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...

The news of Abraham Lincoln's assassination on April 15, 1865, just days after Confederate surrender, astounded the war-weary nation. Massive crowds turned out for services and ceremonies. Countless expressions of grief and dismay were printed in new...

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...

In the wake of the American Revolution, if you had asked a citizen whether his fledgling state would survive more than two centuries, the answer would have been far from confident. The problem, as is so often the case, was money. Left millions of dol...

American cities entered a new phase when, beginning in the 1950s, artists and developers looked upon a decaying industrial zone in Lower Manhattan and saw, not blight, but opportunity: cheap rents, lax regulation, and wide open spaces. Thus, SoHo was...