Excerpts

A new book traces how "the wet dream of an ageing militarist has become a fundamental force driving American foreign policy."

David Blight's report "Yale and Slavery" considers institutional accountability in the context of a world marked by systemic violence and inequality.

The disquieting story of an American health-product giant.

A new book examines the aggressive masculinity that the editors of the Partisan Review brought to their art and literary criticism.

How Claire McCardell changed women’s fashion.

The turbulent late sixties saw the technique’s popularity explode—and it’s been helping moviemakers engage with the unsettling tempos of modern life ever since.

How FDR invented national security, and why Democrats need to move on from it.

How William F. Buckley Jr. turned his father’s private convictions and prejudices into a major political movement.

The progress we have seen toward civil rights for all Americans is inseparable from the history of classical liberalism.

How did the concept become the solution to society’s most deeply entrenched problems?

How did freedom become synonymous with having lots of options?

Texas might have been a place to start a conversation about widening the scope of civil liberties, but it has also been a place where those liberties end.

Red Scare can be read as solid history of the years it depicts—and chilling prophecy of the years to come.

Even some liberals toasted William F. Buckley Jr. as a patrician gentleman. A long-awaited new biography corrects that record.

How an Ovid-quoting London broadsheet from the late seventeenth century spawned “Dear Abby,” Dan Savage, and Reddit’s Am I the Asshole.

Survivors of the nuclear blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still fighting for recognition.

Calls to defund the Marxist left and similar mobilizations against rumors of a new red dawn are nothing new.

How Irving Thalberg helped turn M-G-M into the world’s most famous movie studio—and gave the film business a new sense of artistry and scale.

J. Hoberman’s teeming history of New York’s avant-garde scene is a fascinating trove of research and a thrilling clamor of voices.

A new book portrays five American historians who published popular books that sacrificed neither intellectual depth nor political bite.

A new book illuminates how freedom became associated with choice and questions whether that has been a good thing—for women in particular.

On the political theorist and the new media landscape.

The political vision that William F. Buckley helped forge was—and remains today—focused less on adhering to principles and more on ferreting out enemies.

High-minded and scandal-prone, a foe of marriage who dreamed of domesticity, Fuller radiated a charisma that helped ignite the fight for women’s rights.

Were you to vanish Marx from every library, you’d destroy the central interlocutor around which most of capitalism is built.

Orisanmi Burton’s "Tip of the Spear" uncovers the obscured and radical demands of the inmates who staged the 1971 prison uprising—a world without prisons.

A new book challenges the discursive ignorance about the condition.

Ella Fitzgerald performed above the emotional fray.

How a sharp-elbowed Polish academic with an unpronounceable name helped defeat the Soviet Union.

The 1970s campaign fought to get women paid for their work in the home—and envisioned a society built to better support motherhood.

The nation’s founding myth was based on faith and solidarity – but it also contained the roots of today’s democratic crisis.

Walt Whitman was a champion self-advertiser, maven of the brag and the humblebrag.

A new book demonstrates that the skills taught and honed in the humanities are of vital importance to the defense of democracy.

Hayek suspected that nothing about the vindication of neoliberalism was likely to be straightforward.

In "Memoirs of a Nobody," Henry Boernstein chronicles the militant immigrant organizing that helped keep St. Louis out of the hands of the Confederacy.

R. Crumb’s cartoons plumb the grotesque corners of the American unconscious.

Reflections on memory, dreams, and computer screensavers.

What the Constitution asks of us.

On grifters, the Chicago World Fair, and Oz as symbol of a modern USA.

John Scanlan’s “The Idea of Waste” argues that all civilization is an attempt to make waste disappear.

The great American writer witnessed the forging of his nation – but Ron Chernow’s portrait cannot see beyond its subject.

Aimee Semple McPherson created a wildly popular personal brand as a preacher—then suddenly disappeared.

Manisha Sinha’s history of Reconstruction sheds fresh light on the period that fleetingly opened a door to a different America.

The life and career of Murray Kempton attest to the disappearing ideals of a dying industry. But his example suggests those ideals are not beyond resurrection.

Espionage has always been with us, but its rapid growth over the past century may have undermined trust in government.

Half a century ago the civil rights movement’s effort to carry the campaign for school desegregation from the South to the urban North ended in failure.

A 17th-century column shows that dating has always been an anxiety-riddled endeavor.

We need more than genealogies to know who we are, and who we ought to become.

“Only two states wanted a civil war—Massachusetts and South Carolina.”

The trio of interests atop business, military, and government depicted in C. Wright Mills’s postwar critique is no longer united in setting the national agenda.