Science fiction landscape.

75 Years Ago, "The Martian Chronicles" Legitimized Science Fiction

On Ray Bradbury’s underappreciated classic.
Mark Twain

The Impossible Contradictions of Mark Twain

Populist and patrician, hustler and moralist, salesman and satirist, he embodied the tensions within his America, and ours.
Texas Southern University marching band.

The Storied History of HBCU Marching Bands

Marching bands at historically Black colleges and universities can be seen as both celebratory emblems and complicated arbiters of Black American culture.
Mary MacLane.

“I Am Making the World My Confessor”: Mary MacLane, the Wild Woman from Butte

In 1902, a woman named Mary MacLane from Butte, Montana, became an international sensation after publishing a scandalous journal at the age of 19.
Eugen Sandow flexing his bicep.

The Evolution of the Alpha Male Aesthetic

If you've noticed a certain look common to the manosphere, you're not mistaken. A visual identity has taken hold, with roots that trace back decades.
Cartoon drawing of a child hiding behind a man.

How Robert Crumb Channeled Mid-Century Teenage Angst Into Art

Dan Nadel on the formative awkward adolescence of an iconic American cartoonist.
Henry Fonda in The Best Man (1984).

President of the Nameless: Alexander Horwath on Henry Fonda for President

A documentary dissects Henry Fonda's character and his role in American cinema.
Jack Clayton, The Great Gatsby, 1974.

America the Beautiful

One hundred years ago, "The Great Gatsby" was first published. It remains one of the books that almost every literate American has read.
Leonard Bernstein practices with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1967.

How Leonard Bernstein Changed the Canon

In 1966, the conductor arrived in Vienna with a mission: to restore Gustav Mahler’s place in 20th-century music.
Shots from various conspiracy films of the 20th century.

The Life and Death of Conspiracy Cinema

Why did Hollywood lose interest in making paranoid thrillers? Was it a change in the culture? Or a change in the marketplace?
Several women on bicycles.

The Surprising History of Women and Bicycling

It's not about the bike or the bloomers.
Henry James.

Henry James’s American Journey

Why his turn-of-the-century travelogue still resonates.
Detail of landscape painting Villa Menaggio, Lago di Como by Sophia Peabody Hawthorne.

Transcending the Glass Ceiling

Five women who made important contributions to 19th-century American philosophy finally get their due.
A portrait of Edgar Allen Poe.

The Most Overrated Writer in America

Do people really like Edgar Allen Poe?
Black and white photograph of a lake.

Not So Close

For Henry David Thoreau, it is only as strangers that we can see each other as the bearers of divinity we really are.
Anwan “Big G” Glover, musical director of the Go-Go Museum and Cafe, performs at The Kennedy Center on Feb. 14.

Saving the Signature Sound of Washington, DC

A new museum dedicated to Go-Go music comes with a message for both gentrifiers and lawmakers: #Don’tMuteDC.
Alvin Ailey

How to Forget Alvin Ailey

Even as “Edges of Ailey” gathers such intimate documents, it does not make them legible to its visitors.

Zora Neale Hurston’s Rediscovered Novel

A new publication obscures the canonical writer.
Painting by Earle Richardson titled "Employment of Negroes in Agriculture," 1934.

Uncle Tom's Cabin is the Great American Novel

Most countries take their popular novelists more seriously than America has. The term “Great American Novel” was literally invented to describe this book
Robert Frost.

Chapters and Verse

Looking for the poet between the lines.
Oil painting of Margaret Fuller by Thomas Hicks, 1848 (National Portrait Gallery) and frontispiece from first edition of Woman in the Nineteenth Century.

The Mind and Heart of Margaret Fuller

Margaret Fuller was a polymathic intellect and writer, simultaneously ahead of her time and deeply enmeshed in the social and political fabric of her era.
Arthur Morgan from video game Red Dead Redemption 2 sporting a gun and cowboy hat.

Cult of the Cowboy: Inside the Toxic Adoration of an All-American Obsession

Video games, violence and the enduring allure of the vigilante hero.
Cartoon of well-dressed arm holding a lit match

The Gilded Age Never Ended

Plutocrats, anarchists, and what Henry James grasped about the romance of revolution.
Illustration of Edmond Dédé.

An 1887 Opera by a Black Composer Finally Surfaces

Edmond Dédé’s “Morgiane” shows how diversity initiatives can promote works of real cultural value.
Robert Frost.

The Many Guises of Robert Frost

Sometimes seen as the stuff of commencement addresses, his poems are hard to pin down—just like the man behind them.
A book ladder stretching into a cloudy sky.

Every Book Lover Dreams of It. Few Ever Get It.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a man of letters, in possession of a goodly number of books, must be in need of a ladder.
The title card of George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead.

George Romero’s Pittsburgh

City of the living dead.
A young boy stares at the camera while members of the Black Panther Party distribute free clothing to the public.
partner

The Black Panther Party's Under-Appreciated Legacy of Love

The Black Panther Party illustrated how communal love can be a powerful agent for change and empowerment.
A group of Pilgrims in prayer.

How the Pilgrims Redefined What It Means to Move Across the World

The Puritan origins of modern ideas about migration.
Sam Peckinpah looks into a film camera.

The Noble Savagery of Sam Peckinpah

“Bloody Sam” was born one hundred years ago this month.