Excerpts

Curated stories from around the web.
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American and Israeli Jews protest outside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's New York hotel in support of democracy for all in Israel-Palestine, September 19, 2023.

The Forgotten History of American Jewish Dissent Against Zionism

In resurrecting stories of non- and anti-Zionist critics, a new book shows American Jews how questioning Israel is deeply rooted in their community.
Illustration of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and William James, and a cemetery.

‘Live All You Can’

The reflections of Emerson, Thoreau, and William James one finds a characteristically nineteenth-century American sense of resilience and regeneration.
Gloved hand holding COVID-19-shaped dandelion

Did the Year 2020 Change Us Forever?

The COVID-19 pandemic affected us in millions of ways. But it evades the meanings we want it to bear.
Mural of Harriet Tubman with arm outstretched

Harriet Tubman and the Most Important, Understudied Battle of the Civil War

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.
Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in a scene from the 1966 film “Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?”

The Drama of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” Spilled Into Real Life

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

The Reds Under Romney’s Bed

The most ambitious social experiment in American history that until 1877, explicitly rejected the core values of Victorian capitalism.
Illustration of a man with a shovel working a farm; the background shows scenes of family and communal life

Deep States

The old Midwest was a place animated by the belief that a self-governing republic is the best regime for man.
The cover of a book, titled "Biography of a Phantom: A Robert Johnson Blues Odyssey", written by Robert "Mack" McCormick.

Delta Force

A look at "Biography Of A Phantom", Robert McCormick's book about blues legend Robert Johnson.
Two people hanging poster of a man looking for his family, holding a photo of himself as a child.

Searching for Guatemala’s Stolen Children

Journalist Rachel Nolan investigates tens of thousands of forced adoptions and the U.S. policy that enabled them.
A church building situated amongst mountains.

Thoreau In Good Faith

A literary examination of Henry David Thoreau's life and legacy today.
Jewish moneylender choking debtor

"A Fiendish Fascination"

The representation of Jews in antebellum popular culture reveals that many Americans found them both cartoonishly villainous and enticingly exotic.
Leland and Jane Stanford

Stop All the Cocks! Who Killed Jane Stanford?

Many of the ­private colleges and universities in the US arose as much out of vanity as necessity. But for morbid narcissism, nothing comes close to Stanford.
The Fisk University Jubilee Singers on tour at the court of Queen Victoria in 1873, painted by Edmund Havel.

‘Dvorák’s Prophecy’ Review: America’s Silent Tradition

The Czech composer came to New York with the conviction that African-American melodies would be the ‘seedbed’ for their nation’s 20th-century music.
Jimi Hendrix performing at Woodstock.

The Beautiful Sounds of Jimi Hendrix

“Hendrix used a range of technological innovations...to expand the sound of the guitar, to make it ‘talk’ in ways that it never had.”
Cover of "Beaver Land," featuring a beaver tail

A Fascinating History of Beavers Shows How the Species Shaped the U.S.

Leila Philip's book is thrilling, both on scientific and historical levels.
Book cover; painting of Founding Fathers sitting around a table

The Continental Dollar: How the American Revolution Was Financed with Paper Money

Economists and historians have been telling us the wrong story about Continental currency for two centuries.
Painting of passenger pigeons over farm

They Covered the Sky, and Then...

Perhaps, in ethical terms, it doesn’t matter whether overhunting was or was not the cause of the passenger pigeon’s extinction. Practically speaking, it matters a good deal.
Black and white photo of Sigmund Freud walking between a man in a suit and a woman in a dress and fur coat

President Wilson on the Couch

What happened when a diplomat teamed up with Sigmund Freud to analyse the president?
Tennessee Williams

How Thomas Lanier Williams Became Tennessee

A collection of previously unpublished stories offers a portrait of the playwright as a young artist.
Albert Camus, photographed by Cecil Beaton for Vogue in 1946.

‘Travels in the Americas’ Review: Albert Camus Abroad

The author of ‘The Stranger’ toured the Americas in the years following World War II. He found prosperity and absurdity in plenty.
Cartoon of Buckminster Fuller with spirals in his glasses and hands out as if hypnotizing the reader.

Space-Age Magus

From beginning to end, experts saw through Buckminster Fuller’s ideas and theories. Why did so many people come under his spell?
Painting of of C.L.R. James.

The Dialectician

The paradoxes of C.L.R. James.
Map of the Mason-Dixon line.

Mason-Dixon Lines

The boundary lines preceding Mason and Dixon, everybody knows, were a sham. What’s to follow will be no better.
Collage of Heather Cox Richardson and the subjects of her book -- FDR, Lincoln, and Trump.

We Have No Princes: Heather Cox Richardson and the Battle over American History

One interpretation presents the country as irredeemably tainted by its past. Another contends that the United States has also tended toward egalitarianism.
Man at the wheel of a ship.

The Safe Harbor

Harry Bridges may no longer be widely known, but his philosophy of inclusive, democratic unionism imbues much of today’s most ambitious organizing campaigns.
Niels Vodder display with furniture designed by Finn Juhl, Cabinetmakers Guild Exhibition, 1949.

Freedom Furniture

How did Americans come to love “mid-century modern”?
Black and white portrait of Jones Very

The Voice of Unfiltered Spirit

In the poetry of Jones Very, whom his contemporaries considered “eccentric” and “mad," the self is detached from everything by an intoxicated egoism.
Japanese Americans stand in a line next to a train car, as U.S. military look on

The New Deal's Dark Underbelly

David Beito has penned one of the most damning scholarly histories of FDR to date.
Psychedelic images coming from a chemical flask.

When America First Dropped Acid

Well before the hippies arrived, LSD and other hallucinogens were poised to enter the American mainstream.
William Howard Taft, with the Supreme Court building under construction in the background.

The Architect of Our Divided Supreme Court

100 years ago, Chief Justice William Howard Taft made the Court more efficient and more powerful, marking a turning point whose effects are still being felt.
Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin during the Cold War.

The Book of Liberal Maladies

On Samuel Moyn's Cold War liberalism.
An old journal with cursive writing on the pages

Slanting the History of Handwriting

Whatever writing is today, it is not self-evident. But writing by hand did not simply continue to “advance” until it inevitably began to erode.
A sign left behind by Trump supporters at a rally outside the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, September 27, 2023.

American Fascism

On how Europe’s interwar period informs the present.
Lou Reed playing the guitar in front of an amp

The Brilliant Discontents of Lou Reed

A new biography examines the enigma of the musician.
A sculpture depicting George Washington and the Seneca leader Guyasuta staring at each other.

‘Our Father, the President’

George Washington's fraught relationship with Native Americans.
Rep. David McKinley (R-WV) tries unsuccessfully to hail a taxi as cabbies stage a rolling protest against app-based ride-hailing services.

Uber and the Impoverished Public Expectations of the 2010s

A new book shows that Uber was a symbol of a neoliberal philosophy that neglected public funding and regulation in favor of rule by private corporations.
‘View of Grave Creek Mound’; engraving by Ebenezer Mathers, 1839.

The Plunder and the Pity

Alicia Puglionesi explores the damage white supremacy did to Native Americans and their land.
Jewish civilians who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising are marched out of the city by Nazi troops

What Holocaust Remembrance Forgets

Popular accounts of the Holocaust overlook its irrationality and often disordered violence.
A crowd at an American Nazi Party rally raising their hands for the Nazi salute.

What Is the History of Fascism in the United States?

Bruce Kuklick traces the meaning of the term “fascist” from its origins to the present day and how it has, over the years, gradually lost its coherence.
Cover of Ned Blackhawk's book; a pole with feathers attached is next to the title, "The Rediscovery of America"

The Promise and Perils of Synthetic Native History

Over the past year, two prominent historians have invited readers to rethink the master narrative of US history.
Ellsworth Kelly at his Coenties Slip Studio, New York, 1961.

How a Formerly Deserted Waterfront Neighborhood Attracted Artists to Manhattan in the Mid 1900s

A compelling history of the fertile 1950s-’60s firmament surveys Lower Manhattan’s Coenties Slip.
Sly Stone with daughter Nove, ca. 1980.

On the Sly

A memoir of the Family Stone.
Milton Friedman.

Milton Friedman, the Prizefighter

The economist’s lifelong pugilism wasn’t in spite of his success—it may have been the key to it.
Robert Frost.

Belief is Better

Robert Frost’s correspondence on teaching, writing and having fun.

A Brief History of Mostly Terrible Campaign Biographies

“No harm if true; but, in fact, not true.”
A faux Brazilian village constructed for Henry II and Catherine de’ Medici on the banks of the Seine in Rouen, France, and inhabited by fifty Tupinambá people who were forcibly brought there from Brazil, 1550.

The Discovery of Europe

A new book investigates the indigenous Americans who were brought to or traveled to Europe in the 1500s—a story central to the beginning of globalization.
Reagan signing the Anti-Drug Abuse Act.

The Untold Story of Mass Incarceration

Two new books, including ‘Locking Up Our Own,’ address major blind spots about the causes of America’s carceral failure.
The New York Times headquarters in Manhattan.

The ‘Times’ Is A-Changing

A new history of the ‘New York Times.’
Cover of "Outrageous," with tomato on face of man holding microphone

Endless Culture Wars

On Kliph Nesteroff’s book, “Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars.”
Gun on the cover of Kellie Carter Jackson's book "Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence."

Words to Weapons: A History of the Abolition Movement from Persuasion to Force

With "Force and Freedom," Carter Jackson makes a stimulating and insightful debut which will have a major influence on abolition movement scholarship.
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