United States

How did the concept of United States immigration being a 'melting pot' of diverse nationalities come to be? In this interview, Stanford historian Ana Raquel Minian explores America's complex, highly racialized history of immigration and recommends five of the books on the subject that have most influenced her.

Who are the men and women in black robes who sit on America’s highest judicial bench? Legal correspondent Dahlia Lithwick recommends the best books on the Supreme Court justices of the United States.

Harvard macroeconomist Robert Barro takes issue with some common assumptions about the Great Depression, and how America got out of it.

The author of "The End of History" says the financial crisis revealed a great deal about the nature of America’s political and economic system. The shame, he says, is that opportunities to change it are now being ignored.

When George W Bush declared that America "has never been an empire,” he elided a half century of colonial rule over its overseas dependencies. But American expansionism has manifested in other forms too, says A G Hopkins, imperial historian and author of a panoramic new work of American history.

Inequality is coming not just from the economy; it is coming from politics and policy, says Jamila Michener, assistant professor of government at Cornell University. Here she chooses five books that showcase some of the best, most thought-provoking writing on the politics and consequences of policy.

Beleaguered 'citizens of nowhere' will be pleased to know they have their own literary genre. For anyone who has ever wondered where they belong, or why, when you leave your home country, it's never the same when you return, here are the best five books to read—including some by the greatest authors of the 20th century.

Should America have intervened in Libya? Done more? Done less? Done it differently? The editor of Foreign Affairs, Gideon Rose, explains the tension that lies at the heart of every American foreign policy decision.

The foreign affairs commentator explains why US presidents have less room to manoeuvre on foreign policy than they think, and why President Obama had to set aside his “minimalist” inclinations.

Reports of the death of the world's only superpower may have been exaggerated, but America's inward turn is threatening the world order it created after World War II. Foreign policy analyst Ali Wyne talks us through books to better understand America's current role in the world.