culture

Henry James, spiritualism, and the afterlife.

On the falsification of Lincoln Center’s history.

The star of the 1920s silver screen who appears on Taylor Swift’s new album abruptly left Hollywood at the height of her success.

How did taxes become something we "do"?

What's in a name? According to the "Dictionary of American Family Names," it depends.

It’s time to start learning about Native history from museums and cultural centers that are run by Native nations.

The US today has extraordinary levels of gun ownership. But to see this as a venerable tradition is to misread history.

Sinclair Lewis and the small-town science of yearning.

Wang Huning and Alexis de Tocqueville’s dark vision of the future.

Age of Revolutions was happy to interview Nathan Perl-Rosenthal about his new book, entitled 'The Age of Revolutions and the Generations Who Made It.'

On the Irish writer’s grand tour of the Gilded Age United States.

The self has never been more securely an object of classification than it is today.

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

Common in colonial New England, bundling allowed a suitor to spend a night in bed with his sweetheart—while her parents slept in the next room.

Romanticism, local color, and nostalgic New Orleans.

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

A document in her papers in the Library of Congress sheds new light on postwar research on psychedelics.

Some years wield such power that you must comply with them.

The transformation of Alabama politics in the 1960s and 1970s reflected the rise of a new version of Republicanism that Trump has perfected.

How did Americans come to love “mid-century modern”?

"Frustratingly, Talmudically, Jewish food is simply what Jews eat," she writes.

Asian American artists who performed for primarily white audiences in the 1930s and ’40s both challenged and solidified racial boundaries in the United States.

If history had taken another path, bar codes would look dramatically different today.

What might appear to be common values about shared identities can serve not as a bridge but a wedge.

Samuel W. Franklin’s latest book explains how we sold ourselves out to a fake virtue.

In "Ordinary Notes," Sharpe considers Black culture “in all of its shade and depth and glow.”

Retro was not the antithesis to the sub- and countercultural experiments of the 1960s, it grew directly out of them.

For a full understanding of any historical period, we must read the literature written while its events were still unfolding.

Understanding history can help us understand what will be necessary if we’re serious about finally having a more diverse, less exclusionary publishing industry.

As our faith in the future plummets and the present blends with the past, we feel certain that we’ve reached the point where history has fallen apart.