Culture

At once famous and obscure, marginal and central, Harry Smith anticipated and even invented several important elements of Sixties counterculture.

No other 20th-century American novel did quite so much to burnish Brooklyn’s reputation.

In the 19th century ledger drawings became a concentrated point of resistance for Indigenous people, an expression of individual and communal pride.

While some in the West are squeamish, globally, it's more common than not.

Peanuts’ Franklin has been a controversial character for decades. A new special attempts reparations.

An astonishing new show of Native American ledger drawings brings a historic crime into focus.

After 40 years and more than 25 million copies sold, what story does ‘Legend’ tell us about Bob Marley and the people listening to it?

After "Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," the nightmare of American familyhood was the only game in town.

The celebrations created space for people to subvert gender norms, as New Orleans' LGBTQ communities built new traditions of their own.

A Hungarian immigrant first brought the soccer style field kick to the NFL.

Born out of the Great Depression, the genre reminds us that even in hard times there's laughter, love, and light.

Or, why families under siege make for great movies.

Again and again, a fervant British anticommunist's filmstrip of the novel shows images of women in states of distress.

The hardscrabble origins and unique vision of novelist Willa Cather.

John A. Williams’s unsung novel.

The representation of Jews in antebellum popular culture reveals that many Americans found them both cartoonishly villainous and enticingly exotic.

Before Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” won song of the year at the CMAs, hit maker Ted Jarrett’s music topped the country charts.

The 1895 show purported to show a genuine Southern Black community and demonstrate Black cultural progress in America, from enslavement to citizenship.

How plantation fiction fixed ghost stories to Black Americans.

A new biography examines the enigma of the musician.

Barbecue is a cornerstone of American cuisine, containing all of the contradictions of the country itself.

In narrowly focusing on Leonard Bernstein’s tortured personal life, "Maestro" fails to explore his tortured artistic life.

How The Go-Go’s emerged from the LA punk scene in the late ’70s to become the first and only female band to have a number one album.

When Miles Davis went electric in the late 1960s, he overhauled his thinking about songs, genres, and what it meant to lead a band.

Asian American artists who performed for primarily white audiences in the 1930s and ’40s both challenged and solidified racial boundaries in the United States.

We cannot understand the last fifty years of U.S. history—certainly not the first thing about Black history—without studying the emergence and evolution of rap.

The 20th century brought dinner parties to the masses, along with some truly unhinged entertaining advice.

Universal Camouflage Pattern became a symbol of an unpopular war. Today, it’s being reappraised by those too young to remember the invasion of Iraq.

Our water bottle obsession speaks to deeper historical trends.

Oppenheimer and the demon heart of power.