A fierce critique of civil religion as the taproot of America's bid for global hegemony Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Walter A. McDougall argues powerfully that a pervasive but radically changing faith that "God is on our side" has inspired U.S. f...

The civil rights movement was one of the most searing developments in modern American history. It abounded with noble visions, resounded with magnificent rhetoric, and ended in nightmarish despair. It won a few legislative victories and had a profoun...

With rigorous original scholarship and creative narration, Lisa Brooks recovers a complex picture of war, captivity, and Native resistance during the "First Indian War" (later named King Philip's War) by relaying the stories of Weetamoo, a female Wam...

In August 1784, Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson began their congressional commission to negotiate commercial treaties with twenty nations. Their treaty proposal, which Prussia alone would consider, contained unprecedented humanitarian arti...

Begun in the mid-sixteenth century by Protestant nonconformists keen to reform England's church and society while saving their own souls, the puritan movement was a major catalyst in the great cultural changes that transformed the early modern world....

In the 1930s, battered and humbled by the Great Depression, the U.S. financial sector struck a grand bargain with the federal government. Bankers gained a safety net in exchange for certain curbs on their freedom: transparency rules, record-keeping a...

The 1930s witnessed a harrowing social and ecological disaster, defined by the severe nexus of drought, erosion, and economic depression that ravaged the U.S. southern plains. Known as the Dust Bowl, this crisis has become a major referent of the cli...

One of the country's leading scholars on economics and social policy, Isabel Sawhill addresses the enormous divisions in American society – economic, cultural, and political – and what might be done to bridge them. Widening inequality and the loss of...

Going against the grain of most existing scholarship, Matthew D. O'Hara explores the archives of colonial Mexico to uncover a history of "futuremaking." While historians and historical anthropologists of Latin America have long focused on historical...

Supermarkets were invented in the United States, and from the 1940s on they made their way around the world, often explicitly to carry American-style economic culture with them. This innovative history tells us how supermarkets were used as anticommu...