Excerpts

In his new book, The Crooked Path to Abolition, James Oakes argues that the Constitution was an antislavery document.

Tech was meant to help us transcend our most intractable problems. What went wrong?

Frederick Douglass and Republican legislators had high hopes for Andrew Johnson—but ended up impeaching him.

Yale's John Fabian Witt pens a review of Samuel Moyn's new book, Humane.

Ideas about working from the employee perspective.

Historian Samuel Moyn contends that efforts to conduct war humanely have only perpetuated it. But the solution must lie in politics, not a sacrifice of human rights.

What the border fight means for one of the nation’s most potent, and most violent, myths.

Reflections on Richard Wright’s recently published novel, "The Man Who Lived Underground."

What is Texas? Should we even think about so large and diverse a place as having an essence that can be distilled?

Two books trace anti-police uprisings to the urban riots of the Civil Rights era. But as people took to the streets in 2020, why did so few pick up a brick?

The US has long had a brutal, domineering relationship with the Philippines. And crucially, it’s depended on the labor of colonized Filipinos themselves.

Can the partnership born on a maritime U.S.-U.K. summit still protect democracy?

Why efforts to curb the cruelty of military force may have backfired.

By offering the group as a model for present-day politics, Sarah Schulman’s history of ACT UP reproduces the movement’s failures and exclusions.

Two new books on the history of feminism emphasize global grassroots efforts and the influence of American women labor leaders on international agreements.

The history of patrolling sex in public.

William Darity and A. Kirsten Mullen’s case for reparations.

The author of ‘Founding Brothers’ tries to capture the breadth of the War for Independence in a single narrative.

On the ways that people have conflated freedom with whiteness but pays too little attention to the force of freedom as a concept.

Historians have been too much the ideological allies of Progressivism to permit themselves to see its master flaw.

A lost volume of American history finds the light of day.

A review of a book by Sean Wilentz's "No Property in Man," which argues that the document is full of anti-slavery language.

From the very beginning, the problem with the US involvement in Afghanistan lay essentially in the deficits in American democracy.

Two new books look at the history of Latinx Democrats and Republicans and the role each will play in the future.

Two new books argue that the War on Terror changed American politics, but what if the sources of its violence were already long present in the country?

The idea of history’s judgment was, and remains, seductive. Yet this notion cannot withstand scrutiny, as Joan Wallach Scott’s On the Judgment of History shows.

How the turn toward “precision” combat promoted endless war.

A review of “West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire."

In the gold-rush era, ceremonial greetings swiftly gave way to bigotry and violence.

What can the history of the temp-work industry teach us about the precarity of modern working life?

A review of "Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America."

Liberty for some has always entailed a lack of liberty for many others.

The changes in popular photography.

In the contemporary United States, higher education does more to exaggerate than relieve class and cultural divisions.

We ascribe too much meaning to the early years of the republic.

We know why they were built and why they have to come down.

The Supreme Court and the pursuit of racial equality.

Spencer Ackerman’s new book argues that the forever wars created the conditions for Trump’s rise.

W.E.B. Du Bois’s exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition offered him a chance to present the dramatic gains made by Black Americans since the end of slavery.

How public interest groups inadvertently aided the right’s ascendency.

Do we give the activist groups of the 1960s more credit than they deserve?

Her memoirs contribute to the inaccurate post-Civil War memory of the Southern plantation.

The great discoveries of the age captivated Poe’s imagination. He almost always misunderstood them.

A new history charts the forgotten ways the social politics of the Roosevelt years transformed the United States.

How a book of essays from 1964 explains what happened at the Capitol.

Anthony Comstock’s crusade against vice constrained the lives of ordinary Americans. His antagonists opened up history for feminists and other activists.

Everyday people's creation of porn and erotic objects over the centuries.

The most complete account we are likely to get of the deceptions and duplicities that led to war leaves some crucial mysteries unsolved.

In the 1950s and 1960s, a new generation of American artists began to think of advertising and commercial imagery as the new avant-garde.

A new book shows how southern evangelicals looked to the Bible to justify their opposition to racial integration.