Whatever happened to Bozo the Clown, to Aunt Norma, to Solomon C. Whiskers, those television celebrities who hammed it up between cartoons and contests during local kids' shows?

In Hi There, Boys and Girls! ...

On both sides of the stage improv-comedy's popularity has increased exponentially throughout the 1980s and '90s and into the new millennium. Presto! An original song is created out of thin air. With nothing ...

From his first feature film, Fear and Desire (1953), to his final, posthumously released Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Stanley Kubrick excelled at probing the dark corners of human consciousness. In doing so, ...

What do the comic book figures Static, Hardware, and Icon all have in common?

Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans gives an answer that goes far beyond “tights and capes,” an answer that lie ...

From backwaters as dark as a cypress swamp to nooks as mysterious as a musty college library, southerners have conjured spirits and told ghost stories.

Shadows and Cypress: Southern Ghost Stories is a Dixie ...

Read by millions of women each month, such mainstream periodicals as Ladies’ Home Journal and McCall’s delivered powerful messages about women’s roles and behavior. In 1963 Betty Friedan’s The Feminine ...

Through his comic strip Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz (1922–2000) has left his signatures on American culture—Lucy's fake hold for the kickoff, Linus's security blanket, Charlie Brown's baseball team that nev ...

The family of musical styles known as jazz came into being around 1900 as several popular black musical idioms coalesced. This free-flowing, spontaneous music based in improvisation emerged primarily ...

“Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay. ”

So begins ...

“The early history of New York is obscured in myth,” observed the pseudonymous author of “The Story of Manhattankind” in the first issue of The New Yorker (21 February 1925), “and to separate the purely h ...