Excerpts

Curated stories from around the web.
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Collage of Edna Ferber, a still from the film "Giant," and symbols of Texas.

The Carpetbagger Who Saw Texas’s Future

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.
"Stayed on Freedom" book cover

A History of Black Power We Need and Deserve

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.
John Locke

Review of "America's Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life"

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.
Illustration of sex workers behind waving American flag.

How the United States Tried to Get on Top of the Sex Trade

Why should American exceptionalism end at the red-light district?
"Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right" book cover.

The History of Gay Conservatism

LGBTQ voters overwhelmingly went for Harris, but the idea that gay voters are always going to be solidly blue is a myth.
Burglar sneaking into the bedroom of a sleeping woman.

True Crime: Allan Pinkerton’s “Thirty Years a Detective”

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

A Cold Warrior for Our Time

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

Eroticize the Hood

A new book revamps Newark's reputation as unsexy, violent, destitute, defiantly declaring it “a place of desire, love, eroticism, community, and resistance.”
Tents in Resurrection City in Washington D.C., a protest encampment on the National Mall.

The Poverty of Homeownership

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.
A drawing of the book "Fat is a Feminist Issue" by Susie Orbach with a magnifying glass in front of it.

Was “Fat Is a Feminist Issue” Liberating? Or Weight-Loss Propaganda?

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

Five Magnificent Years

A recent Otis Redding biography examines what was and what could have been, 50 years after tragedy struck.
An older man standing outside a restaurant.

Aging Out

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

Divided Providence

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

The Tragedy of Ryan White

How politicians used the story of one young patient to neglect the AIDS crisis.
The 1879 Yale Football Team posing for a photo with captain Walter Camp.

What Would the Father of American Football Make of the Modern Game?

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.
College students studying in a campus lounge.

What the New Right Learned in School

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

The Second Abolition

Robin Blackburn’s sweeping history of slavery and freedom in the 19th century.
William Hanson with Brigadier General Jacob Walters and Texas Rangers in Longview in 1919.

The Banality of Border Evil

What a long-dead, cartoonishly corrupt Texas bureaucrat can tell us about the nature of immigration enforcement and the U.S.-Mexico divide.
Men on horses and with swords exploring the a canyon.

Scratching the Surface

How geology shaped American culture.
CPUSA members demonstrate in Union Square on May Day, ca. 1930s.

Maurice Isserman’s Red Scare

A new history of the CPUSA reads like a Cold War throwback.
Collage of The Golden Girls, a suitcase, a golf ball, viagra pills, and a Welcome to Florida sign.

How Old Age Was Reborn

“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?
William H. Taft with his extended family in 1918.

Review: ‘The Tafts’ by George W. Liebmann

A new book celebrates an American political dynasty dedicated to public service. Why have they been forgotten?
The American Flag, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and a Jewish Star with Hebrew words.

The Spirit of '76: A Jewish Perspective on the American Revolution

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.
Illustration of an octopus with a "no talking" symbol, with its tentacles around the globe.

How Cancel Culture Panics Ate the World

A set of peculiarly American anxieties has spread across continents.
Paintings by John Singer Sargent: Asher Wertheimer, 1898 (left) and Hylda, Almina and Conway, Children of Asher Wertheimer, 1905 (center), London. Portrait of Mrs. Asher B. Wertheimer, 1898 (right).

A Sudden, Revealing Searchlight

On Jean Strouse and the art of biography.
A girl in Native American tribal regalia being crowned as homecoming queen.

The Complex Politics of Tribal Enrollment

How did the U.S. government become involved in “adjudicating Indianness”?
Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennet

The Frenemies Who Fought to Bring Birth Control to the U.S.

Though Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett shared a mission, they took very different approaches. Their rivalry was political, sometimes even personal.
Author Sanora Babb, with her husband James Wong Howe, in their library.

The Woman Who Defined the Great Depression

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

Gulp Fiction, or Into the Missouri-verse

On Percival Everett’s “James.”
Parade of cars with Donald Trump flags and American flags.

The “Fascist” With a Popular Majority

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?
A standardized test and a pencil, with answers bubbled in.

The Rotting of the College Board

Testing is necessary. The SAT’s creator is not.
Skeletons in a museum posed with varying postures, as if they are performing different tasks.

Why Americans Are Obsessed With Poor Posture

The 20th-century movement to fix slouching questions the moral and political dimensions of addressing bad backs over wider public health concerns.
"REM" musicians pose in front of a mirror.

How R.E.M. Created Alternative Music

In the cultural wasteland of the Reagan era, they showed that a band could have mass appeal without being cheesy, or nostalgic, or playing hair metal.
Protesters storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

What’s the Difference Between a Rampaging Mob and a Righteous Protest?

From the French Revolution to January 6th, crowds have been heroized and vilified. Now they’re a field of study.
A group of students demonstrating during a counterprotest to an ongoing anti–Vietnam War rally.

The Right Uses College Campuses as Its Training Grounds

Conservatives love to bemoan their supposed status as oppressed minorities in universities. But the college campus has long been a key site for the Right.
Portrait of Ena and Betty Wertheimer by John Singer Sargent, 1901.

Friend of the Family

Jean Strouse explores the relationship between the Anglo-Jewish Wertheimers and John Singer Sargent, who painted twelve portraits of them.
Supreme Court justices William O. Douglas, Felix Frankfurter, and Owen J. Roberts at the White House.

FDR’s Compliant Justices

The Supreme Court’s deference to FDR during World War II resulted in unjustifiable ethical breaches.
Cover of "The Corporation in the Nineteenth-Century American Imagination" featuring a dragon with its tentacles entrapping people.

Between The Many and The One

Stephanie Mueller´s book sheds light on the percieved death of liberalism and the fear of corporations.
President Woodrow Wilson riding as a passenger in a two seater car with his chauffeur, George Howard.

States’ Rights or Inalienable Rights?

Some early progressives may have been advocates of states’ rights, but they misunderstood the philosophy of the American Founding.
Pamela Harriman posing in an expensively decorated bedroom beside a four poster bed.

How a Mid-Century Paramour Became a Democratic Power Broker

Churchill weaponized her powers of seduction—but Pamela Harriman came into her own when she brought her glamour to Washington.

Today’s Echoes of the First ‘America First’

Charles Lindbergh’s ideology prefigured Donald Trump’s—and was rightly disgraced.
A view of Wall Street and Federal Hall in the Financial District in New York City.

In the 1970s, the Left Put a Good Crisis to Waste

In "Counterrevolution," Melinda Cooper reads the 1970s economic crisis as an elite revolt rather than proof of the New Deal order’s unsustainability.
Photo by Ralph Ellison of men standing by a street in New York City.

Ralph Ellison’s Alchemical Camera

The novelist's aestheticizing impulse contrasts with the relentless seriousness of his observations and critiques of American society.
Image of the outline of the United States in red fire.

A Dark Reminder of What American Society Has Been and Could Be Again

How an obsessive hatred of immigrants and people of color and deep-seated fears about the empowerment of women led to the Klan’s rule in Indiana.
Doorkeeper at a meeting of the United Mine Workers of America in Wheelwright, Kentucky.

Before Operation Dixie

What the failed Southern labor movement teaches us about the rightward shift in US politics.
The Fallen Angels on the Wing by Gustave Doré, a dark painting of angels falling from heaven.

The Political Afterlife of Paradise Lost

From white supremacists to black activists, readers have sought moral legitimacy in Milton’s epic poem.
Johnny Carson hosting the Tonight Show.

The Amazing, Disappearing Johnny Carson

Carson pioneered a new style of late-night hosting—relaxed, improvisatory, risk-averse, and inscrutable.
A World History Encloypedia graphic image/illustration of The Feudal Society in Medieval Europe.

American Feudalism

A liberalism that divides humanity into a master class and a slave class deserves an asterisk as “white liberalism.”
A black and white photo of an American soldier on patrol in Kabul, Afghanistan, 2005.

God’s Directive

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, evangelical American missionaries followed military tanks into Afghanistan and Iraq to convert Muslims.
Thomas Carlyle.

A Fundamentally Anti-Democratic Tradition: Zack Beauchamp's "The Reactionary Spirit"

Where conservatives may seek to conserve their democratic systems, reactionaries by their nature seek to weaken or abolish them.
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