Excerpts

Historical narratives of the United States have never not been shaped by an anxiety about the end of it all. Are we a new Rome or a new Zion?

White women have trafficked in Black women’s milk.

A new history sees the authors of the Declaration as moral agents, and sets out to capture the thinking behind the principles.

The father of game theory helped develop the atom bomb—and thought he could calculate when to use it.

Why did William F. Buckley campaign to free Edgar Smith?

A review of ”Man Ray: The Artist and His Shadows” by Arthur Lubow.

A history of imperial forgetting.

A review of “The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War."

His approval rating hit historic lows, his party was fractious, crises were everywhere. But Truman rescued his presidency, and his legacy.

The history of the movement is one of unlikely success. But what can we learn from embattled experiments like prescribed heroin? 

Though some have likened it to Sodom and Gomorrah, New York City has a long history of religious vibrancy.

In the new nonfiction collection “You Don’t Know Us Negroes,” what emerges is a writer who mastered a Black idiom but seldom championed race pride.

The transcendentalists thought all human inspiration was divine, all nature a miracle.

Jarvis Givens rediscovers the underground history of black schooling.

Close your eyes and imagine you’re married to Ernest Hemingway. Now, imagine it twice as bad, and you’ll be approaching the life story of Mary Welsh Hemingway.

A review of three books about Abraham Lincoln, the 14th Amendment, and Reconstruction.

A new book aims to recover the Constitution’s pivotal role in shaping claims of justice and equality.

Amidst growing suspicion that equality talk is cheap, a new book explains where egalitarianism went wrong—and what it still has to offer.

At the back of the book, the index provides a space for reference—and sometimes revenge.

After abandoning its working-class roots, the news business is in a death spiral as ordinary Americans reject it in growing numbers.

McCarthy imagined a vast border region where colonial empires clashed, tribes went to war, and bounty hunters roamed.

Whether exploring the dread of everyday life or the horrors of the occult, her ghost tales documented a nation haunted by isolation, class, and despair.

The road to right-wing deregulation began on our nation's highways.

Vaccine skepticism and misinformation have persisted since the smallpox epidemics. With the internet, it's only gotten worse.

The life of Judah Benjamin, a Southern Jew who served in the Confederate government, can tell us only so much about the American Jewish encounter with slavery.

A new feminist history of women and exercise glosses over the darker side of fitness culture.

What else is lost when an object disappears?

What did German listeners hear when African American singers performed Schubert or Brahms?

Nothing could be more toxic to our ongoing effort to build a multiracial democracy than to cast any race as a perennial hero or villain.

A new book explores California’s history through the experience of its Native peoples.

The original book is far more grisly than the beloved Disney classic—and has an unsettling message about humanity.

The girl sleuth, now the star of a TV show, has been eased into the canon. In the process, she’s shed the politics that motivated her creation.

How a cartoon gamine midwifed the graphic novel—and the modern conservative movement.

The farm tractor wasn’t born overnight. Perfecting it led to a three-way battle between Ford, John Deere and International Harvester.

A new book shows just how porous the dividing line has been between the far right and mainstream conservatism.

Martin Luther King Jr. was the galvanizing voice of the civil rights struggle, an uncompromising, complicated figure who soared in the pulpit.

The poet’s memoir Generations is both a chronicle of her ancestral lineage and lesson in the centrality of Black women to the story of American history.

What turned Smedley Butler into a critic of American foreign policy?

Is there something in particular about coming from a Native background that makes a person want to write and perform comedy?

A riveting new book shows how the Civil War in the West was both strategically important and lacking in the moral contours of the broader war.

Recent books by Woody Holton and Alan Taylor offer fresh perspectives on early US history but overstate the importance of white supremacy as its driving force.

By following the money, a new history of urban inequality turns our attention away from federal malfeasance and toward capital markets and financial instruments.

The memoirs of Korean adoptees, once full of confession and confusion, are now marked by confidence and rage.

Why do the Transcendentalists still have an outsize influence on American culture?

The life of Daniel Boone underlines how the North America of the era was a welter of conflict among and between natives and Europeans.

Most adult men could aspire to participation in the religious and political government of the colony. But this communal liberty did not imply personal liberty.

A new volume of Robert Frost’s letters finds him at the height of his artistic powers while suffering an almost unimaginable series of losses.

A storm is never just wind or rain. Our natural problems are social problems. The solutions to them must be social, too.

The untold story of the ideological realignment that upended the nation.

A counter-narrative to Samuel Moyn’s "Humane": drone warfare and the long history of liberal empire blurring the line between policing and endless war.