Excerpts

In “Tyranny of the Minority,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue that the document has doomed our politics. But it can also save them.

This is the first post in our theme for October 2023, Urban Disability focusing on the role of cities in fostering disability rights.

The new album “Some Mississippi Sunday Morning” collects gospel songs recorded inside a notorious penitentiary.

On upending the accepted narrative of the movement.

A 1953 C.I.A.-backed coup that ousted Iran’s Cold War leader has colored U.S.-Iran relations for decades.

Chris Waltz was appalled. He felt Democrats were using the Sandy Hook tragedy to tell him he wasn’t responsible enough to own an AR-15.

The most hypnotic piece of music released so far in 2023 was recorded forty-seven years ago in a barely adequate studio in Rockland County, New York.

On factional strife in the Early Republic, and why parties themselves were universally despised.

The first of these festivals debuted in the early 1960s, serving as a prime example of the United States' burgeoning counterculture.

The Puritans outlawed Thomas Morton's "New English Canaan" because it was critical of the society they were building in colonial New England.

Edgar Allan Poe knew that readers would add their visual image of the author to his work to create a personality that informed their reading.

One of the thousands of white Southerners who supported the Union during the Civil War and a rare example of a slave owner who changed his views on race.

The only question is whether American citizens today can uphold that commitment.

The famous disaster razed a metropolis and spread a pack of colorful lies. To sift through the ashes today is to encounter some uncomfortable truths.

And the ways capital took advantage of the state's policing of sexuality.

The program was about education. But it was also about surveillance.

How American drug companies have exploited government contracts to pursue profit over public interest.

Two new books model radically different ways of studying the past.

Requiring rest, rather than work, is still a radical idea.

A new book exposes effects of anti-Black myth-making and calls for an end to the family policing system.

Pence invoked them at the Republican debates, but a true reckoning with their history provides a different vision of the nation’s future.

A left that is ambivalent about liberalism can still seek to engage it.

To judge from the Concord collection, the public forum of antebellum America was no model of democratic deliberation.

Chile’s president was in Washington over the weekend to mark a grim anniversary. Congress is still asking questions about the U.S. role in the 1973 coup.

The neoliberal order has been exposed as fraudulent, inefficient, and inequitable. Yet it hardly lies in the dustbin of history.

Reconstruction-era opponents of racial equality popularized the charge that protecting civil rights would amount to the end of capitalism.

The story of the man who introduced ice cubes into our beverages.

Two recent books illuminate the dark foundations of Silicon Valley.

A new book illuminates how Black Americans used property ownership, common law and other methods to assert their rights.

Decisions made now could shape the next 100 years.

How the dream of air conditioning turned into the dark future of climate change.

Rather than viewing strikes as a last-resort bargaining tactic, the labor movement must embrace them as engines of political transformation.

A journalistic view of Martin Luther King Jr.'s life, work, and representation in American society.

There were more government shutdowns under Ronald Reagan than under every president since, combined. But some were as short as a few hours.

The famed opera has been criticized for its racist portrayals of Asian-Americans.

Cable TV's backers sold the technology as a boon to democracy, but embraced a business model that chased niche audiences.

To Heather Cox Richardson, the battle for our history is the battle for our democracy. And we may be nearing the endgame.

Municipal governments today hold around $4 trillion in outstanding debt. The growing costs of simply servicing their debt is cannibalizing their annual budgets.

A pair of minor league clubs are asking the court to reverse the league’s lucrative 101-year-old antitrust exemption.

The “Barbenheimer” double feature captures the dawn of our imperiled era.

Conservative Christians are out to restore their historical legal privileges.

There have always been two Americas. One based in religious zeal, mythology, and inequality; and one grounded in rule of the people and the pursuit of equality.

The reissue of “Tim” shows both the prescience and the unrealized promise of the beloved band.

In the last decade, some graffiti writers have moved from outlaw taggers to sought-after artists.

The Max series makes a radical argument for what constitutes American history.

In the late 1970s, mysterious circular patterns started showing up in farm fields.

The New Deal brought Black voters over to the Democratic Party, but was marred by racial inequality.

Tocqueville understood how constitutional review, without meaningful checks, could enable judicial despotism.

A biography of the towers that became "bane as well as boon to lower Manhattan."

The winding story of how a trove of 8,000 of the poet’s family objects were saved.