Excerpts

Why do Americans get so worked up by the basic assertion that all science is political?

How Plessy v. Ferguson shaped the history of racial discrimination in America.

Is it time for an end to American imperialism? Two authors re-examine American intervention overseas.

What the battle between Herbert Hoover and FDR can teach us.

Joy Lisi Rankin’s book on the history of personal computing looks at the technology’s forgotten democratic promise.

For all of its strengths, Richard Rothstein’s new book does not account for the central role capitalism played in segregating America's cities.

An examination of the tragic echoes of Reconstruction-era politics following Obama's presidency.

A new book looks at four different experiments in feminist separatism.

A new book traces the role of Richard Oakes in the turbulent but transformative civil rights era of the 1960s and '70s.

Is the groundswell of popular discontent in Europe and the Americas what’s really threatening democracy?

A review of Gary Dorrien's new book, “Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel.”

Jill Lepore's widely-praised history of the U.S. relies on the eventual exit of indigenous actors to make way for other dramas.

David Garland makes a powerful argument that will persuade many readers that the death penalty is unwise and unjustified.

A Black Power method moves to destabilize or interrogate dominant white perspectives in mainstream media outlets, government records, and in the very definition of what constitutes a credible source.

Deadly fogs, moralistic diatribes, debunked medical theory in what is considered to be the first modern tale of urban apocalypse.

A new book shows the remarkable contrast between 19th-century women’s views of miscarriage and the loss-focused rhetoric of today.

Earl Swift’s Chesapeake Requiem looks at life on a beautiful, vanishing Virginia island in Chesapeake Bay.

The 45 years of peace between the Cold War superpowers were 45 years of killing for much of the rest of the world.

Historians still lack a good way to define, discuss, and address historical actions that appear to be "conspiracies."

A new biography of the architect shows why it’s hard to ignore the authoritarian characteristics of some of his most celebrated work.

Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge’s strange elegy for capitalism.

Four nineteenth-century authors offered blueprints for a better world—but their progressive visions had a dark side.

Sarah Igo’s "The Known Citizen" examines the linked histories of privacy and surveillance in the United States.

Claire L. Evans’s new book is a bittersweet reminder that the internet used to be freer and more fun.

A new book shows how women's leadership in black nationalist movements has always been hidden in plain sight.

The long, entwined history of America First and the American dream.

“The Improbable Wendell Willkie” offers a look at how American politics might have been.

The horrors of the fugitive slave laws, the costs of union, and the value of comity.

How monopolies have flourished—and undermined democracy.

A new book examines the first generation of button-pushing Americans at the turn of the 20th century.

City dwellers of the 19th century were dogged by a foul terror: miasma.

Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Cold War.

A new book argues that race and racism fueled the fires of the American Revolution.

Linda Gordon’s new book captures how white supremacy has long been part of our political mainstream.

Looking at color photographs of WWI feels like seeing a familiar scene through a different pair of eyeglasses.

For hundreds of years, Florida has had the reputation of being a little unstable.

How neoliberalism shapes the global economy and limits the power of democracies.

Considering six books on the outbreak of World War I and its place in history.

What, if anything, can we learn from the 1928 Paris Peace Pact?

How statistical data came to rule public policy.

You can’t tell the story of America without the story of labor.

A review of Jill Lepore's new book, which she has called the most ambitious single-volume American history written in generations.

Three recent books challenge the tech industry's myths of self-reliance and prescience.

Poet Joshua Rivkin’s new book about Cy Twombly is “stranger and more personal than a biography.”

A review of David Blight's new biography of Frederick Douglass.

Voting rights are often associated with the Civil Rights Movement, but this fight extends throughout American history.

Hubert Humphrey and the unmaking of Cold War liberalism.

Seymour Hersh and the ambiguities of investigative reporting.

50 years after King's death, his image has been transformed and stripped of its radicalism.

A new book chronicles the shocking, decades-long effort to combat venereal disease by locking up girls and women.