Excerpts

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

Guthrie challenged the commercial aesthetic of the pre-rock era through a performance style that was almost combatively anti-musical.

A new book on Claude McKay is part of an effort to place the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance within the Black radical tradition.

Three books explore a history of fractious extremism that predates Donald Trump.

How to understand Adam Smith’s politics.

The defining boundaries and problematic categorizations carried by our culture's treatment of the label "millennial."

Liberal Protestants built a global elite in the 20th century. Its fracturing holds a caution for evangelicals today.

A new book traces how the writing of American history, from Reconstruction on, has falsified and illuminated our racial past.

Formed in 1912 for “women who did things—and did them openly,” the Heterodoxy Club laid the groundwork for a century of American feminism.

For all her influence as an activist, intellectual, and writer, Angela Davis has not always been taken as seriously as her peers. Why not?

The dark side of Crèvecoeur's "Letters from an American Farmer."

Romanticized stories about the Second World War are at the heart of American exceptionalism.

“They’ll tell you it was abortion. Sorry, the historical record’s clear: It was segregation.”

Felix Frankfurter warned that politicians, not the courts, should make policy.

Ambrose Bierce deviated from the refined eeriness of English-style ghost stories for his haunting descriptions of fateful coincidence and horrific revelation.

A new history shows how neoliberalism took power during a period of crisis, which leaves open the question of whether it can be forced out as a result of one.

The partisan redistricting tactics of cracking and packing aren’t merely flaws in the system—they are the system.

The most vitriolic and morally panicked conservative figures of the 1990s contributed just as much to modern American conservatism as Ronald Reagan did.

The Ludlow massacre revisited.

Historians are losing their audience, and searching for the next trend won’t win it back.

A new book catalogs the alarming events that created one of the West’s most polluted bodies of water.

A review of how author Jody Rosen depicts the history of the bicycle, mixing the personal with the factual.

Making the case for why U.S. history only makes sense when told as a binational story.

The question of whether or not one served, or was willing to serve, or would be willing to serve, goes deeper than name-calling and allegations of draft dodging.

The Combahee River Collective and E. Franklin Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie agree that the wealthy and powerful will hijack activist energies for their own ends.

A new book challenges the dominant narrative that malls are dying.

American Democratic Socialism has deep roots in the very “American” values it is accused of undermining.

Ukraine didn’t become an epicenter of world history all of a sudden; it became an epicenter again.

Inside a famous Cold War deception.

A trio of books depict the true narrative of the massacres within Indonesia in 1965.

How nonprofits went from essential service providers to vehicles for programs shaped and approved by capital.

Now is a critical time to acquire a better understanding of this misunderstood and oversimplified philosophy known as Neomercantilism.

Texas education officials have preliminarily voted to reject a Mexican-American history textbook that scholars have said was riddled with inaccuracies.

Two new studies ask readers to think expansively about art’s involvement in a broader system of racial capitalism.

In the 1990s, the New Democrats trusted corporations to do the right thing. The results were disastrous.

By reengineering the economy and society to their own benefit, Google and Facebook are undermining personal freedom and corroding democracy.

Clashes between sovereignty rights and civil rights reveal an uncomfortable and complicated story about race and belonging in America.

How progressives came to think that any recognition of Christianity by a public institution violates others’ rights.

How the movement to end legal abortion became intertwined with a different conservative pet project.

The historical insights of one era have been lost to the journalistic instincts of another.

What new possibilities might arise if we were to consider history as ongoing memory work, rather than a set narrative of progress or as singular “truth”?

How we came to rely on the courts, instead of the democratic process, for justice.

A new book recognizes the global character of Asian exclusion.

Generations of utopians seeking inspiration and sea breezes made the trek from Greenwich Village to Cape Cod’s picturesque vistas.

Craig McNamara’s family did not talk about the Vietnam War. He spent his life asking questions about it.

The contradictory past and uncertain future of the Democratic Party.

A new book situates the War on Terror as a story of domination which traces back to the founding of the US as a settler-colonial and slaveholding behemoth.

The leader of a would-be South Carolina slave rebellion was hanged 200 years ago. A new account is a must-read.

The global economic order and the myth of sovereignty.

Francis Fukuyama pines for that old-time liberalism.