Memory

A lifelong passion for the national pastime led John Thorn to redefine the sport's relationship with statistics and reveal the truth behind its earliest days.

The civil-rights attorney has created a sculpture park, indicting the city of Montgomery—a former capital of the domestic slave trade.

How one house can contain larger stories of American migration and growth, reckonings with exclusion, and the advent of new technologies.

Native son Jonah Walters finds something entirely too innocent about the tales told about the anthracite industry’s origins.

Descendants of the first settlers in Nicodemus are working to preserve and share a story of grit, perseverance, self-governance, and homecomings.

The SS Eastland disaster and Chicago's ghosts.

Our thinking about nostalgia is badly flawed because it relies on defective assumptions about progress and time.

At the prodding of John and Abigail Adams, Mercy Otis Warren took on a massive project: writing a comprehensive history of the Revolutionary War.

Who was buried in the lonely grave in New York’s potter’s field? The year-long search led to a lost world in the history of AIDS.

On Walter Isaacson’s biographical project.

The conflict between Red and Blue America is a clash of national mythologies.

A new television miniseries depicts the pursuit of Lincoln’s killer. But the public appetite for tales about the chase began even as it was happening.

Celebrated and damned as the “father of the atomic bomb,” theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer lived a complicated scientific and political life.

This is the story of Giovanni da Verrazzano, who never reached Asia, but became the first European to set foot on the site of the future city of New York.

Suitcases once belonging to residents of a New York State mental hospital tell the stories of long-forgotten lives.

Edda L. Fields-Black sets out to restore the Combahee River Raid to its proper place in Tubman’s life and in the war on slavery.

Isaiah Bowman was one of the worst college presidents in American history.

The COVID-19 pandemic affected us in millions of ways. But it evades the meanings we want it to bear.

The creators of Yale’s Civil War Memorial were more concerned with honoring “both sides” than with the true meaning of the war.

The real Andrew Johnson compared with the only film made about his life.

Feminist. Preacher. Abolitionist. Civil rights pioneer. Now the full story of the American icon's life and faith is finally coming to light.

San Francisco 49ers fans may feel like their team name is less racist than the “Chiefs,” but given the history of the Gold Rush, they shouldn’t be so smug.

The resistance and unionism of enslaved and freed Black women in the midst of the Confederacy is an epic story of sacrifice for nation and citizenship.

The persistence of segregated histories masks a critical truth: there is no American history without African-American history.

The course was getting a first read after years of review. Then, the Texas Board of Education needed more time to assess it without “drama or controversy.”

Activists around the country are debating the best ways to acknowledge lynchings. But they often meet resistance from local residents — both Black and White.

Mars fantasists still cling to dreams of the Old West.

Popular accounts of the Holocaust overlook its irrationality and often disordered violence.

Media coverage of the civil rights movement is a reminder that the deification of King has skewed public memory.

As a versatile but complex hero, King led a life open to interpretation by politicians and activists of all types who fiercely debated his legacy.