Culture

This delicious sticky treat has quite the American origin story.

Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins invented the setting that eventually became Wakanda in her science fiction, but her name isn't widely known.

Nineteenth-century New York City was filled with books, bibliophilia, and marginalia.

In a new land, the ancient past held special meaning.

The story of the girl who grew up in Pasadena, took the bus, loved her mom and grandmother, and wrote herself into the world.

A new book sets out to discover how Americans became such creatures of the seven-day week.

Texas’s elite police force has long played the hero in film and television, although the reality is far more complex.

The pecan pie as we know it is very much a twentieth-century creation, so if you ever see a recipe entitled “Old South Pecan Pie,” you know it’s bogus.

Nothing dates our vision of the future like how we remember the past.

Some of the stars depicted in Yesiltas’ portraits are instantly recognizable as modern-day sirens, while others are less obvious at first glance.

For its ubiquity and richness, the American library building stands as a reflection of the country’s enlightened calling.

A popular writer’s 1829 self-help book ‘The Frugal Housewife’ was based on the same democratic principles that made her a champion of the abolitionist cause.

One of the key changes—pun intended—to the pop charts in the last 60 years is the demise of key changes. What happened?

Christmas starts earlier every year — or does it?

Considering the lessons and history of Crockett Johnson’s classic.

Even at a time of repression, these women found ways to create a culture and life for themselves.

"The Custom of the Country" and its unique relationship with ideas of feminism and the culture of the early 20th century elite.

The author's personal history with the dolls, and an argument for American Girl to make a new doll with a disability.

The first feature-length zombie movie emerged from Haitians’ longstanding association of the living dead with slavery and exploited labor.

Jerry Lee Lewis was known as the Killer, and it wasn’t a casual sobriquet.

Two new books and one expanded edition of Gordon Parks' photographs look at the work of the photographer from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.

Despite the prevalence of tricks and spooky spirits in earlier years, the American commercial holiday didn’t develop until the middle of the twentieth century.

Today’s creepy clowns are not a divergence from tradition, but a return to it.

Bounce is defined by its “up-tempo, call-and-response, heavy base, ass-shaking music” and by its transgressively liberatory power.

The banjo did not exist before it was created by the hands of enslaved people in the New World.

How marketing made guns a fundamental element of contemporary boyhood.

Thanks to a collector, thousands of lobby cards from the silent film era will soon be digitized.

When a climate of fear exists, people don’t scrutinize the evidence behind claims about children’s reading material.

In search of the mythical blues—and their real urban origins.

The Folkies and WWII, Part Two.