Culture

On the literary and cinematic legacy of white supremacy in the United States.

Charles Ives and the visual.

Charles Ives and the Civil War.

The beloved family show left a lasting legacy.

In contemporary publishing, novels fixated on the past rather than the present have garnered the most attention and prestige.

How a subgenre of murder mysteries plays with the way real history is written.

How two amateur schools pulled a generation of thinkers from the workers and teachers of the 19th-century American Midwest.

We don’t often associate Charles Ives and Gustav Mahler, but both composers mined the past to root themselves in an unstable present.

Scarry’s guides to life both reflected and bolstered kids’ lived experience, and in some cases even provided the template for it.

To capture the spirit of the poet Audre Lorde, Alexis Pauline Gumbs decided to break all the rules.

The rhythms of our days may never be the same.

How deathly rituals affect our perception of personal dignity.

Screwball comedies are beloved films, but for decades historians and critics have disagreed over what the genre is and which movies belong to it.

“It’s not just preserving seeds, it’s preserving our culture, our history, our way of life.”

Wayfinding through history and design of the cookbook.

An elegiac retelling of rap's origins, "Hip-Hop Is History" also ends with a sense of hope.

In the forty-eight years that she’s lived in the West Village, the owner of the iconic cookbook shop has never ordered delivery.

The yuppies embodied the winning side of America’s deepening economic divide. Bruce Springsteen spoke for those left behind.

For God, politics, love, integrity, or a sense of ennui, film stars at the height of their fame have left the industry behind.

In the 1950s, the covers of most jazz records featured abstract designs. By the late 1960s, album aesthetics better reflected the times and the musicians.

Capturing the 1968 DNC.

The 2008 election sparked an outburst of brightness and positivity across pop culture. Now hindsight — and cringe — is setting in.

We take for granted the Titians and Botticellis that hang in galleries across the U.S., little aware how and why they were acquired.

By framing the U.S. as a victim, 'Red Dawn' obscured U.S. aggression in Latin America and elsewhere.

The history of Camp Wo-Chi-Ca tells a largely overlooked story about left-wing politics and Black culture.

A new study claims that songs have become less complex. But the magic of these short, sharp tunes can’t be so easily distilled.

Baldwin wrote with the knowledge that change would be hard and slow to achieve.

The famous author, who would have been 100 years old today, was best known for his novels and essays. But correspondence was where his light shone brightest.

Skateboarding was considered a silly and childish phenomenon for much of its existence.

Two books that remind us that tone and timbre, musical style and sound, matter to history.