Memory

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 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.

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.

People who study the past don’t always have special insight into politics. Recent events have made that crystal clear.

How the Wakasa stone, a memorial to a Japanese man murdered in a Utah internment camp, became the flash point of a bitter modern dispute.

Finding a story in the ways Robert Ray Hamilton, John Dudley Sargent, and Edith Sargent weren’t quite forgotten. 

The power of history, numbers, and nostalgia.

“Night Flyer” expands Harriet Tubman’s legacy to include her family, community and “eco-spiritual worldview.”

Myths to explain American history and chart a path to the future once helped to bind the country together. Today, they are absorbed into the culture wars.

Appeals against the war in Gaza are often framed through the lens of the future: “You will regret having been silent.” What about the present tense?

A firsthand account of freedom’s earliest celebrations.

And neither do white players from the segregation era.

Eighty years after D-Day, few know one of its darkest stories: the thousands of civilians killed by a carpet-bombing campaign of little military purpose.

A new exhibition seeks to understand the young soldiers who came ashore at Normandy.

The MLB incorporated the statistics of 2,300 Black athletes who played in the segregated Negro Leagues, making the Josh Gibson its new all-time batting leader.

The images, diaries, and ephemera in Grand Valley State University’s Civil War and Slavery Collection reveal the cold realities of Abraham Lincoln’s world.