Memory

As demands for racial justice grow, Trump is pushing historical mythmaking into high gear.

On the aesthetics and history of the Freedman’s Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Saidiya Hartman’s "Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments" is a strike against the archives’ silence regarding the lives of Black women in the shadow of slavery.

Golf clubs named after Confederate generals are attracting new scrutiny.

Mabel Wilson discusses the history of racial violence and the continued vandalism and destruction of Black historical memorials in the Deep South.

USS Doris Miller will honor a Black Pearl Harbor hero and key figure in the rise of the Civil Rights Movement.

At places like the Gettysburg battlefield and Arlington National Cemetery, there's a new, escalating conflict over monuments that honor the Lost Cause.

Protesters in El Paso have focused on toppling The Equestrian, a monument to a racist colonizer. But the story behind the monument goes deeper.

This 1952 textbook serves as an example of the "patriotic history" that Donald Trump grew up with and calls for today.

The landmark Ken Burns documentary hasn’t aged well. But it continues to shape American perceptions about the Confederacy and slavery.

Patriotism doesn’t require whitewashing.

The founding generation revised the country’s history to make the new nation work.

Jon Sternfeld on collective memory and history as instruction.

Revisionist biographers have given us countless perspectives, from Honest Abe to Killer Lincoln. Is there a version that’s true to his time and attuned to ours?

Setting up a classroom battle between 1619 and 1776 gets history totally wrong and is damaging for our nation.

In a recent speech, Trump looks to America's past for answers. However, the history he recounts is glaringly limited.

But it’s one historians know all too well.

The president has blamed schools for spurring the unrest in several U.S. cities that has led in some cases to looting and fires.

Hearing about backlash to what kids are learning in U.S. History classrooms? It could have been last week—or 150 years ago.

How we perceive the senses changes in different historical, political, and cultural contexts. Sensory historians ask what people smelled, touched and tasted.

Every statue defends an idea about history, but what if those ideas are wrong?

A bill making ethnic studies a graduation requirement for California public-school students is expected to be signed by Governor Newsom.

Cluelessness about Native people is rampant in New England, which romanticizes its Colonial heritage.

How the Civil War-era historian effectively invented a distinctly American tradition of historiography.

What the youngest cohort of American voters thinks about politics, fear and the potential of the country they’ve grown up in.

Moral complexity may be an argument against unthinking iconoclasm. It is not, however, an argument for never taking down statues.

Descendants of the Pilgrims have highlighted their ancestors’ role in the country’s founding. But their sanitized version of events is only now starting to be told in full.

Conservators are restoring a series of dioramas created for the 1940 American Negro Exposition, bringing their magical artistry, and stories, back to life.

Women's clubs were popular after the Civil War among white and Black women. But white clubwomen used their influence to ingrain racist curriculum in schools.

A pair of new books about US Marshal Wyatt Earp are now out. Only one of them shoots straight.