Memory

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.

On the beginnings of our stories—and the history of who owns them.

At museums across the South, you'll often find a white woman cooking in a big house kitchen. That's a role that was usually done by enslaved Africans.

Gameplay can be useful in history classrooms – but manufacturers have to think about how children will be affected by the competition.

The University of North Carolina agreed to pay the Sons of Confederate Veterans $2.5 million—a sum that rivals the endowment of its history department.

On the self-preservation, testimonies, and solace found in the diaries of black women writers.

The 1619 Project offers bitterness, fragility, and intellectual corruption—not history.

The historical interpretations crafted by the men of the Dunning School might now be largely discredited and discarded. But their legacies remain.

Eric Foner has helped us better understand the ambiguous consequences of what were almost always only partial victories.

The founder of cultural anthropology, Franz Boas challenged the reigning notions of race and culture.

On folk hero John Henry.

Four new books show how different, and maybe also why.

American Indians, the Civil War, and Confederate memory.

In the United States, the Populist tradition has always defined left-wing and egalitarian politics, unfairly maligned by bosses and intellectuals alike.

"I look back now and realize I was teaching a lot of misconceptions."

What 1619 has become to the history of American slavery, 1688 is to the history of American antislavery.

Massacres, myths, and the making of the great November holiday.

In his new book, Daniel Rodgers not only offers a close reading of Puritan history but also seeks to rescue their early critique of market economy.

Colonial Williamsburg has acknowledged to the LGBTQ community that people like them “have always existed.”

Leona Tate thought it must be Mardi Gras. Gail thought they were going to kill her.

The Dole pineapple plantation has a destructive history of transforming the Hawaiian Islands—something that continues today in the tourism industry.

In favor of wrestling with the most difficult aspects of our history.

Erasing the women of the founding era makes it harder to see women as leaders today.

In Coates's debut novel, he sets out to recover the struggles for emancipation that have been lost to the past.

Jill Lepore’s awkward embrace of the nation.

For much of our clerisy, the nation is an anachronism or disgrace.

Historians tell stories about the past. A new book argues that those stories are often dangerously wrong.

A review of Lewis Hyde’s “A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past.”

H.W. Brands' new one-volume history of the American West reads too much like a movie we’ve already seen.

Expanding the radical promise of the American Revolution.