Culture

A new biography examines the enigma of the musician.

Barbecue is a cornerstone of American cuisine, containing all of the contradictions of the country itself.

In narrowly focusing on Leonard Bernstein’s tortured personal life, "Maestro" fails to explore his tortured artistic life.

How The Go-Go’s emerged from the LA punk scene in the late ’70s to become the first and only female band to have a number one album.

When Miles Davis went electric in the late 1960s, he overhauled his thinking about songs, genres, and what it meant to lead a band.

Asian American artists who performed for primarily white audiences in the 1930s and ’40s both challenged and solidified racial boundaries in the United States.

We cannot understand the last fifty years of U.S. history—certainly not the first thing about Black history—without studying the emergence and evolution of rap.

The 20th century brought dinner parties to the masses, along with some truly unhinged entertaining advice

Our water bottle obsession speaks to deeper historical trends.

Oppenheimer and the demon heart of power.

What roiled the mind of Nebraska poet John Neihardt with whom Black Elk, the iconic Lakota holy man, shared his story?

Retro was not the antithesis to the sub- and countercultural experiments of the 1960s, it grew directly out of them.

See how Washington Irving, Clement Clarke Moore and Thomas Nast made Santa the merriest man in Manhattan.

A 1941 novel by a former Communist Party member about the dog-eat-dog scumbaggery of movie executives and the lying and artless bragging that Hollywood runs on.

Following the rhythm of Shirley Horn.

The cosmic collision of Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway.

The far-flung tale of a murder song.

A memoir of the Family Stone.

A look into the life, art, and "wildness" of influential choreographer Martha Graham.

For a full understanding of any historical period, we must read the literature written while its events were still unfolding.

Why do they exist? Where did they come from? Can they be defended? The most pressing questions, answered.

The radical art of the Depression years.

Though his younger brother Isaac Bashevis Singer eventually eclipsed him, Israel Joshua Singer excelled at showing characters buffeted by the tides of history.

Throughout its botanical, cultural, and social history, the watermelon has been a vehicle for our ideas about community, survival, and what we owe the future.

In every generation, writers and readers find new ways to plumb the depths of Herman Melville and his work.

A new documentary, “Billion Dollar Babies,” shows how a product of Appalachian folk art drew the blueprint for all holiday toy crazes to come.

On the performance of authenticity and the native stories left to tell.

A pop star’s road map to decadence.

On the early years of America's chronicler of the Great Plains.

He was one of the world’s most celebrated and beloved stars. Then his adopted country turned against him.