Excerpts

When the remains of prehistoric creatures were discovered in Europe and the U.S., it opened up a heated debate on the nature of time and the purpose of science.

How four presidential administrations managed to evade moral responsibility for the “war on terror” by hiding behind legality and process.

A new book links the Pacific Northwest’s infamous serial killers to decades of toxic lead pollution, arguing that poison bred violence.

A nuanced and historically informed analysis of the sudden sea change in US-China relations.

New fusionist intellectuals are the missing link between nineteenth-century race science, twentieth-century libertarianism, and the contemporary alt-right.

The proliferation of privately held companies during the Reagan years laid the foundations for Trump’s approach to government.

How Amanda Vaill gave Eliza and Angelica Schuyler their due.

The history of a single photograph reveals how an atrocity in the Philippines was forgotten by its American perpetrators.

Charles Sumner's example reminds us that "with enough courage and drive, can alter the trajectory of American racial history."

A review of Columbus's impact on the political, economic, and religious effects within the Renaissance period of Europe and the beginning of global exploration.

How liberal Protestants helped to shape the US's views on liberalism, human rights, and current political divides.

Two new books make the case that “when and where you are Latino matters.”

How the Scopes trial informs today's culture wars.

Tracing John Lewis’s lifelong fight for democracy and inclusion.

Karl Marx never visited the United States, but he and his ideas left an imprint nonetheless.

As some financial leaders fret publicly about the stock market falling to earth, a new book recounts the greatest crash of them all.

She lived for 97 years. Only 24 of them were with Alexander Hamilton.

In Life of a Klansman, Edward Ball’s white supremacist great-great-grandfather becomes a case study in the enduring legacy of slavery.

What happens when Hitler’s shadow fades—and what moral vision replaces it?

The web of Atlantic trading routes and solidarity among maritime workers meant a fugitive's chances of reaching freedom below deck were better than over land.

Cory Doctorow’s ‘Enshittification’ describes how tech platforms (and everything else) went down the sewer. Hint: It rhymes with ‘deshmegulation.’

"An account of how chips became a strategically vital resource whose importance is overlooked at our peril.”

To finance the war, the Union had to turn to the banks, and with lasting consequences.

Zbigniew Brzezinski’s ideas had a profound impact in his time. What would he think of the world we face today?

A new book frames America's gun culture as the consequence of the U.S.'s post-World War II decisions to favor consumerism over safety.

Richard Beck charts how 9/11 shapes the way we live now.

Audre Lorde’s legacy shows how feminism can honor difference, as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor argues in this review.

Globalization left millions behind as a policy and transformed the world politically, a new book argues.

A biography of Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah casts the post-WWII era as a Black liberation epic rather than a psychodrama between Moscow and Washington.

The ’80s I thought I remembered now feel very different to me.

Journalist Rebecca Grant shifts the abortion conversation away from laws and morals to focus on access: getting people the care they seek.

At a time when allegations of antisemitism are rampant and often incoherent, historian Mark Mazower offers a helpfully lucid history of the term.

According to John Cassidy’s century-spanning history "Capitalism and Its Critics," the system lives on because of its antagonists.

The New Deal didn’t solve the economic problems behind the Great Depression—it made them worse.

Why has a relatively conventional history of the War of Independence drawn such an outraged response?

How a term coined to describe a nineteenth-century politics of exclusion would become a diagnosis, a political cudgel, and a rallying cry.

Joseph Smith, religious innovator.

Revisiting the lessons of Allan Bérubé’s 1990 history of queer solders during World War II.

The radical lives of James Baldwin.

A new book reveals systematic, profitable, and deadly arson schemes perpetrated by landlords and insurance companies in the Bronx.

To understand the intellectual coordinates of Trumpism we must look in unconventional places.

Long before it was fashionable, Amelia Bloomer pioneered what would later be dubbed "respectability politics."

On new biographies of Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger.

In a new memoir, Susan Cheever searches for the wellspring of her father’s genius.

Historian Jane Smith understands her childhood differently after discovering that her father had been pushed out of his profession during the Red Scare.

Two different accounts from former Democratic Party insiders about the “giant U-turn” from postwar prosperity to the polarization and inequality of today.

Fara Dabhoiwala’s case against free speech.

Black gold powered the United States’ transition from backwater to global hegemon.

"Apple in China" tells the incredible story of China’s industrial development through the lens of America’s most iconic tech giant.

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