Excerpts

Greg Grandin’s new book tells the story of US expansionism and its complex relationship with the rest of the New World.

Building the assumption of work’s meaningfulness happened across many different institutions and types of media.

A lifetime spent studying the disastrous lead-up to World War I gave Paul Schroeder reason to be horrified at the recklessness of US foreign policy.

Before Lincoln turned the idea of “the Union” into a cause worth dying for, he tried other means of ending slavery in America.

The demystification of pregnancy.

Aimee Semple McPherson took to the radio to spread the Gospel, but her mysterious disappearance cast a shadow on her reputation.

How endless options became our only option.

A new Library of America edition of John Quincy Adams’s writings demonstrates the enduring appeal—and real shortcomings—of his revolutionary conservatism.

New York would never be the Puritans' austere city on a hill, yet it became America’s vibrant heart of capitalism.

One of his generation’s most prolific journalists, Kempton never turned a blind eye to the inequalities all around him.

Greg Grandin’s sweeping history of the new world shows how immutably intertwined the United States is with Latin America.

Trump’s “Art of” trilogy may be full of willful exaggeration, but the books also reveal how the 1980s and 90s formed his dog-eat-dog worldview.

A new book highlights Josephine Baker’s wartime contribution, and how she used her fame to provide cover and promote equal rights.

Can a new book rescue Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre’s activism from irrelevance?

Brandon Shimoda’s book about the memorialization of Japanese internment camps also speaks to the brutal system of migrant detention that continues to this day.

An exploration of the contrast between the supreme confidence of Kennan's policy prescriptions and the perpetual turbulence of his inner life.

Dylan C. Penningroth challenges nearly every aspect of our traditional understanding of civil rights history.

Why his turn-of-the-century travelogue still resonates.

Shulamith Firestone and the burdens of prophecy.

On David Roediger’s “An Ordinary White: My Antiracist Education.”

Five women who made important contributions to 19th-century American philosophy finally get their due.

Three new books propose market solutions to problems that require government intervention. We’ve been here before. It didn’t end well.

NYT pundits and NBA writers alike can't stop recommending this four-decade-old book.

According to Andrew Kahrl, the property tax has been used to disposs black homeowners since the 19th century.

How East New York was ransacked by the real estate industry and abandoned by the city in the process.

Linda Gordon argues that social movements are vital partnerships that, by challenging the status quo, are indispensable to the health of the nation.

A new history traces the development and influence of the global Wages for Housework movement from its founding to present day.

On the rise and fall of confession in American Catholicism, and what the demography of today's Catholics says about the future of the faith.

For Henry David Thoreau, it is only as strangers that we can see each other as the bearers of divinity we really are.

I was once paid six figures to write an article—now what?

Newly declassified records reveal how paranoia about subversion in conservative states resulted in major constitutional violations.

A new publication obscures the canonical writer.

Most countries take their popular novelists more seriously than America has. The term “Great American Novel” was literally invented to describe this book

The life and work of Frank Wisner, one of the CIA’s founding officers, offers us a portrait of American intelligence’s excesses.

At its height, the political crackdown felt terrifying and all-encompassing. What can we learn from how the movement unfolded—and from how it came to an end?

The Great Hunger was a modern event, shaped by the belief that the poor are the authors of their own misery and that the market must be obeyed at all costs.

The missing Black history of upstate New York challenges the delusion of New York as a land of freedom far removed from the American original sin of slavery.

Widening the lens to capitalism itself could yield insights on how to close the gap.

Major new books about the peoples who lived in North America for millennia before the arrival of Europeans are reshaping the history of the continent.

In the Seventies, one feminist movement campaigned to make domestic labour both visible and recompensed.

A new biography tells a far more complex, nuanced, and, frankly, interesting historical episode than that depicted in the typical grade-school pageant.

How the American legal system created an economic environment that subordinated the entire world to domestic business interests.

Looking for the poet between the lines.

Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain is remarkable not only for his sacrifices on behalf of the Union, but also for the moral imagination that inspired him.

Rich Benjamin’s new book reveals a shared spirit between the world’s first Black republic and the United States.

Enslaved families were regularly separated​. A new history chronicles the tenacious efforts of the emancipated to be reunited​ with their loved ones.

Sometimes seen as the stuff of commencement addresses, his poems are hard to pin down—just like the man behind them.

Much of the rhetoric surrounding immigration debates is steeped in the language of Revelation, argues New Testament professor Yii-Jan Lin.

The curious case of social psychology.

For decades, the term “school choice” was widely and rightly dismissed as racist. Now it’s the law in thirty-three states.