For more than a century, Harlem has been the epicenter of black America, the celebrated heart of African American life and culture – but it has also been a byword for the problems that have long plagued inner-city neighborhoods: poverty, crime, viole...

In the eighteenth century, the Western world viewed circumcision as an embarrassing disfigurement peculiar to Jews. A century later, British doctors urged parents to circumcise their sons as a routine precaution against every imaginable sexual dysfun...

Everyone knows a joke about mothers-in-law, but what are the golden rules you need to become a popular one? The authors of this pioneering guide, first published in the 1930s, aimed to dramatically improve relationships for all the family with sound...

How should a motorist converse with the police? Should you switch off your headlights when another car approaches? What parts of the engine can you fix with a sheet of emery paper, insulating tape and copper wire? The 1920s heralded the age of motori...

When American troops arrived in Paris to help maintain order at the end of the Second World War they were, at first, received by the local population with a sense of euphoria. However, the French soon began to resent the Americans for their display o...

At which Oxford college does a trumpeter summon you to dinner? What does the appearance of a rose bowl signify? How would you use a grace cup as distinct from a sconce cup? The custom of dining in formal hall at Oxford and Cambridge dates back to the...

In late seventeenth-century London, the most provocative images were produced not by artists, but by scientists. Magnified fly-eyes drawn with the aid of microscopes, apparitions cast on laboratory walls by projection machines, cut-paper figures reve...

"Hollywood & God" is a virtuosic performance, filled with crossings back and forth from cinematic chiaroscuro to a kind of unsettling desperation and disturbing – even lurid – hallucination. From the "Baltimore Catechism" to the great noir films of t...

In 1952 the "New Yorker" published a three-part essay by A. J. Liebling in which he dubbed Chicago the "Second City". From garbage collection to the skyline, nothing escaped Liebling's withering gaze. Among the outraged responses from Chicago residen...

Not for sale in Poland! By placing emerging artists in their political and social contexts, this collection attempts to confront the new activist scene that has arisen in the Russian art world during the past years. The recent explosion of protests...