The Golden Thread

Volume 1:

The Ancient World and Christendom

Published by Encounter Books, August 2025

Volume 2: "The Modern and Contemporary West" (by Allen Guelzo) will appear in January 2026.

The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition is an extraordinary and ambitious two-volume history that redefines how students and the general public encounter the Western tradition. The Golden Thread presents an eloquent and refreshing overview of the trajectory of the West – it's unique customs of art and literature, law, philosophy, science, faith, and tolerance that have bound the people of its tradition together - from the ancient Greeks and Romans to medieval Christendom and Europe, and finally the modern world and America.

Volume 1: "The Ancient World and Christendom," written by James Hankins (Volume 2 is by Allen Guelzo), presents a sweeping and unified account of Western civilization from antiquity to 1500 – bringing political history into conversation with the philosophy, religion, literature, and art that shaped the soul of the West. More than half a decade in the making, Volume 1 gives sustained attention to the many cultures, ideas, an institutions that shaped the Western tradition across the centuries - particularly those too often neglected or misunderstood in other accounts.

The Golden Thread contends that Western civilization has, in our lifetimes, been simultaneously challenge by secular totalitarianism and yet remarkably successful in laying the foundations for material prosperity around the globe. These contradictions will present to the reader the most significant problems facing Western civilization today.

"We’ve just seen the publication of a book that could become a pillar in the edifice of a new Renaissance … The appearance of The Golden Thread is something closer to a cultural event than the simple publication of a book … The drama of our civilizational story comes through, as does the humanity of the great figures of history. Fundamental moral questions are explored, and the bases for historical judgment are contemplated in ways you simply don’t see in standard textbook treatments of Western history. Somehow, Hankins … manages to venture considered judgments on controversial questions while simultaneously laying out fair and open-ended accounts of classic historical debates."

–Stanley Kurtz, National Review

"A civilization is a space, so to speak, in which people may breathe. It creates a public forum, a city square, in which they may do something other than tremble and labor for simple survival. It allows people to erect monuments of art, literature, and thought alongside the everyday need to work, to produce, to exchange. It is a necessity, because the human spirit cannot be captured siply by the way we earn bread or avoid massacre; there is a natural yearning after order, after beauty, after truth."
–From The Golden Thread

"The dangers presented by the neglect of Western history are not trivial. When citizens of Western countries are utterly ignorant of history, as most now are, they are left unarmed against the general hostility to their own tradition that has become so destructive a force in contemporary culture … This, indeed, is the great test that Western civilization faces in our time. We need to find a new balance between tradition and innovation, to modernize with moderation, without losing that inheritance and immeasurable value that we call the Western tradition."
–From The Golden Thread