Memory

He devoted a lifetime to studying America’s foundation, witnessed its near-dissolution, and uncannily anticipated its evolution.

The West and the nation need worthier, more honest memorials.

Jack Kennedy, we hardly know ye—and to know ye is not to love ye.

Natural language processing reveals huge differences in how Texas history textbooks treat men, women, and people of color.

How the preeminent photographic record of the period excluded people of color from the nation’s self-image.

The chaotic quest to mythologize America’s past.

'Freedom!' tried to show the horrors of antebellum slavery and the courage of escaping slaves. But neither schools nor audiences were ready for it.

How does color influence our perception of time?

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.

Patriotism doesn’t require whitewashing.