America’s centennial in 1876 was celebrated with a grand exhibition that projected an image of national unity and inventiveness in the anxious aftermath of civil war and recession.

Vigil finds George Saunders returning to the theme of his first novel, grief—this time not for a person but for a planet.

Peter Magyar’s landslide electoral victory in April made clear that after sixteen years, Hungarians were tired of Viktor Orbán.

Why has the Metropolitan Museum of Art sold prime gallery space to the fashion industry?

Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff’s Muskism examines how Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire, by selling a vision of the future that very few people would want to inhabit.

The naturalist George Forster was fascinated by plants and animals, but he was also driven by a passionate belief in the rights of all people regardless of race, gender, or social status.

Donald Trump has reversed the government’s longstanding benevolence toward Cuban asylum seekers, even as his administration exacerbates the crisis they fled.

Rosemary Tonks emulated French Symbolist poets before converting to Christianity and renouncing all her own works.

Though a mystery to Darwin in his lifetime, the constant mutation of our genes is what allows for life’s magnificent diversity.

A history of five families in El Paso reveals the city’s significance as a bellwether of America’s immigration policy.

Critics who call André Breton’s Nadja a novel miss its most innovative aspects.

Joe Manchin’s memoir reveals that the West Virginian Senator worshipped “work” at the expense of supporting his party’s efforts to help working people.

Two forceful exhibitions have shown how Indian artists and presses met the cultural upheaval of the nineteenth century with lithographic prints that rendered Hindu gods more approachable and helped to galvanize national identity.

Popular memory in the West tends to separate the Holocaust from the German war against the Soviet Union, but for the Nazi regime they were two faces of the same undertaking.

Carol Rama’s abstractions from the late 1960s conjure burned, brutalized bodies.

By transforming her own old paintings into new works of art, Eliza Douglas raises questions about sincerity and cynicism.