Excerpts

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.

The history of labor strikes shows that, in order to achieve lasting success, workers need to capture political power.

Why a radical group of environmentalists turned to direct action in defense of wild nature.

Two historians shed light on the atrocities of Native American enslavement and genocide.

A review of four books that all deal with the long-lasting contradictions between the mythology and reality of farming.

During and after slavery, some whites considered legal marriage too sacred an institution to be offered to black Americans.

Baldwin's often overlooked final years of activism during the 1980's.

Du Bois's "Black Reconstruction in America" showed that the black freedom struggle has always been one for radical democracy.

The political scientist argues that the desire of identity groups for recognition is a key threat to liberalism.

In her groundbreaking new book, Monica Muñoz Martinez uncovers the legacy of a brutal past.

The elusive meaning of privacy in America.

Histories of the Jews reveal a lot about the times in which they were written.

How did the “moral economy”—a concept that once encompassed a radical critique of capitalism—become the province of billionaires?

(When It’s Already Summarized in This Article?)

A review of Zephyr Teachout's "Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United."

Why so many commentators share an overly grim view of America’s fate.

A 1974 review of Robert Caro's "The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York."