Excerpts

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.

Journalist Rachel Nolan investigates tens of thousands of forced adoptions and the U.S. policy that enabled them.

A literary examination of Henry David Thoreau's life and legacy today.

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

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

“Hendrix used a range of technological innovations...to expand the sound of the guitar, to make it ‘talk’ in ways that it never had.”

Leila Philip's book is thrilling, both on scientific and historical levels.

Economists and historians have been telling us the wrong story about Continental currency for two centuries.

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.

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

A collection of previously unpublished stories offers a portrait of the playwright as a young artist.

The author of ‘The Stranger’ toured the Americas in the years following World War II. He found prosperity and absurdity in plenty.

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

The paradoxes of C.L.R. James.

The boundary lines preceding Mason and Dixon, everybody knows, were a sham. What’s to follow will be no better.

One interpretation presents the country as irredeemably tainted by its past. Another contends that the United States has also tended toward egalitarianism.

Harry Bridges may no longer be widely known, but his philosophy of inclusive, democratic unionism imbues much of today’s most ambitious organizing campaigns.

How did Americans come to love “mid-century modern”?