Excerpts

How can Americans have such different memories of slavery?

Fred Kaplan's new book asks why it took Abraham Lincoln so long to embrace emancipation.

The movement finally gets the big, bold history it deserves.

A nation divided, even at birth.

Today, 1 in 3 American babies are delivered via the procedure, twice what the World Health Organization recommends.

Scott W. Stern’s book documents a decades-long program to incarcerate “promiscuous” women.

Many Americans could have gone either way during the Revolution.

A review of "American Honor: The Creation of the Nation’s Ideals during the Revolutionary Era."

Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Jane Goodall, and Alice Waters in the ’60s.

A reflection on Zora Neale Hurston’s newly-published book, "Barracoon."

How is it that the era of neoliberalism coincides almost perfectly with the triumphant rise of a discourse of human rights?

David Blight reviews Ron Chernow's biography of Ulysses S. Grant.

How do ideological debates on gender roles influence the abortion debate?

Meet the good white mothers, PTA members, and newspaper columnists who were also committed white supremacists.

From Benjamin Franklin to Quora, how advice has shaped Americans’ behavior and expectations of the world.

The perils of comparing Trump to twentieth-century dictators.

A new book by Eric Lott frames white appropriation of blackness as containing the possibility of greater racial solidarity.

Despite what Steve King says, the U.S. was never a Christian nation.

On the origins of racial exclusion in the society that would become the United States of America.

"The Color of Law" offers an indicting critique of the progressive agenda.

The America that emerged out of the Civil War was meant to be a radically more equal place. What went wrong?

A history of modernity as a history of factories struggles to see beyond their walls.

The 200-year legal struggle that led to Citizens United and gave corporations the rights of people.

A new history recovers the forgotten legacy and radical implications of the Kerner Commission.

A review of "The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap."

In the case of Chester Arthur, the story is one of surprising redemption.

A crucial new work of generational analysis explores how society turned millennials into human capital.

Selma and the unfulfilled promise of civil rights.

How Americans got so weird about science.

The radical vision of Wages for Housework.

The myth that Appalachia is uniformly White lingers, but communities of “Affrilachians” were documented in the 1930s.

How Walt Whitman became the quintessential poet of disability and death.

Three new books paint a more nuanced portrait of the American militias whose gun rights have been protected since the founding.

The University of Virginia has long been a bastion of white supremacy and white supremacy–validating scholarship.

A review of "Closing the Courthouse Door: How Your Constitutional Rights Became Unenforceable" by Erwin Chemerinsky.

"Masterless Men" shows how poor whites benefited from slavery's end, but does not diminish the experiences of the enslaved.

"Masterless Men" shows how the antebellum political economy made poor southern whites into a volatile, and potentially disruptive, class.

"Hillbilly Elegy" has been used to explain the 2016 election, but its logic is rooted in a dangerous myth about race in Appalachia.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, American comedy just was Jewish comedy, tamped down to appease audiences.

A new book, ‘Active Bodies,’ explores the history.

Reflecting on the tremendous impact of "The Souls of Black Folk," on the 150th anniversary of Du Bois' birth.

The long historical roots and continuing relevance of the disgraced preacher's story.

His presidency was known for corruption, scandal, and booze. In a new book, Ron Chernow attempts to rehabilitate it.

Nazi Germany has closer ties to America and its history of institutionalized racism than some may think.

Understanding the immense reach and cultural implications of Latin American music.

A review of "Lines of Descent: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity," by Kwame Anthony Appiah.

Lily Geismer reviews the second edition of Corey Robin’s “The Reactionary Mind.”

An 18th-century novel explores how American society handles capitalism's collateral damage — and who deserves a second chance.

The rise and fall of Clintonism.

A new book about the My Lai massacre raises the question: how much of an aberration was the infamous wartime episode?