Culture

On the 50th anniversary of ‘What’s Going On,’ a look back on Gaye's onetime dream to become a professional football player.

Mark Bittman’s new history looks at the economy and politics of junk food.

A newly restored novel tests an old dynamic between readers and the author of “Native Son.”

Colescott satirizes an iconic painting of George Washington, and in doing so, challenges the viewer to reconsider their beliefs about American history.

How does Black food go viral among white folks?

How 1980s MTV helped my students understand the Cold War.

A brief history of trick photography.

As the U.S. anticipates a vaccinated summer, historians say measuring the impact of the 1918 influenza on the uproarious decade that followed is tricky.

Dogs were prolific hunters and warm companions for northeastern Native peoples like the Mi'kmaq.

In 1980, the whole city seemed to be on skates. I’m not sure why.

How we sit isn’t the only thing midcentury modernism sought to control.

How photography rose from the margins of the art world to occupy its vital center.

A new biography details the cultural jumble of literature, dirty jokes, and everything in between that went into the making of the foremost self-made American.

What do we know about the history of these designs? Who was buying this furniture when modernism was new, and why?

The history of hipsters is a not-so-secret history of race in the Atlantic world.

'The Man Who Lived Underground,' newly expanded from a story into a novel by the Library of America, may revise the seminal Black author's reputation.

His posthumously released novel, “The Man Who Lived Underground,” was written during a crisis of political faith.

In ‘The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War,’ Louis Menand explores the poetry, music, painting, dance and film that emerged during the Cold War.

Mark Edmundson on the great American poet as a defender of democracy.

Hollywood was just fine avoiding all portrayals of the Central Intelligence Agency for years after the agency's founding in 1947.

For the great American poet, the peculiar qualities of grass suggested a way to resolve the tension between the individual and the group.

The New Yorker critic's new book is a sequel of sorts to "The Metaphysical Club."

The 1918 influenza pandemic had a profound impact on how librarians do their work, transforming libraries into centers of community care.

Ever look at the tome on a coffee table and wonder why coffee table books are a thing? Consider this brief history of coffee table books.

More than just an upset, "Saving Private Ryan" losing the Best Picture Oscar to "Shakespeare in Love" changed how Academy Awards are won.

On the painter’s politics of self-questioning.

Career ranger Virgil "Bus" Carrell had no design training, but "really gave a damn," say experts, about his lasting legacy.

John Berryman's Dream Songs made explicit the racialization of American poetry's turn—and the whiteness of lyric tradition.

A new exhibition celebrates the work of three Austrian artists who escaped their country as Nazis took over and created daring work in the years after.

For years, the West has relied on so-called 'chop suey' fonts to communicate "Asianness" in food packaging, posters and ad campaigns.