“If you buy one self-help book this year, pick this one,” wrote New York Times writer Tara Parker-Pope about How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be, adding the book to the paper's list of eight favorites for healthy living in 2021. What sets How to Change apart is its focus on the internal obstacles that plague efforts to develop healthier habits and move forward in our lives. The author, University of Pennsylvania professor Katie Milkman, PhD ’09, says she organized the book this way in order to enable readers to identify common barriers and the best strategies for overcoming them. This month on Colloquy, Milkman discusses her research and how insights from economics and psychology can be harnessed to change consequential behaviors for good.

Before his death at age 92, the Brown University Professor Gordon Wood, PhD ’64, devoted his long career to making sure we remember the radicalism of the American Revolution. Often referred to as the “dean” of historians of the 18th-century United States, Wood argued that the country represented not only the most liberal and democratic regime in human history, but also a fundamental transformation of society and culture, one that continues to shape popular movements for freedom throughout the world. As the US approached its 250th anniversary, he spoke with Harvard Griffin GSAS about the creation of the American republic in one of the last interviews of his life.

Here in eastern Massachusetts, you can't take more than a few steps without tripping over a marker or a monument to the American Revolution. Middle school students take field trips to where it all happened: the Boston Massacre, Lexington and Concord, and Bunker Hill. Teachers present the war as the struggle of humble farmers and merchants to free themselves from the clutches of the British Empire.

The University of California Berkeley historian Brian DeLay, PhD ’04, author of the forthcoming book, Aim at Empire: American Revolutions, Arms Trading, and the Birth of US Empire, 1763–1815, says that the great paradox of the Revolution was that the Patriots were fighting not only for their independence, but also for an empire of their own—one that rolled through the lands of indigenous peoples west of the boundary set by the British at the end of the Seven Years War in 1763. Moreover, DeLay says the Revolution was one of many that spread across the Americas over a 50-year period in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The common thread throughout these conflicts—and the determinant of success and failure—was often access to guns and ammunition.