Excerpts

Gary Gerstle’s new book tackles important questions of the last century about democracy, economy, and war. But it fails to answer a basic question.

On 50 years of Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow.”

Women’s economic labor was essential to state function.

Two new books ask us to shift our attention away from the white vigilantes of Jim Crow and instead focus on what it meant for the survivors.

Raising awareness helped turn cancer from a stigmatized disease into a treatable one. But it hasn’t made affording that treatment any easier.

In his final book, David Graeber looks at an experiment in radical democracy and piratical justice in Madagascar.

Most Americans now grasp that violence was essential to the functioning of slavery, but a new book excavates the brutality of everyday Black life in the Jim Crow South.

In his history of the John Birch Society, Matthew Dallek says Republicans allowed the extreme fringe to “eventually cannibalize the entire party.”

A new book argues that the real history of the league is one of strife between Black labor and white ownership.

In "The Car," Bryan Appleyard sets out to celebrate the freedom these vehicles granted. But what if they were a dangerous technology from the start?

A Spanish-language pamphlet by Cotton Mather explodes the Black-versus-white binary that dominates most discussions of race in our time.

Three recent books examine the discrimination and hypocrisy at the heart of policing “vice.”

Kelly Lytle Hernández’s new book chronicles the tumultuous period leading up to the Mexican Revolution, casting the border as ground zero for continental change.

The right—and wrong—lessons of the Iraq War.

How the institution’s reactionary origins still leak into today’s film culture.

For many historians today, the present is forever trapped in the past and defined by the worst of it.

A zealot through and through, he ran the FBI like a religious sect.

Many take the separation between science and politics for granted, but this view of science has its own political origins.

Celebrating the Federal Reserve as a cockpit for economic steering conceals the reality of where power lies today.

She’s mostly remembered for one famous speech. Her actual legacy is far greater than that.

George Kennan made hierarchy seem seductive.

For nearly a century, Americans have been throwing the term around—without agreeing what that means.

Loss of control over knowledge of the female body cemented women’s status as second-class citizens.

Was the nineteenth-century Midwest “the most advanced democratic society that the world had seen”?

How conservatives made him their icon and distorted his ideas.

A new history explores the emergence of international economic institutions that continue to wield immense influence over the domestic politics of many states.

The contemporary rise of Christian nationalism in the US is a reactionary response to the country’s liberalization over the past half-century.

Today, the military is perhaps the largest integrated institution in the US. But how it came to be this way reveals a history of racism and resistance.

The Florida governor’s long-ignored 2011 work, "Dreams From Our Founding Fathers," reveals a distinct vision of American history.

Lost wars, especially when defeat comes as a rude surprise, inevitably spark painful self-examination.

Medical schools in the antebellum U.S. were critical in the formation of a medical community that shared ideas about racial science.

Palm oil is in everything, but it is also enmeshed in global supply chains that rely on brutal working conditions and the destruction of the planet.

A sweeping new history weaves personal, intellectual, and spiritual narratives into a book that reminds us of the potential of the socialist movement.

The march toward revolution in America coincided with a smallpox epidemic. True freedom now meant freedom from disease as well.

Keaton had been on the stage longest, risen the highest, fallen the furthest, and left the most indelible legacy.

Revisiting "When Affirmative Action Was White," nearly two decades on.

In a covenantal nation like the United States, words are the very ligaments that hold the body together, and what words we choose become everything.

Immigrant housewives and the riots that shook New York City.

The crusade against civil liberties during World War I.

From Stanford to Silicon Valley, a small town in California spread tech’s gospel of data and control.

The story of Swami Vivekananda and his time in America.

Americans disparaged the British as arsonists. But the rebels fought with fire too.

Alec Nevala-Lee’s new biography assesses the complicated legacy of an architect better known for his image than his work.

Melvyn Leffler’s book on the roots of the Iraq invasion demonstrates the pitfalls of excessive trust in one’s sources, especially when they're top policymakers.

Militia groups have long used Waco as a rallying cry. But it was never the example of whiteness under siege that they invoke.

Hyperindividualism has infiltrated our economic, social, and political landscape.

First-person accounts of those scarred in many ways by the era’s violence suggest Reconstruction did not fail, it was overthrown by violence.

The argument that corporations have historically been a force for good—and can be again—is wishful thinking.

The shadow of Samuel Adams, a crafty and government-wary revolutionary, lingers over the January 6 Capitol insurrection.

“National security” and the history of US export controls.