Excerpts

Advocates of “military Keynesianism” present it as a boon for the working class. In reality, it diverts resources away from social provision.

A teacher tells the story of 1974’s Olean, New York High School murders.

St Louis organizer Bill Sentner led some of the most successful labor battles in Midwestern history by uniting workers across race and gender lines.

The past really is a foreign country, as historian Jonathan Ablard finds when piecing together the turbulent history of his ancestors in the West and Midwest.

Why does the diagnosis of Gage social ‘disinhibition’ lean so heavily on flimsy documentation about Gage, while overlooking the case of Eadweard Muybridge?

In the 1960s, amid the shipping industry's decline, the empty piers became a site for cruising and creativity for gay men in particular.

A historian reviews new books by Peter Beinart, Avi Shlaim and Pankaj Mishra on the project that animates Israel’s violence.

The Interstate Highway System created a national polity defined by circulation. To rethink the Interstates is to rethink the United States.

This Juneteenth we need to discard the caricatures of King that we so often see and learn from what he actually did and believed.

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.

We live in polarized times when freedom is threatened but this Juneteenth we should remind ourselves that we have overcome far worse.

We cannot divorce the independence of the executive branch from its substance.

When Jim Obergefell and his partner John Arthur decided to marry after more than 20 years together, their home state refused to recognize same-sex marriages.

Domestic deployments have generally been quite restrained. Can they still be?

Ten years after the Charleston massacre, reverence for the Confederacy that Roof idolized is going strong.

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

The nation’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence, depicts a wounded, fearful society, teetering on the brink of disaster. Sound familiar?

Undermining international oceans governance could damage American interests.

Toni Morrison was an editor for 12 years, even as she wrote her own masterpieces. I spoke to her authors about being edited by an icon.

McKinley led a country defined by tariffs and colonial wars. Trump is drawn to his legacy—and determined to bring the liberal international order to an end.

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

The commander-in-chief initially barred black soldiers from joining the ranks, but he came to understand the value—both moral and strategic—of a diverse force.

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

Thomas Jefferson's limited government ideal quickly conflicted with the U.S. Constitution and the dominant Federalist Party, prompting a radical proposal.

The sad remnants of a soldier’s life revealed through probate and Ancestry offer a moving glimpse into the afterlife of Civil War service.

Fifty years on, "The Monkey Wrench Gang" remains a problematic text for environmental activists, who are inclined to endorse its violent tendencies.

From Revolutionary War-era recluses to 1920s roadside attractions, meet the solitary figures who turned isolation into a destination.

What looks like an excess of strength may really be a deficit of liberty.

Expanding the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit could make a successful program even better—and address a major crisis.

A look at popular interpretations and actual labor fluctuations in the Rust Belt over time.

A history of wealth, enterprise, and family dysfunction.

Trump's crackdown on immigrants bears alarming parallels to the fugitive slave obsessions of the pre-Civil War South.

The announcement comes just four days before the Army’s multimillion dollar parade in Washington.

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

Birthright citizenship is distinctly American—but not in the way Trump thinks.

The untold story of how American Jewry and the Jewish state almost resolved the question of who is a Jew.

So why are we still surprised when the tide of blood reaches our own shores?

Jack Hanson on the new pope and his namesake.

Trump mixes restoration with revolution—his reactionary modernism wooed Silicon Valley, but for everyone else, it signals looming repression.

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.

Since the 1960s, studies have shown that heavy-handed policing and militarized responses tend to make protests more volatile — not less.

The charged meaning of hair in 19th-century America.

Much of Mackinac Island was designated as a national park, but was too expensive for the government to maintain, so it was transferred to the State of Michigan.

The Trump Administration's reasons for resettling Afrikaners echo early U.S. debates about Haiti's independence.

Gertrude Berg’s “The Goldbergs” was a bold, beloved portrait of a Jewish family. Then the blacklist obliterated her legacy.

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

As Elon Musk and Donald Trump engaged in a campaign of mutually-assured destruction, social media saw record new levels of schadenfreude.

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

French Canadians held a distinct position in an American labor landscape in which experts viewed different “races” as being suited to different kinds of work.

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