Memory

Dorothea Lange created a vast archive of the twentieth century’s crises in America. For years her work was censored, misused, impounded, or simply rejected.

"Rethinking Rufus" argues that enslaved black men were sexually violated by both white men and white women.

Throughout his career, Hamilton acted as a middleman for his family and friends to purchase enslaved people.

Should art heal the centuries of racial violence and injustice in the US?

Born out of the Cold War, the course has a great contradiction at its heart: why do we teach history?

The hope for historical vindication is loud now but not new.

It’s a hashtag, a talking point, a Trump rally riff. The inside story of a New York Times project that launched a year-long culture war.

It helped erode discrimination but also upheld racial prejudice.

More diverse regular history classes are the key to a historically literate population.

A lesson on contextualizing history.

Why did the historian come to fear the very movements he once would have celebrated?

As demands for racial justice grow, Trump is pushing historical mythmaking into high gear.

On the aesthetics and history of the Freedman’s Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Saidiya Hartman’s "Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments" is a strike against the archives’ silence regarding the lives of Black women in the shadow of slavery.

Golf clubs named after Confederate generals are attracting new scrutiny.

Mabel Wilson discusses the history of racial violence and the continued vandalism and destruction of Black historical memorials in the Deep South.

USS Doris Miller will honor a Black Pearl Harbor hero and key figure in the rise of the Civil Rights Movement.

At places like the Gettysburg battlefield and Arlington National Cemetery, there's a new, escalating conflict over monuments that honor the Lost Cause.

Protesters in El Paso have focused on toppling The Equestrian, a monument to a racist colonizer. But the story behind the monument goes deeper.

This 1952 textbook serves as an example of the "patriotic history" that Donald Trump grew up with and calls for today.

The landmark Ken Burns documentary hasn’t aged well. But it continues to shape American perceptions about the Confederacy and slavery.

The founding generation revised the country’s history to make the new nation work.

Jon Sternfeld on collective memory and history as instruction.

Revisionist biographers have given us countless perspectives, from Honest Abe to Killer Lincoln. Is there a version that’s true to his time and attuned to ours?

Setting up a classroom battle between 1619 and 1776 gets history totally wrong and is damaging for our nation.

In a recent speech, Trump looks to America's past for answers. However, the history he recounts is glaringly limited.

But it’s one historians know all too well.

The president has blamed schools for spurring the unrest in several U.S. cities that has led in some cases to looting and fires.

Hearing about backlash to what kids are learning in U.S. History classrooms? It could have been last week—or 150 years ago.

How we perceive the senses changes in different historical, political, and cultural contexts. Sensory historians ask what people smelled, touched and tasted.