Culture

The best-selling musical artist in the world in 1969, Johnny Cash sang of (and for) the "forgotten Americans": the imprisoned men of all races.

Is there something in particular about coming from a Native background that makes a person want to write and perform comedy?

The holiday favorite is an allegorical prayer for peace.

Don Cornelius had faith that Black culture would attract a mass audience, and a belief that Black culture should be in the hands of Black people.

Pheasants? 'Dickory dock'? Toyland? Here's how a narrow slice of American history changed the holidays forever.

His communism brought the great American singer Paul Robeson trouble in the US, but helped make him a hero in China.

A sweeping new history traces the rise of characters caught in a Manichaean struggle between good and evil.

The Christmas classic, released 75 years ago, conveys many messages beyond having faith in one another.

Many early stories praise her work ethic and devotion. But with Mrs. Claus usually hitting the North Pole’s glass ceiling, some writers started to push back.

Why songs of the southland are really northern.

Despite its universalist claims, the field is reckoning with a long legacy of racial exclusion.

The beloved musical’s creator struggled to find a place between left and center.

Aaron Sorkin's new film dramatizes three pivotal moments in the lives of comedy legends Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.

In 1943, Ansel Adams traveled to photograph Manzanar—one of the ten internment camps that together detained 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II.

The girl sleuth, now the star of a TV show, has been eased into the canon. In the process, she’s shed the politics that motivated her creation.

Tammy Wynette and Johnny Cash cancelled gigs in Belfast during the violent 1970s, but Pride played on.

Listen to Blood, Sweat and Tears again.

“Rescue Me,” on repeat.

In the nineteen-sixties, artists such as Bo Diddley and the Ike & Tina Turner Revue played the prom at Pembroke-Country Day.

The dropout was not just a hippy-trippy hedonist but a paranoid soul, who feared brainwashing and societal control.

The week is the most artificial and recent of our time counts yet it’s impossible to imagine our shared lives without it.

Discrimination and mistranslation have long obscured the dish's true origins.

We can’t allow the impression of a historical lack of diversity in the art form to limit access to the industry today.

The American yam is not the food it says it is. How that came to be is a story of robbery, reinvention, and identity.

Bodybuilding is routinely presented as the very apex of male heterosexuality—but its history is a bit gayer than you might think.

19th-century African American writer Charles Chesnutt’s subversive literature.

Pass the free enterprise, please.

The flamboyant big-cat aficionados of the Gilded Age weren’t strangers to fierce competition, threats and bizarre drama.

How racism has shaped the history — and present — of bicycle use.

King recalled: “I liked his voice, though I had no idea he was getting ready to conquer the world.”