Excerpts

In the 1960s, youth counterculture spawned Christian rock.

By naming a common enemy the Union Army was able to build and then steer a coalition of Americans toward the systematic destruction of slavery.

He devoted a lifetime to studying America’s foundation, witnessed its near-dissolution, and uncannily anticipated its evolution.

More than iron, stone, or oil, wood explains human history.

The activists of the 1990s worked so diligently that they were written out of history.

How scientific thought informed colonization and religious conversion during the Age of Discovery.

Jack Kennedy, we hardly know ye—and to know ye is not to love ye.

How the preeminent photographic record of the period excluded people of color from the nation’s self-image.

How did the genre of self-help go from one focused on collective empowerment to one serving the class hierarchy as it stands?

“Robert Johnson was one of the most inventive geniuses of all time,” wrote Bob Dylan. “We still haven’t caught up with him.”

Uncovering the truth about the 1898 massacre of black voters in Wilmington, North Carolina.

A new book on American punk paints the movement as the last gasp of left-wing cultural resistance in the 1980s.

"The Road to Unfreedom," Timothy Snyder's book on Russian influence around the world, is built on contradiction and conspiracy.

A review of Eric Foner's The Second Founding.

The hugely influential but largely forgotten labor leader Ben Fletcher couldn’t be more relevant to the most urgent political projects of today.

A new history charts the global legacy of Fordist mass production, tracing its appeal to political formations on both the left and the right.

Democrats and Republicans are increasingly united in an anti-China front. But their approaches to U.S. foreign policy diverge.

Why debunking mesmerism only made it stronger.

Rick Perlstein's "Reaganland" charts the conservative counter-revolution that moved the US to the right.

A new history of Ed Logue and his vision of urban renewal documents the broken promises of midcentury liberalism.

A new book explains how U.S. political elites sold the UN to the public as a route to global peace, while all along wanting it as a cover for militarization.

A review of "Descent" – a family story that blends the real world and the imagination.

In the nearly sixty years since the Cuban missile crisis, the story of near-catastrophe has only grown more complicated.

A new biography of Joseph McCarthy does not reckon with the devastating effects of anti-communism.

A review of "How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America."

This 1952 textbook serves as an example of the "patriotic history" that Donald Trump grew up with and calls for today.

A new book charts the long contest between elites and the forces of democracy seeking to dismantle their power.

Saidiya Hartman’s "Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments" is a strike against the archives’ silence regarding the lives of Black women in the shadow of slavery.

The system that is nobody’s first choice.

A new book documents the history of three specific mechanisms of expulsion: formal deportation, voluntary departure, and "self-deportation."

Revisionist biographers have given us countless perspectives, from Honest Abe to Killer Lincoln. Is there a version that’s true to his time and attuned to ours?

Reflecting on "Capitalism and Slavery" (1944), a work that continues to influence scholarship today.

The 50-year effort to advance a conservative legal agenda.

The border blurred the stark dividing line between white and black in America, something that Americans like William Ellis used to their advantage.

A review of "You Talkin’ to Me? The Unruly History of New York English."

The 1850 novel reveals disturbing continuities between the 19th century cholera pandemics and global health crises today.

Even housing policies that sought to create more Black homeowners were stymied by racism and a determination to shrink the government’s presence.

Have historians of the conservative movement focused too much on its intellectuals?

A white man of the Jim Crow South, he couldn’t escape the burden of race, yet derived creative force from it.

There is, and always has been, a vanishingly thin line between charismatic democratic rulers and charismatic authoritarians.

McCarthy never sent a single “subversive” to jail, but, decades later, the spirit of his conspiracy-mongering endures.

In “Radical Hamilton,” Christian Parenti argues that the left should use Alexander Hamilton’s mythologized status to drive home his full agenda.

Rick Perlstein’s epic series shows political history and cultural history cannot be disentangled.

On Paul Ortiz’s “African American and Latinx History of the United States.”

For a long time, European historians paid little attention to the extraordinary series of events that now goes by the name of the Haitian Revolution.

Philip Wylie’s "Generation of Vipers," revisited.

Paper was never simply a writing surface, but a complicated substance that folded itself into the fabric of culture and consciousness.

When Nicholson Baker searched for the truth about biological weapons, he found a fog of redaction.

A new book systematically defends the American Founding against those who believe it was destined to end in nihilism.

Where does Edith Wharton's idea of innocence fall into our own world?