Memory

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.

Power and ambition in women are often hidden, buried, disguised, crushed, mocked, diminished, punished, or excoriated.

The Lee and Jackson statues were erected not to mourn their deaths, but to glorify their character.

In ignoring the messy realities of westward expansion, McCullough’s "The Pioneers" is both incomplete and dull.

Anna Jarvis spent years fighting the holiday’s commercialization, but that may have hastened its descent into Hallmark territory.

Hobsbawm saw his political hopes crumble. He used that defeat to tell the story of our age.

It's time to shift the social contract of education away from short-term job training toward long-term development.

Douglas Brinkley offers a brief history of political listicles.

The reparations struggle is about remembering that America was built on slavery, but also about fighting for all working people.

In Brazil, some descendants of defeated Confederate immigrants still believe the war for secession was a noble cause.

Why did I never recognize all the important and valuable stories my mother told me as "history"?