Researching public figures’ families is much easier than it used to be—but that doesn’t mean it’s inherently enlightening.

Our grid is a mess. Its formation could teach us how to fix it.

Was the nineteenth-century Midwest “the most advanced democratic society that the world had seen”?

Unlike accounts that focus on the travails of European settlers, Pekka Hämäläinen’s new book tells a 10,000-year story of Native cultures, politics, and resistance.

A new work of history finds the best antidote to today’s authoritarian politics in Daniel Webster’s nineteenth-century civic nationalism.

Why has a relatively conventional history of the War of Independence drawn such an outraged response?

Juneteenth is an opportunity to recover the possibilities of history

A new book frames this country’s tendency toward state-sanctioned murder as a unique cultural inheritance.

A new book argues that the threat of secession has never left American politics.

The Gettysburg gambit is just his latest attempt to appropriate American history and symbology and pervert it to suit his ends.

On new nonfiction about white supremacy in America's past and present

The terrifying, censored coverage of the 1918 Spanish flu

Two new books tell the stories of people kidnapped and sold into slavery. One of them sued successfully.

Stephen King’s story focuses on our culture’s obsessive denial of grief.

America today has a lot in common with that bygone era of monopolies and gross inequality. But will the country respond similarly?

Three new books trace a century of antiwar activists' visions for a more equal, peaceful world.

The weekend's demonstrators were the latest in a long line of American racists to ally themselves with an imagined Middle Ages.

Trump isn’t the first conspiracy theorist in chief—just the most shameless.

Nancy Isenberg's new book tells the story of a large and forgotten class of “waste people.”