Few have ever enjoyed the degree of foreign-policy influence and versatility that Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. did – in the postwar era, perhaps only George Marshall, Henry Kissinger, and James Baker. Lodge, however, had the distinction of wielding that inf...

In 1969, the Chicago Seven were charged with intent to "incite, organize, promote, and encourage" antiwar riots during the chaotic 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The defendants included major figures of the antiwar and racial justice...

In 1877, the American Humane Society was formed as the national organization for animal and child protection. Thirty years later, there were 354 anticruelty organizations chartered in the United States, nearly 200 of which were similarly invested in...

Intellectuals "have been both rallying points and railed against in American politics, vessels of hope and targets of scorn", writes Michael J. Brown as he invigorates a recurrent debate in American life: are intellectual public figures essential voi...

Anyone interested in the rise of American corporate capitalism should look to the streets of Baltimore. There, in 1827, citizens launched a bold new venture: a "rail-road" that would link their city with the fertile Ohio River Valley. They dubbed thi...

This unconventional history relates the engaging and unusual stories of three families in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries whose involvement in the peppermint oil industry provides insights into the perspectives and concerns of rural...

"States of Exception in American History" brings to light the remarkable number of instances since the Founding in which the protections of the Constitution have been overridden, held in abeyance, or deliberately weakened for certain members of the p...

American banks, to their eternal discredit, long played a key role in disenfranchising nonwhite urbanites and, through redlining, blighting the very city neighborhoods that needed the most investment. Banks long showed little compunction in aiding an...

An urban neighborhood remakes itself every day – and unmakes itself, too. Houses and stores and streets define it in one way. But it's also people – the people who make it their home, some eagerly, others grudgingly. A neighborhood can thrive or it c...

The Second World War exists in the American historical imagination as a time of unity and optimism. In 1942, however, after a series of defeats in the Pacific and the struggle to establish a beachhead on the European front, America seemed to be on th...