Excerpts

On Chuck Berry.

As a movement, it has imploded. As a credo, it’s here to stay.

Sigmund Freud once applied his Oedipal theory to the leader of the free world.

When a pair of college friends with a knack for comedy met up with a musical double act, they had the ingredients for a sensation.

Far from spelling the end of anti-market politics, basic income proposals are one place where it can and has flourished.

James Oakes’s deeply researched book argues that two very different readings of the 1787 charter put the United States on a course of all but inevitable conflict.

A new book asks what we lose by simply removing monuments.

A new book seeks to explain why many Americans, especially but not exclusively in the South, have understood freedom as an entitlement for white people.

New evidence suggests that Sacagawea had a longer life than most historians have believed — fifty-seven years longer.

Ron DeSantis, who has attacked Florida history lessons and aims to run for president, dismisses slavery in his 2011 book as a “personal flaw” of the Founding Fathers.

David Hackett Fischer's book "African Founders" should be the starting point for any reflection on the enduring African ­influence on American national ideals.

A new history of the Apple II charts how computers became unavoidable fixtures of our daily lives.

How America gave up on housing equality.

A new history examines the lost promise and fierce persecution of the IWW.

Through the tragedies and uncertainties of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln may have found a deepened connection to his religious faith.

The saxophonist Albert Ayler revolutionized the avant-garde jazz scene, drastically altering notions of what noises qualified as music.

A writer of haunting, uncategorizable songs, she once seemed poised for runaway fame. But only decades after she disappeared has her music found an audience.

How Lincoln's administration financed the Civil War and transformed the nation's decentralized economy into the global juggernaut of the postwar centuries.

We revere the man and revile the strategy, but King knew what he was doing.

William O. Douglas was a strong advocate of conservation, but as a Supreme Court justice his involvement in such issues was often ethically questionable.

The secret, often missing ingredient to building a majoritarian progressive coalition.

Saddled with debt and forbidden by the crown to mint money, Boston’s Puritans dreamed up a novel monetary system that we still use today.

Ben Smith’s book on the history of the viral internet doesn’t truly reckon with the costs of traffic worship.

A new book considers the possible alternative outcomes of the battles in America's war for independence.

As a student in Paris and a photographer at the Washington Times-Herald, the future First Lady worked behind the lens to bring her own ideas into focus.

A new book makes the case for a more pragmatic anti-policing movement—one that seeks to build working-class solidarity across racial lines.

A new biography of Phillis Wheatley places her in her era and shows the ways she used poetry to criticize the existence of slavery.

“The End of History?” was an announcement of victory. But a quarter-century later, its author remains unsure if liberalism truly won.

The concept was devised in postwar America, in response to the cultural and commercial demands of the era. Now we’re stuck with it.

How digital media pursued viral traffic at all costs and unleashed chaos.

Long before the hippies, a group of thinkers used substances like cocaine, hashish, and nitrous oxide to uncover the secrets of the mind.

After Emancipation, Black people fought for public benefits like pensions that would make their newly won citizenship meaningful.

In Joshua Bennett’s history of spoken word, poetry is alive and well thanks to a movement that began in living rooms and bars.

A new book chronicles the decades-long fight to legalize abortion in the United States.

America’s classification crisis.

Poe’s story of a treasure hunt, revealing the fantastical writer’s hyper-rational penchant for cracking codes.

How an idealistic defense intellectual concluded that democracy is often its own worst enemy.

The true economic legacy of the Reagan years is not tax cuts but union busting.

A new book "examines legal cases of women accused of infanticide and concealment of stillbirth."

Dean Calbreath’s biography, “The Sergeant,” relates the improbable adventures of a brilliant 19th-century Black man.

Historian Adam Lee Cilli effectively illustrates the centrality of Black Pittsburgh within the larger Black Freedom Struggle.

The ‘methods and collections’ of genealogists are political because they have a great deal in common with genealogy as a way of doing history.

Four changes are especially important when we try to measure changes in the poverty rate since 1964.

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.