Excerpts

A book traces how the 1915 film reshaped cinema, fueled white supremacy, and sparked protests, censorship battles, and lasting cultural debate.

Hollywood kept distributing films in Nazi Germany, facing pressure from both the regime and US censors. Some studios resisted, others complied.

In Making the Presidency, Lindsay Chervinsky shows how Adams made decisions when no structure or precedent offered guidance.

A new biography of the journalist Walter Lippmann bashes conservatives but adds value.

Gurney Norman and the dream of the counterculture.

How did the Mason–Dixon Line—meant to resolve a longstanding colonial border dispute—come to represent the US’s foundational divide between slavery and freedom?

Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton may be titans of the American Founding, but these two poles don't describe everything.

A new book says polarization breeds impunity from scandal. But America’s worst injustices emerged when the parties got along too well.

A historical reconstruction of the Big Apple’s crime decline, told from inside the institutions responsible for public safety.

In "Make Your Own Job," Erik Baker shows just how long Americans have scrambled to pile work on top of work—and at what cost.

A new book recounts diverse opinions among US foreign policy intellectuals during the Korean War.

A new history examines the long history of a radical and sometimes conservative concept.

The Early Republic’s maritime jurisprudence is even more relevant given the immense power of the modern executive.

What we learn by tracing rebellions from Africa to the Americas.

A new book recovers stories of Black Georgians who escaped to maroon communities and Spanish Florida.

James Baldwin's fierce attachments.

Donald Trump is once again threatening war with Iran just six months after bombing the Islamic Republic in June.

Crumb's work was called sexist, racist, and obscene, but even his critics often acknowledged that he was hilarious and original.

The Internet was not meant to suck.

Religious liberty owes much to Jefferson and Madison, but the "impregnable wall" doesn't do justice to the founders vision.

The libertarian propaganda series is back and worse than ever.

Kitzmiller 20 years on.

'Blank Space' and 'A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls' examine capitalism and the arts in different eras.

The Republican Party’s descent into chaos is a product of capitalist fragmentation.

Defeating the Nazi war machine necessitated not just military might, but also skillful diplomacy.

A new book examines Americans' long obsession with the enticing and oppressive concept of entrepreneurship.

Capitalism is a global economic system, so a proper chronicle of its rise to dominance has to examine the entire world.

The dangers of confusing self-improvement with institutional change.

Efforts to surveil and undermine activists went far beyond infamous operations such as Cointelpro.

The shah of Iran faced a secular opposition that wanted to restore constitutional government.

Friends, enemies and lovers animate more than 60 years of the John Updike’s remarkable correspondence.

The Mars craze is a case study in twisting evidence and defying facts.

The Marquis de Lafayette’s final visit to the United States in 1825 can show us how to commemorate the Revolution.

The mindset Franklin demonstrated in his scientific work helps us understand his political accomplishments.

A new book offers bitter commentary on the onset of the age of American empire.

A history of Catholic immigration and activity in colonial North America.

In search of the Underground Railroad’s legendary conductor.

In the decades since the Wages for Housework movement, care work has become a site of profit in ways its leaders could never have predicted.

What it would mean to take taste seriously again.

Passing your eyes over those first, electric sentences, it occurs to you that his readers are still catching up.

The AFL-CIO’s role in weakening left-wing labor unions around the world, between the 1940s and 1990s.

The untold story behind the killings of two Americans by the Chilean military after the coup.

In the early twentieth century, America's literature seemed provincial until Malcolm Cowley championed writers like Kerouac and Faulkner as distinctly American.

An institutional history of the “peculiar institution.”

A new book doesn’t aim to skewer Jewish defenders of slavery or celebrate Jewish abolitionists, but to understand them, warts and all.

How and why Walter A. McDougall's representation of history differs from the standard narrative, especially regarding the Wilson administration.

Althea Gibson, one of the great tennis players of the twentieth century, made segregation in her sport untenable.

When the WTO gathered in Seattle in 1999, protests erupted. Their strategy offers a model for resisting globalization at a time of renewed urgency.

Abortion has been an inescapable fact of life for millennia. So why do women gain or lose control over their reproductive lives at different times in history?

Histories of the epidemic tend to focus on coastal cities, but the response was very different in the middle of the country.