Excerpts

A 17th-century column shows that dating has always been an anxiety-riddled endeavor.

Espionage has always been with us, but its rapid growth over the past century may have undermined trust in government.

The trio of interests atop business, military, and government depicted in C. Wright Mills’s postwar critique is no longer united in setting the national agenda.

Most countries take their popular novelists more seriously than America has. The term “Great American Novel” was literally invented to describe this book

The Fourteenth Amendment captures the idea that no people born in the United States should be forced to live in the shadows.

A lifetime spent studying the disastrous lead-up to World War I gave Paul Schroeder reason to be horrified at the recklessness of US foreign policy.

The qualities that enabled Belle da Costa Greene to cross the color line also made her a formidable negotiator and collector for J.P. Morgan’s library.

“Only two states wanted a civil war—Massachusetts and South Carolina.”

Populist and patrician, hustler and moralist, salesman and satirist, he embodied the tensions within his America, and ours.

On Ray Bradbury’s underappreciated classic.

Building the assumption of work’s meaningfulness happened across many different institutions and types of media.

While some Jewish exiles dreamed of a homeland in Palestine, the Jewish Territorial Organization fixed its hopes on Galveston.

Greg Grandin’s new book tells the story of US expansionism and its complex relationship with the rest of the New World.

Why his turn-of-the-century travelogue still resonates.

The complex, sometimes romanticized, but ultimately prophetic Catholic peace movement has critical lessons for today's America amid a genocidal war in Gaza.

In a new book, the Pulitzer Prize winner Greg Grandin tells the history of the hemisphere from south of the border.

Shulamith Firestone and the burdens of prophecy.

According to Andrew Kahrl, the property tax has been used to disposs black homeowners since the 19th century.

For decades, the term “school choice” was widely and rightly dismissed as racist. Now it’s the law in thirty-three states.

Before Lincoln turned the idea of “the Union” into a cause worth dying for, he tried other means of ending slavery in America.

Five women who made important contributions to 19th-century American philosophy finally get their due.

An exploration of the contrast between the supreme confidence of Kennan's policy prescriptions and the perpetual turbulence of his inner life.

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.