Excerpts

The question of what Jefferson meant by “all men” has defined American law and politics for too long.

The leading arguments in support of Black voting rights were race-conscious at their core.

Fareed Zakaria blames America’s crisis on “polarization,” but the real issue is asymmetric radicalization: the Right’s anti-democratic turn.

Blaming video games for violence saves Americans from having to grapple with deeper, harder to solve societal problems.

The Congressional Hackathon highlights fading faith in tech fixes and exposes the limits of AI optimism.

The geological origins of the American Revolution.

What happens when Hitler’s shadow fades—and what moral vision replaces it?

The former President once made an offhand remark about Charles Manson’s guilt. The reaction shows how aberrant Donald Trump’s rhetoric is.

Nearly seventy years after its creation, the S&P 500 may be fit for purpose, but it is clearly no longer the narrow one of the 1950s.

The great civil rights leader was suspicious of charisma, and she had something else in mind.

The rise of the cheap, daily newspaper in the 19th century remade how Americans engaged with the world.

What caused the global populist wave? Blame the screens.

The web of Atlantic trading routes and solidarity among maritime workers meant a fugitive's chances of reaching freedom below deck were better than over land.

Trump's NSPM-7 is a pivotal policy endangering free expression in the United States.

Cory Doctorow’s ‘Enshittification’ describes how tech platforms (and everything else) went down the sewer. Hint: It rhymes with ‘deshmegulation.’

After a century of big-government bureaucracy, the U.S. has a developer-in-chief.

The use of the punitive tactic exploded a century after US officials had deemed it too torturous.

The absence of Native perspectives in American history books and classrooms has been remarked on for over 50 years. Will it ever change?

"An account of how chips became a strategically vital resource whose importance is overlooked at our peril.”

To finance the war, the Union had to turn to the banks, and with lasting consequences.

The first maps of the nuclear contamination of the world reinforced our understanding of the entire biosphere as a radically interconnected ecological space.

Sewing for voting in post-Jim Crow Mississippi.

Zbigniew Brzezinski’s ideas had a profound impact in his time. What would he think of the world we face today?

Across the ideological spectrum, it’s become a bedrock value. What does it mean?

Robert’s Rules shaped 19th-century civic life but were later rejected by 1960s movements, showing shifting ideas of democracy and community.

A new book frames America's gun culture as the consequence of the U.S.'s post-World War II decisions to favor consumerism over safety.

A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin’s Freedom Budget is the key to understanding the appeal of the Democratic nominee for NYC mayor.

Through his work in both the Teamsters and the NAACP, Ernest Calloway embodied the potential of a united labor and civil rights movement.

Although the American tradition is broadly liberal, it is best understood as divided between two schools: classical and managerial liberalism.

Richard Beck charts how 9/11 shapes the way we live now.

As "The Best American Poetry" anthology ends after nearly forty years, the contradictions of its influence stand out.

VHS, Star Wars, and the freedom to remember.

From the Watts Riots to 2025 wildfires, California’s FAIR Plan has stood in the way of transformative change.

Archives from Madison, Wisconsin show the role of mechanized horses, or equine "cyborg" labor, in the growth of U.S. cities.

Audre Lorde’s legacy shows how feminism can honor difference, as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor argues in this review.

King recalled: “I liked his voice, though I had no idea he was getting ready to conquer the world.”

As legend has it, an onstage altercation took place between the two icons in the middle of The Who's set at Woodstock. Or did it?

Now they’ve become an American ritual.

To him, the Revolution was “not made but prevented.”

Trump isn’t the first U.S. president to use the military base to incarcerate migrants.

A habitual drunkard’s journey through guardianship and the asylum.

As a polio survivor, I am a dinosaur today. My great hope is that our country’s living memory of the disease ends with my generation.

Globalization left millions behind as a policy and transformed the world politically, a new book argues.

Conspiracy theories about her disappearance do a disservice to the pilot’s remarkable, flawed legacy.

Tenure is more than just academic freedom; it is also about labor protection, and it has a long history.

"The older I got, the more I realized that our acceptance was . . . fragile, conditional. The signs were small but telling.”

Cy Endfield, film noir, and the blacklist.

A biography of Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah casts the post-WWII era as a Black liberation epic rather than a psychodrama between Moscow and Washington.

From the 1994 Crime Act to Trump 2.0.

The ’80s I thought I remembered now feel very different to me.