Culture

The first edition of the beloved novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory featured "pygmy" characters taken from Africa.

An elaborate secret life was a necessity for children’s author Louise Fitzhugh.

Ukulele Ike, otherwise known as Cliff Edwards, was a major American pop star and an important early force in jazz. It’s time to give him another hearing.

Johnny Cash grappled with the many facets of the outlaw archetype in his feature acting debut, Five Minutes to Live.

Michael Prodger on the artists who make huge sums for painting the US flag.

A new release records the musician’s early metamorphosis—unmoored, broke, living for a time in an attic—when her lodestar was her big, strange, unwieldy talent.

It’s been two hundred years since America’s first sci-fi novel was published. But who wrote it?

Alex Winter’s new documentary about the musician fails to capture his deeply conventional streak.

A musicological conversation about the history and social value of Black music.

How did the genre of self-help go from one focused on collective empowerment to one serving the class hierarchy as it stands?

How gender and power collide in food media and culture.

Four decades of “Jeopardy!” contestants tell the story of Alex Trebek’s rise from affable Canadian TV host to cultural icon.

“Robert Johnson was one of the most inventive geniuses of all time,” wrote Bob Dylan. “We still haven’t caught up with him.”

A food writer cracks into the power of food memories and what deviled eggs might tell us about who we are and who we might become.

A new book on American punk paints the movement as the last gasp of left-wing cultural resistance in the 1980s.

‘Struggle: From the History of the American People’ charts the strife of early US history in a fierce Cubist/Expressionist style.

Before and during the Civil War, both enslavers and abolitionists used photography to garner support for their causes.

The United States’ unofficial anthem, a hymn of love of country.

The Federal Theatre Project put dramatic artists to work — and we could do it again.

The Harrisons’ eco-art told stories about the apocalypse, pointing to a future where we’d all have to be survival artists

The creator of ‘The Twilight Zone’ dramatized isolation and fear but still believed in the best of humanity.

Celtic rituals, tricks of nature, and deals with the devil have all played a part in creating this iconic symbol of Halloween.

On Oct. 21, 1980, a beloved tradition was put to a stop.

Allen Barra reviews Mark Kram Jr.’s Smokin’ Joe, a biography of Joe Frazier.

The politically complacent ’90s produced a surprisingly large number of mainstream American rom-coms about fighting the Man.

The swift, often comfortable ride on the Transcontinental Railroad opened up the American West to new settlement.

On Cold War men's adventure magazines and the antifeminist tradition in American popular culture.

In name, 'girl watching' is long gone. In practice, the trend lives on.

A voice for working-class women and an icon for all kinds of women, Parton has maintained her star power throughout life phases and political cycles.

Thirty years after "Ice Ice Baby," Robert Van Winkle is ready to talk about it all—his rise, his fall, and that infamous night on the balcony.