Memory

Ideas about history still prevailing in the liberal resistance to Trump keep pushing us backward.

One plantation tourist manager said covering slavery would be like “trying to tell the story at Disneyland of how poorly the employees at Disney are treated.”

The hero worship of the family of American royalty has a dark side: a tendency toward conspiracism that fits with the MAGA movement.

When the future arrived, it felt…ordinary. What happened to the glamour of tomorrow?

Commentary on America’s 40th president often misses how the Gipper blended principles and pragmatism for a truly conservative statesmanship.

The symbols sported by Trump’s defense pick show how the medieval past is being reimagined by Christian nationalists, behind a shield of plausible deniability.

The founders anticipated someone like Trump partly because they’d been reading Edward Gibbon’s 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.'

The success of “Reagan” reflects the market demands of a more fragmented moviegoing public—and reality.

We see what we want to see from philosophers such as Locke not because he wrote for our time (or “all time”) but because we imagine he did.

America’s path has been contested since its founding, and realizing the promise of liberty required generations of struggle.

A new Smithsonian book reckons with the enduring legacies of slavery and capitalism.

On being defeated.

You can bury it. But you can’t escape it.

The National Archives museum is backsliding into a sanitized retelling of American history. Don’t assume truth will prevail.

The unraveling of this long-buried atrocity is forging a path toward reconciliation.

The current political moment is reshaping the narrative about the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet.

Is the United States a prisoner of its own mythology?

The driving question of scholarship should be “what is the evidence for your argument?” Instead, it has become “whose side are you on?”

On Joan of Arc’s much-maligned and forgotten haircut.

What role do we really want history to be playing in our public life? And is the history we have actually doing that work?

The Power Broker leaves us ill-equipped to understand or confront the struggles that face the city today.

Civic thought and leadership institutes will thrive if they promote strong scholarship and courses in traditional fields the mainstream academy slights.

Richard Beck’s “Homeland” traces the far-reaching aftereffects of the attacks and tries to recover the events of the day, as they happened.

There’s hagiography, then there’s...whatever this is.

A new California bill would commemorate 'a dark part of our American history' known as the Mexican 'repatriation' of the 1930s.

On the making of a centuries-old obsession at the heart of American national identity.

Today’s battles over issues like gender nonconformity and reproductive rights have antecedents that have been lost or suppressed. What can we learn from them?

A half-century ago, "Saturday Review" asked some of the era's visionaries for their predictions of what 2024 would look like. Here are their hits and misses.

Shedding light on the truth of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.

Questions linger about the assault on Fort Wagner, which took place on this day in 1863.