Culture

On sanitized depictions of the 19th century, comfort shows, and income inequality.

On his films and the way they provocatively confronted the evils of the times in which they were made.

Lessons from the anti-fascist novel in Trump’s second term.

The revolutionary history behind one of America’s main musical exports.

From Jim Crow-era performance to contemporary gospel musicals, entertainers have shaped the Black public sphere.

A new Criterion series of McCarthy-era noir films is a timely collection for an era of rising government repression.

On the early history of Black participation in America's pastime.

The enigma of Samuel Clemens.

On Ray Bradbury’s underappreciated classic.

Populist and patrician, hustler and moralist, salesman and satirist, he embodied the tensions within his America, and ours.

Marching bands at historically Black colleges and universities can be seen as both celebratory emblems and complicated arbiters of Black American culture.

In 1902, a woman named Mary MacLane from Butte, Montana, became an international sensation after publishing a scandalous journal at the age of 19.

If you've noticed a certain look common to the manosphere, you're not mistaken. A visual identity has taken hold, with roots that trace back decades.

Dan Nadel on the formative awkward adolescence of an iconic American cartoonist.

A documentary dissects Henry Fonda's character and his role in American cinema.

One hundred years ago, "The Great Gatsby" was first published. It remains one of the books that almost every literate American has read.

In 1966, the conductor arrived in Vienna with a mission: to restore Gustav Mahler’s place in 20th-century music.

Why did Hollywood lose interest in making paranoid thrillers? Was it a change in the culture? Or a change in the marketplace?

It's not about the bike or the bloomers.

Why his turn-of-the-century travelogue still resonates.

Five women who made important contributions to 19th-century American philosophy finally get their due.

Do people really like Edgar Allen Poe?

For Henry David Thoreau, it is only as strangers that we can see each other as the bearers of divinity we really are.

A new museum dedicated to Go-Go music comes with a message for both gentrifiers and lawmakers: #Don’tMuteDC.

Even as “Edges of Ailey” gathers such intimate documents, it does not make them legible to its visitors.

A new publication obscures the canonical writer.

Most countries take their popular novelists more seriously than America has. The term “Great American Novel” was literally invented to describe this book.

Looking for the poet between the lines.

Margaret Fuller was a polymathic intellect and writer, simultaneously ahead of her time and deeply enmeshed in the social and political fabric of her era.

Video games, violence and the enduring allure of the vigilante hero.