Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Culture
It’s the most purely American food. And that’s maybe the only thing about it that everyone agrees on.
The word emerged during the Depression to define a new kind of American adolescence, one that prevailed for half a century and may now be ending.
ALBERT MURRAY SEES AMERICAN CULTURE AS AN incandescent fusion of European, Yankee, frontier, and black. And he sees what he calls the “blues idiom” as the highest expression of that culture.
Wynton Marsalis believes that America is in danger of losing the truest mirror of our national identity. If that’s the case, we are at least fortunate that, today, jazz’s foremost performer is also its most eloquent advocate.
When Wynton Marsalis burst into the public eye in the early 1980s, it was as a virtuoso trumpet player. From the start he was an articulate talker too, but his bracing opinions were off-thecuff and intuitive; his ideas, like his playing, needed seasoning.
A distinguished scholar of American literature discusses why, after a career of study and reflection, he believes that Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman are bad for you.
Quentin Anderson, Julian Clarence Levy Professor in the Humanities Emeritus at Columbia University, argues in his best-known book, The Imperial Self: An Essay in American Literary and Cultural History, that the writings of three of our m
World War I made the city the financial capital of the world. Then, after World War II, a very few audacious painters and passionate critics made it the cultural capital, as well. Here is how they seized the torch from Europe.
Mark Tansey is a definitively post-modernist painter. His pictures stand at two removes from nature; not art but art history (or art theory) is his subject. Tansey deals in theories and notions, presenting them with the sort of sharp irony found in editorial-page cartoons.
After half a millennium, we scarcely feel the presence of Spain in what is now the United States. But it is all around us.
In 1883, Walt Whitman received an invitation to Santa Fe to deliver a poem at a celebration of the city’s founding.
For 150 years, a crenelated Gothic Revival castle in Connecticut has housed an art collection that was astonishing for its time, and remains so.
We tend to identify the first American public display of art with the post-Civil War surge of wealth called the Gilded Age.
Our ancestors look gravely and steadily upon things that we cannot.
In the course of this lethal century, death has been rendered increasingly abstract—a choreographed plunge on the television screen, the punch of a red button in a bomber or a computer game, a statistic in a column of print.
The fiercest struggle going on in education is about who owns the past. Passionate multi-culturalists say that traditional history- teaching has brushed out minority ethnic identities. Their opponents say that radical multi-culturalism leads toward national fragmentation.
In 1987, a sweeping revision of the social studies program in New York State public schools gave the curriculum a strong multicultural slant.
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