Writing a History of a Pandemic During a Pandemic

Jon Sternfeld on collective memory and history as instruction.
Abraham Lincoln

Why We Keep Reinventing Abraham Lincoln

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?

What Trump Is Missing About American History

Setting up a classroom battle between 1619 and 1776 gets history totally wrong and is damaging for our nation.
Trump speaking in front of Mount Rushmore, stage lit, mountains in night's darkness
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Nostalgia and the Tragedy of Trump's Speech at Mount Rushmore

In a recent speech, Trump looks to America's past for answers. However, the history he recounts is glaringly limited.
Donald Trump in front of Mount Rushmore

Trump’s Vision for American History Education Is a Nightmare

But it’s one historians know all too well.

Trump Calls for More Patriotic Education

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

How U.S. History Is Taught Has Always Been Political

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

What Smells Can Teach Us About History

How we perceive the senses changes in different historical, political, and cultural contexts. Sensory historians ask what people smelled, touched and tasted.
Graffitied Robert E. Lee Statue with child playing basketball.

The New Monuments That America Needs

Every statue defends an idea about history, but what if those ideas are wrong?
A group of people comprising the Save California Ethnic Studies Coalition, sitting in a circle having a meeting in a lobby.

The History Behind California's Plans to Require Ethnic Studies for Public-School Students

A bill making ethnic studies a graduation requirement for California public-school students is expected to be signed by Governor Newsom.
Wabanaki people paddling canoes near bridge

The Myth of Native American Extinction Harms Everyone

Cluelessness about Native people is rampant in New England, which romanticizes its Colonial heritage.
A library reading room with two stories of open stacks, walkways and ornate railings.

Andrew Dickson White and America’s Unfinished (French) Revolution

How the Civil War-era historian effectively invented a distinctly American tradition of historiography.
Illustration of 9/11 inside outline of girl

The Children of 9/11 Are About to Vote

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

When Monuments Fall

Moral complexity may be an argument against unthinking iconoclasm. It is not, however, an argument for never taking down statues.
Replica of the original Plimoth Plantation.

The Complicated Legacy of the Pilgrims is Finally Coming to Light After 400 Years

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.
Diorama of Benjamin Banneker surveying the area around the White House

Art of History: Preserving African American Dioramas

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 and the "Lost Cause"

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.
Book cover of "Ride the Devil's Herd," featuring a mustachioed man wearing a hat

Wyatt Earp Does Not Rest in Peace

A pair of new books about US Marshal Wyatt Earp are now out. Only one of them shoots straight.
People wearing masks; one has a sign that reads "Wear a mask or go to jail."

The Last Pandemic

Using history to guide us in the difficult present.

Beyond the End of History

Historians' prohibition on 'presentism' crumbles under the weight of events.
A political cartoon depicting Abraham Lincoln animalistically, playing cards on top of a keg of gunpowder.

The 1619 Project and the ‘Anti-Lincoln Tradition’

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

How Aztecs Told History

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

History, Civil Rights and the Original Cancel Culture

The initial movement to build memorials to the Confederacy and its supposed “lost cause” were the original cancel culture.
Equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt on a horse accompanied by an African man on foot, outside the American Museum of Natural History

The American Museum of Natural History Grapples with its Most Controversial Piece

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

The Next Lost Cause?

The South’s mythology glamorized a noble defeat. Trump backers may do the same.
A history textbook open to a chapter called "How the Negroes Lived Under Slavery," with an illustration of a wealthy white man shaking the hand of a smiling enslaved African American man whose well-dressed family looks on while white laborers work.

The Lies Our Textbooks Told My Generation of Virginians About Slavery

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

The Problem in the Classroom

Any true reckoning with racism must include our schools.
Phillis Wheatley

How Phillis Wheatley Was Recovered Through History

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

Will The Reckoning Over Racist Names Include These Prisons?

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

John Muir and Race

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