Excerpts

How the Boss provided a 50-year-long soundtrack for the last of the Baby Boomers.

In 1965, Carl Borgmann warned University of Tennessee graduates about CO₂ buildup and climate change, decades before it became a global concern.

Laurence Veysey’s 1965 tome remains the most incisive portrait of higher education.

‘Matcha mania’ shows no signs of slowing, pushing supply chains to the brink. It’s marked quite the rise for a drink long met with skepticism in the West.

The outcome to these three connected events remains ambivalent. Six decades later, many of the issues animating the moratorium remain as relevant as ever.

Following Japan’s unconditional surrender in September 1945, the US aimed to rebuild the nation in its own image – for better or worse.

A new book explores how Americans came to believe in an advanced Martian civilization at the turn of the twentieth century.

Louis Ludlow’s war referendum amendment was the high-water mark of American antiwar populism.

As a new book on their travels together shows, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison's friendship went beyond politics.

At one time, wearing white after Labor Day was not just considered a fashionable “faux pas,” but a mark of bad manners and bad taste.

Spengler shared the anti-American prejudice of many of his German contemporaries, and it is safe to assume that he would have disparaged us as rootless.

How the US State Department used jazz music for its national security aims.

Joan Didion’s journal entries posthumously has sparked a wider ethical debate: Is it acceptable to publish a writer’s unfinished work after their death?

We're living through a communications revolution. But this isn't the first one, nor is it the first time cats have been at the center of social change.

At one time this magazine tangled with the FBI, the Atomic Energy Commission and Joseph McCarthy.

As it turns out, as much as this clutch of papers is about a specific story of Atlantic slavery it still relates to British finance and national politics.

“How are free people supposed to stay free? One short answer: don’t trust anyone over thirty.”

He started in the 1930s farmworker camps that inspired John Steinbeck’s novels and went on to pioneer methodical tactics that transformed American organizing.

The conservative movement "assumed it had intellectual ownership over the presidency," but an NEH appointment fight reveals the Reagan administration disagreed.

New details of drug dealing and murder at North Carolina base, the command center for U.S. Special Forces.

From "National Greatness" to "Make America Great Again."

Back when few people could imagine why they would want to buy a bulky, expensive machine with no obvious purpose, computer marketers had to get creative.

Through genetic testing, millions of Americans have discovered family secrets. The news has upended relationships and created a community looking for answers.

Revisiting a turning point in the history of Israel’s occupation.

The Christian-right luminary built his long career on cruelty and submission.

From 1956–1978, Republicans backed D.C. representation, but now oppose it, reflecting a broader GOP shift against voting rights and toward partisan control.

A detailed, exhausting, and ultimately too-gentle treatment of the midcentury writer and editor, Frank Meyer.

As Bruce Springsteen’s "Born to Run" turns 50, its most underrated track deserves some love.

Music writers were once known for being much crankier than the average listener. What happened?

From the Pequot War to the New Deal-era Civilian Conservation Corps, trees tell a living story.

Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, and many other notorious figures lived in and around Tacoma in the sixties. A new book argues that there was something in the water.

The August 1973 contretemps over President Nixon's bombing of Cambodia was a turning point in how the Supreme Court handles emergency applications.

Trump's tariffs echo centuries of global protectionism, but history and economics question their effectiveness and long-term value.

Only one cousin is in a position of power — and his family can only watch helplessly as he destroys much that they stood for.

Nixon’s 1973 firing of a Watergate prosecutor raised questions about executive power, accountability and the limits of the law.

Georgios Varouxakis reexamines when and why people began to conceptualize "the West."

Churches, city officials and activists assisted migrants fleeing the violent conditions created by U.S. proxy wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala.

On a new biography of James Baldwin.

A street-level view of Rudy Giuliani’s transformation of the Big Apple.

The president’s latest criticism of museums is a thinly veiled attempt to erase Black history.

Frank Meyer’s journey took him from communist agitator to conservative kingmaker.

How a decision sparked by the death of one of the world’s biggest pop stars knocked the Billboard 200 out of alignment.

How the fabled Hollywood director confronted survivor’s guilt, the legacies of the Holocaust, and the paradoxes of Zionism.

DC’s crackdown is just the latest in a long war on being poor and disabled in public.

A landmark 1964 Supreme Court ruling protects the press from angry public officials filing lawsuits. It’s being targeted by President Donald Trump.

It wasn’t the music that drew them, but an intellectual celebrity: Frank Meyer.

During his lifetime, Crockett—who went by David, not Davy—shaped his own myth. In the 20th century, his legacy got a boost from none other than Walt Disney.

Attempts to end birthright citizenship thwart an originalist interpretation of the Constitution.

In the Embers series, historian M.G. Sheftall shares the stories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s last survivors and reveals why their testimony must endure.

If we want democracy to survive, we need a vision that’s going to be more compelling than the one the authoritarians are offering.