Excerpts

More than an artful calligrapher, John Hancock forswore the austerity of his fellow Bostonians, and their extremism.

RJ Smith’s biography of Chuck Berry examines his subject’s instinct for crossing the line musically, racially, and morally.

Alexander Hamilton always believed that the providential protection that kept the small Jewish world alive would embrace his own extraordinary nation.

Before Salem, this small town succumbed to the witch-hunting fever.

The ambivalence many Black soldiers felt toward the U.S. in WWII was matched only by the ambivalence the U.S. showed toward principles on which WWII was fought.

The rifle is a consumer product to which advertisers successfully attached an identity—one that has translated to a particularly intractable politics.

In “Tyranny of the Minority,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue that the document has doomed our politics. But it can also save them.

The famous disaster razed a metropolis and spread a pack of colorful lies. To sift through the ashes today is to encounter some uncomfortable truths.

And the ways capital took advantage of the state's policing of sexuality.

How American drug companies have exploited government contracts to pursue profit over public interest.

Two new books model radically different ways of studying the past.

A left that is ambivalent about liberalism can still seek to engage it.

Two recent books illuminate the dark foundations of Silicon Valley.

A new book illuminates how Black Americans used property ownership, common law and other methods to assert their rights.

A journalistic view of Martin Luther King Jr.'s life, work, and representation in American society.

To Heather Cox Richardson, the battle for our history is the battle for our democracy. And we may be nearing the endgame.

Municipal governments today hold around $4 trillion in outstanding debt. The growing costs of simply servicing their debt is cannibalizing their annual budgets.

The New Deal brought Black voters over to the Democratic Party, but was marred by racial inequality.

On the 50th anniversary of "The Jewish Catalog."

How Cold War liberalism abandoned the vocabulary of hope—and how we still live with the consequences.

There are certainly good grounds to criticize Cold War liberalism. But Samuel Moyn's new book, like similar critiques, has a classic baby-bathwater problem.

Sly and the Family Stone suggested new possibilities in music and life—until it all fell apart.

"Texas Jailhouse Music" explores a time when Texas prisons promoted rehabilitation through a wildly successful radio show.

Betty and Barney Hill lost three hours on a New Hampshire highway in 1961. They spent years trying to understand it.

In his latest work of history, Edward Ayers captures daily life along with the military and political moves.

The photojournalist Bud Lee captured the riots of 1967 and the human cost of the brutal police crackdown.

The current Hollywood strikes have a precedent in Disney’s golden age, when the company was a hothouse of innovation and punishing expectation.

What Betty and Barney Hill's alien abduction story reveals about America.

A new book identifies the 1968 Democratic convention as the moment when broad public regard for the news media gave way to widespread distrust, and American divisiveness took off.

Friedan was indispensable to second-wave feminism. And yet she was difficult to like.

"Liberalism Against Itself" makes an incoherent attack on liberalism.

In "American Slavers," Sean M. Kelley surveys the relatively unknown history of Americans who traded in slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Two family histories by Americans connected to Europe’s twentieth century through their fascist grandfathers seek to occupy the void between history and memory.

Finding space for cars has remade the built world. A new history uncovers just how much our lives revolve around parking.

After the Whig president’s shocking death, his vice president and successor proved to be a Whig by expedience only

Critics of the Supreme Court think it has lost its claim to legitimacy. But proposals for reforming it must strike a balance with preserving its independence.

Urban socialists blazed a path toward social democracy. Leftists who want to reclaim this tradition face a whole new set of obstacles.

Advanced Placement courses are no recipe for igniting the intellect beyond high school. They’re a recipe for extinguishing it.

On the Road with Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and John Burroughs.

Decades of Supreme Court decisions have converted qualified immunity from a commonsense rule into a powerful doctrine that deprives people injured by police misconduct of recourse.

James Garfield is known primarily for being assassinated. But his life reveals the character of nineteenth-century America.

David Grann’s sweeping history of crimes against the Osage people.

A new book explores the Army’s struggles with race relations in the decades of civil rights and Black Power.

The study of poverty has flourished in recent decades. Why haven’t the lives of the poor improved?

Rethinking the twentieth century.

The free market used to be touted as the cure for all our problems; now it’s taken to be the cause of them.

In his latest book, Michael Kazin argues that the Democrats have long sought to build a “moral capitalism.” Have they ever succeeded?

In “Spoiled,” the culinary historian Anne Mendelson takes aim at the American fallacy of fresh milk as a wonder food.

James McBride’s new novel tells a story of solidarity between Black and Jewish communities.

In “Liberalism Against Itself,” Samuel Moyn stresses the need to resuscitate an earlier and more rousing wave of thinkers.