Excerpts

American unions have struggled to make substantial gains since the ’70s, but not for the reasons historians think.

A new book says the conflict began in the late 19th century and subsumed even World War II as our defining event.

The autobiography of NBA star Craig Hodges contains lessons for the pro athletes who are speaking up today.

How the Spanish-American War laid the groundwork for American empire.

Clinton's memoir addresses the gendered discourse and larger feminist contexts of the 2016 presidential campaign.

A biography of Stevie Nicks does little to dispel the magic.

A new biography of Lucy Parsons makes it clear that the activist deserves attention apart from her more well-known husband.

Mike St. Thomas reviews ‘Paradise Lost: A Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald.'

'The Population Bomb' made dire predictions—and triggered a wave of repression around the world.

How a work of science fiction anticipated the coming of Trump.

For every amusingly wrong prediction in “Toward the Year 2018,” there’s one unnervingly close to the mark.

A new history argues that the Second Amendment was intended to perpetuate white settlers' violence toward Native Americans.

The notion that a government’s chief obligation is getting stuff done is a fairly recent arrival on the historical scene.

Ta-Nehisi Coates' latest book preaches political fatalism. But black activism has always believed in the possibility of change.

Noam Maggor’s new book captures how it took both sides of the American continent to revitalize the economy after the Civil War.

Jacob Glatstein’s 1930s Yiddish novel ‘Homecoming at Twilight’ foresaw the coming doom.

The actor’s persona was inextricable from the toxic culture of Cold War machismo.

John W. W. Zeiser reviews Peter Bagge's graphic biography "Fire!! The Zora Neale Hurston Story."

What does the Klan of the 1920s have to teach us about the resurgence of organized bigotry in the Trump era?

How Laura Ingalls Wilder’s frontier vision of freedom and survival lives on in Trump’s America.

Ron Chernow’s biography reminds our 21st-century selves of the distinction between character and personality.

“We are starved!” cried the sixty skeletal members of the English colony of Jamestown as provisions arrived in 1610.

A new book argues that Darwin failed to capture the American imagination because of the untimely death of Henry David Thoreau.

How the contest between capitalism and communism shaped world politics—and defines today’s inequalities.

He fought to remake the center—not yield to it.

Feminism has been on the march since the 1970s, but so has the conservative backlash.

What are Americans really talking about when they talk about religious freedom?

A review of "Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women’s Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics."

Four books contend with the lifting of the 108-year old curse.

Judith Weisenfeld’s book, New World A-Coming, reinterprets the various religious movements among African Americans in the early twentieth century.

The ardent but flawed movement against World War I.

In the 1930s, the Germans were fascinated by the global leader in legal racism—the United States.

Rigid racial codes in the early 20th century gained the admiration not only of many American elites, but also of Nazi Germany.

How the Supreme Court got it wrong.

How the silent majority became a loud and angry minority.

In 1919, white Americans visited awful violence on black Americans. So black Americans decided to fight back.

There was little indication 166 years ago that the book would enter the canon of great American fiction.

100 years ago, war proved to be a godsend for a president with no tolerance for opposition. We would be wise to heed the lesson.

With Donald Trump bringing the Ku Klux Klan back into the spotlight, we must return to William Bradford Huie's 1967 novel.

Fast food did not just find its way to low-income neighborhoods. It was brought there by the federal government.

In the age of Trump, Madison Grant's influential work of scientific racism takes on a new salience.

"Sex and the Constitution: Sex, Religion, and Law from America’s Origins to the Twenty-First Century" by Geoffrey R. Stone.

In the wake of the Second World War, Eleanor Roosevelt seized the moment and gave lasting life to the idea of universal human rights.

John T. Edge's "The Potlikker Papers" looks at multiculturalism, conflict, and civil rights in the American South—all through the history of the region's food.

Making history more appealing to the public may come at a cost.

How the Nobel Prize–winning economist James M. Buchanan shaped today’s antigovernment politics.

The surprising persistence of Henry David Thoreau.

The 1850s were a turning point for globalization, from telegraphs to colonization.

The rise​ of mass incarceration in the early 1970s was fueled by white fear of black crime. But the fear of crime wasn’t confined to whites.

A new book outlines an epidemic of over-diagnosis and addiction.