Excerpts

John Seabrook’s history of Seabrook Farms, where many incarcerated Japanese Americans worked during WWII, is ultimately about fathers and sons.

A new book shows that Marxism in the US "was never constrained to the reiteration of a set of dogmatic principles one associates with party ideologues."

Historian Thomas A. Tweed proposes an environmental approach to the study of American religion.

A new book unearths a chapter of the state’s story when anti-intellectual fundamentalism was put to good ends.

A sweeping new history explores facial hair as a proving ground for notions about gender, race, and rebellion.

When all the bad things America did are true, but none of the good things, something is amiss.

The disquieting story of an American health-product giant.

David Blight's report "Yale and Slavery" considers institutional accountability in the context of a world marked by systemic violence and inequality.

A new book traces how "the wet dream of an ageing militarist has become a fundamental force driving American foreign policy."

How William F. Buckley Jr. turned his father’s private convictions and prejudices into a major political movement.

When McCarthy stalked the groves of academe.

Red Scare can be read as solid history of the years it depicts—and chilling prophecy of the years to come.

How Claire McCardell changed women’s fashion.

A new book offers a fresh perspective on the resistance of enslaved women and their interactions with the law.

A new book examines the aggressive masculinity that the editors of the Partisan Review brought to their art and literary criticism.

The turbulent late sixties saw the technique’s popularity explode—and it’s been helping moviemakers engage with the unsettling tempos of modern life ever since.

How FDR invented national security, and why Democrats need to move on from it.

How did the concept become the solution to society’s most deeply entrenched problems?

The progress we have seen toward civil rights for all Americans is inseparable from the history of classical liberalism.

How one book shaped the way the NPS interpreted the Civil War.

Survivors of the nuclear blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still fighting for recognition.

How did freedom become synonymous with having lots of options?

Texas might have been a place to start a conversation about widening the scope of civil liberties, but it has also been a place where those liberties end.

A new book portrays five American historians who published popular books that sacrificed neither intellectual depth nor political bite.

How an Ovid-quoting London broadsheet from the late seventeenth century spawned “Dear Abby,” Dan Savage, and Reddit’s Am I the Asshole.

Even some liberals toasted William F. Buckley Jr. as a patrician gentleman. A long-awaited new biography corrects that record.

J. Hoberman’s teeming history of New York’s avant-garde scene is a fascinating trove of research and a thrilling clamor of voices.

Calls to defund the Marxist left and similar mobilizations against rumors of a new red dawn are nothing new.

Reflections on memory, dreams, and computer screensavers.

How Irving Thalberg helped turn M-G-M into the world’s most famous movie studio—and gave the film business a new sense of artistry and scale.

A new book challenges the discursive ignorance about the condition.

On grifters, the Chicago World Fair, and Oz as symbol of a modern USA.

On the political theorist and the new media landscape.

On two new books that critique identity politics and seek a new vision of political culture.

High-minded and scandal-prone, a foe of marriage who dreamed of domesticity, Fuller radiated a charisma that helped ignite the fight for women’s rights.

A new book illuminates how freedom became associated with choice and questions whether that has been a good thing—for women in particular.

The political vision that William F. Buckley helped forge was—and remains today—focused less on adhering to principles and more on ferreting out enemies.

Orisanmi Burton’s "Tip of the Spear" uncovers the obscured and radical demands of the inmates who staged the 1971 prison uprising—a world without prisons.

Hayek suspected that nothing about the vindication of neoliberalism was likely to be straightforward.

Were you to vanish Marx from every library, you’d destroy the central interlocutor around which most of capitalism is built.

The 1970s campaign fought to get women paid for their work in the home—and envisioned a society built to better support motherhood.

How a sharp-elbowed Polish academic with an unpronounceable name helped defeat the Soviet Union.

Ella Fitzgerald performed above the emotional fray.

A new book demonstrates that the skills taught and honed in the humanities are of vital importance to the defense of democracy.

Walt Whitman was a champion self-advertiser, maven of the brag and the humblebrag.

In "Memoirs of a Nobody," Henry Boernstein chronicles the militant immigrant organizing that helped keep St. Louis out of the hands of the Confederacy.

Manisha Sinha’s history of Reconstruction sheds fresh light on the period that fleetingly opened a door to a different America.

The nation’s founding myth was based on faith and solidarity – but it also contained the roots of today’s democratic crisis.

R. Crumb’s cartoons plumb the grotesque corners of the American unconscious.

Scott Spillman reviews Seth Rockman’s “Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery.”