Arthur Herman is the New York Times best-selling author of The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization; Freedom’s Forge; How the Scots Invented the Modern World; The Idea of Decline in Western History; To Rule the Waves; and Gandhi and Churchill, the last of which was a 2009 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Dr. Herman taught in the Western Heritage Program of the Smithsonian Institution’s Campus on the Mall; and he has been a professor of history at Georgetown University, The Catholic University of America, George Mason University, and The University of the South at Sewanee.