Beneath a quiet Toronto street, the discovery of ancient Indigenous remains has forced the city and 11 First Nations to confront the complex histories buried under the modern landscape.
In this eerily prophetic 1880 story, a lone survivor enters a silent London where toxic fog has killed millions and the city’s ordinary pollution has become an apocalypse.
Deadly fogs, moralistic diatribes, debunked medical theory — Brett Beasley explores a piece of Victorian science fiction considered to be the first modern tale of urban apocalypse.
The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence happens to also coincide with the 200th birthday of composer Stephen Foster. You know his songs, even if you don’t know his name.
How a nineteenth-century elocutionist’s bogus “microscopic” theory of blood, cats, and universal animalcula somehow connects Edgar Allan Poe, transcendentalism and Looney Tunes.
From Appalachian coal mines to the streets of Minneapolis, protest songs have rallied Americans to choose a side in moments of crisis. As artists revive and reinvent classics like “Which Side Are You On?”, music once again proves its power to console, unify and challenge authority.
There are a lot of different ways to be a bore, and they have not changed much in the last one hundred years.
In the 19th-century American South, white intellectuals and politicians reimagined ancient Egypt as a slaveholding civilization ruled by white pharaohs—an invented history used to legitimize racial hierarchy. But abolitionists and Black Americans reclaimed the biblical Egypt as a symbol of bondage and liberation, turning the past into a battlefield over freedom and power.
From Pliny’s tale of Kora tracing her lover’s shadow to neoclassical canvases where love and loss intertwine, artists have long imagined desire as the seed of representation. How did clay, shadow and longing gave rise to the mythic origins of painting and sculpture?
As a young activist during the civil rights movement, I learned the importance of singing to get through hard times.
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