Memory

The past does not speak to us; we speak for the past.

Why do the Transcendentalists still have an outsize influence on American culture?

Recent books by Woody Holton and Alan Taylor offer fresh perspectives on early US history but overstate the importance of white supremacy as its driving force.

"If you read enough sources, you run into cases of slaves spending a lot of time over Christmas crying."

It erases the fact that, for the first 70 years of its existence, the US was roiled by intense, escalating conflict over slavery – a conflict only resolved by civil war.

The life of Daniel Boone underlines how the North America of the era was a welter of conflict among and between natives and Europeans.

Jon Tracey discusses the history of the creation of the Gettysburg Virginia Monument and the true reason it was erected.

Some personal reflections from American Historical Association president James H. Sweet on the recent wave of "divisive concepts" laws.

Four decades on, the perpetrators of the El Mozote massacre have not been held to account.

As the GOP undermines Black political rights in the present, some right-wing intellectuals are rationalizing Black disenfranchisement in the past.

Artists, museums and other groups are vying to claim fallen monuments from the Jim Crow era — but for very different reasons.

The ambitious Times endeavor reveals the difficulties that greet a journalistic project when it aspires to shift a founding narrative of the past.

Let's recognize the scholar who was behind the other "CRT."

Seeing the war from the perspective of citizens of U.S. colonies sheds new light on the impact of World War II.

Popular religious iconography and art in the decades preceding the Revolution offer a fuller narrative arc of the development of revolutionary ideas within American society.

Romanticized notions of Southern gentility are at odds with historical reality as the lives, culture and contributions of the enslaved are becoming integral on tours.

Confederates’ quest for bones connects to a bizarre history of the use, and misuse, of human remains.

A comparison of the "Lost Cause" narratives from the Confederacy and Mexico's side of the Mexican-American War.

When the US relaxed immigration restrictions in the late 50s, a small Egyptian population emerged. Their early experiences are now available via a new archive.

The project's editor falsifies the history of American history-writing, openly embracing the privileging of “narrative” over “actual fact.”

The historian Allen C. Guelzo believes that the Confederate general deserves a more compassionate reading.

Scholars are unraveling the myths surrounding the 1621 feast, which found the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag cementing a newly established alliance.

What happened in Virginia four months later mattered much more.

Why has a relatively conventional history of the War of Independence drawn such an outraged response?

George III was a model monarch, whose reputation finally deserves rehabilitation a quarter of a millennium later.

While he did not die in a war, he can certainly be mourned as a casualty of war—as can the thousands of other veterans who have died by suicide.

Like the 1619 Project, two new books on the Constitution reflect a vigorous debate about what has changed in the American past—and what hasn’t.

Debating a modern parable about waste and technology.

Fake news has been central to the Lost Cause narrative since its inception, employed to justify and amplify the symbolism of Confederate monuments and flags.

Long marginalized and misrepresented in U.S. history, the Wampanoags are bracing for the 400th anniversary of the first Pilgrim Thanksgiving in 1621.