Excerpts

Was the country’s turn toward free-market fundamentalism driven by race, class, or something else? Yes.

The transformation of the environmental movement.

How American Girl transformed the doll world—and why millennials love it so.

How corporations wrested creative control from writers and editors—to produce less interesting books.

In every generation, writers and readers find new ways to plumb the depths of Herman Melville and his work.

The back-and-forth life of Confederate James Longstreet.

Wherever we find the state engaged in potentially lethal repression, we find prison.

As our faith in the future plummets and the present blends with the past, we feel certain that we’ve reached the point where history has fallen apart.

The American foreign policy sage was driven as much by pessimism about the US as antipathy to the Soviet Union.

The secret history of a psychoanalytic cult.

A recent biography of Vince McMahon presents him as an entertainment tycoon who changed culture and politics. The real story is as banal as it is brutal.

It was J. Edgar Hoover who did more than any fire-breathing churchman to turn fearful white suburbanites into the crusaders of a renewed conservative backlash.

The Chicago Boys and the tragedy of the Chilean coup.

Two new books attempt to grasp Thoreau’s seeming contradictions without reconciling them too easily.

The Chicago school ruled supreme over economics—until recently.

Historian Ned Blackhawk’s new book stresses the importance of telling US history with a wider and more inclusive lens.

Barely-disguised hostilities sometimes belied the rebels’ declared identity as the United States of America.

“Gun Country” chronicles the transformation of guns from tangible weapons to ideological ammunition during the Cold War.

A new book's insistence that the bomb was necessary to bring about Japan’s surrender is largely contradicted by its own evidence.

He was one of the world’s most celebrated and beloved stars. Then his adopted country turned against him.

Johanna Fernández's new book on the Young Lords sheds light on the group's fight for clean streets and public health in 1960s New York City.

"African Founders" corrects some of the ideological uses of Black American history.

The Historic American Building Survey's mission to photograph important architecture before its demolition.

The actual history of New Deal policies provides little evidence that it was a rollicking success.

How cable TV transformed politics—and how politics transformed cable TV.

A novel illuminates a moment of psychedelic history that has often been overlooked: the emergence of LSD psychotherapy just before the moral panic took hold.

Crypts, entombments, physical morbidity: these nightmares are prominent in Poe’s tales, a fictional world in which the word that recurs most crucially is horror.

Will Hermes's new biography, "Lou Reed: The King of New York," tries—and fails—to pin the rocker down.

A new history dispenses with the sentimental lore and examines how Palo Alto has long been the seedbed for exploitation, chaos, and ecological degradation.

A new book offers a critical history of Silicon Valley's blend of California idealism and exploitation.

Our favorite artists may not be our favorite people.

For centuries the study of optics and the use of invisibility in science fiction have developed side by side, each inspiring the other.

It’s because the rapper’s life and work were a cascade of contradictions that we’re still trying to figure him out today.

The murder of independent Congo’s first prime minister, the subject of a new book, had lasting psychological effects on the whole continent.

Who is counted by the census, how, and for what purpose, has changed a lot since 1790.

In her new book, ‘Prequel,’ she looks at a past moment of crisis that might help us understand both the threats we face today and how we can endure them.

In a new biography, the Velvet Underground front man embodies a New York that exists only in memory.

Two books argue that private equity created an economic order in which getting rich quickly preempts other values, undermining companies and evading the law.

A new biography examines the life of the abolitionist, newspaper editor, activist, and globetrotter.

How the gun became a cultural icon—and unmade America.

Was the American Revolution such a good idea?

Springsteen's albums offer a tragic-romantic view of the working class in Reagan-era America.

The abortionist Madame Restell is central to the story of how American women’s reproductive freedom was dismantled in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The rise and rise and rise of data.

Cliff Sloan’s new book explains how the Franklin Roosevelt-shaped Court wrestled with individual rights as the nation fought to save itself and the world.

A new book on the Clinton presidency reveals how it abandoned a progressive vision for a finance-led agenda for economics and geopolitics.

A new biography of Edith Hamilton tells the story of how and why ancient literature became widely read in the United States.

Its inhabitants are as much creatures of state power and industrial capitalism as their city-dwelling counterparts.

A new biography of the Velvet Underground founder, Lou Reed, considers the stark duality of the man and his music.

A feminist perspective on the first and only female prime minister of Israel.