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Collage of women's faces in outlines of women's bodies

What Did the Pop Culture of the Two-Thousands Do to Millennial Women?

“Girl on Girl,” by the critic Sophie Gilbert, is the latest in a series of consciousness-raising-style reappraisals of the decade’s formative texts.
by Dayna Tortorici via The New Yorker on June 9, 2025
Texas Southern University marching band.

The Storied History of HBCU Marching Bands

Marching bands at historically Black colleges and universities can be seen as both celebratory emblems and complicated arbiters of Black American culture.
by Betsy Golden Kellem via JSTOR Daily on April 24, 2025
Jack Clayton, The Great Gatsby, 1974.

America the Beautiful

One hundred years ago, "The Great Gatsby" was first published. It remains one of the books that almost every literate American has read.
by John Pistelli via The Metropolitan Review on April 7, 2025
Sam Peckinpah looks into a film camera.

The Noble Savagery of Sam Peckinpah

“Bloody Sam” was born one hundred years ago this month.
by Christopher Sandford via Modern Age on February 19, 2025
Crowd of construction workers next to the first Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center.

The Rockefeller Christmas Tree Belongs to the Working Class

Construction workers pooled their wages to erect the first one. Their bosses co-opted the gesture, transforming it into today’s consumer spectacle.
by Ashley Bishop, Spencer Snyder via Jacobin on December 17, 2024
A very large American home with three garages.

The Invention that Accidentally Made McMansions

How gang-nail plates led to bigger homes.
by Stewart Hicks via YouTube on December 12, 2024
Virginia Tracy.

Is Virginia Tracy the First Great American Film Critic?

The actress, screenwriter, and novelist’s reviews and essays from 1918-19 display a comprehensive grasp of movie art and a visionary sense of its future.
by Richard Brody via The New Yorker on November 25, 2024
Photograph of Drag stars: Lady Bunny, Misstress Formika, Sweetie, Anna Conda, Tabboo!

A Nearly Complete Oral History of the Pyramid Club

The Pyramid Club is the stuff of downtown New York legend. In the 1980s, a tiny little dive bar became ground zero for the exploding New York drag scene.
by Michael Musto, Mickey Boardman, Sister Dimension, Linda Simpson, John Kelly, Scott Lifshutz, Steve Buscemi, Lypsinka, Fenton Bailey, Randy Barbato, Billy Beyond via Paper on October 24, 2024
Taylor Swift's Instagram post endorsing Kamala Harris. Swift is holding a cat and facing the camera, dressed in black.

Taylor Swift and the History of the Celebrity Endorsement

Do pop culture interventions in presidential elections make a difference?
by Addie Mahmassani via New Lines on October 23, 2024
Paintings by John Singer Sargent: Asher Wertheimer, 1898 (left) and Hylda, Almina and Conway, Children of Asher Wertheimer, 1905 (center), London. Portrait of Mrs. Asher B. Wertheimer, 1898 (right).

A Sudden, Revealing Searchlight

On Jean Strouse and the art of biography.
by Ruth Franklin via Harper’s on October 23, 2024
A homesteader woman feeding chickens.

Some Country for Some Women

As women stretch themselves thin, homesteader influencers sell them an image of containment.
by Kim Hew-Low via The New Inquiry on September 26, 2024
Autumn, an 1856 sunset landscape painting by Frederic Church.

The Sound of the Picturesque

Charles Ives and the visual.
by Tim Barringer via The American Scholar on September 13, 2024
Gustav Mahler; Charles Ives.

Anchoring Shards of Memory

We don’t often associate Charles Ives and Gustav Mahler, but both composers mined the past to root themselves in an unstable present.
by Joseph Horowitz via The American Scholar on September 9, 2024
Jazz album covers.

How Jazz Albums Visualized a Changing America

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.
by Ashawnta Jackson, Carissa Kowalski Dougherty via JSTOR Daily on August 22, 2024
James Baldwin

The Brilliance in James Baldwin’s Letters

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.
by Vann R. Newkirk II via The Atlantic on August 2, 2024
The flags of the USA and the USSR.

Cold War Tones

Two books that remind us that tone and timbre, musical style and sound, matter to history.
by Michael J. Kramer via Society for U.S. Intellectual History on July 28, 2024
Herman Melville; illustration by Maya Chessman.

Siding with Ahab

Can we appreciate Herman Melville’s work without attributing to it schemes for the uplift of modern man?
by Christopher Benfey via New York Review of Books on July 25, 2024
Aaron Douglas, “Still Life,” n.d.

The Harlem Renaissance Was Bigger Than Harlem

How Black artists made modernism their own.
by Susan Tallman via The Atlantic on June 14, 2024
A rendering of Buckminster Fuller and June Jordan's “Skyrise for Harlem” project published in Esquire, April 1965.

Nowhere But Up

In the wake of the 1964 Harlem riots, June Jordan and Buckminster Fuller’s plan to redesign the neighborhood suggested new possibilities for urban life.
by Nikil Saval via New York Review of Books on June 8, 2024
Espresso by Sabrina Carpenter surrounded by African American artists' records.

The Song of the Summer Is Actually the Song of 1982

Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” is one of several recent hits bringing back the genre that never got a name.
by Dan Charnas via Slate on June 4, 2024
Whitehall, designed by Carrère & Hastings for Henry Morrison Flagler, 1902.

Building Palm Beach

On the town’s history & architecture.
by Benjamin Riley via The New Criterion on May 22, 2024
Disabled children learning in a classroom at Washington Boulevard School.

Disabling Modernism

During the first decade of the New Deal, modernist architects designed schools for disabled children that proposed radical visions of civic care.
by David Serlin via Places Journal on May 15, 2024
Lincoln Center on the opening night of the Met Opera, 1966.

Curtains for Lincoln Center

On the falsification of Lincoln Center’s history.
by James Panero via The New Criterion on April 17, 2024
Clara Bow

Taylor Swift’s Homage to Clara Bow

The star of the 1920s silver screen who appears on Taylor Swift’s new album abruptly left Hollywood at the height of her success.
by Deirdre Clemente, Annie Delgado via The Conversation on April 15, 2024
Photo of a female jogger drinking water out of a pink metal water bottle.
partner

Your New Year's Resolution to Drink More Water Has a History

Our water bottle obsession speaks to deeper historical trends.
by Emily J. H. Contois via Made By History on January 2, 2024
Shirley Horn in a publicity shot, 1960.

How to Take It Slow

Following the rhythm of Shirley Horn.
by Lauren Du Graf via Oxford American on December 5, 2023
Painting of waves crashing in the ocean by Winslow Homer

After Melville

In every generation, writers and readers find new ways to plumb the depths of Herman Melville and his work.
by Andrew Schenker via The Baffler on November 22, 2023
Loggers standing next to logs floating down a river in the Oregon forests

Water Logs

Log drivers once steered loose timber on rivers across America before railroad expansion put such shepherds out of work.
by Akanksha Singh via JSTOR Daily on October 3, 2023
Album cover for “Tim,” the "Let It Bleed" edition, by The Replacements.

The Replacements Are Still a Puzzle

The reissue of “Tim” shows both the prescience and the unrealized promise of the beloved band.
by Elizabeth Nelson via The New Yorker on September 21, 2023
"Spy vs. Spy" pointy-headed characters facing each other

Rethinking Spy vs. Spy: A Hand From One Page, A Bomb From Another

Like the spies themselves, the image we have of something is often what gets us in trouble.
by Gyasi Hall via Longreads on September 12, 2023
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