Barack Obama

The history of the United States as the history of capitalism.

Black people own just 2 percent of farmland in the United States. A decades-long history of loan denials at the USDA is a major reason why.

The economist, along with David Card, was instrumental in changing America’s mind about the minimum wage.

The Movement for Black Lives has developed an incipient internationalist language and vision, with the potential to remap America’s place in the world.

Updating the Registry Act and uncoupling legalization from punitive measures could be first steps.

Bipartisanship might not be dead. But it is on life support. And it’s long past time we pulled the plug.

The history of education battles — from fights over evolution to critical race theory — shows why the country’s divisions are growing sharper.

Historian Samuel Moyn contends that efforts to conduct war humanely have only perpetuated it. But the solution must lie in politics, not a sacrifice of human rights.

The president has skillfully played up his Irish roots, but the story of his ancestry is more complicated.

As an attorney, Derrick Bell worked on many civil-rights cases, but his doubts about their impact launched a groundbreaking school of thought.

From the very beginning, the problem with the US involvement in Afghanistan lay essentially in the deficits in American democracy.

How the turn toward “precision” combat promoted endless war.

From the beginning, the War on Terror merged red-hot vengeance with calculated opportunism. Millions are still paying the price.

Far from a relic of the past, September 11 continues to normalize previously unimaginable forms of state-sanctioned barbarity.

Two new books argue that the War on Terror changed American politics, but what if the sources of its violence were already long present in the country?

What the history of a gesture can tell us about Black creative power.

The US suffered grave losses in Iraq and Afghanistan, but we shouldn’t mistake revisions of US military strategy for a turn away from imperialist ambitions.

The books of the last two decades show how overreacting to the attacks unmade America’s values.

Cuba has spent its entire existence as a state and much of its late colonial past in Uncle Sam’s purported backyard.

If colorblindness rests on the claim that the civil rights movement changed everything, the idea that racism is in our DNA borders on a fatalistic proposition that it changed nothing.