Excerpts

From the beginning of the recording industry, many voices have been suppressed and significant cultural history has been lost to prudery and censorship.

Taking seriously the midlife crisis.

Turning the history of capitalism into a morality tale about good guys and bad guys is tempting.

Thoreau’s loafing and the purpose of life.

The rise and fall of the Shingle Style ideal.

A descendant of the Oneida Community reflects on the famous 19th century experiment in managing sexual freedom.

Gary Bass’s new book asks why the tribunal in Tokyo after World War II was so ineffective.

Advanced Placement testing is "a money-making racket that lets states off the hook for underfunding education."

The Great War forced the US to create a modern spying and analysis apparatus.

Patti Davis has spent a lifetime chronicling her life with parents Ronald and Nancy Reagan. In a new book, 'Dear Mom and Dad,' she reckons with them as people.

In a new book, “Did it Happen Here?,” scholars debate what the F-word conceals and what it reveals.

It puts the people in the most peril in the center of the story: the people being systematically exploited, chained, whipped and raped.

An explosive new book delves into American Jewish McCarthyism from the 1950s through late 1970s.

The rise of the sport as we know it was centered in Gotham, where big stadiums, heroic characters, and epic sportswriting produced a pastime that bound a city together.

The feminist history of the crossword puzzle: some of the form's early champions were women working for little to no pay.

Right-wing evangelicalism’s moral and religious descent into Trumpism has been near-total. Is there a way out?

Richardson’s work is as much about the contradictions of our shared past as it is an urgent call to action around the current authoritarian crisis.

A new history of labor organizing in Coachella tells us the story of the United Farm Workers and how its rank-and-file members drove the union to success.

Native son Jonah Walters finds something entirely too innocent about the tales told about the anthracite industry’s origins.

The SS Eastland disaster and Chicago's ghosts.

A groundbreaking new book demonstrates that even during the days of slavery, African Americans knew a lot more about legal principles than has been imagined.

John A. Williams’s unsung novel.

Percival Everett transforms Mark Twain’s classic 'Huckleberry Finn' into a tragedy.

The hardscrabble origins and unique vision of novelist Willa Cather.

As a feminist in the adult-film industry, she believed the answer wasn’t banning porn; it was better porn.

Dan Sinykin’s history of corporate fiction.

A new biography reveals how Ralph Waldo Emerson gave Americans a vocabulary to understand themselves in an era even more tempestuous than our own.

Kevin Cook and Jeff Guinn on David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and the 1993 siege of Waco.

Romano’s book is a vital, comprehensive piece of media scholarship about one of the most influential outlets of the last century. It’s also fun as hell to read.

Matthew Lassiter’s history plays out in ranch houses, high school parking lots, and courtrooms from Shaker Heights to Westchester to Orange County.

Right from the beginning, a commercial spirit and the wealth it generated were essential to creating and constituting America.

Was he a brilliant painter or a brilliant brand?

At once famous and obscure, marginal and central, Harry Smith anticipated and even invented several important elements of Sixties counterculture.

A review of three new studies about how race and class intersect.

America’s favorite gun.

Lepore’s framework insists that the “self-evident” truths of the nation’s founding were anything but.

How Charles Lamb and his collection of well-loved books inspired a generation of American collectors.

‘The Achilles Trap’ reexamines the relationship between Hussein and four U.S. administrations.

Two differing explorations of post-WWII culture, politics, and ideals.

How Istanbul changed his career—and his life.

In “The Court at War,” Cliff Sloan examines the close relationship between FDR and the high court during World War II.

The two-volume ‘Codex of the Endangered Species Act’ takes a long look back — and forward.

In resurrecting stories of non- and anti-Zionist critics, a new book shows American Jews how questioning Israel is deeply rooted in their community.

The reflections of Emerson, Thoreau, and William James one finds a characteristically nineteenth-century American sense of resilience and regeneration.

The COVID-19 pandemic affected us in millions of ways. But it evades the meanings we want it to bear.

Edda L. Fields-Black sets out to restore the Combahee River Raid to its proper place in Tubman’s life and in the war on slavery.

After "Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," the nightmare of American familyhood was the only game in town.

The most ambitious social experiment in American history that until 1877, explicitly rejected the core values of Victorian capitalism.

The old Midwest was a place animated by the belief that a self-governing republic is the best regime for man.

A look at "Biography Of A Phantom", Robert McCormick's book about blues legend Robert Johnson.