Excerpts

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.

A Christian story?

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.

Today, nearly 2.2 million Americans are behind bars. Can contemporary mass incarceration's roots be traced to LBJ's Great Society?

A review of Michael Kazin's "War Against War: The American Fight for Peace, 1914-1918."

Judicial dissent in the Supreme Court has a long history.

It's impossible to revisit the history of America's quest for racial purity without sometimes being reminded of the current public discourse.