A painting entitled "The First Thanksgiving, 1621" by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris (ca. 1932).

Thanksgiving: The National Day of Mourning

A Native student explains why the holiday is a painful reminder of a whitewashed past.
Trix cereal logo with bunny mascot

The White Rabbit and His Colorful Tricks

Breakfast cereal, dietary purity, and race.

How Black Philadelphians Fought for Soldiers During World War I

A brief history of the Crispus Attucks Circle, an African American relief agency.

Mayberry Machiavelli

The self-congratulatory legacies of ‘A Face in the Crowd.’

'I'm Feeling Bad About America'

The sick history of the U.S. campaign song.

How Horror Changed After WWI

The war created a new world, an alternate reality distinct from what most people before 1914 expected their lives to be.
Athleisure clothing items including a windbreaker, cap, sweatpants, and running shoe.

How Athleisure Conquered Modern Fashion

The sudden ubiquity of sportswear might seem a little odd. But almost every feature of modern fashion was once adapted from athletics.
Baseball player is safe as he slides into first base in the 1906 World Series.

Hand Signals

Deaf history and the birth of umpiring gestures in baseball.

Take an Immigrant’s Journey

Follow the paths of eight immigrants, whose stories are based on real laws and historically documented scenarios.

The Gender-Bending Style of Yankee Doodle's Macaroni

The outlandish "macaroni" style of 18th-century England blurred the boundaries of gender, as well as class and nationality.
Poster for Barnum and Bailey circus.

The American Circus in All Its Glory

A new documentary tells the history of the big top.

The Erotics of Cy Twombly

Poet Joshua Rivkin’s new book about Cy Twombly is “stranger and more personal than a biography.”

David Porter Takes Us to School

The man who wrote "Soul Man" gives a master class on how code-switching through music helped catalyze the Civil Rights Movement.
Painting of the mouth of a cave.

Down in the Hole: Outlaw Country and Outlaw Culture

Country music has often stood, as it were, with one foot in and one foot out of the cave.

Sears’s ‘Radical’ Past

How mail-order catalogues subverted the racial hierarchy of Jim Crow.
Lithograph titled "Kiss Me Quick" showing a man and a woman kissing. The woman has her hands on the hats of two children.

Sexual Revolution: Event or Process?

The most important dimension of the sexual revolution of the '60s and '70s was the increased freedom of sexual speech.

How Does a Film Become Lost?

What happens when “lost” films and television shows become found once again—and what that does to the work’s cultural legacy.
Film still of Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch.

How Reconsidering Atticus Finch Makes Us Reconsider America

A new book offers lessons drawn from Harper Lee's ambivalent treatment of this iconic character.
Drawing of a drag ball in the Civil War.

Drag Balls of the Civil War

Queerness has always existed — even on the Civil War battlefield.
Soldiers burning books.

How We Roasted Donald Duck, Disney's Agent of Imperialism

Why a 47-year old anti-colonialist critique by Chilean dissidents may be newly relevant in the Trump era.

Fried Chicken Is Common Ground

If you like hot chicken, perhaps you’d be interested in knowing where it comes from.
Black-and-white television still of man in front of a row of masks of himself, lighting a cigarette for one of them.

Did the Creator of 'The Twilight Zone' Plagiarize Ray Bradbury?

Either way, Rod Serling definitely pissed him off.

Brett Kavanaugh Goes to the Movies

A film scholar reflects on the image of masculinity depicted in "Grease 2," released the same summer of Kavanaugh's alleged assault.

Sentinel

From the day it was inaugurated, the Statue of Liberty has symbolized the tensions between national independence and universal human rights.
Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, and Grace Hartigan

How New York’s Postwar Female Painters Battled for Recognition

The women of the historic Ninth Street Show had a will of iron and an intense need for their talent to be expressed, no matter the cost.
Collage of paper clippings including headless a running man, an explosion where his head would be, and a jet flying alongside him.

Ante Up: The Scales of Power Seen Through Norman Podhoretz’s Eyes

In retrospect, it was peculiar but not surprising that the Jewish-American novel peaked early—halfway through the beginning, to be precise.

Teen ‘Boys Will Be Boys’: A Brief History

The concept of adolescence is a recent invention — and it has been applied unevenly to children from different backgrounds.

The Rape Culture of the 1980s, Explained by Sixteen Candles

The beloved romantic comedy’s date rape scene provides important context for the Brett Kavanaugh accusations.

Here Is a Human Being

The Spotify and Ancestry partnership proposes to entertain users based on the narrowest possible conception of who they are.
Edna Lewis in the kitchen.

The People of Freetown

Can renowned Southern chef and writer Edna Lewis' radical communist politics be parsed out by analyzing her cookbooks?