Richard Drake presents a new interpretation of Charles Austin Beard’s life and work. The foremost American historian and a leading public intellectual in the first half of the twentieth century, Beard participated actively in the debates about American politics and foreign policy surrounding the two world wars. Drake takes this famous man’s...

How the European Union handles posted workers is a growing issue for a region with borders that really are just lines on a map. A 2008 story, dissected in Ines Wagner’s Workers without Borders, about the troubling working conditions of migrant meat and construction workers, exposed a distressing dichotomy: how could a country with such strong...

Bolder economic policy could have addressed bouts of deflation in post-Bubble Japanese history, write Gene Park, Saori N. Katada, Giacomo Chiozza, and Yoshiko Kojo in Taming Japan’s Deflation. Despite warnings from economists, intense political pressure, and "unconventional monetary policy" options to address this problem, Japan’s central bank...

Empire of Hope asks how emotions become meaningful in political life. In a diverse array of cases from recent Japanese history, David Leheny shows how sentimental portrayals of the nation and its global role reflect a durable story of hopefulness about the country’s postwar path. From the medical treatment of conjoined Vietnamese children...

Over the past two decades, many states have heard demands that they recognize and apologize for historic wrongs. Such calls have not elicited uniform or predictable responses. While some states have apologized for past crimes, others continue to silence, deny, and relativize dark pasts. What explains the tremendous variation in how states deal...

Do alliances curb efforts by states to develop nuclear weapons? Atomic Assurance looks at what makes alliances sufficiently credible to prevent nuclear proliferation; how alliances can break down and so encourage nuclear proliferation; and whether security guarantors like the United States can use alliance ties to end the nuclear efforts of...

In 1941 the magazine publishing titan Henry R. Luce urged the nation’s leaders to create an American Century. But in the post-World-War-II era proponents of the American Century faced a daunting task. Even so, Luce had articulated an animating idea that, as William O. Walker III skillfully shows in The Rise and Decline of the American Century...

Since his death, the writings of Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) have been debated, cited, and adopted by political and legal thinkers on both the left and right with increasing frequency, though not without controversy given Schmitt’s unwavering support for National Socialism before and during World War II. In Perilous Futures, Peter Uwe Hohendahl...

How do some national-secessionist campaigns get on the global agenda whereas others do not? Which projects for new nation-states, Philip Roeder asks, give rise to mayhem in the politics of existing states? National secession has been explained by reference to identities, grievances, greed, and opportunities. With the strategic constraints most...

If we believe that the small, open economies of Nordic Europe are paragons of good governance, why are they so prone to economic crisis? In Good Governance Gone Bad, Darius Ornston provides evidence that adapting flexibly to rapid, technological change and shifting patterns of economic competition may be a great virtue, but it does not prevent...