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Old cars piled up under a bridge overpass.

New York: The Invention of an Imaginary City

How nostalgic fantasies about the “authentic” New York City obscure the real-world place.
John F. Kennedy at his graduation from Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1940

Ending the Kennedy Romance

The first volume of Frederik Logevall’s biography of JFK reveals the scope of his ambition and the weakness of his political commitments.
Nuclear explosion
partner

Why the Cold War Race for Nuclear Weapons Is Still a Threat

The Cold War may be over, but an arms race continues, even as safeguards once in place have fallen away.
A pile of trash at a landfill behind a member of the Army Corps of Engineers.

The History of New York, Told Through Its Trash

In 1948, the landfill at Fresh Kills was marketed to Staten Island as a stopgap measure. No one guessed that it would remain open for more than half a century.
Exhibit

Moving Pictures

Tracing the history of Americans' relationships with the silver screen, from film's earliest days to the cinematic creations of our own times.

A graphic featuring art and archival storage.

NFTs and AI Are Unsettling the Very Concept of History

Non-fungible tokens and artificial intelligence make tracing the origins of a digital object more fragile. What are the world’s archivists to do?
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.
"Neighborhood of Fear" book cover

Abolishing the Suburbs

On Kyle Riismandel’s “Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture, 1975–2001.”
Pocahontas characters overlaid onto a landscape.

Deconstructing Disney: Queer Coding and Masculinity in Pocahontas

Disney gets inventive when they need to circumvent white people’s historical responsibility for genocidal atrocities — and queerness is a useful scapegoat.
Thaddeus Stevens

The Radicalism of Thaddeus Stevens

Thaddeus Stevens understood far better than most that fully uprooting slavery meant overthrowing the South’s economic system and challenging property rights.
Lawd, Mah Man's Leavin' by Archibald Motley Jr.

How Should We Understand the Shocking Use of Stereotypes in the Work of Black Artists?

It's about the satirical tradition of 'going there.'
A still from "Judas and the Black Messiah."

The Unsettling Message of ‘Judas and the Black Messiah’

The new crime thriller about a magnetic leader of the Black Panther Party is a sharp criticism of the FBI’s surveillance of social movements past and present.
A walk-up customer at the door of a minister's marriage license booth in Elkton, Md. during the 1920-30s.

How Elkton Became the Marriage Capital of the East Coast

The story of one small Maryland town that became the Marriage Capital of the East Coast in the 20th century.
An illustration of a skeleton apparition.

A History of Presence

The aesthetics of virtual reality, and its promise of “magical” embodied experience, can be found in older experiments with immersive media.
Artwork that says "Bury me fiercely" and features imagery of a face mask and cross

You Are Witness to a Crime

In ACT UP, belonging was not conferred by blood. Care was offered when you joined others on the street with the intent to bring the AIDS crisis to an end.

Her Sentimental Properties

White women have trafficked in Black women’s milk.
Statue of Shakespeare, Central Park, New York City.

Shakespeare’s Contentious Conversation With America

James Shapiro’s recent book looks at why Shakespeare has been a mainstay of the cultural and political conflicts of the country since its founding.
Helen Keller meeting JFK in the White House

The Helen Keller You Didn't Learn About in School

Limited education on Keller's life has implications for how students perceive people with disabilities .
Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl's Anti-Black Racism

The first edition of the beloved novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory featured "pygmy" characters taken from Africa.
An illustration of a kid imagining going to space.

Selling the American Space Dream

The cosmic delusions of Elon Musk and Wernher von Braun.
Photographic collage of James Baldwin

Bringing It Back to Baldwin

Joel Rhone reviews Eddie Glaude Jr.’s Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own
Cover of "Little Lindy is Kidnapped"

We Had Witnessed an Exhibition

A new book about the Lindbergh baby kidnapping focuses on the role played by the media.
A movie still featuring a close-up of two actors from The Age of Innocence

The Age of Innocence: How a US Classic Defined Its Era

Cameron Laux looks at how The Age of Innocence – published 100 years ago – marked a pivotal moment in US history.
Jimmy Carter waving from the stage of a rock and roll concert.

Rock & Roll President: How Musicians Helped Jimmy Carter to the White House

On a documentary in which stars from Bob Dylan to Nile Rodgers discuss how music played a vital role in the unknown politician’s rise to power.
Profiles of four people in background with a hand holding a military gun in the foreground

This Soldier’s Witness to the Iraq War Lie

A U.S. intelligence officer reflects on the moral corruption of an open-ended occupation.

Signs and Wonders

Reading the literature of past plagues and suddenly seeing our present reflected in a mirror.

The Mod Squad, Kojak, Real-Life Cops, and Me

What I relearned (about well-meaning liberalism, race, my late father, and my young gay self) rewatching the TV cop shows of my 1970s youth.
The cover of Exodus by Leon Uris.

How Americans Were Taught to Understand Israel

Leon Uris's bestselling book "Exodus" portrayed the founding of the state of Israel in terms many Americans could relate to.

What Ever Happened to Chicken Fat?

Comedy from Mad Magazine to The Simpsons.

The Forever War Over War Literature

A post-9/11 veteran novelist explores a post-Vietnam literary soiree gone bad, and finds timeless lessons about a contentious and still-evolving genre.
Photograph of Sun Ra by Ming Smith

Sun Ra: ‘I’m Everything and Nothing’

Sun Ra, a seminal artist of afrofuturism, embraced a unique vision of blackness.

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