Excerpts

Calls to defund the Marxist left and similar mobilizations against rumors of a new red dawn are nothing new.

Reflections on memory, dreams, and computer screensavers.

How Irving Thalberg helped turn M-G-M into the world’s most famous movie studio—and gave the film business a new sense of artistry and scale.

A new book challenges the discursive ignorance about the condition.

On grifters, the Chicago World Fair, and Oz as symbol of a modern USA.

On the political theorist and the new media landscape.

On two new books that critique identity politics and seek a new vision of political culture.

High-minded and scandal-prone, a foe of marriage who dreamed of domesticity, Fuller radiated a charisma that helped ignite the fight for women’s rights.

A new book illuminates how freedom became associated with choice and questions whether that has been a good thing—for women in particular.

The political vision that William F. Buckley helped forge was—and remains today—focused less on adhering to principles and more on ferreting out enemies.

Orisanmi Burton’s "Tip of the Spear" uncovers the obscured and radical demands of the inmates who staged the 1971 prison uprising—a world without prisons.

Hayek suspected that nothing about the vindication of neoliberalism was likely to be straightforward.

Were you to vanish Marx from every library, you’d destroy the central interlocutor around which most of capitalism is built.

The 1970s campaign fought to get women paid for their work in the home—and envisioned a society built to better support motherhood.

How a sharp-elbowed Polish academic with an unpronounceable name helped defeat the Soviet Union.

Ella Fitzgerald performed above the emotional fray.

A new book demonstrates that the skills taught and honed in the humanities are of vital importance to the defense of democracy.

Walt Whitman was a champion self-advertiser, maven of the brag and the humblebrag.

In "Memoirs of a Nobody," Henry Boernstein chronicles the militant immigrant organizing that helped keep St. Louis out of the hands of the Confederacy.

Manisha Sinha’s history of Reconstruction sheds fresh light on the period that fleetingly opened a door to a different America.

The nation’s founding myth was based on faith and solidarity – but it also contained the roots of today’s democratic crisis.

R. Crumb’s cartoons plumb the grotesque corners of the American unconscious.

Scott Spillman reviews Seth Rockman’s “Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery.”

The legacies of conflict—and their increasingly accessible images in a global age—frame the shared bonds of trauma in keeping their memories alive.

Dylan C. Penningroth challenges nearly every aspect of our traditional understanding of civil rights history.

Aimee Semple McPherson created a wildly popular personal brand as a preacher—then suddenly disappeared.

On the rise and fall of confession in American Catholicism, and what the demography of today's Catholics says about the future of the faith.

Half a century ago the civil rights movement’s effort to carry the campaign for school desegregation from the South to the urban North ended in failure.

John Scanlan’s “The Idea of Waste” argues that all civilization is an attempt to make waste disappear.

What the Constitution asks of us.

We need more than genealogies to know who we are, and who we ought to become.

The great American writer witnessed the forging of his nation – but Ron Chernow’s portrait cannot see beyond its subject.

The life and career of Murray Kempton attest to the disappearing ideals of a dying industry. But his example suggests those ideals are not beyond resurrection.

A 17th-century column shows that dating has always been an anxiety-riddled endeavor.

Espionage has always been with us, but its rapid growth over the past century may have undermined trust in government.

The trio of interests atop business, military, and government depicted in C. Wright Mills’s postwar critique is no longer united in setting the national agenda.

Most countries take their popular novelists more seriously than America has. The term “Great American Novel” was literally invented to describe this book

The Fourteenth Amendment captures the idea that no people born in the United States should be forced to live in the shadows.

A lifetime spent studying the disastrous lead-up to World War I gave Paul Schroeder reason to be horrified at the recklessness of US foreign policy.

The qualities that enabled Belle da Costa Greene to cross the color line also made her a formidable negotiator and collector for J.P. Morgan’s library.

“Only two states wanted a civil war—Massachusetts and South Carolina.”

Populist and patrician, hustler and moralist, salesman and satirist, he embodied the tensions within his America, and ours.

On Ray Bradbury’s underappreciated classic.

Building the assumption of work’s meaningfulness happened across many different institutions and types of media.

While some Jewish exiles dreamed of a homeland in Palestine, the Jewish Territorial Organization fixed its hopes on Galveston.

Greg Grandin’s new book tells the story of US expansionism and its complex relationship with the rest of the New World.

Why his turn-of-the-century travelogue still resonates.

The complex, sometimes romanticized, but ultimately prophetic Catholic peace movement has critical lessons for today's America amid a genocidal war in Gaza.

In a new book, the Pulitzer Prize winner Greg Grandin tells the history of the hemisphere from south of the border.

Shulamith Firestone and the burdens of prophecy.