Culture

Elbridge Ayer Burbank’s haunting paintings capture a likeness that was only ever real from the vantage point of a White man with a gun, canvas, or camera.

Once dismissed as passé, since recast as a secular saint, Baldwin’s true message remains more unsettling than readers in either camp recognize.

A woman killed by Congress.

Painter William Merritt Chase opened an art school for a new generation of women, teaching them how to draw as well as how to advocate for themselves.

By posting paintings like “American Progress,” the DHS signals its white supremacist beliefs.

The 1893 World’s Fair and the origins of Aunt Jemima.

Correspondence about writing, travel, and friendship, from 1926 through 1929.

A closer look at the character’s history shows that the latest movie is true to his past.

Jaws is a landmark hit, but also a sharp 1970s film shaped by political ire, social critique, and realist cinema’s lasting influence.

A sweeping new history explores facial hair as a proving ground for notions about gender, race, and rebellion.

Despite seeming like strange dance partners, disco and classical make the best music—together.

Art, politics, and revolution intertwined as transatlantic Patriots used wax, paint, and wit to shape the fight for American independence.

Thomas Kinkade’s paintings show conservatives a world they have already won.

Long before the new detention facility in Florida, the reptile has featured in the fantasies of Southern racists.

Chinese immigrants, the queue, and the boundaries of political citizenship.

A new book recognizes Claire McCardell as a pioneer of American womenswear as we know it.

Like the atomic bomb testing site, the new bathing suit was named “le bikini,” and its impact was almost as explosive.

The poem that became a hymn to the nation came about in troubled, polarizing times.

A new book examines the aggressive masculinity that the editors of the Partisan Review brought to their art and literary criticism.

How the novelist turned the violence and randomness of war into a cosmic joke.

How Claire McCardell changed women’s fashion.

The turbulent late sixties saw the technique’s popularity explode—and it’s been helping moviemakers engage with the unsettling tempos of modern life ever since.

Myths are fed back as stereotypes and strawmen to divine some boundary for acceptability.

In 1861, Edward Payson Weston walked the 500 miles from Boston to D.C., and launched a legendary career as a pedestrian in the process.

A group of early 20th-century Catholics sought to impose their standards of morality onto the growing and scandal-ridden Hollywood film industry.

Shahn was an American phenomenon, but a new retrospective suggests that we’ve come to prize his politics over his accomplishments.

More than three decades since "Paris Is Burning" put the underground scene on a world stage, ball culture remains a haven for the queer community.

From Revolutionary War-era recluses to 1920s roadside attractions, meet the solitary figures who turned isolation into a destination.

Trump mixes restoration with revolution—his reactionary modernism wooed Silicon Valley, but for everyone else, it signals looming repression.

How Irving Thalberg helped turn M-G-M into the world’s most famous movie studio—and gave the film business a new sense of artistry and scale.