Culture

Deaf history and the birth of umpiring gestures in baseball.

Follow the paths of eight immigrants, whose stories are based on real laws and historically documented scenarios.

The outlandish "macaroni" style of 18th-century England blurred the boundaries of gender, as well as class and nationality.

A new documentary tells the history of the big top.

Poet Joshua Rivkin’s new book about Cy Twombly is “stranger and more personal than a biography.”

The man who wrote "Soul Man" gives a master class on how code-switching through music helped catalyze the Civil Rights Movement.

Country music has often stood, as it were, with one foot in and one foot out of the cave.

How mail-order catalogues subverted the racial hierarchy of Jim Crow.

The most important dimension of the sexual revolution of the '60s and '70s was the increased freedom of sexual speech.

What happens when “lost” films and television shows become found once again—and what that does to the work’s cultural legacy.

A new book offers lessons drawn from Harper Lee's ambivalent treatment of this iconic character.

Queerness has always existed — even on the Civil War battlefield.

Why a 47-year old anti-colonialist critique by Chilean dissidents may be newly relevant in the Trump era.

If you like hot chicken, perhaps you’d be interested in knowing where it comes from.

Either way, Rod Serling definitely pissed him off.

A film scholar reflects on the image of masculinity depicted in "Grease 2," released the same summer of Kavanaugh's alleged assault.

From the day it was inaugurated, the Statue of Liberty has symbolized the tensions between national independence and universal human rights.

The women of the historic Ninth Street Show had a will of iron and an intense need for their talent to be expressed, no matter the cost.

In retrospect, it was peculiar but not surprising that the Jewish-American novel peaked early—halfway through the beginning, to be precise.

The concept of adolescence is a recent invention — and it has been applied unevenly to children from different backgrounds.

The beloved romantic comedy’s date rape scene provides important context for the Brett Kavanaugh accusations.

The Spotify and Ancestry partnership proposes to entertain users based on the narrowest possible conception of who they are.

Can renowned Southern chef and writer Edna Lewis' radical communist politics be parsed out by analyzing her cookbooks?

The ‘First Television War’ was also documented in over 5,000 songs.

Good thing he had other talents.

Baldwin's often overlooked final years of activism during the 1980's.

An in-depth history of the most important pop innovation of the last 20 years, from Cher’s “Believe” to Kanye West to Migos.

Where's the country music on Pitchfork's Best Albums of the 1980s?

How a cheesy joke from the 1830s became one of the most widely spoken words in the world.

A racial stereotype rears its ugly head.