Excerpts

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?

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.

Interrogating 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.