The First Canadian Novel
Often considered the first Canadian novel, The History of Emily Montague revealed its author’s true feelings about colonial Quebec.
The Long and Winding Island
New York’s Long Island has long served as a backdrop for social and political conflicts between the newly arrived and the established residents.
Weimar Operas and Visions of Utopia
Kurt Weill and his musical collaborators used utopian fantasies to explore the social and political conditions of a fading Weimar Republic.
Enchanting Imposters
Johns Hopkins University’s Bibliotheca Fictiva Collection of Literary and Historical Forgery shows that humans have been creating fan fiction and fake news for millennia.
LEGO: Brick by Ideological Brick
Toys, even ones marketed as tools for the imagination, are never value neutral.
Building De Stijl Style
Piet Mondrian, co-founder of De Stijl, argued that the art movement wasn’t ready for architecture. Theo van Doesburg and others believed it was. Who was right?
The Enduring Popularity of Harry Potter
How has the Harry Potter series remained so beloved across decades filled with young adult and fantasy novels?
The Art of Deforestation
Landscape paintings show how quickly American forests changed in the early nineteenth century—and the mixed feelings people had about that change.
Arts and Crafts Democracy
The Arts and Crafts and Slow Food movements twinned pleasure and democracy though supporters of these artisanal crusades developed a reputation for elitism.
Dissident Memoirs Across Rust-Iron Curtains
Soviet dissident memoirs, like their authors, had to cross the Iron Curtain—an iron curtain of meaning and interpretation.