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The covers of "Romance in Marseille" and "Amiable with Big Teeth" by Claude McCay over a blue blackground splattered with paint.

Zeal, Wit, and Fury: The Queer Black Modernism of Claude McKay

Considering the suppressed legacy of Claude McKay’s two “lost” novels, “Amiable with Big Teeth” and “Romance in Marseille.”
Cartoon spoofing weight loss and weight gain patent medicines.

How the Use of BMI Fetishizes White Embodiment and Racializes Fat Phobia

Size-based health and beauty ideals emanated from eugenic pseudoscientific postulates, and BMI continues to advance white supremacist embodiment norms. 
Collage of poets and words.

Spoken Like a True Poet

In Joshua Bennett’s history of spoken word, poetry is alive and well thanks to a movement that began in living rooms and bars.
Collage of famous historical sites around the world.

The Future of Historic Preservation: History Matters … But Which History?

The complicated and visceral issue of how we preserve our history offers an opportunity for meaningful discourse.
A glimmering white Mormon church has two towering spires on each side, and is strikingly symmetrical. It is flanked by rows of palm trees.

Building Mormonism

History and controversy in the architecture of the Latter-day Saints.

The Making of Norman Mailer

The young man went to war and became a novelist. But did he ever really come back?
Crowds and escalators in the Mall of America.

The Rise and Fall of the Mall

Alexandra Lange's "Meet Me by the Fountain" recovers the forgotten past and the still hopeful future of the American shopping mall.
Collage of images of fetuses and placentas.

Fetal Rites

What we can learn from fifty years of anti-abortion propaganda.
Alfred Stieglitz's photograph "The Steerage."

This Photo of U.S. Immigration Isn’t What You Think

There is more to Alfred Stieglitz’s iconic photograph “The Steerage” than meets the eye.
Photograph of woman in black mourning clothes and pearls

The Elitist History of Wearing Black to Funerals

Today, mourning attire is subdued and dutiful. It wasn’t always that way.
A painting of a Great White Heron eating a fish, by Robert Havell Jr., after Audobon.

Controversies Remind Us of How Complex John James Audubon Always Was

Discovering the naturalist and artist, and the darker trends within.
Wood engraving showing plantation scenes

Value and Its Sources: Slavery and the History of Art

Two new studies ask readers to think expansively about art’s involvement in a broader system of racial capitalism.
Four women (L7) sit on a bench together wearing jeans and jackets.

The Women Who Built Grunge

Bands like L7 and Heavens to Betsy were instrumental to the birth of the grunge scene, but for decades were treated like novelties and sex objects.
Robert Adams, “Tract House, Longmont, Colorado,” 1973.

Robert Adams Looked Past Despair and Found the Truth of America

"To render the world more beautiful than it really is, as so many landscape photographers before Adams routinely did, is dishonest."
Bar chart of different musical genres on a timeline of when they were popular.

A Timeline of African American Music: 1600 to the Present

An interactive visualization of the remarkable diversity of African American music, with essays on the characteristics of each genre and style.
Floral wallpaper, c. 1875. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum Collection, gift of Harvey Smith.

Flower Power

On the women who kickstarted the ecological restoration movement in America.
Stacked pizza boxes

The Hidden Histories of To-Go Container Art

Who drew that winking chef on your pizza box?
Picture of an ornate door knocker.

What Historic Preservation Is Doing to American Cities

Laws meant to safeguard great buildings and neighborhoods can also present an obstacle to social progress.
At the filling station and garage at Pie Town, New Mexico, in October 1940. Photo by Russell Lee, FSA/Library of Congress.

Cowboy Progressives

You likely think of the American West as deeply conservative and rural. Yet history shows this politics is very new indeed.
Winslow Homer painting "The Gulf Stream," depicting a Black man in a boat with no sail, surrounded by sharks.

The Melville of American Painting

In a new exhibit, Winslow Homer, once seen as the oracle of the nation’s innocence, is recast as a poet of conflict.
Enemy monsters in first-person shooter game

A History of 'Hup,' The Jump Sound in Every Video Game

You can hear it in your head: the grunt your character makes when hopping a fence or leaping into battle. Its sonic roots trace all the way back to 1973.
Caesar, William McKinley, and Trump sporting three different comb-overs throughout history.

The Rise, Flop and Fall of the Comb-Over

Balding has been the constant scourge of man since the beginning of time, and for millennia, our best solution was the comb-over.
Split frame image of Norman Mailer, in black and white.

My Norman Mailer Problem—and Ours

Digging down into the roots of white America’s infatuation with Black.
Clockwise from left: William Dawson, Marian Anderson, William Grant Still, Florence Price. Background features the score of Price’s Violin Concerto No. 2.

Classical Music and the Color Line

Despite its universalist claims, the field is reckoning with a long legacy of racial exclusion.
Photograph of Robert Moses on a background collage of a blueprint and a photo of passengers waiting in Penn Station.

Robert Moses Helped Ruin Penn Station. He'd Have Made it Easier to Fix, Too.

Preservationists like Jane Jacobs are urbanist heroes. But their rules can stifle.
Illustration of Frankenstein's monster and a terrified woman

The Horror Century

From the first morbid films a hundred years ago, scary movies always been a dark mirror on Americans’ deepest fears and anxieties.
Collage of Stephen Crane with Civil War scenes

The Miracle of Stephen Crane

Born after the Civil War, he turned himself into its most powerful witness—and modernized the American novel.
Group portrait, "Elihu Yale With Members of His Family and an Enslaved Child," 1719.

Who Is the Enslaved Child in This Portrait of Yale University's Namesake?

Scholars have yet to identify the young boy, but new research offers insights on his age and likely background.
Lucille Ball wrapping a baby doll in a diaper on "I Love Lucy" (left) and drawing of tie-waist skirt design (right)

How a Genius Fashion Invention Freed Midcentury Women Like Lucille Ball to Be Pregnant in Public

The inventor thought her pregnant sister looked like “a beach ball in an unmade bed.”
A selection of newspaper covers from the Reveal Digital American Prison Newspapers collection

Introducing American Prison Newspapers, 1800-2020: Voices from the Inside

This overlooked corner of the press provided news by and for people incarcerated. A newly available archive shows it worked hard to reach outside audiences too.

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