Excerpts

A biography of Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah casts the post-WWII era as a Black liberation epic rather than a psychodrama between Moscow and Washington.

The ’80s I thought I remembered now feel very different to me.

Journalist Rebecca Grant shifts the abortion conversation away from laws and morals to focus on access: getting people the care they seek.

At a time when allegations of antisemitism are rampant and often incoherent, historian Mark Mazower offers a helpfully lucid history of the term.

According to John Cassidy’s century-spanning history "Capitalism and Its Critics," the system lives on because of its antagonists.

The New Deal didn’t solve the economic problems behind the Great Depression—it made them worse.

Why has a relatively conventional history of the War of Independence drawn such an outraged response?

How a term coined to describe a nineteenth-century politics of exclusion would become a diagnosis, a political cudgel, and a rallying cry.

Joseph Smith, religious innovator.

Revisiting the lessons of Allan Bérubé’s 1990 history of queer solders during World War II.

The radical lives of James Baldwin.

A new book reveals systematic, profitable, and deadly arson schemes perpetrated by landlords and insurance companies in the Bronx.

To understand the intellectual coordinates of Trumpism we must look in unconventional places.

Long before it was fashionable, Amelia Bloomer pioneered what would later be dubbed "respectability politics."

On new biographies of Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger.

In a new memoir, Susan Cheever searches for the wellspring of her father’s genius.

Historian Jane Smith understands her childhood differently after discovering that her father had been pushed out of his profession during the Red Scare.

Two different accounts from former Democratic Party insiders about the “giant U-turn” from postwar prosperity to the polarization and inequality of today.

Fara Dabhoiwala’s case against free speech.

Black gold powered the United States’ transition from backwater to global hegemon.

"Apple in China" tells the incredible story of China’s industrial development through the lens of America’s most iconic tech giant.

Is he merely a reactionary, or do his films paint a more complicated picture?

A Republican administration that wages war against immigrants and colleges should be understood as the culmination of William F. Buckley conservative movement.

Revisit the transformative moment in American culture through the lens of a new book about the 1960s New York avant-garde.

A new book explores how Americans came to believe in an advanced Martian civilization at the turn of the twentieth century.

As a new book on their travels together shows, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison's friendship went beyond politics.

A detailed, exhausting, and ultimately too-gentle treatment of the midcentury writer and editor, Frank Meyer.

From the Pequot War to the New Deal-era Civilian Conservation Corps, trees tell a living story.

Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, and many other notorious figures lived in and around Tacoma in the sixties. A new book argues that there was something in the water.

Trump's tariffs echo centuries of global protectionism, but history and economics question their effectiveness and long-term value.

Georgios Varouxakis reexamines when and why people began to conceptualize "the West."

On a new biography of James Baldwin.

A street-level view of Rudy Giuliani’s transformation of the Big Apple.

Frank Meyer’s journey took him from communist agitator to conservative kingmaker.

American special operators brought their tactics in the global war on terror back home.

Once dismissed as passé, since recast as a secular saint, Baldwin’s true message remains more unsettling than readers in either camp recognize.

A new biography shows that his life was more complex than his viral fame suggests.

To some, the fires lit in New York in the late seventies signaled rampant crime; to others, rebellion. But maybe they were signs of something else entirely.

In the 1950s, the CIA funded efforts to smuggle great works of literature into the Eastern Bloc.

The often-overlooked institutions of the federal government truly do matter and so do the individuals who lead those institutions and give them direction.

From a dying adviser to a clumsy editorial, the Revolution was a cascade of accidents and oversights.

There are two ways to understand John Maynard Keynes: tracing his influences and legacies, and highlighting the ideas and perspectives he missed.

Sam Tanenhaus’s biography of William F. Buckley has certain limitations, but it captures the character of conservatism’s founding father.

Eighty years after the bomb, scientists still grapple with nuclear legacy. Some seek atonement, others insist it’s no longer their burden.

A woman killed by Congress.

With Iran’s theocracy under strain, a new history shows that its rise was mainly a stroke of bad luck.

Historians have long grappled with “the American Paradox” of Revolutionary leaders who fought for their own liberty while denying it to enslaved Black people.

A roving history makes the case for shade’s centrality to public health, climate adaptation, and even a more robust and inclusive public sphere.

“Girl on Girl,” by the critic Sophie Gilbert, is the latest in a series of consciousness-raising-style reappraisals of the decade’s formative texts.

Six decades of civil-rights efforts haven’t budged the racial wealth gap, and the usual prescriptions—including reparations—offer no lasting solutions.