Memory

Conservative uproar over the 1619 Project is just the most recent clash in a battle over how we should understand America’s past.

Other than being alive during the 1960s, the baby boomers had almost nothing to do with the era's social and political upheaval.

The first Africans who came to America in 1619 were not ‘enslaved’, they were indentured – and this is a crucial difference.

Simone's birthplace in Tryon, North Carolina, was declared a National Treasure. Now, local events celebrate her and raise money for preservation efforts.

Conservatives created a rosy image of Reagan to further their political project.

Michael W. Twitty on the changing tides of plantation interpretation.

What is revisionist history--and is it dangerous?

Anxieties about Trump’s presidency are the expression of a tradition as venerable as the United States itself.

Why it matters what language we use to describe what happened in 1919.

A proposal to follow the model several former Soviet States have pioneered, to deal with our own monuments to the Confederacy.

America in the summer of 1919 ran red with blood from racial violence, and yet today, 100 years later, not many people know it even happened.

Certain pundits are misrepresenting the biography of the "first black slaveholder."

Presidential libraries are too important for historians to ignore.

And how a handful of black Southerners helped perpetuate it after the Civil War.

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s decision to speak out against Holocaust analogies is a moral threat.

Reports of the death of nuanced interpretations of the Civil War have been grossly exaggerated.

If the British had won the Revolutionary War, things might be very different for Native Americans.

How the story itself came out.

White supremacists are co-opting the Middle Ages. Fighting back requires us to tell better, fuller stories about the period.

As we debate reparations, we need to get the facts right.

The New York Times should have done a better job fact-checking Appiah’s essay. Philosophy may be allegorical. History isn’t.

The Red Summer represented one of the darkest and bloodiest moments in American history.

Without accounting for the often-invisible work of others in his research, Robert Caro's new memoir is not so much inspiration as an exercise in self-celebration.

The Allied invasion of France was an important step in the war against the Nazis. But it was by no means a turning point.

In Jill Lepore's "These Truths," ideas produce other ideas. But new ideas arise from thinking humans, not from other ideas.

Congress had the final say on the design for the slain president’s monument. The competition was intense.

Lady Liberty was inspired by the end of the Civil War and emancipation. The connection to immigration came later.

What started as a solemn commemoration of dead Civil War soldiers has become a celebration of summer. Here's why that makes total sense.

If “living history” role-plays in the classroom can so easily go wrong, why do teachers keep assigning them?

The pessimism of some historians does an injustice to marginalized people of the past and can produce cynicism in students.