Culture

For most people, birthdays were once just another day. Industrialization changed that.

The anatomy of the “orphan train” genre.

Candies of the Halloween season have roots in the sweet treats and real horrors of the Great War.

It's a tale thousands of years in the making.

An introduction to salvage anthropology.

Carving pumpkins, trick-or-treating, and wearing scary costumes are some of the time-honored traditions of Halloween. But why do we do them?

A reissued collection, long out of print, revives the author’s masterly stories of horror and unease.

Her performances of the Black spiritual in the nineteen-thirties caused American and European audiences to fall silent in awe.

From the first morbid films a hundred years ago, scary movies always been a dark mirror on Americans’ deepest fears and anxieties.

Born after the Civil War, he turned himself into its most powerful witness—and modernized the American novel.

Scholars have yet to identify the young boy, but new research offers insights on his age and likely background.

Photographs of empty city streets went out of fashion, but lately are coming back again. What's lost in these images of vacant streets?

Since the 19th century, women have abandoned restrictive undergarments while pursuing social and political freedom.

Civil War veterans could be unmanned by drinking too much, and their service did not insulate them from postwar blights on their manhood.

The untold story of a world-renowned architect, an obsessive librarian, and a $5,500 house that never was.

The inventor thought her pregnant sister looked like “a beach ball in an unmade bed.”

The writer had a deep bond with his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. But he also had a profound connection with Emerson’s wife.

Man Ray made art that looked like the future. How did he become a minor figure?

From boomers to zoomers, the concept gets social history all wrong.

Baseball’s failure to get out in front of the problem in the 1970s had real and lasting consequences.

Reflections on Richard Wright’s recently published novel, "The Man Who Lived Underground."

How Henry Wadsworth Longfellow interpreted Reconstruction by translating Dante.

How one video game tells the story of an industry.

At a recent commemoration of the Battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia, songs of struggle took center stage.

Among P. T. Barnum's “human curiosities” was a supposed escapee from an Ottoman harem, marketed as both the pinnacle of white beauty and an exotic other.

Back in the 18th and 19th centuries, novels were regarded as the video games or TikTok of their age — shallow, addictive, and dangerous.

Remembered as symbols of strength after 9/11, the Twin Towers and their Japanese American architect were once criticized in racist and sexist terms.

In the documentary "Fire Music," the hostile reaction that met the unusual genre soon turns into deep appreciation and a lasting influence.

Revisiting the relationships of “a man who never smiled.”

What the history of a gesture can tell us about Black creative power.