Excerpts

An interview with Steven Conn about his new book, “Lies of the Land: Seeing Rural America for What It Is—and Isn’t.”

Now, and for some years to come, we will need a lot less Paul Weiss, and a lot more Benjamin Warner.

It’s time for another national teach-in movement.

The 250th anniversary of "the shot heard round the world" is a reminder of the rights the Patriots fought for.

The university’s last “finest hour” was more than 200 years ago.

Americans need to reconnect with their innate dislike of arbitrary rule.

Greg Grandin’s sweeping history of the new world shows how immutably intertwined the United States is with Latin America.

How today’s far right manages to combine the call for economic freedom with pseudoscience about natural hierarchies of race and IQ.

Donald Trump is using decades-old laws to expel critics and opponents.

New York would never be the Puritans' austere city on a hill, yet it became America’s vibrant heart of capitalism.

As Americans file their taxes this tax season, the Trump administration threatens to unravel the modern fiscal state.

Under the Trump administration's book police, Jackie Robinson’s life and actions are considered dangerous memories.

Can a new book rescue Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre’s activism from irrelevance?

A new book highlights Josephine Baker’s wartime contribution, and how she used her fame to provide cover and promote equal rights.

Chief Justice John Roberts called it “obvious” that the infamous decision has “no place in law under the Constitution.” Recent events suggest otherwise.

The National Garden of American Heroes represents a dangerous shift in values—from inquiry to reverence.

One hundred years ago, "The Great Gatsby" was first published. It remains one of the books that almost every literate American has read.

Aimee Semple McPherson took to the radio to spread the Gospel, but her mysterious disappearance cast a shadow on her reputation.

Reformers linked tobacco use to a deterioration of social and familial values, a habit that disrupted the sanctity of the home.

As Democrats became the party of proceduralism, they sidestepped a crucial debate.

How the discovery of a long-lost monument shattered trust between a Japanese American community and the museum built to preserve its history.

How a myth about farmers taking on the British has fueled more than two centuries of exclusionary nationalism.

A global marketplace has shaped the U.S. whiskey industry for a century, even as it brands itself distinctly American.

Brandon Shimoda’s book about the memorialization of Japanese internment camps also speaks to the brutal system of migrant detention that continues to this day.

The 1930 tariff bill hurt exporters and provoked other countries to enact their own tariffs as the U.S. economy grappled with the Great Depression.

Trump is relying on a 1798 law with a bad history.

A new Library of America edition of John Quincy Adams’s writings demonstrates the enduring appeal—and real shortcomings—of his revolutionary conservatism.

Historians have revealed that the story Americans long learned about the end of the Civil War was a myth.

How endless options became our only option.

A movement for some Illinois counties to join Indiana threatens to resurrect an ominous practice from the 19th century.

As vital to the success of industrial New England as the mill girls who toiled in the factories were the women who oversaw their lodging.

Since Trump took office, the park service — charged with preserving American history — has changed how it describes key moments from slavery to Jim Crow.

How neoliberals fell in love with “human nature”—the glue that still unites the divergent factions of the new right.

Her ghostwritten autobiography diminishes her, and I found out why.

Japanese survivors recall the day the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and warn of future risks.

Accidentally sharing attack plans in a group chat is bad. Causing a rising superpower to declare war on you because of a Western Union telegram is worse.

The correspondence of Soviet and American women during the Cold War.

The urge to police the past is hardly an invention of the Trump Administration. It is the reflexive obsession of autocrats everywhere.

William Jennings Bryan stoked a worker revolt against protectionism that led to the first income tax.

All Americans with some education are aware that Manifest Destiny was one of the Bad Things in our past and very few know any more about it than that.

The health secretary’s clearest plans for psychiatric treatment are a retreat to the past.

In the 1930s, approximately half a million Mexicans left the United States. Many families had American-born children to whom Mexico was a foreign land.

This Passover, American Jews should embrace the fight for “emancipation of all kinds.”

From historians to horror writers to white nationalists, attempts to explain the settlement's fate reveal a great deal about our own attitudes.

How the NAACP made the police riot in Columbia, Tennessee national news.

Trump claimed that the income tax was passed for “reasons unknown to mankind” and caused the Great Depression. Here’s the real history.

In 1966, the conductor arrived in Vienna with a mission: to restore Gustav Mahler’s place in 20th-century music.

Reflections on the literary legacy of a timeless American novel.

Making a whole group of people this vulnerable does not just happen overnight.

Special Group and PFIAB meeting minutes provide dramatic view of CIA operations.