Culture

“It was made under the worst of conditions,” the filmmaker reveals in a new book. “People versus the eternal sea. The sea won the battle.”

What were Americans' immediate responses to "A Christmas Carol," and how did Dickens' reading tours and eventual death reshape its meaning?

A prolific, meticulous artist, McCay created characters and storyscapes that inspired generations of cartoonists and animators.

Rollins never wavered in his determination to get things right, and often that meant reinventing himself and, along the way, jazz as well.

The story of the Little Longfellow War.

The country song that pits idyllic country life against the corruption of the city is a well-worn trope. Aldean's song reveals the dark heart of the tradition.

Songwriting credits since 1958, broken down by gender.

A recent biography dives into the choreographer's role as both an artist and figure of early American modernism.

Before Christopher Nolan’s "Oppenheimer," the world nearly got Ayn Rand’s "Tribute to Free Enterprise."

On the drive-in movie culture that captured a yearning for fast cars on dusty roads.

On the mismatched sporting advice of Clair Bee and John R. Tunis.

How French cuisine became beloved among status-hungry diners in the United States, from Thomas Jefferson to Kanye West.

And the origins of the term “Kafkaesque.”

The Statue of Freedom atop the U.S. Capitol wouldn’t exist without the artistry of an enslaved man named Philip Reed.

A collection of previously unpublished stories offers a portrait of the playwright as a young artist.

It’s been 25 years since Puff Daddy went to the Hamptons. What’s changed?

Unlike the Southern whites who moved en masse during the 20th century, these early migrants often had direct, personal ties to the institution of slavery.

Digital communications allowed transgender individuals and organizations the digital tools to organize and connect at a previously impossible scale and speed.

Popular culture and social critique through Rogers' writing and Guthrie's songs.

Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton lived an unapologetic life that transcended genres and gender norms beyond her bluesy hit song and the “Elvis moment.”

Don DeLillo's Cold Wars.

Can (and should) conservatives reclaim feminism from the radicals?

On the necessary “deep sincerity” of dark humor.

The New York Renaissance, also known as the Harlem Renaissance, was the first Black-owned, all-black, fully-professional basketball team established in 1923.

The long history of trans.

Community cookbooks provide a perspective on the American melting pot.

He demonstrated how the frontier wasn’t an incubator of democratic equality but a place of unrelenting pain, cruelty, and suffering.

In the last decade, some graffiti writers have moved from outlaw taggers to sought-after artists.

Between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drug use to expand one’s consciousness went from an intellectual pastime to an emblem of social decay.

Babe Ruth's final days revealed his mortality, and made more history, when he encountered a future U.S. president.