Memory

Portraying a 19th-century president.

The kinds of narratives historians tend to fall back on constrain our ability to imagine alternatives to the way things have been, and to the way things are.

The genocide of Native Americans was nowhere more methodically savage than in California. A new state initiative seeks to reckon with this history.

The more that historians make their own experiences an explicit part of their work, the harder it will become to let the sources speak clearly.

One of the thousands of white Southerners who supported the Union during the Civil War and a rare example of a slave owner who changed his views on race.

Radicals in the Age of Revolution saw the classical world as a common inheritance that could aid their fight for liberty.

Reflections from the Naming Commission, and the front lines of the army's war on the Lost Cause.

How a folklorist encourages people to experience the past and present of a place.

Ron DeSantis, who has attacked Florida history lessons and aims to run for president, dismisses slavery in his 2011 book as a “personal flaw” of the Founding Fathers.

The real history of Juneteenth is much messier—and more inspiring.

New evidence suggests that Sacagawea had a longer life than most historians have believed — fifty-seven years longer.

The state removed the educational marker after Concord Republicans complained about Elizabeth Gurley Flynn's communist ties.

The outcome of a fight to control a nonprofit group could shape the teaching of history in Texas.

Jackie Robinson is popularly portrayed as the man who broke baseball’s color line by quietly enduring racist abuse. But that narrative is much too narrow.

Creating a personal myth allows celebrities to create just that—a myth.

Historian Ned Blackhawk’s new book stresses the importance of telling US history with a wider and more inclusive lens.

Americans have often been politically divided. But have the divisions over how we recount our history ever been so deep?

A new book considers the possible alternative outcomes of the battles in America's war for independence.

Historians haven't only underestimated the sheer number of underage Union soldiers, they've also overlooked the internal battles those youths provoked.

It is impossible to understand the U.S. without understanding its Indigenous history, writes Ned Blackhawk.

Professor Blackhawk’s new volume attempts to put Native peoples’ stories at the center of the history of the United States.

Targeted even when unarmed, around 70 percent of the Black Union troops who fought in the 1864 battle died as a result of the clash.

Exploring recent debates about the uses–and utility–of Black history in both the academic and public spheres.

A teenage girl died by suicide after she started menstruating and not knowing what it was, in 1935. A bill in Florida wants to take us back to those times.

Twenty years later, I am living through the making of the Iraq War as history.

Nearly 20 years after their deployment to Iraq, veterans grapple with their younger selves and try to make sense of the war.

The unlikely, true story of the Westinghouse “We Can Do It” work-incentive poster that became an international emblem of women’s empowerment.

The new program might strengthen personal connections to refugees, but history shows there are potential downsides, as well.

How should historians respond to the urgency of this current political moment?

Why is Shelby Foote's Civil War subject to so much contemporary debate?