Culture

The Broadway revival of the musical means less to reanimate the nation’s founding than to talk back to it.

The personal essay is the purest expression of the lie that individual subjectivity exists prior to the social formations that gave rise to it.

In the late 1970s, smaller 'Star Wars' action figures took over.

A show at the Jewish Museum surveys three eventful years of art, film, and performance in New York City—and the political upheavals that defined them.

Beginning in the 1960s, young Black majorettes and dance troupes created a fascinating culture. This is the story of how they did it.

He sold 60 million books and 100 million records. Then he disappeared.

The singer wasn't a feminist torchbearer, but her music amplified women's issues.

“The connection between a hot temper and an empty stomach,” explained through a history of colonial interactions with indigenous peoples.

Watching the Ken Burns series on the U.S. and the Holocaust and thinking about American folk music.

A new book explores the final days of Ralph Waldo Emerson - traveling from Concord to California, and beyond.

Buster Keaton made his own kind of sense out of the perplexities of existence in ways baffling to those among whom he found himself.

"Blonde," a heavily fictionalized film by Andrew Dominik, explores the star's life and legend in a narrative that's equal parts glamorous and disturbing.

Today, mourning attire is subdued and dutiful. It wasn’t always that way.

Hip-hop DJ culture provides a rich site for exploring how culture and industry can converge and collaborate, as well as how they need each other to move forward.

Produced by the master entertainer P. T. Barnum, a melodrama about the dangers of alcohol was the first show to run for a hundred performances in New York City.

In 1931, an entire new cast and crew reshot Dracula in Spanish on the Universal Studios lot.

John Jacob Astor’s "A Journey in Other Worlds" is a high-voltage scientific romance in which visions of imperialism haunt a supposedly “perfect” future.

How a best-selling series gave young readers a new sense of agency.

In this modern Indigenous kitchen, every dish is made without any ingredient introduced to the continent after Europeans arrived.

'Pet of the Petticoats' extends the reach of Anglo-Atlantic anti-Catholicism to the stage, illustrating the ways its tropes and anxieties moved across genres.

Theodore Roosevelt said his made him look like “a mewing cat.” Lyndon Johnson called his “the ugliest thing I ever saw.” Ronald Reagan ordered a do-over.

How an Asian American literary pioneer fell into obscurity.

The genre is the product of migration, rebirth, and the struggle to be heard.

The skin and strength on display at Santa Monica’s Muscle Beach aggravated American fears of gender transgressions and homosexuality.

The defining boundaries and problematic categorizations carried by our culture's treatment of the label "millennial."

Discovering the naturalist and artist, and the darker trends within.

They’re global icons who have left a lasting imprint on American culture. But do recent controversies threaten the squad’s future?

The nationwide spread of a counterculture.

George Kennan made hierarchy seem seductive.

Creedence Clearwater Revival’s unique blend of traditional and progressive sensibilities.