"In The Long Shadow of War, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James M. McPherson considers why the Civil War retains such a hold on our national psyche and identity. Though the drama and tragedy of the subject, from the war's scope and size--an estimated death toll of 750,000, far more than all the rest of the country's wars combined--to the nearly mythical individuals involved--Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson--help explain why the...

"In September 2011, two leading civic engagement advocacy organizations headed, respectively, by Robert Putnam and Peter Levine released a joint report showing that a region's level of civic engagement was a strong predictor of its ability to recover from the Great Recession. This finding confirms what advocates of civic engagement have long hypothesized: that strengthening the networks between government and civil society and increasing citizen participation...

"How stable are free societies today? This book argues that they are under threat from 'market free-choice' and 'moral free-choice,' two sides of the same coin which between them, the author warns, threaten to tear civil society apart. Market free-choice is the prevailing economic ideology that gives free rein to market forces, even when they ride roughshod over communities and whole nations. Moral free-choice, the other side of the coin, is the notion...

Many Americans, argues Michael C. C. Adams, think of the Civil War as more glorious, less awful, than the reality. Tourists flock to battlefields, their perceptions of the war often shaped by reenactors who work hard for verisimilitude but who cannot ultimately simulate the horrors of war. In Living Hell, Adams uses the voices of actual participants on the firing line or in the hospital ward to create a virtual historical reenactment. Perhaps because...

Americans today are frustrated and anxious. Our economy is sluggish, and leaves workers insecure. Income inequality, cultural divisions, and political polarization increasingly pull us apart. Our governing institutions often seem paralyzed. And our politics has failed to rise to these challenges. No wonder, then, that Americans--and the politicians who represent them--are overwhelmingly nostalgic for a better time. The Left looks back to the middle...

Examines the life of the nineteenth-century author famous for the novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin," which denounced slavery and intensified the disagreement between the North and South.

Billions of American tax dollars go into a vast array of programs targeting various social issues: the opioid epidemic, criminal violence, chronic unemployment, and so on. Yet the problems persist and even grow. Howard Husock argues that we have lost sight of a more powerful strategy-a preventive strategy, based on positive social norms. In the past, individuals and institutions of civil society actively promoted what may be called "bourgeois norms,"...