Memory

To understand the right’s plans for Babbitt, look to George Shiffler.

After 9/11, hundreds of pieces of steel debris were catalouged. Much of it ended up in small municipal memorials and in other locations around the country.

A new documentary goes inside the battles that have riven the institution and shaped the historical legacy of the attack.

First responders who survived 9/11 don’t want the day to be forgotten.

At the South Carolina State House, the history of Reconstruction has been systemically erased from view.

Celebrations of multiculturalism obscure the country’s settler colonial history—and the role that immigrants play in perpetuating it.

Divisive concepts, critical race theory, and more in 2021.

We ascribe too much meaning to the early years of the republic.

Which personality of the American Revolution or the founding era is remembered for the wrong reasons, and why?

Elite merchants put up a statue of a British slave trader. A band of protesters toppled it. Who decides what happens now?

We know why they were built and why they have to come down.

Laws against teaching critical race theory might backfire on Republicans.

Whether economic times are good or bad, the lament for the old days of factories and mills never changes.

A favorite icon of critical race theory proponents doesn’t say what they want him to say.

Approaching the 20th anniversary of the attacks, the National September 11 Memorial & Museum at the World Trade Center faces a reckoning.

Do we give the activist groups of the 1960s more credit than they deserve?

Conflict between American settlers/revolutionaries and the Cherokee nation erupted in the early years of the Revolution.

The conservative hysteria over critical race theory is a refusal to acknowledge that American schools have always taught a white-centric view of U.S. history.

In 1871, the Wisconsin town Peshtigo burned to the ground, killing up to 2,500. But due to another event at the time, many have never heard about the disaster.

Banning such teaching isn’t colorblind; it would erase Black people from history and maintain White cultural dominance.

The Left once tried to own the legacy of America’s Bicentennial, but ran into ideological and structural roadblocks all too familiar today.

We do our children no favors if we only feed them a steady diet of fairy tales that sidestep life’s complexities.

Learning the history of Mexico can help Americans better understand themselves.

"By not showing up in American history, by not hearing about Asian Americans in schools, that contributes to that sense of foreignness."

History classes made it seem like young girls wouldn't ever change the course of the world. These books taught them that they could.

The debate over how to teach the history of race in the U.S. is entangling local school boards and engulfing national politics.

There is no American history without the histories of Indigenous and enslaved peoples. And this past has consequences today.

The battles over Critical Race Theory and Southern heritage are really about a narrow, exclusionary reading of our past.

What’s new about the controversy over the Alamo’s history, and how the way Texans tell its story relates to how Americans see each other.

Even as they tell others’ stories, historians often write about their own lives.