Every culture and era finds different things offensive. A universal standard for immorality in art may be an impossibility.

Featuring some 80 artifacts, a show at the Wolfsonian–Florida International University revisits these exhilarating, forward-looking expositions, from 1850s London to 1960s New York and beyond.

Though ambitious and engaging, the New York institution’s reorganized collections galleries struggle to offer a coherent vision of Jewish history and identity.

The Smithsonian was founded after a benefactor’s unexpected gift. Its mission has been ambitious—and sometimes politically embattled.

An exhibition at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art charts the development of astronomical knowledge across continents before and after the Scientific Revolution.

The Yiddish Book Center’s permanent exhibition offers much to kvell about, including a wide-ranging collection of volumes and tributes to Yiddish theater, music and history.

A tour of some of the nation’s elegant institutions, including the Enoura Observatory and the Chichu Art Museum, reveals an approach that is startlingly different from the monumental or encyclopedic ones that define many Western museums.

As the embassy developed as an institution, it began to be used to link nations with sometimes virulently opposed beliefs.

Their narratives have long been built around the stories of survivors. But with that generation dying off they need new ways to keep their testimony vital.

The 300-year-old house, transported piecemeal from Japan and reassembled at the Huntington in California, is a window into the cosmopolitan customs of the Edo-era elite.

Yale University’s museum, which recently completed a four-year reconstruction, is now bigger and free to visit—and yet, caught up in the controversies of the field, it’s evidently skeptical of the very notion of natural history.

The museum, which opened last year in Charleston, S.C., is a powerful and provocative survey of the past, despite certain omissions and moments of overwhelming density.

Only certain terms are used in a gallery. Don’t say a work is sold; say it has been placed. The pretense is that nothing commercial is taking place.

Shows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Walters Art Museum encompass paintings, mosaics, sacred texts and other artifacts in their explorations of religion and history.

An exhibition at the Getty Villa Museum displays papyri and linen mummy wrappings in its examination of the elaborate narratives and incantations concerning life after death that developed in Egyptian culture.

A 16th-century automaton in the shape of a friar is a reminder of the craft of Renaissance inventors. But who devised it?

An exhibition at New York’s Grolier Club explores the history of literacy in the military during World War II, when millions of paperbacks were sent to American troops.

A wide-ranging show at the New-York Historical Society explores the ways different faiths and communities both shaped and were shaped by the nation’s westward expansion.

The abolitionist icon gets an intriguing if overly broad examination at a show in Washington.

The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum examines the role of race in the FDR administration—and reveals shocking prejudices—in this gripping if overly revisionist exhibition