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What Japan’s Atom Bomb Survivors Have Taught Us About the Dangers of Nuclear War

Japanese survivors recall the day the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and warn of future risks.
General Ulysses S. Grant receiving Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox.
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Appomattox Exposes the Dangers of Myths Replacing History

Historians have revealed that the story Americans long learned about the end of the Civil War was a myth.

At the Smithsonian, Donald Trump Takes Aim at History

The urge to police the past is hardly an invention of the Trump Administration. It is the reflexive obsession of autocrats everywhere.
A collage of pages from the National Park service website, including one about Appomattox Court House and one about the Underground Railroad, showing language stricken out since Donald Trump's innauguration in 2025.

Amid Anti-DEI Push, National Park Service Rewrites History of Underground Railroad

Since Trump took office, the park service — charged with preserving American history — has changed how it describes key moments from slavery to Jim Crow.
Japanese American National Museum Volunteer Barbara Keimi stamps the Ireichō

The Japanese American National Museum Is a Site of Remembrance and Belonging

The Japanese American National Museum embraces the Japanese-American experience in all its permutations.
English looking at the word "croatoan" carved in a tree.

The Lingering Mystery of the 'Lost Colony' of Roanoke

From historians to horror writers to white nationalists, attempts to explain the settlement's fate reveal a great deal about our own attitudes.
Exhibitions at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C.

A Truly Patriotic Education Tells Many Stories

Trump’s executive orders can’t define diversity out of history.
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

‘It Reminds You of a Fascist State’: Smithsonian Institution Braces for Trump Rewrite of US History

Normally staid historians sound alarm at authoritarian grasping for control of the premier US museum complex.
Boston’s Faneuil Hall at night.

When Is History Advocacy?

Advocacy should not be a dirty word.
Richard Nixon scowling.
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The Alarming Effort To Rewrite the History of Watergate

For decades, politicians distanced themselves from Nixon's Watergate legacy. Now, some are advancing a new history.
Patrick Henry

Did Patrick Henry Really Say ‘Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death’?

The Virginia delegate may have spoken those words on March 23, 1775, but some historians doubt it.
Slave auction in the United States.

How a Group of 19th-Century Historians Helped Relativize the Violent Legacy of Slavery

On the scholarship and intellectual legacies of Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, William Dunning and other academics.
Painting of Casimir Pulaski on a horse in battle.

Discover the Short Life and Long Legacy of Casimir Pulaski

On the first Monday in March, Pulaski Day festivities at Chicago’s Polish Museum of America honored the “Father of American Cavalry,” 280 years after his birth.
Engraving by Samuel de Champlain of himself and his Algonquin allies attacking the Iroquois.

An Expanding Vision of America

Major new books about the peoples who lived in North America for millennia before the arrival of Europeans are reshaping the history of the continent.
Trash filling the Skagit River in Washington State, 1971.

The Necessity of History for the EPA

Using evidence to remind us.
Shackles with a magnifying glass on the end.

How the Study of Slavery Has Shaped the Academy

Who decides how history gets written?
Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain

Chamberlain’s War

Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain is remarkable not only for his sacrifices on behalf of the Union, but also for the moral imagination that inspired him.
Screen projecting the logo for "Facing History and Ourselves."

A Progressive Education Nonprofit’s Silence on Gaza

Facing History & Ourselves, known for its model lessons on genocide, has angered staff and disappointed teachers by refusing to provide resources about Gaza.
Ken Burns speaking into microphone (left) and Donald Trump (right).

Ken Burns, Donald Trump, and the Lies that Bring Us Together

It may sound counterintuitive, but Ken Burns’ version of U.S. history actually has quite a bit in common with Trump’s version.
Protestors use the celebrated Hamilton lyric, “Immigrants: We Get the Job Done” to protest the first inauguration of President Donald Trump.

“The Premise of Our Founding”: Immigration and Popular Mythmaking

On the tension between celebratory rhetoric and restrictive policy surrounding immigration.
Colonial building on the coast.

1619 in Global Perspective

And why we need to study the history of slavery and the African diaspora globally.
A group of demonstrators at the Stonewall National Monument carrying transgender flags and signs.

No History Without the T

When the National Park Service removed trans people from the webpages of the Stonewall National Monument, it echoed one of the darkest chapters of the queer past.
Painting imagining Washington shaking hands with Lincoln in front of liberty's flame.

Praising Washington in Lincoln’s Day

At the time of the Civil War, many Americans revered the nation’s Founding Fathers, and both supporters and opponents of slavery recruited them to their sides.
1860 political cartoon depicting Lincoln as a "Wide-Awake"
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A Posthumous Romance of White Male Reunion

The history of deriving political meaning from Abraham Lincoln’s sexuality.
illustration of stack of books
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The Rise and Fall of Liberal Historiography

How historians changed their approach, from the 1960s to the present.

Trump May Wish to Abolish the Past. We Historians Will Not.

Commentary from the heads of two prominent historical associations on Trump’s recent executive order on “radical indoctrination” in schools.

What Happens When You Try to Make History Vanish?

The White House’s decision to delete a DOJ database of Jan. 6 cases puts those who seek to preserve the historical record in direct opposition to their own government.
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What Is the Role of the Historian?

Rethinking the job of history — and the American Historical Association — after the veto of the Gaza “scholasticide” resolution.
Members of the Grand Army of the Republic and the Daughters of Union Veterans gather in Colorado in the 1930s.

Veterans Visit an Idealized West

A gathering of Union veterans in 1883 sheds light on the country's vision of the American West—as a space for reconciliation and a prize won by the war.
A flag depicting a hand pulling back the American flag to reveal a Confederate flag.

Patriotic Education and the End of History

Or, a brief history of today's erasure of history.