Excerpts

The demystification of pregnancy.

Greg Grandin’s sweeping history of the new world shows how immutably intertwined the United States is with Latin America.

New York would never be the Puritans' austere city on a hill, yet it became America’s vibrant heart of capitalism.

Can a new book rescue Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre’s activism from irrelevance?

A new book highlights Josephine Baker’s wartime contribution, and how she used her fame to provide cover and promote equal rights.

Aimee Semple McPherson took to the radio to spread the Gospel, but her mysterious disappearance cast a shadow on her reputation.

Brandon Shimoda’s book about the memorialization of Japanese internment camps also speaks to the brutal system of migrant detention that continues to this day.

A new Library of America edition of John Quincy Adams’s writings demonstrates the enduring appeal—and real shortcomings—of his revolutionary conservatism.

How endless options became our only option.

The correspondence of Soviet and American women during the Cold War.

On David Roediger’s “An Ordinary White: My Antiracist Education.”

One of his generation’s most prolific journalists, Kempton never turned a blind eye to the inequalities all around him.

Trump’s “Art of” trilogy may be full of willful exaggeration, but the books also reveal how the 1980s and 90s formed his dog-eat-dog worldview.

Can histories of economic crisis provide us with useful lessons?

A new biography of an elusive comic talent.

Linda Gordon argues that social movements are vital partnerships that, by challenging the status quo, are indispensable to the health of the nation.

Three new books propose market solutions to problems that require government intervention. We’ve been here before. It didn’t end well.

Newly declassified records reveal how paranoia about subversion in conservative states resulted in major constitutional violations.

NYT pundits and NBA writers alike can't stop recommending this four-decade-old book.

A review of Edwin Frank's short list of great 20th century novels.

How East New York was ransacked by the real estate industry and abandoned by the city in the process.

The life and work of Frank Wisner, one of the CIA’s founding officers, offers us a portrait of American intelligence’s excesses.

I was once paid six figures to write an article—now what?

For Henry David Thoreau, it is only as strangers that we can see each other as the bearers of divinity we really are.

Looking for the poet between the lines.

A new history traces the development and influence of the global Wages for Housework movement from its founding to present day.

The books examine the history of space exploration, from the race to discover Pluto to the idea of space colonization.

Sometimes seen as the stuff of commencement addresses, his poems are hard to pin down—just like the man behind them.

A new biography tells a far more complex, nuanced, and, frankly, interesting historical episode than that depicted in the typical grade-school pageant.

The Great Hunger was a modern event, shaped by the belief that the poor are the authors of their own misery and that the market must be obeyed at all costs.

Major new books about the peoples who lived in North America for millennia before the arrival of Europeans are reshaping the history of the continent.

A new publication obscures the canonical writer.

Much of the rhetoric surrounding immigration debates is steeped in the language of Revelation, argues New Testament professor Yii-Jan Lin.

At its height, the political crackdown felt terrifying and all-encompassing. What can we learn from how the movement unfolded—and from how it came to an end?

The missing Black history of upstate New York challenges the delusion of New York as a land of freedom far removed from the American original sin of slavery.

How the American legal system created an economic environment that subordinated the entire world to domestic business interests.

Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain is remarkable not only for his sacrifices on behalf of the Union, but also for the moral imagination that inspired him.

Widening the lens to capitalism itself could yield insights on how to close the gap.

In the Seventies, one feminist movement campaigned to make domestic labour both visible and recompensed.

Henrietta Szold devoted her life to building a Jewish society in Palestine. But how useful is her ’cultural’ Zionism for Jewish Americans today?

Rich Benjamin’s new book reveals a shared spirit between the world’s first Black republic and the United States.

In contrast to feudal society, where everyone, lord or serf, remained rooted to the land, and words were ‘passed on'.

Enslaved families were regularly separated​. A new history chronicles the tenacious efforts of the emancipated to be reunited​ with their loved ones.

The curious case of social psychology.

New books on the War in Afghanistan endeavor to tell the realities of occupation and the "war on terror."

Conservatives might be tempted to hold up Reagan as representative of a nobler era. They’d be wrong.

For all of its faults and weaknesses, no serious competitor has emerged to capture people’s imagination or seriously challenge it.

Washington’s policy-makers showed themselves more wicked and feckless than their Vietnam- and Iraq-era predecessors.

A new dual biography turns the lens on the towering architects of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Why do Americans idealize people who found businesses?