Excerpts

Carson pioneered a new style of late-night hosting—relaxed, improvisatory, risk-averse, and inscrutable.

A liberalism that divides humanity into a master class and a slave class deserves an asterisk as “white liberalism.”

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

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

John Rankin, minister and fierce abolitionist, is a man worth remembering in our moment.

Often, the proper scope of the First Amendment can be determined only by considering both text and context.

In assessing the rise of the global anti-democracy movement, the United States must look inward as well as outward.

Two new books explore the messy complexities of immigration—from the era of Lincoln to Irish New York.

Two recent books about our immigration system reveal its long history of exploiting vulnerable individuals for financial gain.

Contrary to both far right and mainstream center-left, there’s no epidemic of chosen childlessness.

Marion Gibson’s research rigorously traces the legal and human aspects of the trials through today.

Heather Cox Richardson argues that there are two Americas: one interested in equality, the other in hierarchy. But it's not that simple.

“The Bookshop” tells the story of American bookstores in thirteen types. Its true subject is not how bookstore can survive, but how they should be.

John Andrew Jackson spent a night at Harriet Beecher Stowe’s home as he fled north. Why do so few traces of his visit remain?

Fighting over the legacy of a conservative hero in the era of Trump.

Make one of President George Washington's favorite cocktails.

It just might be the great American art form. You can thank the residents of Salem for that.

A truly Christian postliberalism would imagine and enact an alternative modernity with a different standard of progress.

A new work of nonfiction revives a history that some would sooner see forgotten.

Why did the U.S. allow its national communications markets to be run by expansive monopolists?

Matt Stoller charts the shifts in American attitudes toward corporate consolidation.

Clinton’s role in decoupling the Democratic Party from mainstream labor, first in Arkansas and then nationally, had dire consequences.

Jeremy Dauber's new book explores the themes and origins of the American horror genre.

The overlooked Creek War set the tone for America to come.

The rivalry of two men tells the story of how Democrats fumbled with their traditional base—and how they can win again.

Is the car our most gendered technology?

John Steinbeck beat Sanora Babb to the great American Dust Bowl novel—using her field notes. What do we owe her today?

Political polling’s greatest achievement is its complete co-opting of our understanding of public opinion, which we can no longer imagine without it.

Long before the rise of Trump, the American conservative mainstream enjoyed a complex partnership with the Far Right.

Is the United States a prisoner of its own mythology?

The Founders didn’t believe the Constitution had a fixed meaning. So why do so many of the justices?

“Against Constitutional Originalism” by historian Jonathan Gienapp could fundamentally reorient how we understand America’s founding.

A new history revisits “the Trial of the Century” and its legacy in contemporary politics.

As the civil-rights era receded, his personal heroism loomed larger. But movement politics didn’t easily translate into party politics.

Two new books tell the stories of people kidnapped and sold into slavery. One of them sued successfully.

The Civil War cut short many lives, and a new a book that blends the genres of history and memoir sets out the resurrect the memory of one of those lives.

How German Enlightenment thought influenced Abraham Lincoln.

Two new books reveal the shortcomings at the heart of the liberal critique of Trump voters.

How women's liberation transformed America and why our understanding of 1963-1973 needs to include more voices.

During the half-century between Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson, class warfare in the United States was always robust, usually ferocious, and often homicidal.

A new book charts the history of pet cemeteries and honors the universal experience of grieving an animal companion.

In two new books, the rise of recycling is a story of illusory promises, often entwined with disturbing political agendas.

New books reconsider how Ulysses S. Grant became a forceful defender of the rights of African Americans after the Civil War.

A recent history revisits the Tokyo trial.

Originalism is not so much an idea as a legal-industrial complex divided into three parts—the academic, the jurisprudential, and the political.

Many vignettes of sheriffs in action are dramatic and alarming. But how representative are they?

The deep roots of debt relief activism in the United States.

Some scholars say that it’s to blame for our political dysfunction—and that we need to start over.

Historians may never speak of an “Age of Adams” to rival Andrew Jackson, but Randall Woods’s new biography reveals the sixth president’s greatness.

The yuppies embodied the winning side of America’s deepening economic divide. Bruce Springsteen spoke for those left behind.