Memory

Contrary to the story being told in textbooks, media, and museums, the police were not neutral bystanders.

Columbus lives on as a political and cultural symbol—hero, villain, myth—revealing how belief, not fact, shapes history.

Telling the full story of the town’s past is an easy way to make a lot of people mad.

How he used America’s past to rescue its future.

She lived for 97 years. Only 24 of them were with Alexander Hamilton.

Reflections on Harper's Ferry amid a government shutdown.

What happens when Hitler’s shadow fades—and what moral vision replaces it?

Benedict Arnold’s boot wouldn’t come off, and other hardships from my weekend in the Revolutionary War.

The victors of the American Civil War failed to write their story into the history books, leaving a gap for the mythologizing of the Confederacy.

Conspiracy theories about her disappearance do a disservice to the pilot’s remarkable, flawed legacy.

VHS, Star Wars, and the freedom to remember.

As the last Holocaust survivors approach the end of their lives, an AI scholar grapples with technology that promises to freeze them in time.

Amid bluster about warfighting and lethality, it is important to recall the moral burdens of war.

The Trump administration is ordering the removal of information on slavery at multiple national parks in an effort to scrub them of “corrosive ideology.”

Cities across the American West are issuing belated apologies for 19th-century expulsions of Chinese residents, but their meaning and audience remain uncertain.

We must see the world as actors of the past did: through a foggy windshield, not a rearview mirror, facing a future of radical uncertainty.

A new biography examines how 19th-century Americans remembered Mary Ball Washington, who raised the future president on her own after her husband’s death.

The Bullock Museum glorifies Texas heroes while treating slavery like an awkward uncle no one wants to talk about.

A scorched shoe is a crucial part of Zelda Fitzgerald’s modern mythology. But there’s no proof it existed.

No one remembers the assassination of Congressman James M. Hinds. What do we risk by making it just another part of American history?

If we dismiss concepts because of particular examples of misuse, we encourage the repression of discomforting histories and ideas.

Pancho Villa’s death reveals how the border blurs the relationship between Mexico and the United States.

Historians say it's good to highlight America's founders, but the project takes too narrow a view of history.

Calls to attenuate the brutality of slavery in museum depictions is absurd when our institutions already downplay one of its most horrific features.

A painting of Gen. Robert E. Lee in his Confederate uniform is back on display at West Point's library.

The popular musical poses Alexander Hamilton as a symbol of the value of immigrants brought to America, but over time, his party became increasingly xenophobic.

The president’s latest criticism of museums is a thinly veiled attempt to erase Black history.

Spengler shared the anti-American prejudice of many of his German contemporaries, and it is safe to assume that he would have disparaged us as rootless.

The Trump administration has stepped up its antagonism of America’s treasured museums.

Donald Trump seems stuck in the 80s.