C. Vann Woodward

A review of "C. Vann Woodward: America’s Historian."

What role do we really want history to be playing in our public life? And is the history we have actually doing that work?

On Martin Luther King's use of radical ideas to create an understanding of the history of America.

Why did the historian come to fear the very movements he once would have celebrated?

During Watergate, historians helped catalogue accusations made against past Presidents; their findings may be useful again.

"Masterless Men" shows how poor whites benefited from slavery's end, but does not diminish the experiences of the enslaved.

Nixon? Reagan? Jackson? Historical analogies are simplistic, misleading—and absolutely essential.

The 1619 Project claimed to reveal the unknown history of slavery. It ended up helping to distort the real history of slavery and the struggle against it.

A new book traces how the writing of American history, from Reconstruction on, has falsified and illuminated our racial past.

The historical insights of one era have been lost to the journalistic instincts of another.

A new book examines the ways white slaveholders were compensated, while formerly enslaved people were not.

It erases the fact that, for the first 70 years of its existence, the US was roiled by intense, escalating conflict over slavery – a conflict only resolved by civil war.

Florida’s move to silence expert criticism of its disenfranchisement campaign echoes its Redemption-era assault on civil rights.

Trump tried to exploit flaws that were embedded in the law from the start.

If colorblindness rests on the claim that the civil rights movement changed everything, the idea that racism is in our DNA borders on a fatalistic proposition that it changed nothing.

On Juneteenth, we should remember both the struggle against chattel slavery and the struggle for radical freedom during Reconstruction.

The pre-Civil War North was a landscape not of unremitting white supremacy but of persistent struggles over racial justice by both Blacks and whites.

Objections to the appointment of Nikole Hannah-Jones to an academic chair are the latest instance of conservatives using the state to suppress "dangerous" ideas.

Faulkner’s chroniclers have to reconcile the novelist’s often repellent political positions with the extraordinary meditations on race, violence, and cruelty in his fiction.

The answer may lie in the ear of the beholder.