Memory

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.

Politicians from both sides of the aisle have tried to stake a claim to the power of the Kennedy legend. What is it about Camelot?

Lizzie Borden’s father and stepmother were brutally murdered, possibly by Lizzie herself, in August 1892. Why are we still dissecting the crime?

HBO's “Confederate” assumes America is much further from its slaveholding past than it really is.

In a world where Confederate flags continue to fly, it is hard not to cry “enough” at this continued emphasis on all-things-Confederate.

They force us to remember the worst parts of our history.

The sixth president, long derided as a hapless elitist, is suddenly relevant again 250 years after his birth.

The “now more than ever” tendency is everywhere.

What would it take for people "to know their history"? Pay attention to the silences.

Independence Day has always been a political battlefield.

This negates a commonly used defense that Confederate symbols represent ‘heritage not hate’.

As the South Carolina city prepared to break from the Union, its people swung between nostalgia and rebellion.

A nation divided, even at birth.

The question isn’t whether they have anything of value to offer. It’s whether they can avoid partisan vituperation along the way.

And other problems we need to solve before we can get out of this mess.