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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?
by Annette Gordon-Reed via New York Review of Books on October 24, 2019

Reading in an Age of Catastrophe

A review of George Hutchinson's "Facing the Abyss: American Literature and Culture in the 1940s."
by Edward Mendelson via New York Review of Books on February 25, 2019
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.
by Akram Khater, Marjorie Stevens via Khayrallah Center For Lebanese Diaspora Studies on February 6, 2019

Here Is a Human Being

The Spotify and Ancestry partnership proposes to entertain users based on the narrowest possible conception of who they are.
by Cam Scott via Popula on September 27, 2018
Head coach Tom Landry of the Dallas Cowboys, surrounded by his team.

How Football Coaches Became the Vanguard of American Conservatism

Coaches have long sacralized the gridiron, extolling it alongside faith, family and the military as a setting stone of the social order.
by Aaron Timms via The Guardian on July 25, 2018

How the Midlife Crisis Came to Be 

The midlife crisis went from an obscure psychological theory to a ubiquitous phenomenon.
by Pamela Druckerman via The Atlantic on May 29, 2018
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.
by Gracy Olmstead via The American Conservative on April 23, 2018
A painting entitled "The First Thanksgiving, 1621" by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris (ca. 1932).

The Dark Side of Nice

American niceness is the absolute worst thing to ever happen in human history.
by D. Berton Emerson via Los Angeles Review of Books on April 22, 2018

Why Irish America Is Not Evergreen

Thanks to federal immigration policies, immigration from Ireland has all but dried up.
by Sadhbh Walshe via New York Review of Books on March 16, 2018
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.
by Elizabeth Catte, Regan Penaluna via Guernica on March 7, 2018
Still from Dirty Dancing.

In the Dark All Katz Are Grey: Notes on Jewish Nostalgia

Searching for where I belong, I find myself cobbling together a mongrel Judaism—half-remembered and contradictory and all mine.
by Samuel Ashworth via Hazlitt on February 23, 2018

The Mythical Whiteness of Trump Country

"Hillbilly Elegy" has been used to explain the 2016 election, but its logic is rooted in a dangerous myth about race in Appalachia.
by Elizabeth Catte via Boston Review on November 7, 2017
Illustration of Elvis Presley and Big Mama Thornton

The Question of Cultural Appropriation

It’s more helpful to think about exploitation and disrespect than to define cultural “ownership.”
by Briahna Joy Gray via Current Affairs on September 6, 2017

How America’s Obsession With Hula Girls Almost Wrecked Hawai’i

Popularized images of female hula dancers have deviated far from their origins and perpetuated stereotypes.
by Lisa Hix via Collectors Weekly on March 22, 2017
Kids and adults free dancing.

Camille A. Brown: A Visual History of Social Dance in 25 Moves

Why do we dance? African-American social dances started as a way for enslaved Africans to keep cultural traditions alive and retain a sense of inner freedom.
by Camille A. Brown via TED on June 1, 2016
Engraving of Hawaiian high chief Ka‘iana

When Hawaii Was Ruled by Shark-Like Gods

19th century Hawai‘i attracted traders, entrepreneurs, and capitalists, who displaced, a flourishing and elaborate culture.
by Patrick Vinton Kirch via New York Review of Books on December 3, 2015
Christopher Columbus

Man of the Year

A review of Columbus's impact on the political, economic, and religious effects within the Renaissance period of Europe and the beginning of global exploration.
by Garry Wills via New York Review of Books on November 21, 1992
A map of the United States divided into regions.

A Balkanized Federation

Without a shared civic narrative – the pursuit of liberal democratic self-government – the rival regional cultures of the United States agree on very little.
via Nationhood Lab
Bruce Springsteen playing the guitar.

The Long Road to Nebraska

Springsteen’s 1982 classic has become an American scripture, its ghosts of fathers and highways still haunting today’s America.
by Brian Francis Slattery via Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera on November 4, 2025
William Faulkner, Malcolm Cowley, and a manuscript letter.

The Man Who Rescued Faulkner

How the critic Malcolm Cowley made American literature into its own great tradition.
by Michael Gorra via The Atlantic on November 4, 2025
The Canadian and American flags.

Canada’s Heroic Delusion

The country’s 40-year-ago embrace of free trade with the U.S. has come back to haunt it.
by Dónal Gill via The Dial on October 28, 2025
Kitchen workers moving a paper-mache Statue of Liberty in 2009 Kabul, Afghanistan.

Pervasive Impunity

How four presidential administrations managed to evade moral responsibility for the “war on terror” by hiding behind legality and process.
by Cora Currier via New York Review of Books on October 16, 2025
George Washington saying farewell to his officers in 1783.

Where George Washington Would Disagree with Pete Hegseth About Fitness for Command and a Warrior

Washington’s ‘warrior ethos’ was grounded in decency, temperance and the capacity to act with courage without surrendering to rage.
by Maurizio Valsania via The Conversation on October 2, 2025
Efka Pyramiden cigarette papers in a green packaging sleeve made in Nazi Germany.
partner

Papering Over History

Efka—the German rolling paper company—was a Nazi regime favorite. After World War II, it was refashioned as a darling of the pot-infused counterculture.
by Alexandra M. Lord, Robert M. Ehrenreich via JSTOR Daily on September 24, 2025
Frank Matsura photograph: a staged scene of a Native American man using a rifle to hold up men playing cards.

How Photographer Frank S. Matsura Challenged White America’s Hegemonic View of the West

On the groundbreaking work of the Japanese photographer who made Washington state his home.
by Glen Mimura via Literary Hub on September 11, 2025
Two matcha drinks.

Green Gruel? Pea Soup? What Westerners Thought of Matcha When They Tried It for the First Time

‘Matcha mania’ shows no signs of slowing, pushing supply chains to the brink. It’s marked quite the rise for a drink long met with skepticism in the West.
by Rebecca Corbett via The Conversation on September 3, 2025
Collage of photos of Lionel Trilling.

Lionel Trilling and the Limits of Crisis-Thought

Lionel Trilling defends humanism amid crisis culture, warning that obsessing over evil can erode the self and our capacity for moral and creative agency.
by Sam Gee via The Hedgehog Review on September 3, 2025
Black and white teenagers dance in a train car while a band plays.

Twist and Shout: Music, Race, and Medical Moralization

On the role that medical and health professionals played in raising suspicions of The Twist.
by Beth Linker, Hannah Yusuf via Nursing Clio on September 3, 2025
John McCain stands in a crowd shaking hands in a Ukrainian city.

How Decades of Folly Led to War in Ukraine

For decades, US hostility towards Russia and continued NATO encroachment ever further into Eastern Europe have laid the groundwork for the current crisis.
by Michael A. Reynolds via Compact on August 15, 2025
Donald Trump, flanked by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and others, shows executive order restarting the Presidential Fitness Test

What’s Behind Trump’s New (Old) Physical-Fitness Test?

He misrepresented the history of the gym-class test. I know because I served on the council that helped modernize it.
by Mark Hertling via The Bulwark on August 4, 2025
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