Excerpts

Yuval Levin urges us to take America’s greatest constitutional thinker, James Madison, as our lodestar.

By focusing on the Black working class and its long history, Blair LM Kelley’s book, "Black Folk," helps tell the larger story of American democracy.

Its agents are often depicted as malevolent puppet masters—or as bumbling idiots. The truth is even less comforting.

She remade the American songbook in her image, uprooting the very meaning of musical performance.

Historian Manisha Sinha argues that the Second Republic lasted decades longer than most histories state and achieved wider gains.

In Jack London’s novel, Martin Eden personifies debates still raging over the role and purpose of education in American life.

On Ana Raquel Minian’s “In the Shadow of Liberty.”

An essential new volume collects accounts of Japanese incarceration by patriotic idealists, righteous firebrands, and downtrodden cynics alike.

All that’s past isn’t necessarily present.

A new book explores the Communist Party's western base and its alliance with the labor movement.

In its reexamination of narratives about the expropriation of Native land, Michael Witgen’s work changes how Native people are in the arc of American history.

Judith Jones edited culinary greats such as Julia Child and Edna Lewis—and identified the pleasure at the core of traditional “women’s work.”

A new study of the national security apparatus finds the existing Bureau incompatible with republican government.

"The Reckoning," Robin Blackburn’s monumental history, offers a dizzying account of the politics behind slavery's rise and fall.

A new book traces "the rise and fall of Pete Rose, and the last glory days of baseball."

When Thomas Kuhn coined the term, he wasn’t referring simply to “out of the box” thinking.

Wilfred Reilly reviews two books critiquing modern ideas of race, social status, and diversity, advocating in favor of racial color-blindness.

Injecting the world’s deadliest toxin into one’s eye was always going to be a hard sell.

“John Marshall...exhibited a subservience to the executive branch that continues to haunt us.”

When viewing federal authority as a bulwark for civil rights against local tyranny, we miss what the U.S. government has done to sustain white freedom.

The legal academy has grown dismissive of Justice O’Connor, but the Supreme Court is not a law school faculty workshop. She saw herself as a problem-solver.

Our thinking about nostalgia is badly flawed because it relies on defective assumptions about progress and time.

Sinclair Lewis and the small-town science of yearning.

What a little-known family reveals about the nation’s untamed spirit.

In Beth Linker’s new book, she applies a disability studies lens to the history of posture.

Beware of theories about human nature based on the study of our earliest ancestors.

Marty Peretz and the travails of American liberalism.

A new career-spanning book offers a portrait of Painter’s career as a historian, essayist, and most recently visual artist.

Swarns’s book about a sale of enslaved people by Jesuit priests to save Georgetown University reminds us that the legacy of slavery is the legacy of resistance.

On Laura Helton’s “Scattered and Fugitive Things.”

For Ellen and William Craft, a flight from bondage required a daring masquerade, with exposure a constant risk.

A sweeping new history examines many untold stories of the American West in the late nineteenth century.

In a new book, Robert KD Colby of the University of Mississippi shows how the Confederacy remained committed to slavery.

Examining how William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass interpreted the nation's relationship with the Constitution.

When the creator of MDMA first experimented with the drug, he felt a mellow sensation that he compared to "a low-calorie martini."

On the mechanics of Wall Street’s influence on key institutions of American democracy, from the New Deal to today.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s “On Death and Dying” sparked a revolution in end-of-life care. But soon she began to deny mortality altogether.

A new history argues that illiberalism is not a backlash but a central feature from the founding to today.

New books examine the place of work in our lives—and how people throughout history have tried to change it.

Considering how relationships of cooperation and perhaps even solidarity might be forged between human beings and animals.

How Keith Haring got his halo.

Why should taxpayers fund schools that violate their own values, the Moms for Liberty wonder? A new book traces how this kind of thinking about public spending came to be.

Neighborhoods that once promised prosperity now offer crumbling infrastructure, aged housing stock, and social animus.

By looking at the labor history of academia, you can see the roots of a crisis in higher education that has been decades in the making.

The African American perfectionists offered “faith” instead of “hope”—emphasizing the struggle to realize a vision of justice.

No other 20th-century American novel did quite so much to burnish Brooklyn’s reputation.

Funny, convivial, chatty—a new edition of Emily Dickinson's letters upends the myth of her reclusive genius. 

On Cormac McCarthy.

George Balanchine and Martha Graham trade places.

We don’t need to imagine a world ravaged by nuclear war – we’re already living in it.