David S. Reynolds places Abraham Lincoln in the context of his era’s attitudes toward the frontier, religion, law, marriage, politics and slavery. (iStock) Review by Louis P. Masur There are some ...

The painting known as "Whistler's Mother" is on display in Philadelphia for the first time in nearly 150 years. It's one of the best-known paintings in the world — and it has a backstory. Now to NPR ...

Maidment with early 19th-century periodicals: he was thrilled by ‘the inky blackness of the lettering, shouting display types and perpetually inventive combination of type, image and white page’ ...

One evening in 1890, Sam Johnson, a lanky Confederate veteran with dark hair and a friendly demeanor, attended a meeting of the Gillespie County Farmers’ Alliance in Fredericksburg. The 51-year-old ...

A stroll through the Presidential-portrait wing at the National Portrait Gallery, in Washington, D.C., is, among other things, a game of Now You See It, Now You Don’t. In the beginning, not a whisper ...

Reimagine America dining room at Ballantine House. Ballantine House, a 19th Century beer mansion that's part of the Newark Museum of Art. Apart from the 19th Century B\W exhibit, the mansion's ...

A young man with a watering can pretends to douse his companions. Two friends playfully attack each other, brandishing a hacksaw and a cleaver. A grinning girl takes aim with a popgun. Typical ...

India, April 12 -- At its most basic, art is meant to delight and provide joy. Yet, it also plays an important role as a ...

The Europeans.authorBy Orlando Figes.Metropolitan Books; 592 pages; $35. Allen Lane; £30. FOR AN EXAMPLE of the cosmopolitan glamour and sheer brassiness of high European culture in the 19th century, ...

There’s a reason why one of the most important American novels of the twentieth century, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), begins with an epigraph by the writer Herman Melville and an allusion to ...