History & Theory

New York Times bestselling author and MSNBC and podcast host Chris Hayes offers a powerful wide-angle reckoning with how the assault from attention capitalism on our minds and our hearts has reordered our politics and the very fabric of our society

Amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive, this piercing work distills 3,000 years of the history of power into 48 well-explicated laws....

From acclaimed columnist and political commentator Michael Harriot comes a searingly smart and bitingly hilarious retelling of American history that corrects the record and showcases the perspectives and experiences of Black Americans....

In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation....

Discover the game-changing theory of the cycles of history and what past generations can teach us about living through times of upheaval—with deep insights into the roles that Boomers, Generation X, and Millennials have to play....

Twenty-five years ago, Neil Howe and the late William Strauss dazzled the world with a provocative new theory of American history. Looking back at the last 500 years, they’d uncovered a distinct pattern: modern history moves in cycles, each one lasting roughly 80 to 100 years....

What happens when the President of the United States governs one Tweet at a time? When the elected leader of the free world may not have a firm grasp on the names of government agencies, much less an understanding of their intricate inner-workings? Find out....

Everyone needs to love and be loved - even men. But to know love, men must be able to look at the ways that patriarchal culture keeps them from knowing themselves, from being in touch with their feelings, from loving....

James A. Garfield may have been the most extraordinary man ever elected president....

What is fascism? By focusing on the concrete: what the fascists did rather than what they said, the esteemed historian Robert O. Paxton answers this question....

In this powerful, epic biography, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough unfolds the adventurous life-journey of John Adams....

A chilling exposé of corporate corruption and government cover-ups, this account of a nationwide child-trafficking and pedophilia ring in the United States tells a sordid tale of corruption in high places....

In this monumental work of moral and political philosophy, Plato sought to answer some of the world's most formidable questions....

At the height of the Cold War, JFK risked committing the greatest crime in human history....

Jimmy Carter, 39th president, Nobel Peace Prize winner, international humanitarian, fisherman, reflects on his full and happy life....

Andrew Jackson, his intimate circle of friends, and his tumultuous times are at the heart of this remarkable book about the man who rose from nothing to create the modern presidency....

From one of the most admired international leaders comes a timely, considered, and personal look at the history and current resurgence of fascism today and the virulent threat it poses....

Sent by the French government to examine the American prison system, Alexis de Tocqueville spent nine months touring the United States between 1831 and 1832....

Reconstruction chronicles the way in which Americans—black and white—responded to the unprecedented changes unleashed by the war and the end of slavery.

The Bolsheviks promised that they were building a new society, a workers’ paradise that would change the nature of mankind itself. What they ended up constructing was the largest prison the world had ever seen: a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that spanned half the globe....

While the North prevailed in the Civil War, ending slavery and giving the country a "new birth of freedom," Heather Cox Richardson argues in this provocative work that democracy's blood-soaked victory was ephemeral....

The definitive history of the military's decades-long investigation into mental powers and phenomena....

Why did democracy fall apart so quickly and completely in Germany in the 1930s? How did a democratic government allow Adolf Hitler to seize power? Benjamin Carter Hett answers these questions, with disturbing resonances for our own time....

Pulitzer Prize-winning conflict journalist C.J. Chivers follows the arcs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq through the experiences of those who fought them, as Stephen Ambrose did for the grunts of WWII, and Michael Herr’s classic Dispatches did for Vietnam....

In The End Is Always Near, Dan Carlin looks at questions and historical events that force us to consider what sounds like fantasy; that we might suffer the same fate that all previous eras did....

We all feel it—the distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive focus on the wrong things for too long. We bump into the zombies on their phones in the street, and sometimes they’re us. We stare in pity at the four people at the table in the restaurant, all on their phones, and then we feel the buzz in our pocket. Something has changed utterly: for most of human history, the boundary between public and private has been clear, at least in theory. Now, as Chris Hayes writes, “With the help of a few tech firms, we basically tore it down in about a decade.”

In 1972, New York Representative Shirley Chisholm broke the ice in American politics when she became the first Black woman to run for president of the United States. Chisholm left behind a coalition-building model personified by a once-in-an-era Hollywood party hosted by legendary actress and singer Diahann Carroll, and attended by the likes of Huey P. Newton, Barbara Lee, Berry Gordy, David Frost, Flip Wilson, Goldie Hawn and others. In A More Perfect Party, MSNBC political analyst Juanita Tolliver presents a path to people-centered politics through the lens of this soiree.

LBJ and McNamara: The Vietnam Partnership Destined to Fail details how President Lyndon B. Johnson and his secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, made choices central to US strategy in Vietnam, ending in defeat. The portrait emerges of men who knew that conventional victory was impossible but who could not or would not reverse the policies that they and the military pursued.

Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station is intellectual history on a grand scale, full of romance, idealism, intrigue, and conspiracy, that traces the revolutionary ideas that shaped the modern world from the French Revolution up through Lenin's arrival at Finland Station in St. Petersburg in 1917. Fueled by Wilson's own passionate engagement with the ideas and politics at play, it is a lively and vivid, sweeping account of a singular idea—that it is possible to construct a society based on justice, equality, and freedom—gaining the power to change history.

Claudine Gay's resignation on January 2, 2024, as Harvard University's first Black president, after only six months on the job, sent shock waves across the world. However, it did not shock anyone closely following her situation. Gay stepped down less than a month after giving disastrous testimony in Congress about her university's laissez-faire approach to protecting Jews on campus from rising expressions of antisemitism that followed Hamas's terrorist attacks on Israel.