Culture

Meditating on blotter not just as art, or as a historical artifact, but as a kind of media, even a “meta medium.”

Was he a brilliant painter or a brilliant brand?

Neither the Bureau of Prisons nor the Production Code Administration could stop the production of a movie about murderer and ornithologist Robert Stroud.

Syncopation and swing reigned supreme at the annual Lorton Reformatory Jazz Festival in the 1960s.

The rich history of Japanese-language literature challenges assumptions about what counts as U.S. art.

Mario Van Peebles' "Outlaw Posse" is the latest attempt to correct the erasure of people of color from the classic cinema genre.

Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific shows the limits–and power–of mainstream entertainment in addressing weighty social topics.

Romanticism, local color, and nostalgic New Orleans.

“It was an affirmation of our city,” says New Orleanian food historian Lolis Eric Elie.

In 1990, scholars found a Sierra Leonean woman who remembered a nearly identical version of a tune passed down by a Georgia woman’s enslaved ancestors

Maria P. Williams pioneered filmmaking for African American women, but her life is even more thrilling than her sole film.

At once famous and obscure, marginal and central, Harry Smith anticipated and even invented several important elements of Sixties counterculture.

No other 20th-century American novel did quite so much to burnish Brooklyn’s reputation.

In the 19th century ledger drawings became a concentrated point of resistance for Indigenous people, an expression of individual and communal pride.

While some in the West are squeamish, globally, it's more common than not.

Peanuts’ Franklin has been a controversial character for decades. A new special attempts reparations.

An astonishing new show of Native American ledger drawings brings a historic crime into focus.

After 40 years and more than 25 million copies sold, what story does ‘Legend’ tell us about Bob Marley and the people listening to it?

After "Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," the nightmare of American familyhood was the only game in town.

The celebrations created space for people to subvert gender norms, as New Orleans' LGBTQ communities built new traditions of their own.

A Hungarian immigrant first brought the soccer style field kick to the NFL.

Born out of the Great Depression, the genre reminds us that even in hard times there's laughter, love, and light.

Or, why families under siege make for great movies.

Again and again, a fervant British anticommunist's filmstrip of the novel shows images of women in states of distress.

The hardscrabble origins and unique vision of novelist Willa Cather.

John A. Williams’s unsung novel.

The representation of Jews in antebellum popular culture reveals that many Americans found them both cartoonishly villainous and enticingly exotic.

Before Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” won song of the year at the CMAs, hit maker Ted Jarrett’s music topped the country charts.

The 1895 show purported to show a genuine Southern Black community and demonstrate Black cultural progress in America, from enslavement to citizenship.

How plantation fiction fixed ghost stories to Black Americans.