James M. McPherson

The Editor of the American Historical Review weighs in on recent historiographical debates around the New York Times' 1619 Project.

The cruelty of enslavers when it came to reproduction and families shaped the 13th and 14th Amendments.

Nikole Hannah-Jones' new book sidesteps scholarly critics while quietly deleting previous factual errors.

The ambitious Times endeavor reveals the difficulties that greet a journalistic project when it aspires to shift a founding narrative of the past.

The project's editor falsifies the history of American history-writing, openly embracing the privileging of “narrative” over “actual fact.”

1619, 1776, and the politics of the past.

Daryl Michael Scott on propaganda and myth from ‘The 1619 Project’ to Trumpism.

“There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law,” declared the man who would be America’s sixteenth president.

The Bleeding Kansas parallels with our current moment get weirder and darker.

The United States didn't begin in 1619.

Critics of the New York Times’s 1619 Project obscure a longstanding debate among historians over whether the American Revolution was a proslavery revolt.

The New York Times’ 1619 Project launched with the best of intentions, but has been undermined by some of its claims.

A dispute between some scholars and the authors of NYT Magazine’s issue on slavery represents a fundamental disagreement over the trajectory of U.S. society.

Conservative uproar over the 1619 Project is just the most recent clash in a battle over how we should understand America’s past.

The Trump administration’s commitment to deterring immigration through cruelty has made horrifying conditions in there inevitable.

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

The legend of the Confederate leader’s heroism and decency is based in the fiction of a person who never existed.

If Jackson's presidency had been later, he may have prevented the Civil War.

The longest-running party in America has seen significant shifts in its ideological and geographic makeup.

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