Excerpts

Was the impeachment of Andrew Johnson a matter of national principles? Or an affair of pragmatic politics?

Joyce Chaplin on the malevolence of American goodwill.

"The Common Wind" covers the radical world of black mariners, rebels, and runaways banding together to realize their freedom.

Challenges to the legitimacy of the profession have forced it to examine itself. What, exactly, constitutes a mental disorder?

Before Roe, abortion providers operated on the margins of medicine. They still do.

Black homeowners have been an oft ignored actor in metropolitan history despite playing a central role.

Jenny Hendrix on the 'Naughty Nineties,' the decade in which America rediscovered sex.

James Campbell opens the FBI file on James Baldwin.

Hobsbawm saw his political hopes crumble. He used that defeat to tell the story of our age.

In ignoring the messy realities of westward expansion, McCullough’s "The Pioneers" is both incomplete and dull.

How the Vermont senator went from a third-party independent to a 2020 frontrunner.

Michael Kimmage considers "The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History" by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen.

America’s obsession with beef was born of conquest and exploitation.

A review of three recent books that delve into the history and science of vaccines and immunity, and the anxieties that accompany them.

A new insider account reveals how the Obama administration’s botched bailout deal reinforced neoliberal Clintonism.

The idea that liberal democracies shielded science from politics was always flawed.

Unearthing the beauty in the wayward, the fiction in the facts, and the thriving existence in the face of a blanked out history.

A new book argues that, politically, messianic movements were often light-years ahead of their time. But at what cost?

A review of "City of Inmates" by Kelly Lytle Hernández.

A review of Daniel T. Rodgers’ "As a City on a Hill: The Story of America’s Most Famous Lay Sermon."

A towering new biography of the great American orator and public intellectual Frederick Douglass.

Three recent books explore different aspects of opiate addiction in America.

"Everything, of course."

Henry Adams's classic autobiography speaks to concerns of privilege, failure, and progress in his rapidly changing world.

Two new books recount the leading role women have played in Appalachian social justice movements.

During Reconstruction, true citizenship finally seemed in reach for black Americans. Then their dreams were dismantled.

Greg Grandin’s new book charts the past and present of American expansionism and its high human costs.

A new book tells the history of America through its workplace struggles.

In 1907, a patent application for the pigeon camera was submitted.

Rodriguez has captured celebrities in repose and farmworkers on strike.

American niceness is the absolute worst thing to ever happen in human history.

More than 150 years ago, Frederick Law Olmsted changed how Americans think of public space.

His reputation was savaged because he had the temerity to question the 'Good War' narrative.

To convert was not just a matter of belief, but also a claim to power.

It’s the 200th anniversary of Frederick Douglass’s birth, and some on the right have been crashing the party.

A new history of the early republic explores the origins of originalism.

A review of Robert Dallek's book, "Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life."

Our ethics and desires can shape digital networks at least as forcefully as those networks influence us.

A review of "She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity."

A review of George Hutchinson's "Facing the Abyss: American Literature and Culture in the 1940s."

White women and the economy of slavery.

The enduring popularity of "The Camp of the Saints" sheds light on nativists' historical opposition to immigration.

Journalist Elizabeth Gordon had unsparing opinions about the inadequacy of both mainstream and elite notions of design.

How the region switched from being the stronghold of one party to the base of its adversary.

In neoliberalism, state power is needed to enforce market relations, but the site of that power must be hidden from politics.

A new book shows that for female slaveholders, the business of human exploitation was just as profitable as it was for men.

Hoover was a brilliant manager, a wizard of logistics, and an effective humanitarian. Why do we remember him as a failure?

Americans tend to see their country as a nation-state, not an imperial power.

A new book argues that the Constitution’s framers believed that vast concentrations of wealth were the enemy of democracy.

He never denounced slavery and was brutal towards American Indians, but remains a popular figure. Why?