Walking through ancient cities with my books and notes in hand has given me some of the most rewarding moments of my life. Anatolia offers an extraordinary opportunity to observe the many cultural layers of history. To contemplate the Hittites, Carians, Lycians, Phrygians, Ionians, Persians, Romans, Byzantines, Seljuks, and Ottomans within the same geography is to witness that history advances not in a linear fashion but through accumulation. The fact that Anatolia has been h

Few periods in European intellectual history have produced such an extraordinary concentration of philosophical, literary, and cultural innovation as the German-speaking lands between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Within little more than half a century, thinkers including Lessing, Kant, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, Schelling, and Hegel transformed debates about reason, freedom, history, culture,