This book—arguably the longest longitudinal study of age, crime, and the life course to date—analyzes data on crime and social development up to age 70 for 500 men who were remanded to reform school in the 1940s. The authors find that men who desisted from crime were rooted in structural routines and had strong social ties to family and community.

The romantic vision of the civil rights movement is exhausted, and its inverse, Afropessimism, offers a self-defeating irony. To resolve this impasse, Brandon Terry transforms the standard story of America’s democratic awakening through a tragic reading of the civil rights movement: as an ongoing struggle still worthy of affirmation.

During the Cold War, the United States shook off its traditional aversion to alliances and built the most impressive peacetime treaty structure in history. Yet today politicians argue that the country is so secure it gains nothing paying the cost of mutual defense. In doing so, they threaten a key source of that security: the alliances themselves.

In Shinto Shrines in Prewar and Wartime Japan, Helen Hardacre uses shrine records, personal diaries, contemporary literature, and government documents to enhance understanding of State Shinto’s reach and influence, contributing to broader discussions on the interplay between religion, politics, and society in modern Japanese history.

The great themes woven through John Lukacs’s spirited, concise history of the twentieth century are inseparable from the author’s own intellectual preoccupations: the fading of liberalism, the rise of populism and nationalism, the achievements and dangers of technology, the continuing democratization of the globe, and the limitations of knowledge.

In a society where trust is in short supply and democracy weak, the Mafia sells protection, a guarantee of safe conduct for parties to commercial transactions. Drawing on the confessions of eight Mafiosi, Diego Gambetta develops an elegant analysis of the economic and political role of the Sicilian Mafia.

Volodymyr Rafeyenko’s Signals of Being: A Play in Three Acts stages a captivating dramatic interpretation of a country at war today. Set in the early days of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, residents of a small community outside Kyiv rely on connection to survive as they are cut off from aid and unable to escape.

Volodymyr Rafeyenko’s Signals of Being: A Play in Three Acts stages a captivating dramatic interpretation of a country at war today. Set in the early days of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, residents of a small community outside Kyiv rely on connection to survive as they are cut off from aid and unable to escape.

Iya Kiva’s poetry, collected in English translation in Silence Dressed in Cyrillic Letters, stitches memories of the past into Ukraine’s new reality. Her lyric poems reflect her Ukrainian, Russian, and Jewish backgrounds and acknowledge the deep trauma of war while radiating love and hope.

Iya Kiva’s poetry, collected in English translation in Silence Dressed in Cyrillic Letters, stitches memories of the past into Ukraine’s new reality. Her lyric poems reflect her Ukrainian, Russian, and Jewish backgrounds and acknowledge the deep trauma of war while radiating love and hope.