Culture

Buttigieg believes he probably won’t be the first gay president if he’s elected in 2020.

Fifty years after Jazzercise was founded, it is still shaping how Americans work out—for better or for worse.

From Bob Dylan to David Bowie to The Beatles, the legendary Beat writer’s influence reached beyond literature into music in surprising ways.

The Doomsday Clock is set to two minutes to midnight. So why don't we make movies about nuclear war anymore?

How queer artist J.C. Leyendecker invented an iconography of twentieth-century American masculinity.

Why we still read Orwell’s book of prophecy.

Or everything that came before Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus walked down that “Old Town Road.”

Jeanna Kadlec considers Anne Lister, the center figure of HBO’s Gentleman Jack, and the influence of other preceding queer women.

A review of Lisa Duggan's book, "Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed.”

How an intense unclassifiable relationship shaped the history of modern thought.

How did facial hair win American men’s hearts and minds? Thank the War on Terror.

It was everywhere at the turn of the 20th century. It was also inedible.

Slavery and the Civil War were central to the development of photography as both a technology and an art.

In the realism, the set pieces, the operatic music, Sergio Leone was pointing the way towards modern filmmaking.

"But he'd have to acknowledge that the soul of his country is southern; the soul of his country is black."

To appreciate who Whitman was, we have to reinterpret the poet in ways that have made generations of critical gatekeepers uncomfortable.

How the 1960s Black Is Beautiful movement inspired her latest Fenty fashion collection.

The difference between the careers and reputations of the three famous authors is about gender as well as genius.

It didn't go exactly as planned. But for TAC's founder, this is where his populist antiwar movement may have begun.

Hundreds—or maybe thousands—of women and girls performed and recorded rock and roll in its early years.

Odetta’s artistry was a weapon in the Civil Rights struggle, and was crucial to the era’s politics.

Edward Said's Orientalism is still with us forty years after his influential book’s publication, but it is not the same as it was.

Family dynasties are neither new nor newly influential in pop.

How a black psychiatrist helped design a groundbreaking television show as a radical therapeutic tool for minority preschoolers.

A strong woman using a new tool to talk to people who were otherwise overlooked played as a joke for some. But was it effective?

The roots musician is inspired by the evolving legacy of the black string band.

A new history of Reconstruction traces the roots of American “respectability” politics through artwork.

American System-Built Homes in Chicago (and elsewhere).

A story of how Louis Wain single handedly made cats adored by Victorian society through to modern day.

Michael Washburn explains what we can glean from the failure of Tom Petty's 1985 concept album "Southern Accents."