Excerpts

The great grand strategist of the Cold War believed he failed in his most important task.

The most important third party in the history of American politics is one you may never have heard of before.

From the machine politicians in La Villita to the radicals in Pilsen, Mexican Chicagoans have played a central role in defining their city. 

For all the clouds of publicity, the dream machine is actually a craft business. Have we asked too much of it?

A new history of the environmental movement places too much emphasis on famous figures like Rachel Carson and shies away from confronting failures.

If fact-checking could fix us, we’d be a utopia by now.

Gregory Ain wanted to create social housing in Los Angeles. Dogged by the FBI, his hope for more egalitarian architecture never came to be.

Segregation, separatism, and the history of black barbershops.

In Jill Lepore's "These Truths," ideas produce other ideas. But new ideas arise from thinking humans, not from other ideas.

Jedediah Purdy's new book examines why the U.S. has continuously failed to qualify as a system defined by popular rule.

Why are Georgia peaches so iconic? The answer has a lot to do with slavery — its end and a need for the South to rebrand itself.

The tale of the long forgotten Joseph Jefferson, who revolutionized character acting in 19th century American theater.

Lessons from the start of the Cold War.

A two-volume biography tracks the life and times of one of Harlem’s leading socialists.

"The Custom of the Country" and its unique relationship with ideas of feminism and the culture of the early 20th century elite.

Game theory, computers, the atom bomb—these are just a few of things von Neumann played a role in developing, changing the 20th century for better and worse.

Still’s detailed record of radical abolitionist action remains a model for creating freedom out of community and community out of freedom.

Mills exposed postwar American power and warned of an authoritarian turn in the book, which speaks to our own moment of inequality and right-wing anger.

The FBI’s first director built the agency around some of his own worst instincts.

In Chris Herring’s recent history of the New York basketball team, we get a behind-the-scenes look at the sports commentariat’s fixation on grit and toughness.

Alexandra Lange's "Meet Me by the Fountain" recovers the forgotten past and the still hopeful future of the American shopping mall.

A new book traces the long history of cloaking racism in the language of resistance to an overbearing federal government.

Sanctions were conceived as an alternative to war. But they may have made the world more violent.

Was abolition intended as a perpetuation of slavery by other means?

Historian Gerald Horne has developed a grand theory of U.S. history as a series of devastating backlashes to progress—right down to the present day.

A new book argues that the American right emerged out of a backlash to multiracial democracy following the Civil War.

A new book sets out to discover how Americans became such creatures of the seven-day week.

Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek have been through the wringer.

What the story of the Grimke family tells us about race in the United States.

How stories of abuse in minority religious communities have influenced American culture.

How Americans lost faith in the possibility of self-government.

The presidency of Theodore Roosevelt and his creation of the modern "performer" president.

Can the origins of today’s right be traced to the 1990s?

Since the 18th century, American politics has functioned via coalitions between competing factions. Can alliances survive today’s partisan climate?

Alexis de Tocqueville left France to study the American prison system and returned with the material that would become “Democracy in America.”

Before his abuses of power were exposed, he was celebrated as a scourge of Nazis, Communists, and subversives.

A new book exalts the heyday of music magazines, when electric prose reigned and egos collided.

The Christian, the athlete, and the activist.

How historians have understood Africa and the Black diaspora in global conversations about race and identity.

The moral contradiction of a nation torn between allegiance to its highest ideals and awareness of the base realities of racial discrimination.

A new work of history finds the best antidote to today’s authoritarian politics in Daniel Webster’s 19th-century civic nationalism.

By age 44, most people are figuring out how to live and die peacefully. That was certainly not the case with sharecropper and hero Fannie Lou Hamer.

The F.B.I. director promised to save American democracy from those who would subvert it—while his secret programs subverted it from within.

Is Jefferson's Bible evidence that the Founding Fathers engaged with scripture to birth a Christian nation? Or that they sought to foster a new secular order?

A brief look into Equiano's life reveals that many Black figures were considerably more transnational in their movements and critiques than commonly assumed.

A new book uncovers the story of New York’s pursuit of water, and the homes and communities destroyed in the process.

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.