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Mural depicting bluesman John Dee Holeman and friends playing on the front porch of a house.

The Living Legacy of the Piedmont Blues

The music that grew out of Durham's tobacco manufacturing plants influenced some of the most widely recorded musicians of the last 65 years—and still does.
Scene from "The Sugarland Express." A woman is leaning out the window of police car.

Hot Pursuit: The Brief Rise of 1970s Hixploitation Cinema

On the drive-in movie culture that captured a yearning for fast cars on dusty roads.
The cover of The Black Mask magazine, June 1, 1923, featuring a hooded Klan member.

The Gumshoes Who Took On the Klan

In the pages of "Black Mask" magazine, the Continental Op and Race Williams fought the KKK even as they shared its love of vigilante justice.
Illustration of a person reading, sitting on a giant stack of books.

Is Writing History Like Solving a Mystery?

Why historians like to think of themselves as detectives.
Mae West

Mae West and Camp

A camp diva, a queer icon, and a model of feminism—the memorable Mae West left behind a complicated legacy, on and off the stage.
Connie Converse playing a guitar

The Lost Music of Connie Converse

A writer of haunting, uncategorizable songs, she once seemed poised for runaway fame. But only decades after she disappeared has her music found an audience.
Premiere of The Gaucho at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, November 4, 1927.

The Gaucho Western

When Hollywood went down Argentine way.
original

The Life of Song

What the surprising career of Bob McGrath teaches us about popular music.
Pubs and Bars having colorful lights and decorations in the French Quarter

Sex, Race, and Gender in Bounce Music Culture

Bounce is defined by its “up-tempo, call-and-response, heavy base, ass-shaking music” and by its transgressively liberatory power.
Mark Wallinger's "Self-Portrait," a painting showing black dripping paint in the silhouette of an unfurled scroll on a grey background

The Illusion of the First Person

The personal essay is the purest expression of the lie that individual subjectivity exists prior to the social formations that gave rise to it.
Eight frames (in two rows of four) from "How It Feels To Be Run Over." The top four show a carriage full of people traveling along the road approaching the camera, while the bottom four read "Mother will be pleased."

“Mother Will Be Pleased”: "How It Feels to Be Run Over" (1900)

One of the earliest uses of intertitles, in this fin-de-siècle accident picture we can observe cinema discovering new forms of communication.
Two DJs, DJ Aladdin on the left.

Scratch Cyborgs: The Hip-Hop DJ as Technology

Hip-hop DJ culture provides a rich site for exploring how culture and industry can converge and collaborate, as well as how they need each other to move forward.
Bad Bunny performs for the 2022 MTV Video Music Awards.

Bad Bunny and the Political History of Reggaeton

The genre is the product of migration, rebirth, and the struggle to be heard.
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.
Black and white photo of Gertrude Stein writing at desk.

Gertrude Stein's Pulp Fiction

It has taken decades for an appreciation of Stein’s crime fiction to really take hold.
Portraits of Dean Dixon, William Grant Still, and Margaret Bonds, three African American classical musicians.

A Prophecy Unfulfilled?

What a new book and six companion videos have to say about the fate of Black classical music in America.
Patricia Hearst in front of SLA flag, 1974; CSU Archives/Everett Collection/Alamy Stock Photo.

American Captivity

The captivity narrative as creation myth.
Unaccompanied children in a train station

Novel Transport

The anatomy of the “orphan train” genre.
The full chart of television genres from 1945 to present.

Television Genres Over Time

Here’s how the distribution of genres has changed since 1945 up to present.
The cover of the book Her Stories by Elana Levine

Guiding Lights: On “Her Stories: Daytime Soap Opera and US Television History”

Annie Berke reviews Elana Levine's book on a pivotal genre and its diverse fandom.
John Coltrane performing

‘It Didn’t Adhere to Any of the Rules’: The Fascinating History of Free Jazz

In the documentary "Fire Music," the hostile reaction that met the unusual genre soon turns into deep appreciation and a lasting influence.
H.P. Lovecraft.

The Shadow Over H.P. Lovecraft

Recent works inspired by his fiction struggle to reckon with his racist fantasies.
Morgan Wallen
partner

The Crossroads Facing Country Music After Morgan Wallen’s Use of a Racist Slur

Will the industry remain a bastion of conservatism, or take advantage of the opportunity to broaden its base?
A group of five wealthy women in Victorian dress.

A Pool of One’s Own

Group biographies and the female friendship vogue.

How Sci-Fi Shaped Socialism

Sci-fi has long provided an outlet for socialist thinkers — offering readers a break from capitalist realism and allowing us to imagine a different world.
Frank Zappa.

How Weird Was Frank Zappa?

Alex Winter’s new documentary about the musician fails to capture his deeply conventional streak.
A collage of book covers.

The Radical Origins of Self-Help Literature

How did the genre of self-help go from one focused on collective empowerment to one serving the class hierarchy as it stands?
A screenshot from the movie "You've Got Mail."

The Romance of American Clintonism

The politically complacent ’90s produced a surprisingly large number of mainstream American rom-coms about fighting the Man.

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.

Rewriting Country Music's Racist History

Artists like Yola and Rhiannon Giddens are blowing up what Giddens calls a “manufactured image of country music being white and being poor.”

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