intellectual history

How conservatives made him their icon and distorted his ideas.

A new book examines military manuals as a genre to understand what armed counter-revolutionaries think of as the right way to do what they do.

Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek have been through the wringer.

The concept of geopolitics comes from German and Russian attempts to explain defeat and reverse loss of influence.

Two centuries of New England intellectual history through the lives and ideas of people who are memorialized there.

The history of race has animated a highly contentious, sometimes fractious debate among scholars.

John Stuart Mill was an unusual man who lived an extraordinary life devoted to a set of problems that once again dominate political thought in the 21st century.

The fevered hunt for basic symbols.

The past does not speak to us; we speak for the past.

A new way to think about the American Revolution.

In White Freedom, historian Tyler Stovall examines how liberty for some has always entailed a lack of liberty for many others.  

A new book tackles the deep and persistent American intellectual tradition we might call Science-hesitant.

In ‘The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War,’ Louis Menand explores the poetry, music, painting, dance and film that emerged during the Cold War.

A review of "Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America."

The modern conception of freedom emerged as an antidemocratic reaction by elites who wanted to curtail state power.

Why did the historian come to fear the very movements he once would have celebrated?

Historians have been too much the ideological allies of Progressivism to permit themselves to see its master flaw.

The rise and fall of Perry Miller.

Four new books show how different, and maybe also why.

In his new book, Daniel Rodgers not only offers a close reading of Puritan history but also seeks to rescue their early critique of market economy.