Culture

Isaac Murphy was once called ‘The Prince of Jockeys’ during the fleeting era when African Americans reigned on the nation’s racetracks.

On Chuck Berry.

Europeans translated the "Chinese Book of Changes" in the nineteenth century, but the philosophy really took off in the West after 1924.

A new, Pulitzer Prize–winning opera adapts the memoir of Omar ibn Said, an African Muslim who spent much of his life enslaved in North Carolina.

An unlikely pair of Southern California businessmen paved the way for the sushi revolution in Los Angeles, upending American dining — and their own lives.

A classic ghost story has something to say about America—200 years ago, 100 years ago, and today.

At every stop, he enthralled audiences with a device called a “stereopticon.”

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.

A short history of a misunderstood literary genre and the world it created.

The new documentary “I Am Everything” explores the gulf between what Richard accomplished and what he got for it.

The ragtime composer's life, career, and resurrection.

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.

A new biography of Phillis Wheatley places her in her era and shows the ways she used poetry to criticize the existence of slavery.

Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House" series is the best introduction for a child to virtues indispensable to liberty.

The saxophonist Albert Ayler revolutionized the avant-garde jazz scene, drastically altering notions of what noises qualified as music.

The concept was devised in postwar America, in response to the cultural and commercial demands of the era. Now we’re stuck with it.

A museum dedicated to techno music has opened in Frankfurt, Germany, and many genre pioneers feel that Black and queer artists in Detroit have been overlooked.

Women have been punching each other in the face (during boxing matches) since the early 1700s.

It’s difficult to read the gender of children in many old photos. That’s because coding American children via clothing didn’t begin until the 1920s.

The artist and his birds continue to challenge us.

Lynn Riggs wrote the play that served as the basis of the hit 1943 musical.

In Joshua Bennett’s history of spoken word, poetry is alive and well thanks to a movement that began in living rooms and bars.

Native farming practices and settler-colonial imaginations in the video game "Empire: Total War."

Can it be produced without controversy?

What the Medicine Wheel, an indigenous American model of time, shows about apocalypse.

Sha-Rock claims her place as the first female MC in hip-hop history.

The author of a new book, The Underwater Eye, discusses how film enables audiences "to connect to the most remote environment on the planet: the ocean."

By mass-marketing social aspiration, the brand toed the line between exclusivity and accessibility—and established prep as America’s visual vernacular.

A generation is still dying younger than it should—this time, of “natural causes.”

So where were those angsty kids?