Photographs of empty spaces provide us with an alternative view of the world without us. The images of empty spaces that were once lively capture a departure from our norms and instead project alternative realities emptied of our presence. In Washington, D.C., a province rich with our nation's history, anything abandoned is either hastily torn down, tagged, or senselessly vandalized. Still, some forlorn structures remain and hold timeless beauty, or better yet, have a second chance at life along with the preservation of history. The author's collection of abandonments, forgotten or repurposed, includes several historic schools, a famous psychiatric hospital, a veterans' home, some industrial sites, and a few artful public statements about our society. Additionally, she includes the surreal deserted representation of Washington, D.C., in the time of COVID-19. With streets devoid of its usual grid-locked traffic and pedestrians, haunting images of familiar places become unfamiliar. Like a collection of abandoned photos, Washington D.C.'s surroundings, only recently integral to daily habits, now seem fragile and tenuous. Washington, D.C.'s deserted public spaces expose the new and sudden solitary human condition amplified beyond the silence of the environment.

Series statement from publisher's website.

Northern Virginia's forlorn footprints are close to the din of our nation's capital, yet some still cling to their old Southern roots, especially those from areas steeped with Civil War imprints. While a few derelict places are fortunate to have their legacies preserved, too many abandonments vanish at the direction of Mother Nature or the wrecking ball. This Northern Virginia collection of forsaken structures includes several Civil War-era vestiges--indispensable markers in America's most decisive era. Other chapters illuminate a strategic bastion formerly immersed in Cold War tensions, a coastal defense fort secreting clandestine activity for decades, a once lively dinner theater nightspot recently eradicated from the landscape, a shuttered business cloaked in eccentric lore, an infamous prison, a penal work camp succumbing to nature's green hand, the bygone remembrances of grist mills, a rural chapel, the remains of a bucolic gentleman's farm, and even a Northern Virginian ghost town. Observing these Northern Virginia images' desolate beauty and grasping the weight of their life chronicles allows one to appreciate how history is the best way to greet the future.

A compelling defense of the sacred from acclaimed philosopher Roger Scruton In The Soul of the World, renowned philosopher Roger Scruton defends the experience of the sacred against today's fashionable forms of atheism. He argues that our personal relationships, moral intuitions, and aesthetic judgments hint at a transcendent dimension that cannot be understood through the lens of science alone. To be fully alive—and to understand what we are—is to acknowledge the reality of sacred things. Rather than an argument for the existence of God, or a defense of the truth of religion, the book is an extended reflection on why a sense of the sacred is essential to human life—and what the final loss of the sacred would mean. In short, the book addresses the most important question of modernity: what is left of our aspirations after science has delivered its verdict about what we are? Drawing on art, architecture, music, and literature, Scruton suggests that the highest forms of human experience and expression tell the story of our religious need, and of our quest for the being who might answer it, and that this search for the sacred endows the world with a soul. Evolution cannot explain our conception of the sacred; neuroscience is irrelevant to our interpersonal relationships, which provide a model for our posture toward God; and scientific understanding has nothing to say about the experience of beauty, which provides a God’s-eye perspective on reality. Ultimately, a world without the sacred would be a completely different world—one in which we humans are not truly at home. Yet despite the shrinking place for the sacred in today’s world, Scruton says, the paths to transcendence remain open.

Housed in the former 16th-century convent of Santo Domingo church, now the Regional Museum of Oaxaca, Mexico, is an important collection of textiles representing the area’s indigenous cultures. The collection includes a wealth of exquisitely made traditional weavings, many that are now considered rare. The Unbroken Thread: Conserving the Textile Traditions of Oaxaca details a joint project of the Getty Conservation Institute and the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) of Mexico to conserve the collection and to document current use of textile traditions in daily life and ceremony. The book contains 145 color photographs of the valuable textiles in the collection, as well as images of local weavers and project participants at work. Subjects include anthropological research, ancient and present-day weaving techniques, analyses of natural dyestuffs, and discussions of the ethical and practical considerations involved in working in Latin America to conserve the materials and practices of living cultures.

Reproduction of the original: Inquiries Into Human Faculty and Its Development by Francis Galton

James Charlton has produced a ringing indictment of disability oppression, which, he says, is rooted in degradation, dependency, and powerlessness and is experienced in some form by five hundred million persons throughout the world who have physical, sensory, cognitive, or developmental disabilities. Nothing About Us Without Us is the first book in the literature on disability to provide a theoretical overview of disability oppression that shows its similarities to, and differences from, racism, sexism, and colonialism. Charlton's analysis is illuminated by interviews he conducted over a ten-year period with disability rights activists throughout the Third World, Europe, and the United States. Charlton finds an antidote for dependency and powerlessness in the resistance to disability oppression that is emerging worldwide. His interviews contain striking stories of self-reliance and empowerment evoking the new consciousness of disability rights activists. As a latecomer among the world's liberation movements, the disability rights movement will gain visibility and momentum from Charlton's elucidation of its history and its political philosophy of self-determination, which is captured in the title of his book. Nothing About Us Without Us expresses the conviction of people with disabilities that they know what is best for them. Charlton's combination of personal involvement and theoretical awareness assures greater understanding of the disability rights movement.

Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future. For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront. It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.