Excerpts

Henrietta Szold devoted her life to building a Jewish society in Palestine. But how useful is her ’cultural’ Zionism for Jewish Americans today?

Rich Benjamin’s new book reveals a shared spirit between the world’s first Black republic and the United States.

In contrast to feudal society, where everyone, lord or serf, remained rooted to the land, and words were ‘passed on'.

Enslaved families were regularly separated​. A new history chronicles the tenacious efforts of the emancipated to be reunited​ with their loved ones.

The curious case of social psychology.

New books on the War in Afghanistan endeavor to tell the realities of occupation and the "war on terror."

Conservatives might be tempted to hold up Reagan as representative of a nobler era. They’d be wrong.

For all of its faults and weaknesses, no serious competitor has emerged to capture people’s imagination or seriously challenge it.

Washington’s policy-makers showed themselves more wicked and feckless than their Vietnam- and Iraq-era predecessors.

A new dual biography turns the lens on the towering architects of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Why do Americans idealize people who found businesses?

In a new book, Jeffrey Toobin makes a convincing case that Ford’s pardon of President Nixon set the stage for unchecked presidential power.

Jon Savage’s “The Secret Public” traces the influence of queer artists on a hostile culture.

An investigation of the US’s mass internment of Japanese Americans.

During the Cold War, American and Soviet scientists embarked on an unprecedented quest to contact extraterrestrials.

The eighth president defined the future of politics.

What the author of "If—" learned about empire from the United States

Her new book tells the story of Black people through an exploration of the color blue.

Hard thinking on difficult and uncomfortable questions about how to keep everything from falling apart.

You’re passionate. Purpose-driven. Dreaming big, working hard, making it happen. And now they’ve got you where they want you.

Standardized forensic exams are a useful tool for sexual-violence investigations—or they would be if police departments consistently tested their findings.

How an erroneous 18th-century story about the “Caucasian race” led to a centuries of prejudice and misapprehension.

The general’s campaign through the South is known for its brutality against civilians. For the enslaved who followed his army, though, it was a shot at freedom.

The true cost of the immigration policy can be measured in the generations of Chinese Americans who were never born.

A new book traces the rise of the Israel lobby and the challenges it has faced as global criticism of Israel has intensified.

From the pianoforte to the smartphone, each wave of tech has sparked fears of brain rot. But the problem isn’t our ability to focus—it’s what we’re focusing on.

A new book questions what we think we know about heterosexuality and Latter-day Saints, or Mormons.

What does the Jewish experience in the Revolutionary War say about America?

The connections between the first president’s commitment to agricultural innovation and his evolving attitudes toward his enslaved laborers at Mount Vernon.

Two new biographies enhance our knowledge of John Lewis, the late congressman and civil rights hero.

Dinner parties in the capital have long been a path to power, but Perle Mesta had her eye on a different prize.

Michael Boskin’s volume gives a grim account of the state of federalism today.

How scholars achieved some of the most consequential intelligence victories of the twentieth century.

Reagan’s capacity to inhabit and generate legend stemmed from his own impulse to substitute pleasing fictions for inconvenient facts.

If ordinary Americans know one critic of the American Empire, it’s almost certainly Chomsky.

Her long-unpublished novel was the culmination of a years-long fascination. What does it reveal about her fraught views on civil rights?

The abusive experiments on mentally disabled children at Willowbrook State School were only one part of a much larger unethical research program.

Two new books examine how colonial logic has long been embedded within US carceral systems.

The rise and fall of an evangelical church, founded with progressive intentions and undone by dissension and bad faith.

Dismantling it requires getting the story right.

Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett each had a different vision of reproductive freedom. Would reproductive rights be more secure if Dennett’s had prevailed?

Humans love to imagine their own demise.

In every generation, charlatans come along with a plan to make education better by spending less money on schools.

Shaul Magid attempts to show us how much contemporary Jews have inherited from a man most have tried to forget.

A new book by Sarah Archer explores the influence of the Space Race and Cold War on America's midcentury Christmas celebrations.

A sweeping new history chronicles a century of unprecedented economic progress driven by markets and innovation.

A new collection of essays by David Montgomery shows how he used labor history as a means of grappling with the largest questions in American history.

Understanding the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan in the early twentieth century gives insight into the roots of today’s reactionary activists and policymakers.

Second-wave feminists meant business—but they had a lot of fun at it, too.

A new biography explores the American roots of Meir Kahane's far-right ideology — and how the U.S. Jewish establishment embraced his beliefs.