Based on the re-analysis of Sheldon and Eleanor Gluecks' mid-century study of 500 delinquents and 500 non-delinquents from childhood to adulthood, this informal social control theory accepts the importance of childhood behaviour but rejects the idea that adult social factors have little relevance.

The crises of American democracy and criminal justice are intimately connected. David A. Sklansky shows how police, courts, and prisons helped to break American democracy and can be reformed to empower equitable self-governance. Seeking durable change, Sklansky urges pragmatic proposals rooted in a strong commitment to pluralism.

Using Nobel Prize–winning examples like the transistor, laser, and magnetic resonance imaging, Venky Narayanamurti and Tolu Odumosu explore the daily micro-practices of research and show that distinctions between the search for knowledge and creative problem solving break down when one pays attention to how pathbreaking research actually happens.

Cyropaedia is a historical romance on the education of the sixth-century BC Persian king Cyrus the Great that reflects Xenophon’s ideas about rulers and government.

Cyrus the Great re-contextualizes Cyrus's epoch in light of recent scholarship. Themes include: Mesopotamian antecedents of his religious policy, the idiosyncratic genesis of Persian imperial art; Babylonian exile and the Bible; Hellenistic and Arsacid genealogical constructs; and his enigmatic evanescence in Sasanian and Muslim traditions.

Marco Santagata illuminates one of the world's supreme poets from many angles philosopher, father, courtier, political partisan. He brings together a vast body of Italian scholarship on Dante's medieval world, untangles a complex web of family relationships for English readers, and shows the influence of local and regional politics on his writing.

The authors consider the intersection of Daoism and ecology, looking at the theoretical and historical implications associated with a Daoist approach to the environment. They also analyze perspectives found in Daoist religious texts and within the larger Chinese cultural context in order to delineate key issues found in the classical texts.

For Tommie Shelby, the persistence of ghettos raises many thorny questions of morality, and he offers practical answers framed in terms of what justice requires of government and its citizens. His social vision and political ethics calls for putting the abolition of ghettos at the center of reform.

Gilroy offers a new understanding of W. E. B. Du Bois’ intellectual and political legacy and revitalizes the study of African American culture. He traces the shifting character of black intellectual and social movements, and shows how we can construct an account of moral progress that reflects today’s complex realities.

Lucian (c. 120-190 CE), apprentice sculptor then travelling rhetorician, settled in Athens and developed an original brand of satire. Notable for the Attic purity and elegance of his Greek and for literary versatility, he is famous chiefly for the lively, cynical wit of the dialogues in which he satirizes human folly, superstition, and hypocrisy.