Memory

We need more than genealogies to know who we are, and who we ought to become.

Popular memory of the war in both the U.S. and Vietnam tends to cast the fall of Saigon as inevitable.

A public opinion poll suggests that people really have strong opinions about a period that they don't really know anything about.

I, a historian of the Vietnam War, have watched the Turning Point treatment. I have some notes.

Films from Vietnam and Hollywood testify to the range of stories told about the war on-screen and the different memories they embody.

Chicago’s latest museum looks to change the narrative around the federally supported housing projects that US cities turned their backs on decades ago.

Late last month, President Donald Trump issued an executive order to restore “truth and sanity to American history.”

The legacies of conflict—and their increasingly accessible images in a global age—frame the shared bonds of trauma in keeping their memories alive.

On the gendered dimensions of trans-Mississippi Civil War memory, the idea of the single-family household, and the politics of expansion and settlement.

And what happens when empirical fact is labeled “improper ideology.”

How a myth about farmers taking on the British has fueled more than two centuries of exclusionary nationalism.

The National Garden of American Heroes represents a dangerous shift in values—from inquiry to reverence.

Under the Trump administration's book police, Jackie Robinson’s life and actions are considered dangerous memories.

Japanese survivors recall the day the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and warn of future risks.

In the early twentieth century, architects turned to a newly discovered past to craft novel visions of the future: the ancient history of Mesopotamia.

Historians have revealed that the story Americans long learned about the end of the Civil War was a myth.

The urge to police the past is hardly an invention of the Trump Administration. It is the reflexive obsession of autocrats everywhere.

Since Trump took office, the park service — charged with preserving American history — has changed how it describes key moments from slavery to Jim Crow.

The Japanese American National Museum embraces the Japanese-American experience in all its permutations.

From historians to horror writers to white nationalists, attempts to explain the settlement's fate reveal a great deal about our own attitudes.

How the discovery of a long-lost monument shattered trust between a Japanese American community and the museum built to preserve its history.

Trump’s executive orders can’t define diversity out of history.

Normally staid historians sound alarm at authoritarian grasping for control of the premier US museum complex.

Advocacy should not be a dirty word.

For decades, politicians distanced themselves from Nixon's Watergate legacy. Now, some are advancing a new history.

The Virginia delegate may have spoken those words on March 23, 1775, but some historians doubt it.

On the scholarship and intellectual legacies of Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, William Dunning and other academics.

On the first Monday in March, Pulaski Day festivities at Chicago’s Polish Museum of America honored the “Father of American Cavalry,” 280 years after his birth.

Major new books about the peoples who lived in North America for millennia before the arrival of Europeans are reshaping the history of the continent.

Using evidence to remind us.