Memory

An essay by the president of the American Historical Association generated a firestorm of criticism — but got some things right.

'Nothing is more dramatic than having the College Board launch an AP course in a field,' says Henry Louis Gates Jr., who helped develop the curriculum.

Bett Freeman's story and the legal precedent her case established are now forever remembered in Sheffield, Massachusetts.

A lively defense of narrative history and the lived experience that informs historical writing.

When historians concede to discuss the past with the terms of the present, they abandon the skill set that makes them historians.

All the articles from the University of Virginia's student newspaper covering the "Unite the Right" rally, and the grief, activism, and reforms it sparked.

Why universities must help lead the battle to defend and expand critical race theory.

Making the case for why U.S. history only makes sense when told as a binational story.

How the study of historical memory created a new reckoning with the creation of “American history."

After the 2020 removal of Confederate memorials, museums provide a place to confront the ugly past and find a way forward.

In the 1930s, the Federal Writers’ Project interviewed 300 formerly enslaved Virginians to share their oral histories.

An effective media strategy has often been crucial to rallying the public behind Black victims of fatal violence.

The uses and abuses of history through the "diary" of Thomas Fallon.

A contemporary Atlantic writer reflects on one of the voices from the magazine's archives who helped shape the publication—and the nation.

We are living through a time when we cannot take our shared identity—and therefore our shared stories—for granted.

As much as we may wish otherwise, history gives us few reasons to believe that its moral arc bends toward justice.

July 4 and the perils of celebrating America’s past.

A scholar of gun culture looks at the roots of Americans’ love affair with firearms – and their willingness to accept gun violence as a price of freedom.

While cemeteries are tributes to the dead, they are really about the living. They are about those who want to commemorate something.

The beginning of the fight for Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

The Court’s striking down of a New York gun law relies on a fundamentally anti-democratic historical record that excludes women and people of color.

Bisexuality introduces nuance, which has always made it easier to discard than accommodate it .

Chin’s killing, 40 years ago, has inspired documentaries, young-adult books, and countless works of scholarship. What do we want from his story, and the people who tell it?

By learning about an overlooked cohort of women who served in World War I, we can expand our understandings of memorials beyond physical statues and monuments.

A century ago, cars killed pedestrians and cyclists in record numbers. As traffic deaths rise again, it’s time to remember how US cities once responded to this safety crisis.

What new possibilities might arise if we were to consider history as ongoing memory work, rather than a set narrative of progress or as singular “truth”?

Mississippi makes a move to confront a shameful episode from the past.

“I’m amazed at how numb many of us can be about these sites.”

On Lewis Mumford, Herman Melville, and the gentle art of looking back in time.

Before Juneteenth became an official federal holiday, 94-year-old Opal Lee was on a mission.