Culture

The transcendentalists thought all human inspiration was divine, all nature a miracle.

A spectre is haunting houses—the spectre of possession.

In the new nonfiction collection “You Don’t Know Us Negroes,” what emerges is a writer who mastered a Black idiom but seldom championed race pride.

After the 1927 Great Flood, Black musicians from the Delta produced an outpour of songs testifying to the destruction. The same is true today.

A brief history of their tangled saga of patriotism and dissent.

Whether exploring the dread of everyday life or the horrors of the occult, her ghost tales documented a nation haunted by isolation, class, and despair.

Green burials — the long-ago practice of laying loved ones to rest in biodegradable wooden caskets or shrouds, without embalming — are gaining in popularity.

Uncovering the life of Rose Dougan, a real Renaissance woman, and her pioneering role in preserving Native American art.

The king of ragtime published his hit tune 120 years ago. Pianist Lara Downes believes the piece helped shape the future of American music.

A new feminist history of women and exercise glosses over the darker side of fitness culture.

While Poe was likely using opium, the efforts to keep him quiet suggest that he was also drinking.

When Sidney Poitier slapped a white murder suspect on screen, it changed how the stories of Black Americans were portrayed on film.

Coming to love Puritan poetry is an odd aesthetic journey. It's the sort of thing you expect people partial to bowties and gin gimlets to get involved with.

Of mice and men.

The Czech composer came to New York with the conviction that African-American melodies would be the ‘seedbed’ for their nation’s 20th-century music.

Margaret Wise Brown constantly pushed boundaries—in her life and in her art.

Since their initial popularity during World War II, comic books have always been a medium for American counterculture and for nativism and empire. 

In the work of writers like W.B. Yeats and Virginia Woolf, we can find new ways to tell our own stories.

Julian Fellowes' new series dramatizes the late 19th-century clash between New York City's old and new monied elite.

What did German listeners hear when African American singers performed Schubert or Brahms?

They weren't about to let all that good camel hair go to waste.

A remarkable blues musician emerged from obscurity in 1959, but something about him just didn’t seem right.

The original book is far more grisly than the beloved Disney classic—and has an unsettling message about humanity.

She’s been canonized as a hero of both mainstream literature and radical politics. Who was she really?

Promoters and performers in pro wrestling began increasingly prizing entertainment value over maintaining the appearance of legitimate contests.

America has a love affair with “productive leisure.”

In Yoknapatawpha County, the past never speaks with a single voice.

Once Peter Parker received his miraculous spider powers, the last thing he wanted to do was go out and get a colorful costume and fight crime.

Cocktails — the ingredients, the stories, the pageantry — can reveal more than expected about the Gilded Age.

The film “deliberately maligned the upper class,” according to a report that didn’t like the portrayal of Mr. Potter as a bad guy.