Memory

"The Day After Trinity" and "The Strangest Dream" evacuate the mythical tropes of the tortured genius biopic that Hollywood loves to rehearse.

Ron DeSantis wants to retrofit history to conform to conservative ideology.

In 2026, we will celebrate the nation’s semiquincentennial, and also the fifth anniversary of the January 6th uprising.

J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project scientists are a rare example of weapons designers who have gone down in history.

Even as the world celebrates hip-hop turning 50, the debate over rap's birth date spins on.

The movie has no interest in reducing the atomic bombings to a trivializing, exploitative spectacle, despite what some would want.

After a year of controversy, the city has narrowed down five options for a monument to the activist and abolitionist.

Our ideas about sexuality and gender have changed before, and now they’re changing again.

What happens when radical historians write for the public.

At 12 years old, Martha Hodes was on board a hijacked plane and was taken hostage for a week. How did she forget much of the experience?

That history has nothing to do with culture wars, and everything to do with what real justice looks like in the United States, and who has access to it.

The "father of the atomic bomb" has long been misunderstood. Will the new film finally get J. Robert Oppenheimer right?

The controversial historian drew criticism from both left and right. We need more like him today.

“Who controls the past,” George Orwell wrote, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” So it has been with baseball.

“I’ve learned, through hundreds of interviews and years of research, is that what crack really did was expose every vulnerability of society.”

The esteemed labor historian reflects on his life and career, including Berkeley in the 1960s, Walter Reuther, the early UAW, Walmart, Bill Clinton, and more.

The Founding Fathers made startlingly progressive statements that didn’t make it into popular history.

"Outlander" challenges the myth of American exceptionalism at the root of much U.S. popular culture.

The long-term impact of Quarles’s work.

We're talking about the Battle of Little Bighorn all wrong.

The arson attack on a New Orleans nightclub was the largest massacre of queer people in 20th-century America—and it remains relevant to our present moment.

The way we learn about our collective past is under attack thanks to new leadership at the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA).

A conversation with Colin Kaepernick on Black studies, white supremacy, and capitalism.

It would be a mistake to think of the current wave of attacks on “critical race theory” as a culture war. This is a political battle.

Mike Pence and Ron DeSantis say they would restore the Fort Bragg name if elected. Its namesake was a “merciless tyrant” who helped lose the Civil War.

How the fight of one Black Texas family to make freedom real offers lessons for Texas lawmakers trying to erase history from the classroom.

James Forten was one of Philadelphia’s most distinguished and important citizens.

We should interrogate nostalgia’s primacy without advocating for its eradication.

“Queer” has experienced a loss of meaning and a curdling of political potential. To reinvigorate it, we need a new approach to history.

The last relics of ‘lost cause’ ideology are being removed, as a federal panel renames US military bases that honored Confederate generals.