Excerpts

“A Promised Land” tells of a country that needed a savior.

St. Louis seems to define America’s past—but does it offer insight for the future?

In "Algiers, Third World Capital," Elaine Mokhtefi captures a world of camaraderie, shared ideals, and frequent miscommunication.

At the end of his remarkable, improbable life, Malcolm X was on the cusp of a reinvention that might have been even more significant than his conversion.

Why Thomas Morton seems to have taken particular delight in driving the Pilgrims and Puritans out of their minds.

Arturo Schomburg's work is still inspiring researchers and cooks today.

The gourmet’s real genius wasn’t in his recipes but in his packaging. He knew how to serve up the authenticity that his audiences craved.

How talk radio established the power of the modern Republican Party.

Three new books examine how the rise of coal, oil, and gas have permanently remade our world.

Since World War I we’ve been solving problems with dangerous chemicals that introduce new problems.

What the Civil War tells us about who has the power to shape history.

A review of Robert Elder's new biography of John C. Calhoun.

The inventor did not look for problems in need of solutions; he looked for solutions in need of modification.

For decades, a white woman’s memoir shaped our understanding of America’s first Black poet. Does a new book change the story?

Joel Rhone reviews Eddie Glaude Jr.’s Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own

Allen Barra reviews Mark Kram Jr.’s Smokin’ Joe, a biography of Joe Frazier.

An abstract expressionist and master of collage, an intellectual and outspoken activist, Bearden evolved as much as his times did.

A review of "Set The Night on Fire", an inspiring book that points to a new generation of activists who remain unbowed by conservative historiographies.

In 1969, an activist set out to build an African-American metropolis from scratch. What would have happened if Soul City had succeeded?

A recent history centers the Lakota and the vast territory they controlled in the story of the formation of the United States.

Far from a marginal outsider, a new biography contends, Thorstein Veblen was the most important economic thinker of the Gilded Age.

Julia Gaffield reviews two books that discuss the transatlantic slave trade.

With chatter about Texas leaving the union on the rise, two new books remind us what it was like the last time we tried to go it alone.

Fears about “undeserving” people receiving public assistance have deep ties to racism and the policing of black women’s bodies.

From Bronze Age farmers to New World colonialists, the stories of struggle to claim more ground have shaped where and how we live.

Pioneering cartoonists were experimental, satiric, erotic, and artistically ambitious.

A new biography of the pioneering doctors shows why “first” can be a tricky designation.

As large spaces where different sectors of the city converge, stadiums are sites of social and political struggle.

Faulkner’s chroniclers have to reconcile the novelist’s often repellent political positions with the extraordinary meditations on race, violence, and cruelty in his fiction.

Thorstein Veblen’s maverick economic ideas made him the foremost iconoclast of the Age of Iconoclasts.

The devastating cruelties these stories reveal also contain a fundamental truth about prison.

A new book frames this country’s tendency toward state-sanctioned murder as a unique cultural inheritance.

A new proposal for reparations for slavery raises three critical questions: How much does America owe? Where will the money come from? And who gets paid?

By neglecting the history of the Black diaspora, Isabel Wilkerson's "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents" fails to reckon with systems of racial capitalism.

Historian John Turner tells the story of Plymouth Colony with nuance and care.

Peeples helps us to see that Poe’s imagination was stoked by his external surroundings as well as by his interior life.

A new biography of William Tecumseh Sherman questions his reputation as the brutal "prophet of total war."

The ideals of the Confederate South found new force in the bloody plains of the American West.

A new history of five heroes of the revolutionary period considers the power and instability of charismatic leadership.

A new history shows how the glut of US military bases abroad has led to a constant state of military conflict.

Jefferson revised the Gospels to make Jesus more reasonable, and lost the power of his story.

An elaborate secret life was a necessity for children’s author Louise Fitzhugh.

Covid-19 and climate change are drastically intensifying insecurity in New Orleans.

How the United States terrorizes the rest of the world, Baldwin realized abroad, echoed how it terrorized its inhabitants at home.

The celebration of Isabel Wilkerson’s ‘Caste’ reflects the continued priority of elite preferences over the needs and struggles of ordinary people.

Without a more fundamental transformation of criminal law, public defenders often provide only a limited form of equality and fairness before the law.

Socialised investment and the spectre of full employment.

Abraham Lincoln is widely revered, while many Americans consider John Brown mad. Yet it was Brown’s strategy that brought slavery to an end.

Frank B. Wilderson III sketches a map of the world in which Black people are everywhere integral but always excluded.

In 1963, after Sam Cooke was turned away from a hotel in Shreveport, Louisiana, because he was black, he wrote “A Change Is Gonna Come.” He was right.