Excerpts

“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.

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.