Memory

Every statue defends an idea about history, but what if those ideas are wrong?

A bill making ethnic studies a graduation requirement for California public-school students is expected to be signed by Governor Newsom.

Cluelessness about Native people is rampant in New England, which romanticizes its Colonial heritage.

How the Civil War-era historian effectively invented a distinctly American tradition of historiography.

What the youngest cohort of American voters thinks about politics, fear and the potential of the country they’ve grown up in.

Moral complexity may be an argument against unthinking iconoclasm. It is not, however, an argument for never taking down statues.

Descendants of the Pilgrims have highlighted their ancestors’ role in the country’s founding. But their sanitized version of events is only now starting to be told in full.

Conservators are restoring a series of dioramas created for the 1940 American Negro Exposition, bringing their magical artistry, and stories, back to life.

Women's clubs were popular after the Civil War among white and Black women. But white clubwomen used their influence to ingrain racist curriculum in schools.

A pair of new books about US Marshal Wyatt Earp are now out. Only one of them shoots straight.

Using history to guide us in the difficult present.

Historians' prohibition on 'presentism' crumbles under the weight of events.

The Great Emancipator's character and anti-slavery legacy has been questioned by Black Americans for over a century.

For the warriors and wanderers who became the Aztec people, truth was not singular and history was braided from many voices.

The initial movement to build memorials to the Confederacy and its supposed “lost cause” were the original cancel culture.

Museum visitors, as well as scholars of art, history, and African and Native American studies, discuss the sculpture’s intended and perceived meanings.

The South’s mythology glamorized a noble defeat. Trump backers may do the same.

State leaders went to great lengths to instill their gauzy version of the Lost Cause in young minds.

Any true reckoning with racism must include our schools.

For decades, a white woman’s memoir shaped our understanding of America’s first Black poet. Does a new book change the story?

Many prisons, especially in the South, are named after racist officials and former plantations.

Environmental historian Donald E. Worster pushes back against recent characterizations of Muir as a racist.

An interview with Sean Wilentz on Library of America's new collection of Richard Hofstadter's works.

Unlike the statues of Lee and Jackson, these Charlottesville monuments had less to do with memory than they did with an imagined past.

Whether it’s happening or not.

Why the Gilded Age was the era of statues.

Trump spends so much time defending statues not because he cares about history, but precisely because he doesn’t

Kennedy defined courage as a willingness to take an unpopular stand in service of a larger, higher cause. But what cause?

They’re good for kickstarting political debate but analogies with the past are often ahistorical and should be treated with care.

The Great Toppling of 2020 and the rebirth of civic imagination.