On the two-hundredth anniversary of George Washington's 1796 Farewell Address - one of the most influential but misunderstood expressions of American political thought - this book places the Address in the full context of American history and explains its enduring relevance for the next century. Generations of American political leaders have invoked the authority of the Address to shape foreign and domestic policy. With discussions about national character and personal responsibility dominating the current political landscape, there has been a resurgence of interest in the character of the nation's founders, particularly Washington's. The authors show how the Address expressed Washington's ideas for forming a national character that would cultivate the habits, morals, and civic virtues essential for stable republican self-government. An insightful and provocative analysis of the past, present, and future of American democracy and its most important citizen, this book will be of value to anyone concerned about the current state of American citizenship and the future role of the federal government.

Based on true events, this novel set in a Soviet prison is “both a feat of fractured storytelling and a beautiful excavation of a recent, haunting past” (Publishers Weekly). As a political dissident, Berdzenishvili lands in jail, serving a sentence on trumped-up charges of activism and agitation. But rather than being the hell he expected, jail allows him access to a wide array of intellectuals, professionals, citizens of all walks of life, many of whom, he freely admits, he would not have had the chance to meet if he had not been in jail. Here he bears witness to those lives. Each chapter carries a single person’s name and focuses on a single story. Collectively, however, these portraits create a multifaceted and vast picture of life in the Soviet Union, including during its demise. A nation seeks to suppress its brightest citizens, to keep them locked away in the dark. But in that darkness, unbeknown to the jailor, bonds stronger than walls were forming.

This illustrated volume commemorates the life and legacy of America's Founding Father by bringing noteworthy scholars and authors together for a timely and topical consideration of Washington's enduring importance.

The Essential Guide to Rolling Back the Progressive Assault and Putting America Back on Course Many Americans are concerned, frightened, angry. The country, it seems, is on the wrong track. But what is the right course for America? Knowing what we stand against is not the same as knowing what we stand for. Just in time, Matthew Spalding provides the plan for translating angst into proper action in this bestselling book. We Still Hold These Truths offers a bracing analysis of how and why we have lost our bearings as a nation and lays out the strategy to rescue our future from arbitrary and unlimited government.

When the Bolsheviks set out to build a new world in the wake of the Russian Revolution, they expected religion to die off. Soviet power used a variety of tools--from education to propaganda to terror—to turn its vision of a Communist world without religion into reality. Yet even with its monopoly on ideology and power, the Soviet Communist Party never succeeded in overcoming religion and creating an atheist society. A Sacred Space Is Never Empty presents the first history of Soviet atheism from the 1917 revolution to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Drawing on a wealth of archival material and in-depth interviews with those who were on the front lines of Communist ideological campaigns, Victoria Smolkin argues that to understand the Soviet experiment, we must make sense of Soviet atheism. Smolkin shows how atheism was reimagined as an alternative cosmology with its own set of positive beliefs, practices, and spiritual commitments. Through its engagements with religion, the Soviet leadership realized that removing religion from the "sacred spaces" of Soviet life was not enough. Then, in the final years of the Soviet experiment, Mikhail Gorbachev—in a stunning and unexpected reversal—abandoned atheism and reintroduced religion into Soviet public life. A Sacred Space Is Never Empty explores the meaning of atheism for religious life, for Communist ideology, and for Soviet politics.

Finalist for the National Book Award • Finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Award • Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award • Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize • Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award • Winner of the National Jewish Book Award • Finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award • Finalist for the T. S. Eliot Prize • Finalist for the Forward Prize for Best Collection Ilya Kaminsky’s astonishing parable in poems asks us, What is silence? Deaf Republic opens in an occupied country in a time of political unrest. When soldiers breaking up a protest kill a deaf boy, Petya, the gunshot becomes the last thing the citizens hear—they all have gone deaf, and their dissent becomes coordinated by sign language. The story follows the private lives of townspeople encircled by public violence: a newly married couple, Alfonso and Sonya, expecting a child; the brash Momma Galya, instigating the insurgency from her puppet theater; and Galya’s girls, heroically teaching signing by day and by night luring soldiers one by one to their deaths behind the curtain. At once a love story, an elegy, and an urgent plea, Ilya Kaminsky’s long-awaited Deaf Republic confronts our time’s vicious atrocities and our collective silence in the face of them.