Memory

Despite our long history of interrogating the memorial landscape, no movement has been able to dislodge it.

Reflections on reading Nietzsche in Alaska in the early days of Covid-19.

In times that feel “unprecedented,” it is all the more important to use history as a way to understand the present and chart a path to the future.

The Confederate memorial carving at Georgia’s Stone Mountain is etched with more than a century of racist history. But tearing it down won’t be so easy.

A series of graphs that help explain why at least 830 monuments were erected many decades after the end of the Civil War.

In the years after the Civil War, printmakers in New York and elsewhere abetted the Lost Cause movement by selling images of false idols.

It is fair to ask whether Grant’s prewar experiences define the entirety of his character, and who sets the bar for which public figures deserve commemoration.

Studying Hurricane Katrina as a discrete event is studying a fiction.

The shameful career of Roger Sherman, mild-mannered Yankee.

Susan Neiman, a philosopher who studies Germany’s confrontation with its Nazi past, examines how the United States can remember slavery and segregation.

How a monument that championed black sacrifice in the name of emancipation was forgotten.

Sculptor Gutzon Borglum was deeply involved with the Ku Klux Klan while designing the Confederate memorial at Stone Mountain, Ga.

Why removing the names of Confederates from military bases matters.

A review of "Escalante’s Dream: On the Trail of the Spanish Discovery of the Southwest."

Which songs will future generations use to characterize the decade?

A collaborative project that set out in the summer of 2020 to document the removal of monuments through both official and unofficial channels.

A whole vision of history seems to be leaving the stage.

The Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C., has become a flashpoint in today’s reckoning with racist statues.

A new book systematically defends the American Founding against those who believe it was destined to end in nihilism.

Historical narratives of the United States have never not been shaped by an anxiety about the end of it all. Are we a new Rome or a new Zion?

In a newly discovered letter, the famed abolitionist wrote that ‘no one monument could be made to tell the whole truth'

The National Statuary Collection announced the unification of the former slave economy’s emotional heartland with the heart of national government.

June, PTSD Awareness month, is a time to recognize how trauma has shaped our history.

The man who supposedly never told a lie figured out how to stretch the truth when it came to human bondage.

Why does the U.S. Army name its bases after generals it defeated?

Keep in mind what it meant to the people who created it.

The truth about policies of Native American removal.

A celebration of emancipation in Texas is taking hold in the minds of Americans everywhere.

African American activists have long coupled these efforts with fighting against racist laws and racial violence.

For Baldwin, the past had always been bent in service of a lie. Could a true story be told?