Memory

The nation's historical markers delight, distort and, sometimes, just get the story wrong.

A quarter century on, the school shooters’ mythology has propagated a sprawling subculture that idolizes murder and mayhem.

"I was always working on a theory of America."

An argument for returning the recent past, and the history of modern conservatism, to classrooms.

The 2024 OAH Conference on American History falls almost fifteen years after the renowned historian, teacher, and activist's death.

The struggles of a century ago show that historians need to keep explaining their work and role to the public.

It’s important to remember why analogies to Jesus should stay out of the political realm. The results are always ugly.

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.

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

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.