Excerpts

Smith collected rare books, paper airplanes, Pennsylvania Dutch tools—and harvested the folk music recordings that changed a generation.

A new book argues that American politics are defined by unfulfilled desire.

A new chronicle of redwood logging exposes how a cadre of wealthy industrialists reaped a fortune in the name of environmentalism.

The story of how The Band, in Robbie Robertson's words, "acted out an ideal of democracy and equality."

A new book works to counteract the “symphony of erasure” that has obscured and denied Africa’s contributions to the contemporary world.

How a style steeped in American elitism took over the world.

In a white supremacist society, where Black people are still fighting for freedom, the Black family offers protection and, at times, a space for resistance.

The tiny downtown passage, where artists burned pallets for warmth, was home to Ellsworth Kelly and Agnes Martin.

Sara Marcus’s recent book argues that from the Reconstruction to the AIDS era, a distinct aesthetic formed around defeat in the realm of politics.

At 12 years old, Martha Hodes was on board a hijacked plane and was taken hostage for a week. How did she forget much of the experience?

The “Barbie” movie glides over the history of dolls as powerful cultural objects.

Dan Flores reminds us that modern North Americans still walk in the footsteps of our fellow animals.

The ruthless logic driving our economy can be traced back to 19th-century Palo Alto.

Stowe’s novel shifted public opinion about slavery so dramatically that it has often been credited with fuelling the war that destroyed the institution.

Rollins never wavered in his determination to get things right, and often that meant reinventing himself and, along the way, jazz as well.

A new book about Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing traces the path from Ronald Reagan’s antigovernment ideology to today’s radicalized right.

Sean Mirski terms the Monroe Doctrine “revolutionary” in his impressively erudite "We May Dominate the World."

A recent biography dives into the choreographer's role as both an artist and figure of early American modernism.

Our ways of thinking about thinking are a product of postwar business culture.

What happens when radical historians write for the public.

Institutional reform is no match for pervasive structural inequality.

Until more Americans know what happened in periods such as the Gilded Age, they can’t protect themselves from those who abuse history to advance poor policy.

Real democratic participation in foreign policy is almost unimaginable today—but this wasn’t always the case.

Don DeLillo's Cold Wars.

The Law and Economics movement was one front in the decades-long advance of a revived free-market ideology that became the new American consensus.

On Darryl Holter and Stephen Gee’s “Driving Force: Automobiles and the New American City, 1900–1930.”

The visa lottery reveals the inherent myths and contradictions at play in the US immigration system.

The 2007–2008 crisis was an epic clusterfuck. The rise of private equity has only made things worse.

Why did Chicago become the headquarters of free market fundamentalism? Adam Smith offers a clue.

"The Floating University: Experience, Empire, and the Politics of Knowledge"

Hawks may claim that uncompromising defense policies won the Cold War. But his pursuit of peace was more important.

Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News' coverage of claims that the company had rigged the 2020 election may soon become an artifact of a vanished era.

The standard narrative of Roosevelt's court-packing efforts casts them as a failure. But what if they were a success?

A new biography of William Still show how the abolitionist documented the underground railroad as he helped people through it.

The Declaration of Independence seems to Pauline Maier to be "peculiarly unsuited" for the role that it eventually came to play in America.

On Philip Dray’s “A Lynching at Port Jervis.”

How did a field meant to reclaim genetics from Nazi abuses wind up a haven for race science?

A new book revisits Freud’s analysis of Woodrow Wilson to ask: how much do leaders’ psychologies shape our politics?

A new history cuts against stereotypes, to show a region constantly changing—and whose future is up for grabs.

In “The 272,” Rachel L. Swarns sets out how the country’s first Catholic university profited from the sale of enslaved people.

The long history of trans.

The kinds of narratives historians tend to fall back on constrain our ability to imagine alternatives to the way things have been, and to the way things are.

A revisionist view of the drug wars.

The American right doesn’t need the John Birch Society these days, but that is because it’s adopted the Birchers’ extremism wholesale.

For some time now, the answer has not been the abolitionists.

After the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln faced the issue of sorting out a nation divided over the issue of freed slaves. But what were his views on it?

‘Time’ magazine and the unraveling of the American consensus.

In 1941 an ambitious Philadelphia pediatrician, the wonderfully named Waldo Emerson Nelson, became the editor of America’s leading textbook of pediatrics.

Between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drug use to expand one’s consciousness went from an intellectual pastime to an emblem of social decay.

In the sixties and seventies, the Sullivanian Institute had a winning sales pitch for young New Yorkers: parties, sex, low rent, and affordable therapy.