The Oxford historian's new book is a work of immense scope that succeeds in making human interaction with the environment a central character in history and argues for urgent action against the climate change that could write the final pages of that story.
The combination of alcohol and unconsidered remarks about Lee Harvey Oswald in the wake of the Kennedy assassination helped ensure that the FBI opened a file on the singer.
It's anachronistic thinking to ask whether the American revolution improved women's status; a legal historian's new book seeks to understand change and continuity in women's status through those women's own worldview, which often involved leveraging their dependent status in specific claims.
A new history of Nixon and Kissinger's Vietnam policy shows a president driven by the abstract goal of credibility instead of concrete steps to conclude the conflict, at the cost of tens of thousands of American and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese lives.
David Cortright's history of the opposition to the Iraq War places the peace movement in the context of the underacknowledged peace movements of the American past.
The words of Jefferson Davis, his inner circle, and his critics trace the path to war in an exerpt from a new book telling the story of the conflict through the firsthand observations of the participants.
As Congressional controversy over DC's criminal law reforms shows, there remains significant unfinished business in the longstanding quest of DC residents to govern their city on their own terms.
This excerpt from a new collection of essays on the precolonial kingdoms of Africa examines the sophisticated way that the Asante integrated the political power of their ruling elite with the spiritual and ceremonial to rule.
Daniel Akst profiles the pacifists who opposed American involvement in the Second World War and their influence on the civil rights and peace movements that followed.
From the New Deal's NRA to the Manhattan Project's labor needs, and from the launch of Social Security to JFK's famous birthday party featuring Marilyn Monroe, Rosenberg was a master facilitator who had a hand in many of the policies that shaped modern America, as a compelling new biography explains.
David Kertzer's book argues that defenders of Pope Pius XII's actions during the Holocaust mistake his defense of the prerogatives of the Catholic Church for a defense of the victims of Nazi persecution and genocide.
As Sherwin points out, “the real lesson of the Cuban missile crisis . . . is that nuclear armaments create the perils they are deployed to prevent, but are of little use in resolving them.”
The contemporary troubles of the Midwest shouldn't blind historians and readers to the region's important history as an incubator of a democratic culture.
"LeMay’s operation really served as an important trial balloon to see how the American public would respond to the mass killing of enemy civilians.... To the surprise of many in Washington, however, the American public voiced no real objection."
As one battlefield nurse wrote home, “the science of healing stood baffled before the science of destroying.” Dr. Harold Gillies let the effort to catch up, arguably the only lasting "victory" of the Great War.
American popular music didn't start with Elvis. It emerged when musical fads onstage converged with a new mass market for in-home record players to make song publishing big business.
An inflationary crisis proved to be the justification for reworking the American political economy in the direction of the vast inequality we observe today.
From specialized trauma care to emergency transportation to board certification of physicians, when we encounter the medical system today, we are experiencing Civil War medicine.
