SOCIETY

Chris Von der Ahe knew next to nothing about baseball when he risked his life’s savings to found the St. Louis Browns, the franchise that would become the St. Louis Cardinals. Yet the German-born beer garden proprietor would become one of the most important—and funniest—figures in the game’s history. Learn More

The extraordinary story of the 1968 baseball season—when the game was played to perfection even as the country was being pulled apart at the seams. Learn More

Subversives traces the FBI’s secret involvement with three iconic figures at Berkeley during the 1960s: the ambitious neophyte politician Ronald Reagan, the fierce but fragile radical Mario Savio, and the liberal university president Clark Kerr. Learn More

Like the typewriter and the light bulb, the heterosexual was invented in the 1860s and swiftly and permanently transformed Western culture. The idea of “the heterosexual” was unprecedented. After all, men and women had been having sex, marrying, building families, and sometimes even falling in love for millennia without having any special name for their emotions or acts. Yet, within half a century, “heterosexual” had become a byword for “normal,” enshrined in law, medicine, psychiatry, and the media as a new gold standard for human experience. Learn More

The tortuous path from Nixon to Reagan—think Archie Bunker, Dog Day Afternoon, and Merle Haggard—in a major new work on the cultural and political history of the 1970s, from a prizewinning historian. Learn More

Memories of an Irish-American growing up log-shack poor in small-town Ohio. Learn More

Since Darwin's day, we've been told that sexual monogamy comes naturally to our species. Mainstream science—as well as religious and cultural institutions—has maintained that men and women evolved in families in which a man's possessions and protection were exchanged for a woman's fertility and fidelity. But this narrative is collapsing. Fewer and fewer couples are getting married, and divorce rates keep climbing as adultery and flagging libido drag down even seemingly solid marriages. Learn More

What are the words we use to describe something that we never thought we'd have to describe? Learn More

'One of the most curious of delusions is the belief that widespread and deep-rooted evils can be cured by trifling remedies.' Learn More