Excerpts

The paradoxes of C.L.R. James.

The boundary lines preceding Mason and Dixon, everybody knows, were a sham. What’s to follow will be no better.

One interpretation presents the country as irredeemably tainted by its past. Another contends that the United States has also tended toward egalitarianism.

Harry Bridges may no longer be widely known, but his philosophy of inclusive, democratic unionism imbues much of today’s most ambitious organizing campaigns.

How did Americans come to love “mid-century modern”?

In the poetry of Jones Very, whom his contemporaries considered “eccentric” and “mad," the self is detached from everything by an intoxicated egoism.

David Beito has penned one of the most damning scholarly histories of FDR to date.

Well before the hippies arrived, LSD and other hallucinogens were poised to enter the American mainstream.

100 years ago, Chief Justice William Howard Taft made the Court more efficient and more powerful, marking a turning point whose effects are still being felt.

On Samuel Moyn's Cold War liberalism.

Whatever writing is today, it is not self-evident. But writing by hand did not simply continue to “advance” until it inevitably began to erode.

On how Europe’s interwar period informs the present.

A new biography examines the enigma of the musician.

George Washington's fraught relationship with Native Americans.

A new book shows that Uber was a symbol of a neoliberal philosophy that neglected public funding and regulation in favor of rule by private corporations.

Alicia Puglionesi explores the damage white supremacy did to Native Americans and their land.

Popular accounts of the Holocaust overlook its irrationality and often disordered violence.

Bruce Kuklick traces the meaning of the term “fascist” from its origins to the present day and how it has, over the years, gradually lost its coherence.

Over the past year, two prominent historians have invited readers to rethink the master narrative of US history.

A compelling history of the fertile 1950s-’60s firmament surveys Lower Manhattan’s Coenties Slip.

A memoir of the Family Stone.

The economist’s lifelong pugilism wasn’t in spite of his success—it may have been the key to it.

Robert Frost’s correspondence on teaching, writing and having fun.

“No harm if true; but, in fact, not true.”

A new book investigates the indigenous Americans who were brought to or traveled to Europe in the 1500s—a story central to the beginning of globalization.

Two new books, including ‘Locking Up Our Own,’ address major blind spots about the causes of America’s carceral failure.

A new history of the ‘New York Times.’

On Kliph Nesteroff’s book, “Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars.”

With "Force and Freedom," Carter Jackson makes a stimulating and insightful debut which will have a major influence on abolition movement scholarship.

James Longstreet became an apostate for supporting black civil rights during Reconstruction.

Samuel W. Franklin’s latest book explains how we sold ourselves out to a fake virtue.

Chicago economists had free rein in Chile. The country is still recovering.

After the English Revolution—and an island’s experiment with republicanism—a genuine restoration was never in the cards.

The Bonaventure Hotel was a battleground in the war between transnational real estate capital and the city’s multiracial working class.

Considering the suppressed legacy of Claude McKay’s two “lost” novels, “Amiable with Big Teeth” and “Romance in Marseille.”

How William Cooper envisioned a web entangling global capitalism, the government, and UFOs, and incubated the politics of conspiracy.

Former Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust’s extraordinary memoir recalls painful memories for her--and me.

The complex history, career, and legacy of one of America's most popular speakers and reformers.

A new biography examines the life and times of the pioneering activist, abolitionist, and writer.

What the tech pioneer can, and can’t, teach us.

In "Ordinary Notes," Sharpe considers Black culture “in all of its shade and depth and glow.”

What roiled the mind of Nebraska poet John Neihardt with whom Black Elk, the iconic Lakota holy man, shared his story?

For a full understanding of any historical period, we must read the literature written while its events were still unfolding.

In 1950, the Sullivinian Institute was created to push the boundaries of psychoanalysis. By 1980, its therapists and patients had become a small paramilitary.

Judge the author of the “Feminine Mystique” not by the gains she made, but by her experience.

The law, passed in a frenzy after the First World War, is a disaster. Why is it still on the books?

The War on Poverty comes to life in a new book that explores how welfare mothers in Las Vegas built an organizing juggernaut that transformed lives.

A look into the life, art, and "wildness" of influential choreographer Martha Graham.

What made those left-of-the-dial broadcasts so special during the 1980s, ‘90s and 2000s?

The schism isn't between TV viewers who love a show and those who hate it—it’s between those who love it in very different ways.