Culture

On the HBO Max streaming service, with their skipped numbers, the episodes omitted from the 31 seasons of Looney Tunes are easy to spot.

Ninety-six years after the book's publication, the characters of "The Great Gatsby" continue to mesmerize readers.

How a personal connection to Nick Carraway inspired the author to write the novel "Nick."

The bizarre sanitarium staple that became a spreadable obsession.

The long history of sampling in music, and a new tool that lets artists sample without fear of copyright claims.

Over time, the historic roots of some holiday music have been forgotten.

What’s at stake in debates about the meaning and visibility of the Black Santa.

The story of Caesar, an enslaved chef and chocolatier in colonial Virginia.

Pioneering cartoonists were experimental, satiric, erotic, and artistically ambitious.

Faulkner’s chroniclers have to reconcile the novelist’s often repellent political positions with the extraordinary meditations on race, violence, and cruelty in his fiction.

Sci-fi has long provided an outlet for socialist thinkers — offering readers a break from capitalist realism and allowing us to imagine a different world.

James Shapiro’s recent book looks at why Shakespeare has been a mainstay of the cultural and political conflicts of the country since its founding.

On the 250th anniversary of the famous composer’s birth, the story of how his music first took hold across the Atlantic.

An oral history with 25 fashion luminaries, highlighting a previously untold history of the AIDS crisis.

Early in its history, the candy company made a strategic move to find its most successful market.

Native minstrelsy and the American summer camp movement.

From Kentucky to Wales and all across the Atlantic, the enslaved and downtrodden got married – by leaping over a broom. Why?

Social networks existed long before the invention of social media.

How a Gilded Age best seller shaped American race discourse.

The sale of the singer-songwriter’s catalogue is a reminder of his massive cultural legacy.

The first edition of the beloved novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory featured "pygmy" characters taken from Africa.

An elaborate secret life was a necessity for children’s author Louise Fitzhugh.

Ukulele Ike, otherwise known as Cliff Edwards, was a major American pop star and an important early force in jazz. It’s time to give him another hearing.

Johnny Cash grappled with the many facets of the outlaw archetype in his feature acting debut, Five Minutes to Live.

Michael Prodger on the artists who make huge sums for painting the US flag.

A new release records the musician’s early metamorphosis—unmoored, broke, living for a time in an attic—when her lodestar was her big, strange, unwieldy talent.

It’s been two hundred years since America’s first sci-fi novel was published. But who wrote it?

Alex Winter’s new documentary about the musician fails to capture his deeply conventional streak.

A musicological conversation about the history and social value of Black music.

How did the genre of self-help go from one focused on collective empowerment to one serving the class hierarchy as it stands?