Bruce Cole, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

Chef José Andrés is the “Chief Culinary Advisor” for “What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam? The Government’s Effect on the American Diet,” an exhibition now at the National Archives in Washington. In his introduction to the show’s catalogue, the chef writes that the exhibition inspired him to partner with the National Archives Foundation to launch a new restaurant, America Eats. Although Andrés is better known for paella than pot roast, his new venture — located, we are helpfully told, “just steps away” from the Archives building — features a neo–New Deal menu.

“What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam...

The tale of the building of the transcontinental railroad, the steel band that wed the metropolitan East to the frontier West, is among the greatest in American history.

“It was the moon launch of its time,” says Chuck Vollan, assistant professor of history at South Dakota State University — an epic feat of engineering, human effort and national resolve. William G. Thomas, history professor at University of Nebraska and author of the new book “The Iron Way,” concurs, but adds that if anything, its impact was even more immediate and dramatic. “In a few short years, the railroad transformed society in ways that people of the time could never have imagined,” Thomas says. “It completely revolutionized communications and commerce. For people of that era, the railroad was the Internet.”

That’s why the announcement by AMC — the cable channel responsible for “Mad Men” and the breakout zom-drom hit “The Walking Dead” — that its next big original series, titled “Hell on Wheels,”...

For a time in the mid-to-late 1920s the art of the cinema meant only one thing to the serious-minded film critics of America and Europe: Soviet-style montage, or the art of cutting shots together in a way that would produce ideas and emotions beyond those expressed in the images themselves.

The concepts could be simple ones, as in Lev Kuleshov’s famous experiments: the same close-up of a man looking into the camera could equal “fatherly love” when juxtaposed with the image of a baby, or “empty stomach” when juxtaposed with the image of a loaf of bread.

Or montage could be pushed to elaborate, symphonic heights, as in the celebrated “Odessa Steps” sequence of Sergei Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin.” Playing contrasts in content (czarist soldiers versus protesting townspeople), composition (slashing diagonals versus stable triangles) and rhythm (the relentless...