Culture

Since their initial popularity during World War II, comic books have always been a medium for American counterculture and for nativism and empire. 

In the work of writers like W.B. Yeats and Virginia Woolf, we can find new ways to tell our own stories.

Julian Fellowes' new series dramatizes the late 19th-century clash between New York City's old and new monied elite.

What did German listeners hear when African American singers performed Schubert or Brahms?

They weren't about to let all that good camel hair go to waste.

A remarkable blues musician emerged from obscurity in 1959, but something about him just didn’t seem right.

The original book is far more grisly than the beloved Disney classic—and has an unsettling message about humanity.

She’s been canonized as a hero of both mainstream literature and radical politics. Who was she really?

Promoters and performers in pro wrestling began increasingly prizing entertainment value over maintaining the appearance of legitimate contests.

America has a love affair with “productive leisure.”

In Yoknapatawpha County, the past never speaks with a single voice.

Once Peter Parker received his miraculous spider powers, the last thing he wanted to do was go out and get a colorful costume and fight crime.

Cocktails — the ingredients, the stories, the pageantry — can reveal more than expected about the Gilded Age.

The film “deliberately maligned the upper class,” according to a report that didn’t like the portrayal of Mr. Potter as a bad guy.

The best-selling musical artist in the world in 1969, Johnny Cash sang of (and for) the "forgotten Americans": the imprisoned men of all races.

Is there something in particular about coming from a Native background that makes a person want to write and perform comedy?

The holiday favorite is an allegorical prayer for peace.

Don Cornelius had faith that Black culture would attract a mass audience, and a belief that Black culture should be in the hands of Black people.

Pheasants? 'Dickory dock'? Toyland? Here's how a narrow slice of American history changed the holidays forever.

His communism brought the great American singer Paul Robeson trouble in the US, but helped make him a hero in China.

A sweeping new history traces the rise of characters caught in a Manichaean struggle between good and evil.

The Christmas classic, released 75 years ago, conveys many messages beyond having faith in one another.

Many early stories praise her work ethic and devotion. But with Mrs. Claus usually hitting the North Pole’s glass ceiling, some writers started to push back.

Why songs of the southland are really northern.

Despite its universalist claims, the field is reckoning with a long legacy of racial exclusion.

The beloved musical’s creator struggled to find a place between left and center.

Aaron Sorkin's new film dramatizes three pivotal moments in the lives of comedy legends Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.

In 1943, Ansel Adams traveled to photograph Manzanar—one of the ten internment camps that together detained 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II.

The girl sleuth, now the star of a TV show, has been eased into the canon. In the process, she’s shed the politics that motivated her creation.

Tammy Wynette and Johnny Cash cancelled gigs in Belfast during the violent 1970s, but Pride played on.