Culture

On Percival Everett’s “James.”

On the grand tradition of movies reflecting a deep distrust of those in charge.

In the years after her husband John’s death, the harpist discovered a sound all her own, a jazz rooted in acts of spirit and will.

It puts the people in the most peril in the center of the story: the people being systematically exploited, chained, whipped and raped.

As a feminist in the adult-film industry, she believed the answer wasn’t banning porn; it was better porn.

In a circumscribed universe, Black Americans have ceaselessly reinvented themselves.

136 books that made America think.

George Balanchine and Martha Graham trade places.

The historical novel isn’t cool. Popular? Yes. Enduring? Yes. A bit, well — for nerds? Also yes. Coolness lies in being at the right place at the right time.

Percival Everett transforms Mark Twain’s classic 'Huckleberry Finn' into a tragedy.

Galvanized by an act of racial violence, the band A Grain of Sand brought a new version of Asian American activism and identity to the folk music scene.

He moved to California during the Nazi era, and his music—which ranged from the lushly melodic to the rigorously atonal—caught the ears of everyone.

Meditating on blotter not just as art, or as a historical artifact, but as a kind of media, even a “meta medium.”

Was he a brilliant painter or a brilliant brand?

Neither the Bureau of Prisons nor the Production Code Administration could stop the production of a movie about murderer and ornithologist Robert Stroud.

Syncopation and swing reigned supreme at the annual Lorton Reformatory Jazz Festival in the 1960s.

The rich history of Japanese-language literature challenges assumptions about what counts as U.S. art.

Mario Van Peebles' "Outlaw Posse" is the latest attempt to correct the erasure of people of color from the classic cinema genre.

Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific shows the limits–and power–of mainstream entertainment in addressing weighty social topics.

Romanticism, local color, and nostalgic New Orleans.

“It was an affirmation of our city,” says New Orleanian food historian Lolis Eric Elie.

In 1990, scholars found a Sierra Leonean woman who remembered a nearly identical version of a tune passed down by a Georgia woman’s enslaved ancestors

Maria P. Williams pioneered filmmaking for African American women, but her life is even more thrilling than her sole film.

At once famous and obscure, marginal and central, Harry Smith anticipated and even invented several important elements of Sixties counterculture.

No other 20th-century American novel did quite so much to burnish Brooklyn’s reputation.

In the 19th century ledger drawings became a concentrated point of resistance for Indigenous people, an expression of individual and communal pride.

While some in the West are squeamish, globally, it's more common than not.

Peanuts’ Franklin has been a controversial character for decades. A new special attempts reparations.

An astonishing new show of Native American ledger drawings brings a historic crime into focus.

After 40 years and more than 25 million copies sold, what story does ‘Legend’ tell us about Bob Marley and the people listening to it?