Memory

Using history to guide us in the difficult present.

Historians' prohibition on 'presentism' crumbles under the weight of events.

The Great Emancipator's character and anti-slavery legacy has been questioned by Black Americans for over a century.

For the warriors and wanderers who became the Aztec people, truth was not singular and history was braided from many voices.

On the iconic conservation legacy of Theodore Roosevelt and the perception that the national parks and monuments he created were previously untouched and empty.

The initial movement to build memorials to the Confederacy and its supposed “lost cause” were the original cancel culture.

Museum visitors, as well as scholars of art, history, and African and Native American studies, discuss the sculpture’s intended and perceived meanings.

The South’s mythology glamorized a noble defeat. Trump backers may do the same.

State leaders went to great lengths to instill their gauzy version of the Lost Cause in young minds.

Any true reckoning with racism must include our schools.

For decades, a white woman’s memoir shaped our understanding of America’s first Black poet. Does a new book change the story?

Many prisons, especially in the South, are named after racist officials and former plantations.

Environmental historian Donald E. Worster pushes back against recent characterizations of Muir as a racist.

An interview with Sean Wilentz on Library of America's new collection of Richard Hofstadter's works.

Unlike the statues of Lee and Jackson, these Charlottesville monuments had less to do with memory than they did with an imagined past.

Whether it’s happening or not.

Why the Gilded Age was the era of statues.

Trump spends so much time defending statues not because he cares about history, but precisely because he doesn’t

Kennedy defined courage as a willingness to take an unpopular stand in service of a larger, higher cause. But what cause?

They’re good for kickstarting political debate but analogies with the past are often ahistorical and should be treated with care.

The Great Toppling of 2020 and the rebirth of civic imagination.

Despite our long history of interrogating the memorial landscape, no movement has been able to dislodge it.

Reflections on reading Nietzsche in Alaska in the early days of Covid-19.

In times that feel “unprecedented,” it is all the more important to use history as a way to understand the present and chart a path to the future.

The Confederate memorial carving at Georgia’s Stone Mountain is etched with more than a century of racist history. But tearing it down won’t be so easy.

A series of graphs that help explain why at least 830 monuments were erected many decades after the end of the Civil War.

In the years after the Civil War, printmakers in New York and elsewhere abetted the Lost Cause movement by selling images of false idols.

It is fair to ask whether Grant’s prewar experiences define the entirety of his character, and who sets the bar for which public figures deserve commemoration.

Studying Hurricane Katrina as a discrete event is studying a fiction.

The shameful career of Roger Sherman, mild-mannered Yankee.