The Burr-Hamilton Duel, 1804, Peter Newark American Pictures / Bridgeman Images .

Dueling: The Violence of Gentlemen

What honor required of men.
Illustration of a bookshelf at CYCO with a bust of I.L. Peretz.

The Joy of Yiddish Books

The language sustained a Jewish diasporan secular culture. Today, that heritage survives in a gritty corner of Queens to be claimed by a new generation.
Man holding a Jack-O-Lantern.

Why Do We Carve Pumpkins Into Jack-O'-Lanterns For Halloween?

It's a tale thousands of years in the making.
CNN studio with monitor in the foreground and anchor at desk in the background.

From TV News Tickers to Homeland: The Ways TV Was Affected By 9/11

There is a long list of ways America was transformed by the terrorist attacks. But the question of how TV itself was changed is more complicated.
Richard Jean So and the cover of his book "Redlining Culture"

The History of Publishing Is a History of Racial Inequality

A conversation with Richard Jean So about combining data and literary analysis to understand how the publishing industry came to be dominated by white writers. 
A collage of significant people from the time like the Beatles and Elvis.

How Americans Re-Learned to Think After World War II

In ‘The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War,’ Louis Menand explores the poetry, music, painting, dance and film that emerged during the Cold War.
Painting of a couple kissing under a broomstick

Broomstick Weddings and the History of the Atlantic World

From Kentucky to Wales and all across the Atlantic, the enslaved and downtrodden got married – by leaping over a broom. Why?

How Aztecs Told History

For the warriors and wanderers who became the Aztec people, truth was not singular and history was braided from many voices.

The Defender of Differences

Three new books consider the life, and impact, of Franz Boas, the "father of American cultural anthropology."

Janis Joplin, the Mistaken Icon of the Counterculture

The counterculture dictum to “turn on, tune in, drop out” did not quite capture Janis’s philosophy to “get it while you can.”
The cover of Cynthia A. Kierner's "Inventing Disaster," which depicts a shipwreck during a storm.

On Inventing Disaster

The culture of calamity from the Jamestown Colony to the Johnstown Flood.
African-American cowboys in Bonham, Texas, circa 1913

The Real Texas

What is Texas? Should we even think about so large and diverse a place as having an essence that can be distilled?

Reading in an Age of Catastrophe

A review of George Hutchinson's "Facing the Abyss: American Literature and Culture in the 1940s."
Places of origin for early Eastern Mediterranean immigrants. The dot size reflects the relative number of immigrants.

“Like A Wolf Who Fell Upon Sheep”: Early Lebanese Immigrants and Religion in America

For some Lebanese immigrants, religion was a comfort, providing a sense of home in an new world. For others, it was a constant reminder of what was left behind.

Here Is a Human Being

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

How the Midlife Crisis Came to Be 

The midlife crisis went from an obscure psychological theory to a ubiquitous phenomenon.
Farmers haying.

Remembering the ‘Spooky Wisdom’ of Our Agrarian Past

For millennia, humans have followed specific patterns passed down by their forbears without always knowing why.
Illustration imagining the first Thanksgiving.

The Dark Side of Nice

American niceness is the absolute worst thing to ever happen in human history.

Why Irish America Is Not Evergreen

Thanks to federal immigration policies, immigration from Ireland has all but dried up.
Book cover of "What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia."

Appalachia Isn’t Trump Country

A region that outsiders love to imagine but can’t seem to understand.