Memory

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.

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?