Culture

Charles Oldrieve used custom-made wooden shoes to float on the water’s surface and propel himself forward.

'Freaks' asked audiences to think about the exploitative display of human difference while also demonstrating that the sideshow was a locus of community.

Lists of great artists say more about the list-maker than the artist.

The new Boss biopic robs his music of its mythic American qualities.

Starbucks didn’t invent them. But it’s possible that Tori Amos or a Midwest grandma did.

When the single was released in 1955, it was a big hit – but only after the original lyrics were changed.

Washington Irving’s story isn’t just about a very long nap. It’s about the making of America.

Audre Lorde’s legacy shows how feminism can honor difference, as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor argues in this review.

Sarah Curtis: “Maybe we’ve just learned what my teenage daughter does not yet fully know: that to be held to a law is often to be loved.”

What the Founding Fathers ate—and drank—on July 4, 1777.

Ubisoft was reportedly working on a game set after the Civil War era, but canceled it due to politics and protagonist backlash.

With sumptuous fabric and big shoulder pads, 'King Giorgio' draped us in an outsized identity.

On the terror of being buried alive and Americanism in Poe’s work.

Washington’s ‘warrior ethos’ was grounded in decency, temperance and the capacity to act with courage without surrendering to rage.

On the culture wars of the late 1980s and ’90s.

As "The Best American Poetry" anthology ends after nearly forty years, the contradictions of its influence stand out.

James Baldwin's fierce attachments.

Even when it was considered socially unacceptable, American women were knocking down pins on the local lanes.

The story of the woman who inspired Janis Joplin’s signature song, then slipped away.

And the end of civilisation.

Where Western men’s clothing traditions came from, how they have evolved, and how they're being continually reinterpreted.

The pair’s new book recovers the sound of early Black music.

On the groundbreaking work of the Japanese photographer who made Washington state his home.

Long before it was fashionable, Amelia Bloomer pioneered what would later be dubbed "respectability politics."

An exhibit at the Jewish Museum reveals an artist for his time — and ours.

Is he merely a reactionary, or do his films paint a more complicated picture?

The murals at Croatian Catholic Church of St. Nicholas in Millvale do indeed have an implicit politics that was intimately familiar to the congregation.

On the role that medical and health professionals played in raising suspicions of The Twist.

Lionel Trilling defends humanism amid crisis culture, warning that obsessing over evil can erode the self and our capacity for moral and creative agency.

While she always insisted that she wasn’t a ‘real’ critic, Dorothy Parker is more astute than most on matters of style.