The future of free speech

reversing the global decline of democracy's most essential freedom

An incisive examination of free speech's global decline and a framework for preserving expression in democratic societies. The Future of Free Speech confronts a stark truth: the right to speak freely is under siege. Once celebrated as a cornerstone of democratic societies, free expression ...

Lessons from the new Cold War

America confronts the China challenge

How the US-China rivalry is reshaping global power, democracy, and the international order. A new cold war is unfolding-one that will define the future of the international order. In Lessons from the New Cold War, editor Hal Brands assembles an all-star cast of the most ...

Parliamentary America

the least radical means of radically repairing our broken democracy

Can a parliamentary democracy end America's constitutional crisis? Americans face increasingly stark choices each presidential election and a growing sense that our government can't solve the nation's most urgent challenges. Our eighteenth-century system is ill suited to our twenty-first-century world. Information-age technology ...

War in Ukraine

conflict, strategy, and the return of a fractured world

The war in Ukraine has altered the course of global history. These authors explore how. When Vladimir Putin's forces sought to conquer Ukraine in February 2022, they did more than threaten the survival of a vulnerable democracy. The invasion unleashed a crisis that has ...

The liberty paradox

living with the responsibilities of freedom

How do we balance freedom with the responsibilities we owe each other as members of society? Are we free to do whatever we want? This idea challenges us throughout our daily lives, from how to tackle pandemic restrictions and vaccine mandates to how to respond ...

Conspiracy

why the rational believe the irrational

Nothing happens by accident, everything is connected, and there are no coincidences: that is the essence of conspiratorial thinking. Long a fringe part of the American political landscape, conspiracy theories are now mainstream: 147 members of Congress voted in favor of objections to the 2020 ...

The Arctic and world order

The Arctic, long described as the world’s last frontier, is quickly becoming our first frontier, the front line in a world of more diffuse power, sharper geopolitical competition, and deepening interdependencies between people and nature. A space of often-bitter cold, the Arctic is the ...

The Ruler's House

Contesting Power and Privacy in Julio-Claudian Rome

The Julio-Claudian dynasty, beginning with the rise of Augustus in the late first century BCE and ending with the death of Nero in 68 CE, was the first ruling family of the Roman Empire. Elite Romans had always used domestic space to assert and promote ...

Sailing school

navigating science and skill, 1550-1800

Throughout the Age of Exploration, European maritime communities bent on colonial and commercial expansion embraced the complex mechanics of celestial navigation. They developed schools, textbooks, and instruments to teach the new mathematical techniques to sailors. As these experts debated the value of theory and practice ...

A monument to dynasty and death

the story of Rome's Colosseum and the emperors who built it

Early one morning in 80 CE, the Colosseum roared to life with the deafening cheers of tens of thousands of spectators as the emperor, Titus, inaugurated the new amphitheater with one hundred days of bloody spectacles. These games were much anticipated, for the new amphitheater ...

Law and people in colonial America

How did American colonists transform British law into their own? What were the colonies' first legal institutions, and who served in them? And why did the early Americans develop a passion for litigation that continues to this day? In Law and People in Colonial America ...

The Great Fire of Rome

life and death in the Ancient City

Peril was everywhere in ancient Rome, but the Great Fire of 64 CE was unlike anything the city had ever experienced. No building, no neighborhood, no person was safe from conflagration. When the fire finally subsided—after burning for nine days straight—vast swaths of ...

Killing for the Republic

citizen soldiers and the roman way of war

"For who is so worthless or indolent as not to wish to know by what means and under what system of polity the Romans... succeeded in subjecting nearly the whole inhabited world to their sole government-a thing unique in history?"-Polybius The year 146 BC ...

The pursuit of parenthood

reproductive technology from test-tube babies to uterus transplants

Since the 1978 birth of the first IVF baby, Louise Brown, in England, more than eight million children have been born with the help of assisted reproductive technologies. From the start, they have stirred controversy and raised profound questions: Should there be limits to the ...

The year of Julius and Caesar

59 BC and the transformation of the Roman Republic

The year 59 BC—when Gaius Julius Caesar and Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus served as joint consuls—marked a major turning point in the history of the Roman Republic. It was a dramatic and momentous time of political intrigue, bloodshed, and murder, one that boasted some ...

Global forensic cultures

making fact and justice in the modern era

Contemporary forensic science has achieved unprecedented visibility as a compelling example of applied expertise. But the common public view—that we are living in an era of forensic deliverance, one exemplified by DNA typing—has masked the reality: that forensic science has always been unique ...

Patently mathematical

picking partners, passwords, and careers by the numbers

How do dating sites match compatible partners? What do cell phones and sea coasts have in common? And why do computer scientists keep ant colonies? Jeff Suzuki answers these questions and more in Patently Mathematical, which explores the mathematics behind some of the key inventions ...

The environment

a history of the idea

Is it possible for the economy to grow without the environment being destroyed? Will our lifestyles impoverish the planet for our children and grandchildren? Is the world sick? Can it be healed? Less than a lifetime ago, these questions would have made no sense. This ...

A telephone for the world

Iridium, Motorola, and the making of a Global Age

The first book to tell the story of Iridium in this context, A Telephone for the World is a fascinating look at how people, nations, and corporations across the world grappled in different ways with the meaning of a new historical era.

Eisenhower

becoming the leader of the free world

Destined to be the best short biography of the 34th president of the United States, Eisenhower conclusively demonstrates how and why this master of the middle way became the successful leader of the free world.

Persian interventions

the Achaemenid Empire, Athens and Sparta, 450-386 BCE

Thirty years after Xerxes invaded Greece, the Achaemenid Persian Empire ended its long war with Athens. For the next four decades, the Persians tolerated Athenian control of their former tributaries, the Ionian Greek cities of western Anatolia. But during the Peloponnesian War, Persia reclaimed Ionia ...

Emergent strategy and grand strategy

how american presidents succeed in foreign policy

Emergent Strategy and Grand Strategy thus offers both scholars and practitioners of foreign policy an original theoretical framework to explain strategic success.