Reading List Reflecting on America鈥檚 250th anniversary: First Peoples June 22, 2026 Long before the founding of the United States, Indigenous peoples shaped the lands and cultures of North America. This reading list centers their perspectives, examining encounter and dispossession across centuries of American history. Read More
Reading List Reflecting on America鈥檚 250th anniversary: The First Amendment June 22, 2026 Freedom of speech has been a cornerstone of American democracy, as well as the focus of ongoing discussion over dissent and the limits of power. This reading list explores the First Amendment and years of debate over who gets to speak, and why it matters. Read More
Reading List Read with Pride June 01, 2026 Celebrate Pride throughout the year with this diverse collection of books exploring LGBTQ+ issues and perspectives. Read More
Podcast Africa鈥檚 Buildings April 29, 2026 Africa鈥檚 Buildings uncovers the vast scale of cultural displacement perpetrated by the West and proposes a new role for museums in this history, one in which they champion the repatriation of Africa鈥檚 architectural heritage and restitution for African communities. Read More
Interview Roland Betancourt on Disneyland and the Rise of Automation April 23, 2026 Roland Betancourt traces how Disneyland became a proving ground for automation at the very moment the American public was most anxious about its consequences. Read More
Interview Leslie Umberger on Grandma Moses March 24, 2026 Leslie Umberger is coauthor (along with Randall R. Griffey) of Grandma Moses: A Good Day's Work, a major reexamination of the life, art, and legacy of a self-taught American master. Read More
Reading List 快色直播 to read during Women鈥檚 History Month March 02, 2026 Explore books by and about women who have pushed boundaries, effected change, redefined roles, or who have complicated our understanding of what it means to be powerful. Read More
Essay Clash of Titians February 24, 2026 Titian and Michelangelo were already famous by the time they first met in 1529, and they were extravagantly famous by the time they met again in Rome in 1546. They did not need to compete, but they did鈥攕ometimes admiring and emulating, sometimes criticizing and correcting. Read More
Podcast Wound Man December 02, 2025 The Wound Man鈥攁 medical diagram depicting a figure fantastically pierced by weapons and ravaged by injuries and diseases鈥攚as reproduced widely across the medieval and early modern globe. Jack Hartnell charts the emergence and endurance of this striking image, used as a visual guide to the treatment of many ailments. Read More
Essay Architecture鈥檚 forgotten figures October 10, 2025 Like any other subject, the history of modernist architecture has its favored heroes and plotlines, but also important figures who drop out of sight despite their contemporary successes. Ella Briggs is one of them. Read More
Interview Lars Krutak on Indigenous Tattoo Traditions May 05, 2025 Transporting readers through history, anthropologist Lars Krutak explores the art and customs of tattooing across numerous ancestral lands, including Africa, the Middle East, the Americas, the Arctic, Oceania, Japan, Southeast Asia, and Siberia. Read More
Podcast Leonardo da Vinci: An Untraceable Life April 30, 2025 Stephen J. Campbell examines the strangeness of Leonardo鈥檚 words and works, and the distinctive premodern world of artisans and thinkers from which he emerged. Far from being a solitary genius living ahead of his time, Leonardo inhabited a vibrant network of artistic, technological, and literary exchange. Read More
Essay Race and American sculpture December 12, 2024 As monuments representing painful histories are dislodged from their pedestals, it is impossible to obfuscate the relationship between sculpture, race, and power in the United States. Read More
Podcast Fragmentary Forms December 10, 2024 While the emergence of collage is frequently placed in the twentieth century when it was a favored medium of modern artists, its earliest beginnings are tied to the invention of paper in China around 200 BCE. Read More
Essay Collage beyond modernism November 24, 2024 What happens when we try and trace a history of collage back across time and space? Read More
