Memory

In the 1930s, the Federal Writers’ Project interviewed 300 formerly enslaved Virginians to share their oral histories.

An effective media strategy has often been crucial to rallying the public behind Black victims of fatal violence.

The uses and abuses of history through the "diary" of Thomas Fallon.

A contemporary Atlantic writer reflects on one of the voices from the magazine's archives who helped shape the publication—and the nation.

We are living through a time when we cannot take our shared identity—and therefore our shared stories—for granted.

As much as we may wish otherwise, history gives us few reasons to believe that its moral arc bends toward justice.

July 4 and the perils of celebrating America’s past.

A scholar of gun culture looks at the roots of Americans’ love affair with firearms – and their willingness to accept gun violence as a price of freedom.

While cemeteries are tributes to the dead, they are really about the living. They are about those who want to commemorate something.

The beginning of the fight for Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

The Court’s striking down of a New York gun law relies on a fundamentally anti-democratic historical record that excludes women and people of color.

Bisexuality introduces nuance, which has always made it easier to discard than accommodate it .

Chin’s killing, 40 years ago, has inspired documentaries, young-adult books, and countless works of scholarship. What do we want from his story, and the people who tell it?

By learning about an overlooked cohort of women who served in World War I, we can expand our understandings of memorials beyond physical statues and monuments.

A century ago, cars killed pedestrians and cyclists in record numbers. As traffic deaths rise again, it’s time to remember how US cities once responded to this safety crisis.

What new possibilities might arise if we were to consider history as ongoing memory work, rather than a set narrative of progress or as singular “truth”?

Mississippi makes a move to confront a shameful episode from the past.

“I’m amazed at how numb many of us can be about these sites.”

On Lewis Mumford, Herman Melville, and the gentle art of looking back in time.

Before Juneteenth became an official federal holiday, 94-year-old Opal Lee was on a mission.

Fifty years on, Nick Ut’s Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph, “Napalm Girl,” still has the power to shock. But can a picture change the world?

A new book examines explores the ways that an uncritical celebration of “good” gays and “good” gayness can cause harm.

In 2015, precisely 31 years to the day of her death, blues and cabaret singer Alberta Hunter was inducted into the Memphis Music Hall of Fame.

Ashley D. Farmer and Tanisha C. Ford explain the importance of biographical writing of African American women and the personal connection involved.

“Paper City” explores the forgotten firebombing of Japan’s capital.

Seating was segregated, and the ceremony's only Black speaker was forced to drastically revise his speech to avoid spreading "propaganda."

"History​ is written by the victors, but diligent and continual silencing is required to maintain its claims on the present and future."

Accountability is crucial as we remember the individuals and communities harmed by our institutions and call for retroactive justice.

The commission is charged with renaming bases whose names currently honor Confederate leaders.

In early 1945, a six-panel comic in a U.S. pamphlet offered a visceral depiction of the Third Reich's killing machine.