Excerpts

A quiet movement that began in the 1920s didn’t disappear—it just went underground.

The little-told tale of the 1651 trial of Hugh and Mary Parsons.

Robert Moses' final project, Co-op City, both reflected and defied major trends in New York City.

Behind his tough image, the longtime FBI director was a man of profound contradictions.

J.D. Vance's "Hillbilly Elegy" and Steven Stoll's "Ramp Hollow" both remind us that the history of poor and migratory people in Appalachia is a difficult story to tell.

Two new books and one expanded edition of Gordon Parks' photographs look at the work of the photographer from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.

They dominated far longer than they were dominated, and, a new book contends, shaped the United States in profound ways.

For three quarters of a century the South was the geographic base of Democratic Presidential hopes.

In the 1740s, Bordeaux developed some of the first modern theories of racial difference, even as the city profited from the slave trade.

A new biography explores the work of the influential abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, who wrote about the social, political, and cultural issues of her time.

Her private writing offers another, more idiosyncratic angle to understand the famed poet.

How best to tell the story of oppressed peoples? By chronicling the hardships they’ve faced? Or by highlighting their triumphs over adversity?

A new book details the tangled tale of "Ulitsa Sezam," a "Sesame Street" spinoff that aired until visions of Russia's democratic future faltered.

Felix Frankfurter was renowned as a liberal lawyer and advocate. Why did he turn out to be such a conservative Supreme Court justice?

During the Civil War, the Lincoln administration demonstrated that a progressive agenda and effective anti-inflationary measures could overlap.

The famous historian makes the claim that the demigods of American historical mythology can help us carve paths through our forbidding 21st-century wilderness.

A virtuoso of the eighteenth-century version of viral memes and fake news, he had a sense of political theatre that helped create a radical new reality.

Railroads—in the Jim Crow South just as in today’s Ukraine—employ physical infrastructure to create racial divisions.

Saidiya Hartman’s unrelenting exploration of slavery and freedom in the United States first appeared in 1997 and has lost none of its relevance.

A new book documents a period of thriving radical groups and their devastating suppression.

A review of "C. Vann Woodward: America’s Historian."

The promise of US federalism is that states will be “laboratories of democracy." The reality is that states are more often laboratories of authoritarianism.

To what extent did newspapers influence public opinion in the US and Britain before and during World War II?

Two recent books examine the idea of the Midwest as a haven for white supremacy and patriarchy.

A new book explores the final days of Ralph Waldo Emerson - traveling from Concord to California, and beyond.

A new history of the rebels led by Ricardo Flores Magón emphasizes the role of the United States in the effort to take them down.

A new book provides a framework that engages with “big history” or “deep history” while avoiding explanations that flirt with forms of determinism.

"Slouching Towards Utopia" is a rise-and-fall epic—but it is better at depicting the rise than explaining the fall.

“The connection between a hot temper and an empty stomach,” explained through a history of colonial interactions with indigenous peoples.

A new history examines their use in the past and considers their effectiveness for the future.

In the 1990s, liberal intellectuals complained that evangelicals were moralistic on political questions. Now the complaint is reversed.

The Covid-19 pandemic has shown just how hard it is for Americans to grieve.

Buster Keaton made his own kind of sense out of the perplexities of existence in ways baffling to those among whom he found himself.

In the wake of economic crises, liberal democracies proved most adept at imposing austerity.

A new history of the Civil War and Reconstruction examines the ways in which Black Americans formed networks of self-reliance in their pursuit of emancipation.

“Big money alone does not fully explain the Republican embrace of the gospel of more.”

Traditional Supreme Court precedent may depend too much on substantive due process to safeguard human rights.

In a novelized biography of Samuel Sewell, a greater mystery than what bedeviled the girls is what motivated a righteous man to condemn them for witchcraft.

By documenting how public debt produced our present nightmare, Destin Jenkins allows us to dream about using public money to mend the ills of our era.

Walter Lippmann’s seminal work identified a fundamental problem for modern democratic society that remains as pressing—and intractable—as ever.

Contrary to popular belief, the South has always been the key to defining the promise and limits of American democracy.

Among the thousands of cases the Supreme Court has decided, only a handful of dissenting opinions stand out.

Lincoln's wartime governance had dire, and longstanding, economic consequences.

His vision of a tech-optimized future inspired a generation. But his true talent was for burnishing his own image.

The twentieth century promised prosperity and leisure for all. What went wrong?

A new history of spiritualism during the Civil War era suggests an unexpected link between the Lincoln family and that of John Wilkes Booth.

The rise of the “economic style of reasoning” in the 1960s cannot be properly understood without attending to the political fallout of earlier decades.

John Jacob Astor’s "A Journey in Other Worlds" is a high-voltage scientific romance in which visions of imperialism haunt a supposedly “perfect” future.

Institutions meant to secure peace, from NATO to the U.N., date back to Truman’s Presidency. So do the conflicts threatening that peace.

We must dive deeper into the intellectual artifacts of black women thinkers to support the evolution of black feminist discourse and political action.