Books, Arts, and Culture

In the decades after the Civil War, when white southerners created the mythology of the Lost Cause, they depicted slavery as a benign institution that uplifted...

In the opening scene of Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour, a novel about an Anglo-Irish household in the first half of the twentieth century, a fifty-seven-year-old woman...

The colony known as German Southwest Africa (now the nation of Namibia) was born out of a monumental swindle. In 1883 Adolf Lüderitz, a tobacco merchant...

Henry James went to prison on a December morning in 1884. He was a good walker and probably set out on foot from his flat off...

In early 2020, just before the coronavirus upended American life, I sat down with a prominent poverty expert and asked what she thought of the efforts...

“I always knew I would someday write a book about my family,” writes Maria Stepanova in a chapter of In Memory of Memory called “On Beginnings.”...

When Frances Wilson was a teenager her mother forbade D.H. Lawrence’s books in the house and her college English professor refused to teach him. It was...

One night in September 2018, in a gentrifying neighborhood just south of downtown Dallas, a twenty-six-year-old accountant named Botham Jean came home from work. Without locking...

World War II was an emergency that demanded a complete economic mobilization. In response to the war, the US government put forward a system of comprehensive...