In 1936 the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project commissioned Stuart Davis (1892-1964) to paint a mural for the Williamsburg Houses, a New York City housing project. Though the mural, "Swing Landscape", was never installed in its inten...

This book examines the history of early secret police forces in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War. Molly Pucci delves into the ways their origins diverged from the original Soviet model based on differi...

How can we make sense of our lives when we do not know where we come from? This was a pressing question for the youngest survivors of the Holocaust, whose prewar memories were vague or nonexistent. In this beautifully written account, Rebecca Cliffor...

Social order requires a sovereign: an actor with unlimited, undivided, and unaccountable authority. Or so the classic theory says. But without noticing, we've gutted the theory. Constitutionalism limits state authority. Federalism divides it. The rul...

Few artists have had as much of an impact on American popular culture as Stan Lee. The characters he created – Spider-Man and Iron Man, the X-Men and the Fantastic Four – occupy Hollywood's imagination and production schedules, generate billions at t...

<p>John Sexton argues that over six decades, a "secular dogmatism", impenetrable by dialogue or reason, has come to dominate political discourse in America. Political positions, elevated to the status of doctrinal truths, now simply are &qu...

In this illuminating book, James Davison Hunter and Paul Nedelisky recount the centuries-long, passionate quest to discover a scientific foundation for morality. The "new moral science" led by such figures as E.O. Wilson, Patricia Churchland and Josh...

In a sustained exploration of the possibilities of abstraction, Sean Scully (b. 1945) has created a rich body of work throughout his 50-year career. "Sean Scully: The Shape of Ideas" sets his entire output within a detailed biographical framework, cl...

Hailed as "a magisterial critique of top-down social planning" by the New York Times, this essential work analyzes disasters from Russia to Tanzania to uncover why states so often fail – sometimes catastrophically – in grand efforts to engineer their...

The hollow more than shape is certain. The 114th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets features Jill Osier's poems of quiet attention to the human and natural worlds. In his foreword to the collection, award-winning poet Carl Phillips notes, "Ce...