On the morning of November 22, 1963, President Kennedy told Jackie as they started for Dallas, "We're heading into nut country today". That day's events ultimately obscured and revealed just how right he was: Oswald was a lone gunman, but the city th...

Politics in Alaska have changed significantly since the last major book on the subject was published more than twenty years ago, with the rise and fall of Sarah Palin and the rise and fall of oil prices being but two of the many developments to alter...

Newton Minow's long engagement with the world of television began nearly fifty years ago when President Kennedy appointed him chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. As its head, Minow would famously dub TV a "vast wasteland", thus inaugur...

Crime writer Sara Paretsky is known the world over for her acclaimed series of mysteries starring Chicago Private Investigator V. I. Warshawski, now in its seventeenth installment. Paretsky's work has long been inflected with history – for her charac...

The United States deported nearly two million illegal immigrants during the first five years of the Obama presidency – more than during any previous administration. President Obama stands accused by activists of being "deporter in chief". Yet despite...

The George W. Bush administration's ambitious – even breathtaking – claims of unilateral executive authority raised deep concerns among constitutional scholars, civil libertarians, and ordinary citizens alike. But Bush's attempts to assert his power...

When we think of segregation, what often comes to mind is apartheid South Africa, or the American South in the age of Jim Crow – two societies fundamentally premised on the concept of the separation of the races. But as Carl H. Nightingale shows us i...

To many, Newark seems a profound symbol of postwar liberalism's failings: an impoverished, deeply divided city where commitments to integration and widespread economic security went up in flames during the 1967 riots. While it's true that these faili...

For more than fifty years, Robert G. McCloskey's classic work on the Supreme Court's role in constructing the US Constitution has introduced generations of students to the workings of our nation's highest court. As in prior editions, McCloskey's orig...

It was the biggest funeral Chicago had seen since Lincoln's. On May 26, 1889, four thousand mourners proceeded down Michigan Avenue, followed by a crowd forty thousand strong, in a howl of protest at what commentators called one of the ghastliest and...