Memory

The Founding Fathers were more interested in limiting democracy than securing and expanding it.

Eric Foner, Walter Johnson, Thavolia Glymph, and Annette Gordon-Reed discuss trends in the study of slavery and emancipation.

An interview with Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf.

Andrew Jackson deserves nothing but contempt from modern America, not a place on our currency.

We can learn more from him in today's political world.

Rather than censuring the legacies of our ancestors, we should work to make our descendants proud.

The celebratory month has its roots in the socialist and labor movements.

“Terrible, terrible! A thousand casualties. And heartrending scenes. Men trampling down women and children. Most brutal thing…” — James Joyce, Ulysses

A new book re-traces the origins of the 19th-century KKK, which began as a social club before swiftly moving to murder.

How do you diagnose the problem of racism in America without understanding its actual history?

The 19th century recovery of John Winthrop's sermon, "A City on a Hill."

Europeans didn’t just displace Native Americans — they enslaved them, on a scale historians are only beginning to fathom.

A careful study of recent popular history books reveals a genre dominated by generals, presidents—and male authors.

It will help black Americans to recall that they have a history that transcends victimization and exclusion.

The gap between academic and popular understandings of early American topics is an enduring challenge for early Americanists.

The 20th century produced monuments to a false consensus—can the 21st century create a more representative commemorative sphere?

The argument over renaming Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School is neither trivial nor simple.

It would be a grave mistake to ignore the link between Wilson’s white supremacy at home and his racist militarism abroad.

The role of Red Horse's drawings in the historical narrative of the Battle of Little Bighorn.

Another way to look at controversial historical figures.

On the eve of World War 2, most Americans opposed granting asylum to Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler.

America's forgotten migration – the journeys of a million African-Americans from the tobacco South to the cotton South

Acknowledging the truth about colonialism is crucial if we want to comprehend the world around us today.

Sacagawea is a symbol for everything from Manifest Destiny to women’s rights to American diversity. Except we don't know much about her.

During the Depression, more than a million people of Mexican descent were deported. Author Francisco Balderrama says that most were American citizens.

The documentary's accommodation of the Lost Cause narrative may have left viewers with a skewed understanding of the conflict.

A wealthy white lawyer has spent 16 years and millions of dollars turning the Whitney Plantation into a memorial to the nation's past.

Why eliminate street names that tell one part of Southern history when we can amplify them to tell even more of it?

The Confederate flag’s military tenure continued long after the Civil War ended.

Washington changed the world forever when he crossed the Delaware—for the worse.