Sean Wilentz

The Emancipators’ Vision

Was abolition intended as a perpetuation of slavery by other means?

The Constitution & the Slave Trade

The Paradox of the American Revolution

Recent books by Woody Holton and Alan Taylor offer fresh perspectives on early US history but overemphasize the importance of white supremacy as its driving force.

Slavery vs. White Supremacy

Bob Dylan, Historian

Across the six decades of his career, the singer-songwriter has mined America’s past for images, characters, and events that speak to the nation’s turbulent present.

Forging an Early Black Politics

The pre-Civil War North was a landscape not of unremitting white supremacy but of persistent struggles over racial justice by both Blacks and whites.

Lincoln’s Rowdy America

A new biography captures the cultural jumble of great literature, dirty jokes, and everything in between that went into the self-making of the foremost self-made American.

The Lost World of the Jazz Club

It was an era when this milieu of popular music seemed to herald a now-distant promise of what American life might be.

Senator Cotton’s Distortions on Slavery

As far as a Union founded on the “necessary evil” of slavery is concerned, Senator Cotton appears unaware of how profoundly the Constitution of the United States of America differed from that of the Confederate States of America.

Abolition’s First Wave

Say It Is So: Baseball’s Disgrace

The Houston Astros’ exploitation of a high-tech version of the 1951 Giants’ sign-stealing conspiracy is, even before all the facts have come in, by far the worst disgrace ever to hit the game and could well cripple it.

American Slavery and ‘the Relentless Unforeseen’

Against slavery’s millennia, the struggle to abolish it came abruptly. By the end of the succeeding century, against slavery’s immense and unyielding power, it had largely succeeded.

The Culmination of Republican Decay

Tim Alberta’s ‘American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump’

‘No Property in Man’: An Exchange

How Our Politics Broke

Holding Starr Accountable

Presumed Guilty

‘Contempt: A Memoir of the Clinton Investigation’ by Ken Starr

The American Revolutions

The High Table Liberal

‘Untold History’: An Exchange