Excerpts

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.

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.