Memory

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.

The removal of Indigenous people was a national priority with broad consensus.

“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.

An interview with Taylor Brown, author of the novel "Rednecks."

A century after three Tejano men were shot to death, the story their family tells is different than the official account. Whose story counts as Texas history?

At the Habsburg Convention in Plano.

From 'The Tattooist of Auschwitz' to 'We Were the Lucky Ones,' a new wave of Holocaust dramas feel surprisingly shallow.

A new career-spanning book offers a portrait of Painter’s career as a historian, essayist, and most recently visual artist.

The university where 13 student protesters were killed or injured during the Vietnam War era worries that other schools have learned nothing from its history.

The nation's historical markers delight, distort and, sometimes, just get the story wrong.

A quarter century on, the school shooters’ mythology has propagated a sprawling subculture that idolizes murder and mayhem.

"I was always working on a theory of America."

An argument for returning the recent past, and the history of modern conservatism, to classrooms.

The 2024 OAH Conference on American History falls almost fifteen years after the renowned historian, teacher, and activist's death.

The struggles of a century ago show that historians need to keep explaining their work and role to the public.

It’s important to remember why analogies to Jesus should stay out of the political realm. The results are always ugly.