining U.S. interests on major objectives. This theory of foreign policy is often attributed to president Warren Harding or his Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover. Yet, Parrini's study determines, nearly all decisions made with respect to international investment, allocation of raw materials, reparations, war debts, and tariffs, were based on earlier principles established by Woodrow Wilson's administration.
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History of the Empire, Volume I
Books 1–4
Herodian
Harvard University Press

A chronicle of Rome in crisis.

The History of Herodian (born ca. AD 178–179) covers a period of the Roman empire from the death of the emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 180) to the accession of Gordian III (238), half a century of turbulence, in which we can see the onset of the revolution which, in the words of Gibbon, “will ever be remembered, and is still felt by the nations of the earth.” In these years, a succession of frontier crises and a disastrous lack of economic planning established a pattern of military coups and increasing cultural pluralism.

Of this revolutionary epoch we know all too little. The selection of chance has destroyed all but a handful of the literary sources that deal with the immediate post-Antonine scene. Herodian’s work is one of the few that have survived, and it has come down to us completely intact. Of the author we know virtually nothing, except that he served in some official capacity in the empire of which he wrote. His History was apparently produced for the benefit of people in the Greek-speaking half of the Roman empire. It betrays the faults of an age when truth was distorted by rhetoric and stereotypes were a substitute for sound reason. But it is an essential document for any who would try to understand the nature of the Roman empire in an era of rapidly changing social and political institutions.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Herodian is in two volumes.

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History of the Empire, Volume II
Books 5–8
Herodian
Harvard University Press, 1969

A chronicle of Rome in crisis.

The History of Herodian (born ca. AD 178–179) covers a period of the Roman empire from the death of the emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 180) to the accession of Gordian III (238), half a century of turbulence, in which we can see the onset of the revolution which, in the words of Gibbon, “will ever be remembered, and is still felt by the nations of the earth.” In these years, a succession of frontier crises and a disastrous lack of economic planning established a pattern of military coups and increasing cultural pluralism.

Of this revolutionary epoch we know all too little. The selection of chance has destroyed all but a handful of the literary sources that deal with the immediate post-Antonine scene. Herodian’s work is one of the few that have survived, and it has come down to us completely intact. Of the author we know virtually nothing, except that he served in some official capacity in the empire of which he wrote. His History was apparently produced for the benefit of people in the Greek-speaking half of the Roman empire. It betrays the faults of an age when truth was distorted by rhetoric and stereotypes were a substitute for sound reason. But it is an essential document for any who would try to understand the nature of the Roman empire in an era of rapidly changing social and political institutions.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Herodian is in two volumes.

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