Culture

The first feature-length zombie movie emerged from Haitians’ longstanding association of the living dead with slavery and exploited labor.

Jerry Lee Lewis was known as the Killer, and it wasn’t a casual sobriquet.

Two new books and one expanded edition of Gordon Parks' photographs look at the work of the photographer from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.

Despite the prevalence of tricks and spooky spirits in earlier years, the American commercial holiday didn’t develop until the middle of the twentieth century.

Today’s creepy clowns are not a divergence from tradition, but a return to it.

Bounce is defined by its “up-tempo, call-and-response, heavy base, ass-shaking music” and by its transgressively liberatory power.

The banjo did not exist before it was created by the hands of enslaved people in the New World.

How marketing made guns a fundamental element of contemporary boyhood.

Thanks to a collector, thousands of lobby cards from the silent film era will soon be digitized.

When a climate of fear exists, people don’t scrutinize the evidence behind claims about children’s reading material.

In search of the mythical blues—and their real urban origins.

The Folkies and WWII, Part Two.

The Broadway revival of the musical means less to reanimate the nation’s founding than to talk back to it.

The personal essay is the purest expression of the lie that individual subjectivity exists prior to the social formations that gave rise to it.

In the late 1970s, smaller 'Star Wars' action figures took over.

A show at the Jewish Museum surveys three eventful years of art, film, and performance in New York City—and the political upheavals that defined them.

Beginning in the 1960s, young Black majorettes and dance troupes created a fascinating culture. This is the story of how they did it.

He sold 60 million books and 100 million records. Then he disappeared.

The singer wasn't a feminist torchbearer, but her music amplified women's issues.

“The connection between a hot temper and an empty stomach,” explained through a history of colonial interactions with indigenous peoples.

Watching the Ken Burns series on the U.S. and the Holocaust and thinking about American folk music.

A new book explores the final days of Ralph Waldo Emerson - traveling from Concord to California, and beyond.

Buster Keaton made his own kind of sense out of the perplexities of existence in ways baffling to those among whom he found himself.

"Blonde," a heavily fictionalized film by Andrew Dominik, explores the star's life and legend in a narrative that's equal parts glamorous and disturbing.

Today, mourning attire is subdued and dutiful. It wasn’t always that way.

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.

Produced by the master entertainer P. T. Barnum, a melodrama about the dangers of alcohol was the first show to run for a hundred performances in New York City.

In 1931, an entire new cast and crew reshot Dracula in Spanish on the Universal Studios lot.

John Jacob Astor’s "A Journey in Other Worlds" is a high-voltage scientific romance in which visions of imperialism haunt a supposedly “perfect” future.

How a best-selling series gave young readers a new sense of agency.