"With its blend of Eastern mysticism and Western culture, Hesse's best-known and most autobiographical work is one of literature's most poetic evocations of the soul's journey to liberation. Harry Haller is a sad and lonely figure, a reclusive intellectual for whom life holds no joy. He struggles to reconcile the wild primeval wolf and the rational man within himself without surrendering to the bourgeois values he despises. His life changes dramatically...

"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...

European history is deeply embedded in the global civilization that has emerged in the 21st century. More than two thirds of today's nations were once European colonies or protectorates. Europe's legacy is evident in the trajectory of the United States and has influenced aspiring hegemonic powers like China. For centuries, Europe was the heart and soul of the West, and European powers enjoyed unprecedented global hegemony, not only by military and...

A history of Western civilization's rise to global dominance offers insight into contributing factors and the development of such specific concepts as competition, modern medicine and the work ethic, arguing that Western dominance is being lost to cultures who are more productively utilizing Western techniques.

A history of the influential rivalry between Plato and Aristotle traces the Western world's ongoing battle of ideas to their competing philosophies, demonstrating how their contrasting views on everything became the twin fountainheads of Western culture.

"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...