The original definition of the American Dream was rooted in the democratic principles of both the Founding Fathers and nineteenth-century transcendentalists.
The culture wars have led to a deep sense of loss for most normative Americans.
Herbert Hoover’s US Food Administration did more than simply change Americans’ eating habits.
Race is an absurdity. Yet as a means of defining and separating people, it retains its power.
A neglected hard-boiled novelist wrote on the greatest conspiracy of all.
Both Donald Trump and Oprah Winfrey endorse the same belief: that there are only winners and losers.
As a child, I thought that to be American was to believe in individuality, to support pluralism and equality, and to celebrate common holidays and eat common foods.
Writing a book about Thomas Jefferson means entering a very crowded field.
King’s arguments for freedom and justice were not only constitutional but also profoundly ethical.
It is fair to say that a new economic populism has been rendered impotent by cultural identity markers that shape voting patterns.
In the words of retired Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy, “a people confident in its laws and institutions should not be ashamed of mercy.”
When you turn to the news, what you will encounter, overwhelmingly, is crime.
What do we mean by culture? Don’t ask me, I’m a political scientist.
Despite obvious differences and contradictions, “we” extended across class and race and stressed our common vulnerability.
Concern with authenticity seems to be unique to societies marked by conspicuous racial or ethnic hierarchies.
Learning to read for the possibility or the certainty of laughter in the writings of Phillis Wheatley.
Black Americans still embrace the exodus story as the defining trope of their collective experience.
Carrying forward an evolving “we” of the democratic imagination.
Were it not for this creative, constructive impulse, the fire next time would have burned this country down many times over.
I’ve been cursed to envision peace without ever experiencing it myself.
Ambivalence captures the internal nature of liberalism’s discontents.
Amid the social turmoil of postwar Vienna, Othmar Spann’s class auditorium became a political battlefield.
Why is Shelby Foote's Civil War subject to so much contemporary debate?
Revisiting Meredith v. Fair, we get the inside story of how critical race theory was developed in the years after Brown.
It’s nice to think that a gift like that possessed by Ella Fitzgerald will always find its way. But luck matters too.
Our contemporary culture is a culture of nihilism without nihilists.
Instead of satire, which aims at improvement, we have snark.
The regrettable but all-too-common phenomenon of medical personnel “turning a blind eye” to unethical and injurious practices.
Family policy is at the heart of an intense debate about the future of any plausible post-neoliberal governance.
What is lost in translation can be recovered if one begins to understand the nuances and significance of what has been placed on the margins.
Paton’s novel depicts a vivid and deliberately partial articulation of internal disintegration.
The gap between our concepts of love and justice has served us poorly.
It would be hard to blame him if he had lost faith in the republic.
Corporations are not defanging a threatening ideology but welcoming it back home from a field trip.
Media executives have honed the craft of attracting national interest to flair-ups and clashes over school board proceedings, controversial small business practices, or more recently, police misconduct.
Warikoo might have explored the ways in which Asian cultural repertoires matched up with the neoliberal transformation of our schools and colleges.
The official publication day came and went. I felt weirdly out of it, waiting for something I had anticipated for half my life and worked toward unremittingly.
A murder mystery that is also an impressive sociological imaginary.
One big and enduring reason Jerry trusted me is that he sensed that I was no stranger to the dark spot in the wood—something we shared in common.
The harsh violence of Blood Meridian and Lonesome Dove draw us in more than it repels, and the proximity of death makes the actions of its dramatis personae only more vivid and compelling to us.