Excerpts

What led Peter Matthiessen from spying to starting a magazine?

Federal agents have long harassed immigrants and Black and brown people in cities, but something dangerous is changing behind the scenes.

What does it mean to be a liberal in America—and why has that label inspired both devotion and disdain?

What New York City can learn from its past about the potential for urban growth that is not hostage to the preferences of the largest private owners.

Where Western men’s clothing traditions came from, how they have evolved, and how they're being continually reinterpreted.

The pair’s new book recovers the sound of early Black music.

A new biography examines how 19th-century Americans remembered Mary Ball Washington, who raised the future president on her own after her husband’s death.

A Q&A with the author of "America, América: “A New History of the New World.”

How pastors’ wives use power and submission.

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

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.

Stanley Greenberg has spent decades answering the question of how water arrives in our taps and building interest in this vast and impressive system.

How the New Right emerged from neoliberalism’s inner split.

A new book examines the long history of racial inequality in higher education through the post-baccalaureate experiences of Jim Crow era African Americans.

A new book recognizes Claire McCardell as a pioneer of American womenswear as we know it.

The Native activist spent nearly fifty years in prison for the killing of two F.B.I. agents. In January, Joe Biden commuted his sentence, and he went home.

Jewish-led Palestine solidarity demonstrations are part of a long history of Jewish identity being bound up in leftist politics.

Harriet Tubman’s revolutionary Civil War raid and the power of preserving Black history in the face of political pushback.

The author of a new biography talks about the conservative journalist’s life and legacy.

Christy Thornton and Greg Grandin discuss his new book, “America, América,” and the intertwined histories of the U.S. and Latin America.

The author on capitalism’s critics, why everyone is so unhappy with the system, and what may come next.

After the successful purges of leftists from unions, US labor leaders were enlisted by government officials to join in their global imperialist operations.

For two centuries, Karl Marx’s thoughts have significantly impacted US politics. In turn, his close study of the US informed the development of his ideas.

On his films and the way they provocatively confronted the evils of the times in which they were made.

On the Second Red Scare and the lessons that it can provide for us today.

Rather than resisting authoritarianism, the courts have enabled Trump’s rise.

"We should go back into history and ask: Why did we need the federal Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906?"

How and why ideas like germ theory are pursued, accepted or ignored, and how human habits of the mind can make it difficult to ask the right questions.

Films from Vietnam and Hollywood testify to the range of stories told about the war on-screen and the different memories they embody.

On the gendered dimensions of trans-Mississippi Civil War memory, the idea of the single-family household, and the politics of expansion and settlement.

Today no one on either side of the political spectrum would present themselves as an enemy of choice. Sophia Rosenfeld exposes the complex legacy of this idea.

A conversation with the creators of a podcast series on the feedback loop of American empire.

A conversation with Greg Grandin about his groundbreaking new book "America, América: A New History of the New World."

Legendary filmmaker Oliver Stone says we’re closer than ever to finally piecing together the mystery of November 22, 1963.

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

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

On the robust influence of labor reform and antislavery ideas and movements on each other from the early National period to the Civil War.

A documentary dissects Henry Fonda's character and his role in American cinema.

In his latest book, journalist and historian Clay Risen explores how the House Un-American Activities Committee and Senator Joseph McCarthy upended the nation.

International trade boomed with the city’s early adoption of technological and economic changes, but Black neighborhoods became ‘sacrifice zones.’

Martha S. Jones’ new memoir draws on genealogical research and memories shared by relatives.

On the schoolhouse’s role in enforcing racial hierarchy.

Margaret Fuller was a polymathic intellect and writer, simultaneously ahead of her time and deeply enmeshed in the social and political fabric of her era.

How the country’s post-apartheid politics may inform the world view of Elon Musk and Donald Trump.

Black Marxist thought emphasizes the centrality of capitalism to racial oppression and the destructiveness of that oppression for all workers.

A historian explores his own family's history to understand the African-American community’s internal pigmentocracy and the absurdity of racial binaries.

Once a nation of movers, the US has lost its “culture of mobility,” a new book argues. That’s been a disaster for housing affordability and economic progress.

In the aftermath of the American Revolution, southern slaveholders were thinking about what a prison should look like for a society that was economically and socially dependent on slavery.

Do judges have the power to enforce their rulings if the executive branch refuses to comply?