Culture

How the fight to ban "The Birth of a Nation" shaped the nascent civil rights movement.

An interview with Mary Pilon about her new book, ‘The Monopolists,’ which uncovers the real story about how Monopoly became the game it is today.

If you think that the banjo can teach us nothing about American history, Southern culture and modern race relations, then you certainly don't know the banjo.

Crypts, entombments, physical morbidity: these nightmares are prominent in Poe’s tales, a fictional world in which the word that recurs most crucially is horror.

Tracing the evolution of Christmas from a drunken carnival to the peaceful, family-oriented, consumeristic ritual we celebrate today.

The Library of Congress has the only complete version of the original 1948 release.

Before its subversion in the Jim Crow era, the fruit symbolized black self-sufficiency.

We have always questioned the spiritual and physical effects of alcohol.

The holiday emerged not from the 17th century, but rather from concerns over immigration and urbanization in the 19th century.

The Dearborn Independent, a newspaper Ford owned, regularly supported and spread anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

The history of the comic-book superhero's creation seven decades ago has been hidden away — until now.

How the entire U.S. came to drink out of a vessel never meant for human lips.

Tracing its emergence of as a distinct cultural institution.

How the Earth, Wind & Fire hit "September" came into being, and why it continues to unite the generations on the dance floor.

In early 20th-century St. Louis, Pearl Curran claimed to have conjured a long-dead New England Puritan named Patience Worth through a Ouija board.

The gradual decline of the fade-out in popular music.

A closer look at non-Native Americans that appropriate, fabricate, and invent Native identities for themselves.

How Nina Simone turned the movement into music.

James Gordon Bennett Jr.'s most eccentric public service announcement.

In 1855, prohibitionists set their sights on the wettest day of the year.

Black barbershops are a symbol of community, and they provide a window into our nation's complicated racial dynamics.

People without the means to visit America's wonders could finally picture it for themselves.

In 1883, heavy-weight boxing champion John L. Sullivan embarked on a tour of the country that would make him a sports superstar.

The schism isn't between TV viewers who love a show and those who hate it—it’s between those who love it in very different ways.

Nelson “Little D” Ross talks soul and significance with music historian Robert Gordon.

With help from the CIA, Paul Engle’s writing students battled Communism and eggheaded abstraction. The damage to writing still lingers.

“Hendrix used a range of technological innovations...to expand the sound of the guitar, to make it ‘talk’ in ways that it never had.”

Charlie Rich, the tragic soul man whose legacy was largely forgotten after his brief period of fame.

Nostalgia has always been harnessed or packaged to sell things.

What our mannequins say about us.