Excerpts

An interview with Steven Conn about his new book, “Lies of the Land: Seeing Rural America for What It Is—and Isn’t.”

How today’s far right manages to combine the call for economic freedom with pseudoscience about natural hierarchies of race and IQ.

A documentary dissects Henry Fonda's character and his role in American cinema.

In his latest book, journalist and historian Clay Risen explores how the House Un-American Activities Committee and Senator Joseph McCarthy upended the nation.

International trade boomed with the city’s early adoption of technological and economic changes, but Black neighborhoods became ‘sacrifice zones.’

The same Christian ideology that inspired J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI to surveil MLK is alive and well in the Trump administration.

A historian explores his own family's history to understand the African-American community’s internal pigmentocracy and the absurdity of racial binaries.

On the schoolhouse’s role in enforcing racial hierarchy.

Black Marxist thought emphasizes the centrality of capitalism to racial oppression and the destructiveness of that oppression for all workers.

How the country’s post-apartheid politics may inform the world view of Elon Musk and Donald Trump.

In the aftermath of the American Revolution, southern slaveholders were thinking about what a prison should look like for a society that was economically and socially dependent on slavery.

Once a nation of movers, the US has lost its “culture of mobility,” a new book argues. That’s been a disaster for housing affordability and economic progress.

Do judges have the power to enforce their rulings if the executive branch refuses to comply?

Mifepristone took longer to get approved than most drugs—but not because it was unsafe.

An interview with sociologist and historian of psychiatry Andrew Scull about the history and legacy of psychiatric deinstitutionalization.

What the President’s confrontations with Panama, Greenland, Canada, and Colombia suggest about his expansionist vision.

Frances Perkins’ challenged the United States’ restrictive immigration policies as FDR’s Secretary of Labor.

The Catholic order has branches all over the world, and a deep history of unethical and illegal behavior.

A historian of U.S. empire discusses nuclear Greenland, selling Puerto Rico, and the renaissance of William McKinley.

Jimmy Carter is associated with an idealistic “human rights agenda.” In reality, he was paving the way for Ronald Reagan’s aggressive anti-communism.

“The world didn’t give It, but the world can’t take It away.”

"Published by the Author" explores the resourcefulness of Black writers of the nineteenth century.

Trump is often described as unprecedented, but in winning a non-consecutive second term, he has a significant antecedent: Grover Cleveland.

Quinn Slobodian and Jennifer Mittelstadt discuss their research on the meanings of “globalism” and “sovereignty” throughout history.

When Thomas Jefferson penned ‘all men are created equal,’ he did not mean individual equality, says Stanford scholar.

Leaders of the political right learned lessons from the 1960s that still inform the movement today.

A conversation with historian Zachary Schrag and his father Philip Schrag about their multi-generational encounters with nuclear threats.

How incarcerated people have become separated from American society.

“Postpartum depression” encompasses various debilitating changes in mood that can occur after giving birth. How did that language come to be?

Scientists and lawmakers in the 70s knew more than we think they did about climate change and the impacts of fossil fuel regulations.

An expert on white nationalism explains how such demonizing rhetoric incubates and spreads—and what sets this particular episode apart.

Demography has not managed to be destiny in the past half-century—but predictions of a millenarian shift have not lost their appeal.

During the Cold War, the AFL-CIO actively participated in efforts to suppress left-wing labor movements abroad.

On the myths and rituals of the market, the lost radicalism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the rise of neoliberalism.

Klaxon horns, once standard safety equipment, disappeared from the roads after World War I. But the tensions they exposed about urban noise still echo.

An animation historian on Reddy Kilowatt, the cartoon charged with electrifying everything in the early 20th century.

The author of "Cahokia Jazz" reflects on the similarities between historical fiction and science fiction, and the imaginative space opened by archival silences.

The Democratic Party, and the US political system as a whole, is a very strange beast.

In “The Heartland,” Kristin L. Hoganson says America’s Midwest has been more connected to global events than remembered.

1934 world champion runner Zdenek Koubek, boxer Imane Khelif, and how far we haven’t come on gender in sports.

A new book takes on a diagnosis invented to cover up police killings: that men of color are “combusting as a result of their aggressiveness.”

A new book explores the history of presidents who abused their constitutional power and the citizen movements that stopped them.

Deindustrialization has helped create a right-wing turn in many Midwestern towns. Long traditions of labor militancy can explain why it hasn’t in others.

“Night Flyer” expands Harriet Tubman’s legacy to include her family, community and “eco-spiritual worldview.”

A new graphic book unpacks the role that some White women played in suppressing voting rights for all — and the lessons today in the fight for universal ballot access.

How the Federalist Society became the engine of the conservative legal movement—and where it might be headed next.

Tracing financial capital—from J. P. Morgan to BlackRock.

John Ganz’s “When the Clock Broke” renders the signal political battles of the present in an entirely new light.

An interview with Taylor Brown, author of the novel "Rednecks."

“An Ideal for Living” explores the fascinating backstory of a mini music format.