Excerpts

Rewriting the history and future of an iconic suburb.

We cannot understand the last fifty years of U.S. history—certainly not the first thing about Black history—without studying the emergence and evolution of rap.

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

An Alabama man faces execution by nitrogen gas—the first U.S. execution by gas in a quarter-century, 100 years after the practice began.

Long before the Sacklers appeared on the scene, families like the Astors and the Delanos cemented their upper-crust status through the global trade in opium.

How The Go-Go’s emerged from the LA punk scene in the late ’70s to become the first and only female band to have a number one album.

Barbecue is a cornerstone of American cuisine, containing all of the contradictions of the country itself.

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

In the 1950s the construction of a dam on the Texas–Mexico border displaced communities from their land—and anticipated the wall-building underway today.

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.

The special relationship between the United States and Israel was cemented by the support offered by Lyndon B. Johnson throughout the sixties.

What happened to the Bailey family in the Detroit suburb of Warren became a flashpoint in the national battle over integration.

How the Southern Strategy of the late 20th century gave rise to the modern GOP.

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.

“It was made under the worst of conditions,” the filmmaker reveals in a new book. “People versus the eternal sea. The sea won the battle.”

Politicians from both sides used to agree on immigration policy. What happened?

Researchers studying the 160-year-old fur of a dog named Mutton found that the breed existed for at least 5,000 years before European colonizers eradicated it.

A new biography examines the enigma of the musician.

The 20th century brought dinner parties to the masses, along with some truly unhinged entertaining advice.

As director of the FBI for decades, J. Edgar Hoover helped build a massive, professionalized national security state and hounded leftists out of public life.

Powered by compressed air, the system transported millions of letters between 1897 and 1953.

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.

Mars fantasists still cling to dreams of the Old West.

When speech offends, who decides where boundaries should be drawn?

The exhibition “Mermaids and Monsters” explores hoaxes of yore.

How decades-old decisions to build two California prisons in a dry lakebed and a chaotic climate left 8,000 incarcerated people at risk.

In March 1911, the segregated Crownsville asylum opened outside Baltimore, Maryland, admitting only Black patients.

Republicans may claim otherwise, but the civil rights hero was no color-blind conservative.

Americans have been isolated at the U.N. on Israel for a half century — but that used to prompt fierce debate.

Lost cause narratives sometimes have been powerful enough to build or destroy political regimes. They can advance a politics of grievance.

In the 19th century, civil wars tore apart the US, Mexico and Argentina. Then came democracy’s fight against reaction.

Prohibition—and its newly created underground economy—changed the way women lived, worked, and socialized.

A reminder of how tricky it is to balance protecting transparency and freedom of association.

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.

Without a shared civic narrative – the pursuit of liberal democratic self-government – the rival regional cultures of the United States agree on very little.

The 26th president once demanded that military personnel be able to walk 50 miles in 20 hours. I set off on an ill-fated mission to see if I could do it myself.

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.

Without smart regulation, price competition turns into a race to the bottom.

Searching for the first, in the 1860s.

In narrowly focusing on Leonard Bernstein’s tortured personal life, "Maestro" fails to explore his tortured artistic life.

Belief that schools must teach moral values is older than public schools themselves. But whose morals?

Knowing I come from people who lived hard lives and endured terrible things is difficult. Knowing that I come from someone who ruined lives haunts me.

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

Media coverage of the civil rights movement is a reminder that the deification of King has skewed public memory.

Matter-of-fact accounting of the legal mechanism of slavery provides insight into American history and the country’s fraught present.

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