"In How the World Made the West, Oxford historian and classicist Josephine Quinn poses perhaps the most significant challenge ever to the "civilizational" thinking regarding the origins of Western culture and thought-that is, the idea that civilizations arose separately and distinctly from one another. Upending two centuries of conventional historiography and troubling the waters of our Western origin story, she locates the roots of the West in everything...

"In his 2020 book American Rule, Jared Yates Sexton took a hard look at our nation's history: namely, the abuses committed by those in power, and the comforting myths that provided them cover and shaped the way we view ourselves up to the present. His approach and the narrative he uncovered proved worryingly relevant, as Americans have struggled with an identity crisis in an increasingly divided public square. Now, in The Midnight Kingdom, Sexton...

Introduces the origins of self-understanding in the cultures of Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, and explains how Western civilization frames the issues of self and society.