Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast on Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Today we're joined by

Professor James Hankins and Alan Guelso. James is Professor of History at Harvard University

where he teaches Western intellectual history, classical tradition, and the Italian Renaissance.

He's the author of a number of books, including the prize-winning virtue politics, soul craft and statecraft

in Renaissance Italy. Alan Guelso, who's familiar to City Journal readers. He's written for us

before. He's professor of humanities in the Hamilton School of Classical and Civic Education

at the University of Florida. That's a new position for him. He was formerly professor

in the James Madison program at Princeton. He's the best-selling author most recently of our

ancient faith, Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment, and he's a three-time winner of

the Lincoln Prize. Today, though, they're here to discuss their remarkable,

newly released book project called The Golden Thread, the History of the Western Tradition.

Volume 1, The Ancient World and Christendom has just been released, with Volume 2,

the modern and contemporary West forthcoming. Welcome, gentlemen.

Very glad to have you on 10 blocks. Thank you, Brian. Very good to see you virtually.

Let's start basically with the origin and design of the project. So what inspired creation of the

Golden Thread Initiative, as you're calling it, and how did you decide

to split the initial effort between these two volumes in terms of the historical markers,

one on the ancient and medieval world, and then the other on the modern and contemporary

West? And when should readers expect volume two?

We were asked during the project by Roger Kimball and Count for Books. And it was a project that followed on the book by Bill McLeigh, Wolf

McLean, Land of Hope, which was intended as a history of America that would be balanced,

...