Excerpts

Since the invention of the automobile, police have used the dangers of America's roads to justify their growing oversight of motorists.

Massacres, myths, and the making of the great November holiday.

The University of Virginia was supposed to transform a slave-owning generation, but it failed.

His political evolution points to a different locus of power than the one liberals tend to invoke when discussing the era’s history.

In Coates's debut novel, he sets out to recover the struggles for emancipation that have been lost to the past.

Jill Lepore’s awkward embrace of the nation.

Historians tell stories about the past. A new book argues that those stories are often dangerously wrong.

A review of Lewis Hyde’s “A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past.”

H.W. Brands' new one-volume history of the American West reads too much like a movie we’ve already seen.

The question of how to fix the tech industry is now inseparable from the question of how to fix late 20th century capitalism.

The making of the black working class.

A review of two recent books about white paramilitarism in the wake of the Cold War.

A new book explores the tangled politics behind a global addiction.

How three late 19th century equality movements failed to promote equality.

The pitfalls and the potential of cryptocurrency are explored in three recent publications.

A review of two new books on the postwar origins of “the Environment.”

A new book makes the case.

Discussions of eugenics and other fascistic ideas in American history tend to provoke the defense that they never took root. So why do they keep flowering?

A review of Roger D. Launius's "Apollo’s Legacy" and Teasel E. Muir-Harmony's "Apollo to the Moon."

‘Cold Warriors’ traces how the U.S. and Soviet government used writers like George Orwell and Boris Pasternak to wage ideological battles during the Cold War.

They slaughtered our ancestors and derailed our history. And they’re not finished with us yet.

A review of two books exploring the importance and legacy of the founding of the English colony at Jamestown.

The great showman taught us to love hyperbole, fake news, and a good hoax. A century and a half later, the show has escaped the tent.

Barnum called himself the “Prince of Humbugs,” which left open the possibility that one day there would arise a king.

We might say that these books are recording a life with music, and that they are worth listening to.

The Supreme Court justice may have been heralded by many of his progressive peers, but the legacy he left behind is far more ambiguous.

A review of Casey Cep's new book on Harper Lee's never written true crime book, "The Reverend."

For a century, we’ve loved our cars. They haven’t loved us back.

A new take on the origins of our ideas about religious liberty.

A century after the 19th Amendment, it’s worth remembering why suffragists fought so hard, and who was fighting against them.

In a new book, Lisa Duggan spotlights the Randian spirit of what she calls the “Neoliberal Theater of Cruelty.”

Only in the science fiction genre can one compare an alien to a woman.

The right turned Linda Taylor into a bogeyman. But her real life was much more complicated.

What happened to the great defender of Empire when he settled in the States?

Amy Kaplan’s new book examines the pioneering cultural myths that have tied Israel and the United States together.

The Boston Symphony’s refusal to play the national anthem in its one concerts triggered a xenophobic panic that led an arrest.

Without accounting for the often-invisible work of others in his research, Robert Caro's new memoir is not so much inspiration as an exercise in self-celebration.

Freeing Thoreau from layers of caricature that have long distorted his legacy.

A new book on James Buchanan and public-choice theory explores the Southern roots of the free-market right.

A history sheds light on venture capital’s ties to the military-industrial complex.

Why is U.S. foreign policy dominated by an unelected, often reckless cohort of “the best and the brightest”?

Athletes who helped shape our times and the economic freedom that enabled them.

A new history of Reconstruction traces the roots of American “respectability” politics through artwork.

A review of Kim Phillips-Fein’s "Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics."

A consideration of four recent books that attempt to contend with the rise of Trumpism at home and abroad.

A new book rescues the Poor People’s Campaign from its reputation as a desperate last cry of the civil rights movement.

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

"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.