Culture

Visualizing Queer Space and American Life

Jenny Turner reviews "Face It" by Debbie Harry.

The allegations against Michael Jackson make listening to his songs a struggle, one that resists the comfort those songs once provided.

Why do they have to be such sore winners?

To work, a theme park needs to collapse the mythic pasts that it depicts with the pasts of our own lives.

On the Grateful Dead's “New Speedway Boogie,” and the true end of the Sixties.

Is it possible to write a good Civil War romance?

In the early twentieth century, Mary MacLane’s genre-defying books earned the scorn of critics and the adoration of readers across the nation.

Here’s what to know about consent in the 1940s, when the song was written.

This is about much more than Star Wars—it is about media bias and "information disorder" in the twenty-first century.

The modern image of Santa Claus first appeared in a Civil War illustration, and it wasn’t the last time St. Nick was deployed in wartime.

A history of Japanese Internment in America through the art produced from it.

Remembering a time when composers mattered more.

Comedian Richard Pryor's performance of Blackness throughout his career.

A tradition as American as apple pie, and older than the Constitution.

Weekly shows on local TV stations helped make the ironic viewing of bad movies into a national pastime.

The culture of calamity from the Jamestown Colony to the Johnstown Flood.

A new book asks how music criticism can reckon with the lives of immoral artists.

On the relationship between African American music traditions and one of the most infamous slave revolts, the Stono Rebellion, in colonial South Carolina.

The origins of the Big Apple dance.

Ben Marks on all that came of one interview in 1994.

Popeyes has long cultivated a black customer base — which has positive and negative ramifications.

In the 1850s, abolitionists, including black women, fought for freedom by force.

From colonial times to the nineteenth century, Thanksgiving was very different from the holiday we know now.

Dark was the night, cold was the ground, and brilliant is that song drifting through space.

Did mass graves in the influenza pandemic help give rise to the living dead?

They played essential behind-the-scenes roles as the American movie industry was taking off. What happened?

Frank Capra’s 1941 drama carries forward the populist themes of his other movies, only with a much darker premise.

The original cowboys were actually Indigenous, Black and Latinx, but that's not what Hollywood has generally led us to believe.

The new punk generation made the hippies look past their prime.