Excerpts

Overshadowed by more famous contemporaries, the visionary behind “The Wonder Show of the Universe” left a far-reaching legacy.

As the 2020 presidential election nears, internationalists are plotting their return. But they still haven’t learned from the failure of liberal universalism.

An insightful exploration of the ways America has read ‘the Great American Novel.’

In a book and documentary series, Henry Louis Gates Jr. offers a wide-ranging tour of Black religion in America.

Set the Night on Fire isn't just a portrait of a city in upheaval. It's a history of uprisings for civil rights, against poverty, and for a better world.

Neoliberals refashioned the idea of freedom by tying it to the free market, and turning it into a weapon to be used against anticolonial projects worldwide.

In 1948, the landfill at Fresh Kills was marketed to Staten Island as a stopgap measure. No one guessed that it would remain open for more than half a century.

At the end of the nineteenth century, a wave of women rethought what journalism could say, sound like, and do. Why were they forgotten?

A new book presents an expansive vision of soul music.

Lady Bird Johnson and Nancy Reagan grappled with the contradictions of a role that is at once public and private, superficial and serious.

Family blessings are a curse, or they can be. The life of Henry Adams explained in his book Education.

A new book tackles the deep and persistent American intellectual tradition we might call Science-hesitant.

"The Dead are Arising" may be the best Malcolm X biography yet. But its author seems unsure of how to write about a religion outside the American mainstream.

His posthumously released novel, “The Man Who Lived Underground,” was written during a crisis of political faith.

A new history of the Cuban missile crisis emphasizes how close the world came to destruction—and how severe a threat the weapons still pose.

Confronting a long tradition of projecting fantasies onto the South Bronx.

In ‘The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War,’ Louis Menand explores the poetry, music, painting, dance and film that emerged during the Cold War.

Jonathan W. Wilson offers a constructively critical review of Wilfred McClay's American history textbook "Land of Hope."

On Kyle Riismandel’s “Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture, 1975–2001.”

Heavy industry once drove Pittsburgh’s economy. Now health care does—but without the same hard-won benefits.

What has been gained and lost from overlooking histories about the wild heterogeneity of networks that existed for well over a century?

It’s easier to blame individuals for the opioid crisis than to attempt to diagnose and cure the ills of a society.

In a career of many flops, he laid claim to the outsized success of Marvel Comics.

A new book by Ruth Ben-Ghiat discusses the past and present challenges posed by authoritarianism, but misses the conditions in which it arises.

A review of "To Live and Defy in LA: How Gangsta Rap Changed America."

The history of the Atlantic slave trade after the American Revolution is a story of sustained efforts to suppress it even as demand for slaves increased.

How John and Jessie Frémont explored the frontiers of legend-making.

Group biographies and the female friendship vogue.

How do we memorialize life online when it’s constantly disappearing?

While they advanced African American rights, they had serious flaws, Eric Foner writes.

The individualization of risk that we often think of as part of neoliberalism already existed strongly in the early 20th century.

Was this new age spurred by the ideals of the Enlightenment or by the imperatives of global warfare?

A wrenching new book recounts the bloodiest prison battle in our history.

For poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, as for the Black Romantics, history is the repetition of anti-Black violence that has yet to be abolished.

The filibuster, invented to uphold slavery, must be eliminated if Democrats hope to deliver progressive legislation.

Are the evangelicals who voted for Trump and stormed the Capitol in his defense part of the fringe of evangelicalism, or the core?

Depression-era Americans viewed urban life in America through the lens of Weegee’s camera.

In his sweeping new history, the economist systematically demolishes the conceit that extreme inequality is our destiny, rather than our choice.

As we confront rightwing extremism in our own time, the history of American fascist sympathy reveals a legacy worth reckoning with.

The US imperialist wars in the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan grew from US wars against Indigenous people in the 19th century.

Who needs a public health system when sickness is a personal failure?

Redlining itself cannot explain this persistence of inequality in America's cities.

As technologies of quantification and video capture grow more sophisticated, is baseball changing? Do those changes have moral implications?

Even after slave trade was banned, the United States and New York City, in particular, were complicit in allowing it to persist.

Thaddeus Stevens understood far better than most that fully uprooting slavery meant overthrowing the South’s economic system and challenging property rights.

On Juanita Harrison’s "My Great, Wide, Beautiful World."

Leigh Eric Schmidt profiles the nineteenth century's notable "village atheists."

The drive for American independence coalesced in only a few years of rapidly accelerating political change.

It’s time to abandon the assumption that workers have a “natural” home on the center-left.

That’s why the privileged White novelist’s work is still worth reading, Michael Gorra argues.