Excerpts

To understand the intellectual coordinates of Trumpism we must look in unconventional places.

Fara Dabhoiwala’s case against free speech.

Two different accounts from former Democratic Party insiders about the “giant U-turn” from postwar prosperity to the polarization and inequality of today.

The radical lives of James Baldwin.

"Apple in China" tells the incredible story of China’s industrial development through the lens of America’s most iconic tech giant.

Historian Jane Smith understands her childhood differently after discovering that her father had been pushed out of his profession during the Red Scare.

In a new memoir, Susan Cheever searches for the wellspring of her father’s genius.

On new biographies of Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger.

Long before it was fashionable, Amelia Bloomer pioneered what would later be dubbed "respectability politics."

A new book reveals systematic, profitable, and deadly arson schemes perpetrated by landlords and insurance companies in the Bronx.

Black gold powered the United States’ transition from backwater to global hegemon.

Abortion has been an inescapable fact of life for millennia. So why do women gain or lose control over their reproductive lives at different times in history?

When the WTO gathered in Seattle in 1999, protests erupted. Their strategy offers a model for resisting globalization at a time of renewed urgency.

Althea Gibson, one of the great tennis players of the twentieth century, made segregation in her sport untenable.

Is he merely a reactionary, or do his films paint a more complicated picture?

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

A Republican administration that wages war against immigrants and colleges should be understood as the culmination of William F. Buckley conservative movement.

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

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

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

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

On a new biography of James Baldwin.

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

To some, the fires lit in New York in the late seventies signaled rampant crime; to others, rebellion. But maybe they were signs of something else entirely.

A new biography shows that his life was more complex than his viral fame suggests.

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

American special operators brought their tactics in the global war on terror back home.

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

In the 1950s, the CIA funded efforts to smuggle great works of literature into the Eastern Bloc.

Once dismissed as passé, since recast as a secular saint, Baldwin’s true message remains more unsettling than readers in either camp recognize.

Charles Sumner's example reminds us that "with enough courage and drive, can alter the trajectory of American racial history."

Revisit the transformative moment in American culture through the lens of a new book about the 1960s New York avant-garde.

A woman killed by Congress.

Eighty years after the bomb, scientists still grapple with nuclear legacy. Some seek atonement, others insist it’s no longer their burden.

With Iran’s theocracy under strain, a new history shows that its rise was mainly a stroke of bad luck.

From a dying adviser to a clumsy editorial, the Revolution was a cascade of accidents and oversights.

The often-overlooked institutions of the federal government truly do matter and so do the individuals who lead those institutions and give them direction.

Journalist Rebecca Grant shifts the abortion conversation away from laws and morals to focus on access: getting people the care they seek.

Historians have long grappled with “the American Paradox” of Revolutionary leaders who fought for their own liberty while denying it to enslaved Black people.

A roving history makes the case for shade’s centrality to public health, climate adaptation, and even a more robust and inclusive public sphere.

Six decades of civil-rights efforts haven’t budged the racial wealth gap, and the usual prescriptions—including reparations—offer no lasting solutions.

John Seabrook’s history of Seabrook Farms, where many incarcerated Japanese Americans worked during WWII, is ultimately about fathers and sons.

The ’80s I thought I remembered now feel very different to me.

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.

A new book shows that Marxism in the US "was never constrained to the reiteration of a set of dogmatic principles one associates with party ideologues."

Historian Thomas A. Tweed proposes an environmental approach to the study of American religion.

A sweeping new history explores facial hair as a proving ground for notions about gender, race, and rebellion.

The disquieting story of an American health-product giant.

A new book unearths a chapter of the state’s story when anti-intellectual fundamentalism was put to good ends.