Giuseppi Verdi's 1853 opera La Traviata was a shocker when it was first performed. Nineteenth-century audiences didn't expect to watch a sex worker die of tuberculosis at the opera.

Much has been written about South African novelist J. M. Coetzee, but his newly found photographs offer a news lens through which to consider his writing.

How do the artistic inspirations that portrait artist Amy Sherald cites for Michelle Obama’s dress impact our visual and cultural understanding of the portrait for the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery?

Murphy Brown represented a threat to “family values”—a position that inherently placed her on the side of the families of color whose single family structures supposedly threatened the white, middle-class status quo of the 1990s.

What's behind the Australian habit of nicknaming and abbreviating everything? Nicknames may just reveal how Australians see themselves and relate to each other.

A miniseries directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder finally has its U.S. premier 45 years later and reminds us of the phenomenon of this great German director.

Poems by African-American poets, including Gwendolyn Brooks, Kwame Dawes, Rita Dove, Langston Hughes, Tyehimba Jess, Kevin Young, and more.

Alexander Pushkin is known as the quintessential Russian writer, but he took particular inspiration from his African great-grandfather, General Abraham Petrovitch Gannibal.

Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women" is a cultural touchstone. But what about the women behind the "Women," Alcott's real-life sisters on whom she based her characters? An interview with novelist Elise Hooper considers the life of "The Other Alcott."

Marooned sailor Alexander Selkirk, rescued after four years on a remote island, is usually taken as the model of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, but is he really?