Excerpts

The convergence of economy and politics in the Sino-US relationship via Jonathan Chatwin’s “The Southern Tour” and Elizabeth O’Brien Ingleson’s “Made in China.”

Plus: One historian’s about-face on the Communist record.

Generally speaking, emergencies tend to reduce productivity, at least in the short and medium terms.

"The Bondwoman’s Narrative" is the first novel by a Black woman to describe slavery from the inside. Recently, scholars have discovered her true identity.

James Shapiro's book "The Playbook" is a timely reminder both of the power of theater and of the vehement antipathy it can generate.

In 2024, the U.S. faces some of the same challenges in the region that it did in 1954.

What was the Popular Front? Where did it come from, and where did its energies go?

John Ganz offers a whirlwind tour of the cranks, conservatives, and con artists who helped remake the American right at the turn of the 21st century.

Can we appreciate Herman Melville’s work without attributing to it schemes for the uplift of modern man?

Jewish masculinity and the New York intellectuals.

After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans replaced all its public schools with charter schools. A new book recovers the decades of work the storm disrupted.

Why conservatives killed America’s federally funded theater.

Revisiting his first book, "The Enormous Room," a reader can get a sense of everything appealing and appalling in his work.

It has suddenly become popular to cast NATO as the first benign military alliance in history, without concealed politics.

On the intertwined history of free speech law and media technology.

The resistance inside prisons is an integral part of the struggle against white supremacy and for Black liberation beyond the walls.

The anthology drama provided a venue for discourses on American national identity during the massive cultural, economic, and political changes occurring at midcentury.

Humans have doodled for as long as they have written and drawn, but psychoanalysis began to imagine the doodle as a key to understanding the unconscious mind.

Lyndsey Stonebridge’s book hurls us deeper into Hannah Arendt’s thinking, showing us that there was muddle rather than method at the heart of it.

Sinha enlarges the temporal boundaries students are accustomed to by covering the end of the 19th century into the Progressive era with the 19th Amendment.

An in-depth reckoning with the Gates Foundation as a discrete actor is long overdue.

High ideals have always gone together with economic self-interest in the history of the United States.

The story of American abolitionists who, after Emancipation, pivoted from antislavery campaigns to animal welfare advocacy.

On three histories of the Biden White House, and the 2024 election.

To understand the racism of the drug war, we must look to the ways policymakers sought to protect white suburban youth.

Norman Mailer’s generation learned to “write like men.” But their female contemporaries from Mary McCarthy to Diana Trilling pioneered a more enduring style.

What was in the water circa 1992?

A new book brings to life the war in the South.

Steven Hyden's new book about Bruce Springsteen's iconic "Born in the U.S.A" album is the product of a lifelong passion for the music of "The Boss."

Charting the history of a TV phenomenon.

A new book argues that worship of the Constitution has distorted our politics.

Bill Trueheart's battles with friend and fellow Foreign Service officer Fritz Nolting illustrate the American tragedy in Southeast Asia.

"To believe that the richness of Black identity can be understood through a temporary costume trivializes the lifelong trauma of racism. It turns the complexity of Black life into a stunt."

For the players in the First World War, the goal was not to prevail but to avoid being seen as the loser.

Siskel and Ebert and the heyday of popular movie criticism.

The American public is more susceptible than ever to skewed narratives.

The latest biography of the great transcendentalist captures the paradoxes of his Yankee mind.

Neoliberalism isn’t just a set of economic precepts—it’s also an architecture of laws passed to reinforce those precepts. Those laws must be changed.

Myths to explain American history and chart a path to the future once helped to bind the country together. Today, they are absorbed into the culture wars.

A new book conveys in dramatic detail what America’s Moses did to help abolish slavery. Another addresses the love of God and country that helped her do so.

In defense of the furred and the hoofed.

Alan Taylor’s case for thinking of it as a continental conflict.

The warnings in Cold War history.

Many recoil at the thought of stronger political parties. But revitalized parties could be exactly what our ailing democracy needs.

How psychedelics went from counterculture to grind culture.

The long arc of racist plunder through local tax codes is shocking—or, well, maybe it’s not, really.

Ann Powers’s deeply personal biography of Joni Mitchell looks at how a generation of listeners came to identify with the folk singer’s intimate songs.

In ‘When the Clock Broke,’ John Ganz revisits the era of Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot to find the roots of our populist moment.

Do Americans in rural places really “marinate in a sense of loss and perpetual disappointment”?

Power and choice in the 1930s novel.