Memory

The forgotten history of Thanksgiving.

Pete Seeger, William F. Buckley, Jr., and public history.

Oral tradition, nationalism, and the invention of history.

A review of two books exploring the importance and legacy of the founding of the English colony at Jamestown.

To fully understand what has gone wrong since 9/11, it is necessary to rewind the tape to that moment just before.

A response to claims that the First Thanksgiving was not a "thanksgiving" as the Pilgrims understood it.

"A People’s History" is bad history, albeit gilded with virtuous intentions.

“It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.”— Robert E. Lee, at Fredericksburg

An argument against looking at our past through the lens of today.

Was the 'first Thanksgiving' merely a pretext for the bloodshed, enslavement, and displacement that would follow in later decades?

Maya Lin recounts the experience of creating the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

The recent march in South Carolina, demanding removal of the Confederate flag from the state Capitol is the latest episode in a long-running debate over slavery's legacy.

The city in summer floated in a daze that moved otherwise sensible people to repeat endlessly the brainless greeting “Hot enough for ya?”

A name, now famously associated with a mass school shooting, belonged to a strong advocate for the Everglades.

The diary has been distorted by even her greatest champions. Would history have been better served if it had been destroyed?

The beauty of the atomic scientists' calculations hid from them the truly Faustian contract they scratched their names to.

Were the real prisoners of war the young Americans who never left home?

Textbook watchdogs Mel and Norma Gabler are good, sincere, dedicated people, who just may be destroying your child’s education.

John McCain's harrowing account of nearly six years as a North Vietnamese prisoner of war, in his own words.

On the second anniversary of MLK's assassination, political prisoner Martin Sostre wrote a tribute emphasizing his radical disobedience.

In 1908, Eugene Debs eulogized John Brown as America's "greatest liberator," vowing the Socialist Party would continue Brown's work. We publish it here in full.

Olaudah Equiano, native of Africa, survivor of the Middle Passage and enslavement, tells his story.

“Transgender” has gone from an umbrella term for different behaviors, to an umbrella term for different identities.

When Native Americans met George Washington in 1753, they called him by the Algonquian name "Conotocarious," meaning "town taker" or "devourer of villages."

Retracing the steps of a Texan lynched in 1921 requires a trip through dark days in state history.

A collection of resources challenging the notion that the U.S. was built on nothing but injustice and subjugation.