COMING SPRING 2025
western history
The Golden Thread: Volume I
The Ancient World and Christendom
Where do the threads that form the Western tradition originate, and how were they woven together in the two and half millenia before 1500? What are the sources of our modern ideas about science, freedom, equality, law, good government, and virtue? These are the questions addressed by The Golden Thread Volume I: The Ancient World and Christendom.
The story begins with the seminal culture of the classical Greeks and describes the Hellenization of the east following the conquests of Alexander the Great; the volume then narrates the rise and dominance of Rome, and the confluence of Greco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian culture in the Christian empire of the fourth century AD. It follows the history of Christendom from fall of western Rome, describes the long rivalry with the Islamic world, and culminates in the emergence of European civilization in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
Volume I explores how the foundations were laid for the economic, cultural, and political dominance of the West in the modern period.
The Golden Thread: Volume II
The Modern and Contemporary West
With the end of the Renaissance in Europe, the Western world experienced a long series of cataclysmic events that still reverberate in modern society. The Golden Thread Volume II: The Modern and Contemporary West begins with the end of the dominance of the Roman Catholic Church on European states during the Protestant Reformation, before turning to the creation of empires that swiftly circled the globe, and to the explosion of intellectual, economic, and technological advancements of the Enlightenment.
These were often moments of flourishing in Western Civilization, but also moments of shadow, as they pointed toward the violent political upheavals that shook continental Europe and the Americas during the American, French and Bolivarean Revolutions and the Napoleonic Wars. The political leaders of the Western nations struggled to minimize the impact of these developments. But the Industrial Revolution, the Romantic revolt against the Enlightenment (and Enlightenment politics), and a second wave of scientific movements in the 19th century challenged any attempt to restore the classical unity of the West. A radically re-drawn world emerged from these developments, and one which was ill-prepared for the colossal physical and moral shocks of the First and Second World Wars.
In the closing chapters, we will see how Western civilization has, in our lifetimes, been simultaneously challenged by secular totalitarianisms and yet remarkably successful in laying the foundations for material prosperity around the globe. These contradictions will present to the student the most significant problems facing Western civilization today.
THE Authors
Allen C. Guelzo
Allen C. Guelzo is the Senior Research Scholar in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University. He is the bestselling author, most recently, of Robert E. Lee: A Life. He is Director of the James Madison Program Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship and Senior Research Scholar in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University.
James Hankins
James Hankins is Professor of History at Harvard University, where he focuses on Renaissance political thought, history of philosophy, and history of the classical tradition. His most recent book, Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy, was published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University in November 2019.