Excerpts

Fearful of increasing participation, elites of the era attempted to rein in democracy.

A New Deal program to restore Totem Poles in Alaska provided jobs and boosted tourism, but it ignored their history and significance within Native culture.

From “The Old Farmer’s Almanac” to “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” what do bestselling guides to self-improvement reveal about the United States?

A new creative history comes closer than ever to giving us access to Turner’s visionary life.

Chronicling the policing of gay life in the mid-20th century.

W.E.B. DuBois, 100 years ago.

Photographer Andrew Feiler documented how the educational institutions shaped a generation of black leaders.

A new edition of Emily Dickinson’s Master letters highlights what remains blazingly intense and mysterious in her work.

A new book recovers the reputation Poe had in his own lifetime of being a cross between a science writer, a poet, and a man of letters.

Researching the history of time capsules.

19th century Hawai‘i attracted traders, entrepreneurs, and capitalists, who displaced, a flourishing and elaborate culture.

Mark Massaro reviews Jason Vuic’s “The Swamp Peddlers: How Lot Sellers, Land Scammers, and Retirees Built Modern Florida and Transformed the American Dream.”

A new book about the Lindbergh baby kidnapping focuses on the role played by the media.

The pre-Civil War North was a landscape not of unremitting white supremacy but of persistent struggles over racial justice by both Blacks and whites.

A new history charts the radical agitation around Black rights and freedom back to the early nineteenth century. 

In 1838, as the U.S. began its Exploring Expedition to the South Seas, Edgar Allan Poe published a novel that masqueraded as a travelogue.

A review of Jon Meacham's newest book and documentary.

Government support created jobs, built trust, and invigorated American literature. We should try it again.

Known as a master of horror, he also understood the power—and the limits—of science.

When the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith ran for president, he wasn’t seeking further glory but a policy change in religious liberty.

Cold War modernists of the title do not seem to be the painters, sculptors, poets, and novelists who produced the original works.

Though the cruelties of the Trump administration’s “Zero Tolerance” policy were unique, they were part of an American tradition of taking children from parents.

Eric Hinderaker offers a masterclass in how to peel back the layers of data, scholarship, and propaganda to understand what we call the Boston Massacre.

What the 1971 uprising and massacre reveal about our prison system and the liberal democratic state.

A recent biography reveals the many contradictions of the photographer who fastidiously documented postwar American life.

The memoirist is at the center of two new, very different books: a biography of D. H. Lawrence and a novel by Rachel Cusk. Has she been rescued or reduced?

Soul City in North Carolina was designed to build Black wealth and address racial injustice. Then its opponents lined up.

Whatever the “City on a Hill” is, the phrase was not discovered by Kennedy or Reagan.

In a new book, the often under-appreciated contribution that black soldiers made during the civil war is brought to light with a trove of unseen photos.

A new book says “the Internet was developed as a weapon and remains a weapon today.” Does the charge hold up?

A new book recovers long-suppressed alternative politics.

In her new book, Colley shows how written constitutions developed both as a way to further justify rulers and to turn rebellions into legitimate governments.

How the late 19th century’s raucous party system gave way to a sedate and exclusionary political culture that erected more and more barriers to participation.

A new biography details the cultural jumble of literature, dirty jokes, and everything in between that went into the making of the foremost self-made American.

Slavery and the Civil War were central to the development of photography as both a technology and an art.

Several recent books offer a more complete, bottom-up picture of the role sailors and Black political actors played in making the Atlantic world.

How the master of suspense got his sadistic streak.

A new book persuasively places Malcolm X and Martin Luther King at the center of each other’s most dramatic transformations.

In the history of St. Louis, we find both a radical and reactionary past—and a more hopeful future too.

Malcolm Gladwell’s apologia for American butchery.

Only a certain kind of person, both foolish and resolute, would choose to study a subject so extensive, yet so restrictive, as the secrets of nuclear weapons.

A newly restored novel tests an old dynamic between readers and the author of “Native Son.”

Thaddeus Stevens was a fierce opponent of the “odious” compromises in the Constitution, and of the North’s compromises after the Civil War.

Mark Bittman’s new history looks at the economy and politics of junk food.

A new book tells the forgotten story of fugitive slaves who found freedom south of the border.

The first volume of Frederik Logevall’s biography of JFK reveals the scope of his ambition and the weakness of his political commitments.

Dispelling myths of entrepreneurial exceptionalism, a sweeping new history of U.S. capitalism finds that economic gains have always been driven by the state.

Could the separation of the Revolutionary War have been patched in the late 19th century? Some powerful men tried...

A brave band of scholars set out to save us from racism and sexism. What happened?

In modern democracies, who gets to determine what counts as truth—an elite of experts or the people as a whole?