Fall 2024

On September 24, 2011, Michael Kazin published an important essay in the New York Times, “Whatever Happened to the American Left?” In it he examined the “populist left’s” historic role in shaping politics and policy discussions in the United States, …

Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America by Richard White W. W. Norton and Company, 2011, 634 pp. FOR A generation now, historians have been reluctant to write about capitalism. Cultural history has been the rage, even as …

We hear a lot today about federalism, the doctrine that emphasizes the rights and powers of the states versus those of the federal government. The political Right expresses alarm at the dramatic expansion in central government power that began under …

When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America by Ira Katznelson

In the last one hundred years, war-induced worries about unity and loyalty have led to fears of foreigners in our midst and campaigns to restrict their rights and opportunities. This has been especially true at times, such as the 1910s …

Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein Hill and Wang, 2001, 671 pp., $30 No political movement in America these last twenty-five years has rivaled conservatism in appeal or influence. Everywhere one …

The veneration that surrounds the name of Franklin D. Roosevelt causes us to forget that, in his time, not everybody loved the man. To some of his opponents, he was downright evil. It was bad enough that this country squire …

Since the early years of the twentieth century, historians have characterized the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the preeminent organization of American trade unionists from the 1890s through the early 1930s, as craft-dominated, procapitalist, and politically tame. America’s pioneer labor …

Patriotism, in conservative periods like our own, is a tool used by the right to bludgeon labor and the left. In the 1980s, corporations are said to represent the essence of American civilization—unions its denial. Such ideological attacks on the …