Excerpts

Is he merely a reactionary, or do his films paint a more complicated picture?

A Republican administration that wages war against immigrants and colleges should be understood as the culmination of William F. Buckley conservative movement.

Revisit the transformative moment in American culture through the lens of a new book about the 1960s New York avant-garde.

A new book explores how Americans came to believe in an advanced Martian civilization at the turn of the twentieth century.

As a new book on their travels together shows, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison's friendship went beyond politics.

A detailed, exhausting, and ultimately too-gentle treatment of the midcentury writer and editor, Frank Meyer.

From the Pequot War to the New Deal-era Civilian Conservation Corps, trees tell a living story.

Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, and many other notorious figures lived in and around Tacoma in the sixties. A new book argues that there was something in the water.

Trump's tariffs echo centuries of global protectionism, but history and economics question their effectiveness and long-term value.

Georgios Varouxakis reexamines when and why people began to conceptualize "the West."

On a new biography of James Baldwin.

A street-level view of Rudy Giuliani’s transformation of the Big Apple.

Frank Meyer’s journey took him from communist agitator to conservative kingmaker.

American special operators brought their tactics in the global war on terror back home.

Once dismissed as passé, since recast as a secular saint, Baldwin’s true message remains more unsettling than readers in either camp recognize.

A new biography shows that his life was more complex than his viral fame suggests.

To some, the fires lit in New York in the late seventies signaled rampant crime; to others, rebellion. But maybe they were signs of something else entirely.

In the 1950s, the CIA funded efforts to smuggle great works of literature into the Eastern Bloc.

The often-overlooked institutions of the federal government truly do matter and so do the individuals who lead those institutions and give them direction.

From a dying adviser to a clumsy editorial, the Revolution was a cascade of accidents and oversights.

There are two ways to understand John Maynard Keynes: tracing his influences and legacies, and highlighting the ideas and perspectives he missed.

Sam Tanenhaus’s biography of William F. Buckley has certain limitations, but it captures the character of conservatism’s founding father.

Eighty years after the bomb, scientists still grapple with nuclear legacy. Some seek atonement, others insist it’s no longer their burden.

A woman killed by Congress.

With Iran’s theocracy under strain, a new history shows that its rise was mainly a stroke of bad luck.

Historians have long grappled with “the American Paradox” of Revolutionary leaders who fought for their own liberty while denying it to enslaved Black people.

A roving history makes the case for shade’s centrality to public health, climate adaptation, and even a more robust and inclusive public sphere.

“Girl on Girl,” by the critic Sophie Gilbert, is the latest in a series of consciousness-raising-style reappraisals of the decade’s formative texts.

Six decades of civil-rights efforts haven’t budged the racial wealth gap, and the usual prescriptions—including reparations—offer no lasting solutions.

John Seabrook’s history of Seabrook Farms, where many incarcerated Japanese Americans worked during WWII, is ultimately about fathers and sons.

A new book shows that Marxism in the US "was never constrained to the reiteration of a set of dogmatic principles one associates with party ideologues."

Historian Thomas A. Tweed proposes an environmental approach to the study of American religion.

A new book unearths a chapter of the state’s story when anti-intellectual fundamentalism was put to good ends.

A sweeping new history explores facial hair as a proving ground for notions about gender, race, and rebellion.

When all the bad things America did are true, but none of the good things, something is amiss.

The disquieting story of an American health-product giant.

David Blight's report "Yale and Slavery" considers institutional accountability in the context of a world marked by systemic violence and inequality.

A new book traces how "the wet dream of an ageing militarist has become a fundamental force driving American foreign policy."

How William F. Buckley Jr. turned his father’s private convictions and prejudices into a major political movement.

When McCarthy stalked the groves of academe.

Red Scare can be read as solid history of the years it depicts—and chilling prophecy of the years to come.

How Claire McCardell changed women’s fashion.

A new book offers a fresh perspective on the resistance of enslaved women and their interactions with the law.

A new book examines the aggressive masculinity that the editors of the Partisan Review brought to their art and literary criticism.

The turbulent late sixties saw the technique’s popularity explode—and it’s been helping moviemakers engage with the unsettling tempos of modern life ever since.

How FDR invented national security, and why Democrats need to move on from it.

How did the concept become the solution to society’s most deeply entrenched problems?

The progress we have seen toward civil rights for all Americans is inseparable from the history of classical liberalism.

How one book shaped the way the NPS interpreted the Civil War.

Survivors of the nuclear blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still fighting for recognition.