Excerpts

Private bunkers and the people who build them.

A review of "Escalante’s Dream: On the Trail of the Spanish Discovery of the Southwest."

While he opposed slavery and southern secession early in his career, as president Andrew Johnson turned out to be an unsightly bigot.

Two recent books put the reemergence of anti-immigrant sentiment in the Trump era into historical relief.

A sweeping new history traces the rise of characters caught in a Manichaean struggle between good and evil.

The Age of Revolution inaugurated a new era in modern history defined not only by new democratic institutions but also by despots and charismatic leaders.

Repeated failures by both political parties to get a decent policy through our 18th-century constitutional structure led to the Affordable Care Act.

The ambitious Times endeavor reveals the difficulties that greet a journalistic project when it aspires to shift a founding narrative of the past.

Sheryll Cashin’s “White Space, Black Hood” shows how economic discrimination combines with racial injustice in America’s housing policy.

In his lifetime, Robert Welch toiled in the mocked and marginal fringe. Today his ideas are the mainstream of the American right.

With its doctrine of fairness, A Theory of Justice transformed political philosophy. But what did it leave out? 

A new collection of essays demonstrates how the civil rights icon’s thinking evolved amid the upheavals of the 20th century.

As we mine the 1940s for alternate visions of international order, we must not presume that the US remains the benevolent center of global politics.

A pair of new books about US Marshal Wyatt Earp are now out. Only one of them shoots straight.

It’s the biggest battle on U.S. soil that most Americans have never heard of.

A number of recent books blame the rise of neoliberalism on economists. But the evidence suggests it is still capital that rules.

James Shapiro’s recent book looks at why Shakespeare has been a mainstay of the cultural and political conflicts of the country since its founding.

In The Loud Minority, Daniel Gillion examines the relationship between electoral politics and protest movements.

For the poor, who are disproportionately people of color, the criminal justice system in the United States is essentially a plea-and-probation system.

With Susan Ronald’s meticulous, relentless biography, Joseph P. Kennedy is now firmly established in the annals of twentieth-century fascism.

Why has a relatively conventional history of the War of Independence drawn such an outraged response?

After Charlottesville, the historian Joan Wallach Scott wanted to find out how societies face up to their past—and why some fail.

How statistics were used in the urban North to condemn Blackness as inherently criminal.

The CIA committed many crimes in the early days of post-independence Africa. But is it fair to call their interference “recolonization”?

Lazy assumptions about young and old cloud our politics.

Joshua Cohen imagines how Philip Roth would review his own biographer.

Washington was a savvy packager of his own personal virtues. He knew that if you don’t engage in a bit of self-aggrandizement, you lose.

How Transcendentalism, the American philosophy that championed the individual, caught on in tight-knit Concord, Massachusetts.

Once, abolitionists had to imagine a world without slavery. Can we similarly envision a world where migrants are offered justice?

In Life of a Klansman, Edward Ball’s white supremacist great-great-grandfather becomes a case study in the enduring legacy of slavery.

Like the 1619 Project, two new books on the Constitution reflect a vigorous debate about what has changed in the American past—and what hasn’t.

The New Yorker critic's new book is a sequel of sorts to "The Metaphysical Club."

Elizabeth Catte’s new book traces a shameful history and its legacy today.

For economist Albert Hirschman, social planning meant creative experimentation rather than theoretical certainty.

How the secular movement underestimated the endurance of religion.

What gets lost when we view the American past as primarily a story about capitalism? 

Born after the Civil War, he turned himself into its most powerful witness—and modernized the American novel.

New books investigate the brutality of the internal slave trade by focusing on businesses, and examine the role of white women in enslaving Black people.

Annie Berke reviews Elana Levine's book on a pivotal genre and its diverse fandom.

How Rosalind Franklin, the crystallographer whose data were crucial to solving the structure of DNA, was written out of the story of scientific discovery.

The perils of turning the plaintiff in Roe v. Wade into a political symbol.

A new book challenges the notion that independent inventors were shunted aside in the 20th century by anonymous scientists in corporate research laboratories.

In “The Loneliest Americans,” Jay Caspian Kang asks whether Asian American identity can be rescued from people like him.

How a grassroots movement of farmers laid the foundation for state intervention in the economy, challenging the slaveholding South.

From boomers to zoomers, the concept gets social history all wrong.

A review of "Cruising for Conspirators: How a New Orleans DA Prosecuted the Kennedy Assassination as a Sex Crime."

The debate regarding which Bible kids should read in school was about whether Catholic immigrants should have the full rights of American citizenship.

How New Yorkers trying to ward off catastrophe paved the road to the privatized city.

How the predominant ideology of our time survived the pandemic.

Man Ray made art that looked like the future. How did he become a minor figure?