Memory

Why I decided to devote my professional life to something I wasn't very interested in.

What professional historians do – and don't – have to offer communities struggling with the Confederate monuments in their midst.

Celebrations of the Confederacy have steadily ebbed, and the recent confrontations will accelerate this retreat among all but the extremists.

The "father of U.S. gynecology" is usually depicted as either a monstrous butcher or a benevolent healer. It's not that simple.

He professes admiration for "statues and monuments" but his family has a record of tearing down rather than preserving.

Americans should build this pivotal post–Civil War era into the new politics of historical memory.

The two men owned slaves — but at vastly different moments in American history.

At least one monument has come down this summer, but two streets in Brooklyn have proved difficult to rename.

Stripping Virginia of its Lee tributes is far harder than it is in other places.

Ninety years after the duo was executed, there are virtually no physical markers in Boston commemorating them.

Memorials to the Lost Cause have always meant something sinister for the descendants of enslaved people.

Why we must ask not only what stories our landscapes of commemoration tell, but also what stories they leave out.

The Making Of Dylann Roof.

There's a reason you won't find many monuments in the South to one of Robert E. Lee's most able deputies.

America's unconditional love of the Civil War has blinded us to its true meaning.

A group of historians takes a stand for the removal of the Confederate emblem from their state's flag.

Don’t let extremists on both sides destroy honor and valor, even as they seek to destroy everything else.

Annette Gordon-Reed explores the ways in which the many paradoxes of Jefferson make him a potent figure for racists and anti-racists alike.

Empty pedestals can offer the same lessons about racism and war that the statues do.

One alternative to tearing down Confederate monuments: creatively repurposing them.

Many monuments in the South were made in the North — by the same companies, and with the same molds, as those sold to Northern towns.

Many were funded privately. The public now deserves a say in their fate.

Statues don’t need to venerate military leaders of the Civil War to promulgate false narratives.

The president's stand on the Confederate hero represents the kind of moral relativism that conservatives usually decry.

If you understand why that Civil War statue really went up, the debate over removing it looks a lot different.

The state's only Confederate memorial, a stone on Georges Island, has been boarded up since June while the state ponders its fate.

The weekend's demonstrators were the latest in a long line of American racists to ally themselves with an imagined Middle Ages.

The city isn't rushing to put it back up.

The only logic to honoring Lee is to honor treason and treason in the worst possible cause.

Jefferson had a complicated relationship with white supremacy.