Excerpts

If ordinary Americans know one critic of the American Empire, it’s almost certainly Chomsky.

Her long-unpublished novel was the culmination of a years-long fascination. What does it reveal about her fraught views on civil rights?

The abusive experiments on mentally disabled children at Willowbrook State School were only one part of a much larger unethical research program.

Two new books examine how colonial logic has long been embedded within US carceral systems.

The question that remains at the end of the book concerns the meaning of “progressive” within an evangelical Christian church.

Dismantling it requires getting the story right.

Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett each had a different vision of reproductive freedom. Would reproductive rights be more secure if Dennett’s had prevailed?

Humans love to imagine their own demise.

In every generation, charlatans come along with a plan to make education better by spending less money on schools.

Shaul Magid attempts to show us how much contemporary Jews have inherited from a man most have tried to forget.

A new book by Sarah Archer explores the influence of the Space Race and Cold War on America's midcentury Christmas celebrations.

A sweeping new history chronicles a century of unprecedented economic progress driven by markets and innovation.

A new collection of essays by David Montgomery shows how he used labor history as a means of grappling with the largest questions in American history.

Understanding the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan in the early twentieth century gives insight into the roots of today’s reactionary activists and policymakers.

Second-wave feminists meant business—but they had a lot of fun at it, too.

A new biography explores the American roots of Meir Kahane's far-right ideology — and how the U.S. Jewish establishment embraced his beliefs.

A new book considers the challenges of controlling the commercialization of college sports.

The story of credit cards is the story of industry versus regulators. Industry won.

The notion of political realignment in the Lone Star State is older than you think. It goes back to Giant, an acidic novel by Edna Ferber.

A history that is as tactical as it is analytical, as global as it is local, and as based in love as it is in politics.

We see what we want to see from philosophers such as Locke not because he wrote for our time (or “all time”) but because we imagine he did.

Why should American exceptionalism end at the red-light district?

LGBTQ voters overwhelmingly went for Harris, but the idea that gay voters are always going to be solidly blue is a myth.

Am 1884 guide to vice and crime by the founder of the world’s largest private detective agency.

James Graham Wilson makes a compelling case that the under-celebrated example of Paul Nitze is both instructive and worthy of our emulation.

A new book revamps Newark's reputation as unsexy, violent, destitute, defiantly declaring it “a place of desire, love, eroticism, community, and resistance.”

On both sides of the color line, to own one’s home remains synonymous with freedom—even as real estate has proven itself to be relentlessly unequal.

Susie Orbach’s 1978 book is a fascinating snapshot of diet and physical culture in a very different era.

A recent Otis Redding biography examines what was and what could have been, 50 years after tragedy struck.

Many of us do not go gentle into that good night.

Faith’s pivotal role in the outcome of the Civil War.

How politicians used the story of one young patient to neglect the AIDS crisis.

Walter Camp praised the sport as a way to toughen up élite young white men. Despite changes to the game and society, his legacy remains.

Many of today's most influential right-wing tactics and arguments have their roots in 1960s-era college campuses.

Robin Blackburn’s sweeping history of slavery and freedom in the 19th century.

What a long-dead, cartoonishly corrupt Texas bureaucrat can tell us about the nature of immigration enforcement and the U.S.-Mexico divide.

How geology shaped American culture.

A new history of the CPUSA reads like a Cold War throwback.

“The Golden Girls” reframed senior life as being about socializing and sex. But did the cultural narrative of advanced age as continued youth go too far?

A new book celebrates an American political dynasty dedicated to public service. Why have they been forgotten?

What was “exceptional” about the American Revolution wasn’t so much the creation of a single republic but the immediate opportunity it provided for action.

A set of peculiarly American anxieties has spread across continents.

On Jean Strouse and the art of biography.

How did the U.S. government become involved in “adjudicating Indianness”?

Though Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett shared a mission, they took very different approaches. Their rivalry was political, sometimes even personal.

John Steinbeck based “The Grapes of Wrath” on Sanora Babb’s notes. But she was writing her own American epic.

On Percival Everett’s “James.”

Donald Trump’s victory will inevitably reopen the “fascism debate.” But does a populist whose appeal cuts across diverse groups truly fit the fascist profile?

Testing is necessary. The SAT’s creator is not.

The 20th-century movement to fix slouching questions the moral and political dimensions of addressing bad backs over wider public health concerns.