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What Makes James Joyce’s Ulysses a Masterpiece: Great Books Explained
Here on Open Culture, we’ve often featured the work of gallerist-Youtuber James Payne, creator of the channel Great Art Explained. Not long ago we wrote up his examination of the work of René...
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The History of the Electric Guitar Solo: A Seven-Part Series
?si=cPPdX0lEFTgicTQV No instrument is more closely identified with rock and roll music than the electric guitar, and no form of performance is more closely associated with the electric guitar than the...
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How the “Lost Cities” of the Amazon Were Finally Discovered
About a decade and a half ago, The Lost City of Z seemed to have been placed front-and-center in most bookstores of the English-speaking world. It was the first book by journalist David Grann, and it...
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How the CIA Secretly Used Jackson Pollock & Other Abstract Expressionists to...
What’s the difference between the United States of America and a cup of yogurt? If you leave the cup of yogurt alone for 200 years, it develops a culture. So goes one of many jokes long in circulation...
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Meet the Man Who Created the Iconic Emblem of the Day of the Dead: José...
Odds are you’re acquainted with the lady pictured above. She’s called La Catrina, and her likeness adorns countless t-shirts and tote bags. She is a popular Halloween costume and a mainstay of Day of...
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Animated: The Rise & Fall of the Largest Cities in the World, from 3,000 BC...
This is the first era of human history when more of us live in cities than not. That’s what we’ve often been told in recent years, at least, though the specifics do depend on what kinds of urbanized...
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Leonardo da Vinci Created the Design for the Miter Lock, Which Is Still Used...
“A Man, a Plan, a Canal — Panama”: we all know the piece of infrastructure to which this famous palindrome refers. But who, exactly, is the man? Some might imagine President Theodore Roosevelt in the...
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The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Historical Primers That Help Explain the...
On October 7th, Hamas invaded Israel and brutally massacred 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians. On a per capita basis, the attack amounted to twelve 9/11s (per The Economist). It also marked the single...
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A Secret Room with Drawings Attributed to Michelangelo Opens to Visitors in...
Images on this page come courtesy of the Musei del Bargello In the year 1530, Michelangelo was sentenced to death by Pope Clement VII — who, not coincidentally, was born Giulio de’ Medici. That famous...
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Why People Hate Brutalist Buildings on American College Campuses
Many Americans receive their introduction to the style known as Brutalism in college. This owes less to courses in twentieth-century architecture than to university campuses themselves, which tend to...
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Renaissance Knives Had Music Engraved on the Blades & Now You Can Hear the...
Image courtesy of The Victoria and Albert Museum On any given weekend, in any part of the state where I live, you can find yourself standing in a hall full of knives, if that’s the kind of thing you...
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The History of Disco Visualized on a Circuit Diagram of a Klipschorn Speaker:...
Half a century after it was birthed in New York’s black, Latino and gay underground club scene–and nearly 45 years after the infamous Disco Demolition in Chicago’s Comiskey Park–disco is finally being...
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Explore the Florentine Codex: A Brilliant 16th Century Manuscript Documenting...
The Spanish conquista of the Americas happened long enough ago — and left behind a spotty enough body of historical records — that we tend to perceive it as much through simplifications,...
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Advice for Time Traveling to Medieval Europe: How to Staying Healthy & Safe,...
Generations of foreign tourists in Europe have heard advice about traveling in groups, haggling prices, avoiding pickpockets, and being able to communicate in, if not the local language, then at least...
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Oculi Mundi: A Beautiful Online Archive of 130 Ancient Maps, Atlases & Globes
When it comes to maps, your first hit is always free. For you, maybe it was a Mercator projection of the world hung on the wall of an elementary-school classroom; maybe it was a road atlas in the...
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Discover the Mikiphone, the World’s First Portable Record Player: “Fits a...
The iPod shuffle recently enjoyed a bit of a comeback on TikTok. Can the Mikiphone be far behind? The invention of siblings Miklós and Étienne Vadász, the world’s first pocket record player caused a...
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Behold Ancient Egyptian, Greek & Roman Sculptures in Their Original Color
There was a time when we imagined that most ancient sculpture never had any color except for that of the stone from which it was hewed. Doubt fell upon that notion as long ago as the eighteenth...
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The New York Public Library Presents an Archive of 860,000 Historical Images:...
Back when we last featured the New York Public Library’s digital collections in 2016, they contained about 160,000 high-resolution images from various historical periods. This seemed like a fairly...
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Napoleon’s Kindle: Discover the Miniaturized Traveling Library That the...
Every piece of technology has a precedent. Most have several different types of precedents. You’ve probably used (and may well own) an eBook reader, for instance, but what would have afforded you a...
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Rome Reborn: A New 3D Virtual Model Lets You Fly Over the Great Monuments of...
Thirteen years ago here on Open Culture, we first featured Rome Reborn 2.2, a digital 3D model of the ancient metropolis at the height of its glory in the fourth century. And that rebirth has...
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