Amy Henderson

Amy Henderson on the technologies that brought show tunes to the masses—a review of ‘From Broadway to Main Street.’

Amy Henderson reviews Desmond Morris’s book dishing the dirt on the Surrealists.

Amy Henderson reviews the new novel by the author of ‘Under the Tuscan Sun.’

Amy Henderson on the case for warts-and-all biographies.

‘Life ain’t as simple as it used to be’—except at Dolly Parton’s amusement park.

Museums have traditionally served as repositories for the past. But younger generations are avoiding the chance to slow-walk through history, so museums are exploring new ways to attract visitors.

One night over dinner, Mark Twain and his neighbor Charles Dudley Warner decided to write a satire skewering the postbellum culture of excess. They took their novel’s title from a line in Shakespeare’s King John: “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily . . . is wasteful and ridiculous excess.” The…

The movie The Post arrives at a perfect cultural moment. As women today forcefully assert their presence, Katharine Graham is finally getting the spotlight she has always deserved. Notably, her glaring omission from All the President’s Men has now been rectified.

In the unpredictable and often baffling way that hip, new meaning can glom onto even the stuffiest of words, “curating” has emerged in recent years as a ubiquitous cultural tag for fashion, groceries, Instagram posts, Pinterest accounts, and much else. Grammy winner Usher “curated” a July 4…

Garry Apgar introduces his book by stating that Mickey Mouse “has been a part of our mental and emotional universe for over eight decades." Walt Disney launched the phenomenon in 1928 with his revolutionary sound cartoon, Steamboat Willie, nurtured MM to stardom during Hollywood's heyday in the…

Dreams of a Northwest Passage connecting America to Asia tantalized empire builders from the earliest days of New World exploration. But after the Napoleonic Wars, the British turned this fascination into an obsession. Sending out the fleet to explore new trade routes kept the Royal Navy busy and…

Dreams of a Northwest Passage connecting America to Asia tantalized empire builders from the earliest days of New World exploration. But after the Napoleonic Wars, the British turned this fascination into an obsession. Sending out the fleet to explore new trade routes kept the Royal Navy busy and…

The prolific children’s book author Margaret Wise Brown (1910-1952) began her most famous work, Goodnight Moon, by describing how In the great green room / There was a telephone / And a red balloon. This 1947 classic has sold 27 million copies and, along with such other bestsellers as The Runaway…

On Christmas Day 1780, Virginia governor Thomas Jefferson instructed the head of his state's militia, George Rogers Clark, to fortify Virginia's western frontier against a British-Indian invasion. At the end of his instructions, Jefferson added his hope that the American "Empire of Liberty" would…

On Christmas Day 1780, Virginia governor Thomas Jefferson instructed the head of his state's militia, George Rogers Clark, to fortify Virginia's western frontier against a British-Indian invasion. At the end of his instructions, Jefferson added his hope that the American "Empire of Liberty" would…

Why do orchids have such a fascinating grip on the popular imagination? There are poems, songs, and perfumes dedicated to roses, and famous paintings showcase sunflowers and water lilies. But no other flower has inspired the range of myth and symbolism as the orchid. According to Jim Endersby, the…

In today's 24/7 media age, the public image of a president—or president-elect!—is inescapable. But how did Americans perceive their presidents before mass media captured them for wide distribution? What was the everyday citizen's visual conception of a leader whose visage was understood only…

In today’s 24/7 media age, the public image of a president—or president-elect!—is inescapable. But how did Americans perceive their presidents before mass media captured them for wide distribution? What was the everyday citizen's visual conception of a leader whose visage was understood only…

In 2006, Julia Child's memoir My Life in France was a rousing bestseller. The story of how a "6-foot-2-inch, 36-year-old, rather loud and unserious Californian" (her words) transformed herself and America's appetites was a sheer delight. But it nearly didn't happen. For years she had talked about…

In 2006, Julia Child's memoir My Life in France was a rousing bestseller. The story of how a "6-foot-2-inch, 36-year-old, rather loud and unserious Californian" (her words) transformed herself and America's appetites was a sheer delight. But it nearly didn't happen. For years she had talked about…

"I cannot remember a time,” Rosamond Bernier announces early in this memoir, “when I didn’t know Leopold Stokowski.”

In House of Lost Worlds, Richard Conniff fills an instructive gap in the story of how and why American museums were invented. The creation of Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History is a tale encompassing all three subjects of the subtitle, with the most delicious being the drag-down drama of how…

Social media mavens would have us believe that print media is dead, killed off by the innovative disruption of onscreen newspapers, magazines, and ebooks. But it turns out that pockets of print and print lovers still exist. Part of print’s survival is psychological. In the case of books, body…

Fog has played a defining role in some of our favorite movies, instantly setting the stage for either romance or menace. In Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart always seems to be shrouded in fog or cigarette smoke, while Fred Astaire, in his first film without Ginger Rogers, A Damsel in Distress, woos Joan…

Emily Bingham begins the biography of her outrageous great-aunt by explaining, “The surest way to make a child curious about an ancestor is never to discuss her.” Born in 1901 into the powerful Louisville family that owned the Courier-Journal, Henrietta Bingham rejected the genteel life of a…

In its heyday in the twenties, the Algonquin Round Table was a headline-grabbing “smart set” that came to fame in a decade when mass media took center stage in American culture. A showcase setting for journalists and theater people, the Round Table’s stars included Dorothy Parker, George S.…

For Coco Chanel, the Duchess of Windsor’s declaration that “you can’t be too rich or too thin” was holy writ. Born into poverty in 1883, she was worth the equivalent of almost $1 billion before she was 50. To the age of modernism, she contributed a streamlined female silhouette that radically…

This exhibition is eye-popping. Richard Estes’s hyper-realistic art is somehow more than real. In the introductory panel, Estes himself sets the stage by teasing, “What is real?”   

With this second, and concluding, volume of her biography of Clare Boothe Luce, Sylvia Jukes Morris completes the tantalizing saga of a woman who helped define the “pushy broad” in a century when men made the rules and women made the coffee. The result is an impeccably researched and thoughtfully…

Gardening, as an idea, has always seemed like a great way to spend time. What could be more fulfilling than to transform a barren plot of ground into a landscape bursting with brightly colored flowers and rows of nutritious vegetables? 

James Whistler’s flamboyance assured his fame in decades when mass culture was setting new standards for recognition. He was a creature who relished the spotlight, and he became a star player in the increasingly public art scene that surged to the forefront in late-19th-century life. Whether…

In the 1970s and ’80s, American museums reinvented themselves as dazzling arenas of art and culture. Sacred temples of tradition suddenly heard the siren call of show business: Spectacular exhibitions took center stage, and museums became the most exciting sites in town, with visitors flocking (and…

Who was Helen of Troy? Why do we even recognize her name in 2013? She had an extraordinary start: Her mother was a mortal who was seduced by Zeus when he came to her in the form of a swan; Leda gave birth to two eggs—one hatched the twins Castor and Pollux, the other brought forth Helen. Known as…

Bringing an inanimate thing to life has tantalized story-tellers from Aeschylus (Prometheus Bound) to Mary Shelley (Frankenstein) to Mel Brooks (Young Frankenstein). But when the life spirit is encased in a mesmerizing artifact rather than a rampaging monster, the goal is to inject the object with…

Two million people live in the shadows of Mount Vesuvius, serenely confident that mainland Europe’s most active volcano will not choose any time soon to blow its lid. Their proximity is an astonishing act of faith. They must spend their evenings singing “On Top of Old Smokey” and “You’re the Top.”…

"Our Mona Lisa,” is how Ronald S. Lauder described the portrait he had just paid a record $135 million for in 2006. The shimmering Gustav Klimt painting, destined to become the centerpiece of Lauder’s Neue Galerie in New York, depicts Adele Bloch-Bauer, the wife of a wealthy Viennese sugar…

This is a brief but vigorous defense of museums in the grand manner. Begun as the 2009 Campbell Lectures at Rice University, Museums Matter emerged as an opportunity for Cuno, president and CEO of the Getty Trust, to explore the origins and future of the modern museum: Where does the encyclopedic…