Excerpts

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.

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.