"Cultivating Citizens rethinks the aesthetics and politics of regionalism in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. During this period, painters Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry formed a loose alliance as American Regionalists. Some lauded their depictions of the rural landscape and hardworking inhabitants of America's midwestern heartland. Others deemed Regionalist painting dangerous, regarding its easily understood realism...

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich sounds the warning bell that communist-ruled China poses the biggest threat to the United States that we have seen in our lifetime. The United States is currently engaged in a competition with the Chinese government unlike any other that we have witnessed in the past. This is a competition between the American system-which is governed by freedom and the rule of law-and a totalitarian dictatorship that is controlled...

"A tiny, fastidiously dressed man emerged from Black Philadelphia around the turn of the century to mentor a generation of young artists including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jacob Lawrence and call them the New Negro--the creative African Americans whose art, literature, music, and drama would inspire Black people to greatness. In The New Negro : The Life of Alain Locke, Jeffrey C. Stewart offers the definitive biography of the father...

A complex exploration of the physical and emotional effects of trauma. A college student attempts suicide after a brutal sexual assault but is stopped by a mechanic whose kindness unfortunately takes an unsettling turn. Startlingly modern in its frankness and psychological realism, the film represents one of the purest on-screen expressions of the sensibility of the intimate community of artists around New York's Actors Studio, which transformed American...

Richard Meryman began an enduring friendship with Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009) while on the job as a Life magazine editor in 1964. For Meryman, this unique friendship yielded more than four decades of recorded conversations with Wyeth, his family, friends and neighbors in Wyeth's homes in Pennsylvania and Maine. Meryman notes that, whether during formal interviews, shared meals, car rides or long walks, "Wyeth applied to himself the same sensitive understandings...