Featuring contributions by Conrad Black, Victor Davis Hanson, Roger Kimball, Andrew Roberts, and other luminaries, this book collects the ten special essays from The New Criterion’s fortieth-anniversary season to assess where Western civilization is now, and where it’s going.

Paper Belt on Fire is the unlikely account of how two outsiders with no experience in finance—a charter school principal and defrocked philosopher—start a venture capital fund to short the higher education bubble.

Peter Wood offers a point-by-point response to the New York Times‘s 1619 Project and argues that the proper starting point for the American story is 1620, with the signing of the Mayflower Compact aboard ship before the Pilgrims set foot upon a new land.

During the 1980s and 1990s, European economies went through a period of slowing economic growth and high unemployment, what some economists described as “secular decline.” On the other side of the Atlantic, the United States enjoyed a robust recovery during those years by reducing taxes, eliminating regulations on business, and tightening monetary policy. Now, after two decades of subpar growth, the question is whether or not the American economy has entered into its own era of secular decline.

In clear prose and deeply-informed philosophical argument, The Worth of Persons establishes a foundation for ethics in the equal worth of persons, which makes ethics absolutely objective and immune to relativist attacks because it is based on the metaphysical truth about humans.

One of America’s greatest success stories is its economy. For more than a century, it has been the envy of the world. The opportunity it generates has inspired millions of people to want to become American. Today, however, America’s economy is at a crossroads. Managed decline and creeping statism do not have to be America’s only choices. This book insists that there is an alternative: a vibrant market economy grounded on entrepreneurship, competition, and trade openness.

John Quincy Adams is widely recognized as America’s most distinguished diplomat, taking into account the length and breadth of his public service and his influence on American foreign policy. In the course of this remarkable journey, John Quincy Adams documented his ideas and actions through his writings, speeches, letters, diary entries, and state papers. To aid those interested specifically in learning more about the man and his views on foreign policy, the editors have compiled a collection of the most important and often-cited works, such as his famous July 4, 1821 Oration: “she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”

By the dawn of the twentieth century, the United States had become the world’s greatest economic power and an increasingly important actor on the world stage. Yet success presented a challenge to the country not to lose sight of its heritage of constitutional liberty and the virtues that had made its flourishing possible. That challenge remains for us today.

From its beginnings America was a land of hope, a magnet for those seeking a new beginning for themselves. The American Founders created a unique plan of government designed to realize those ideals. Implementing the plan was not easy, though, and a bloody civil war would push the American experiment to the breaking point — and to a new birth of freedom.

Over sixty years ago, we were introduced to the idea of “the two cultures” in higher education—that is, the growing rift in the academy between the humanities and the sciences, a rift wherein neither side understood the other, spoke to the other, or cared for the other. But this divide in the academy, real as it may be, is nothing compared to another great divide—the rift today between our common American culture and the culture of the academy itself.

The Republican Party must return to its roots as a progressive conservative party that defends the American Dream, the idea that whoever you are, you can get ahead and know that your children will have it better than you did. It must show how the Democrats have become the party of inequality and immobility and that they created what structural racism exists through their unjust education, immigration, and job-killing policies.

The Trump Administration’s “Peace to Prosperity” vision for the Middle East was unveiled on January 28, 2020. What followed over the next eleven months was one of the most fascinating and consequential periods of U.S. foreign policy in a generation, leading to five normalization agreements between Israel and Muslim states. As the senior advisor to the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Aryeh Lightstone had a front-row seat on events that dramatically altered the dynamics of the Middle East. Let My People Know provides a behind-the-scenes account of the strategies that allowed the “Deal of the Century” to be struck.