Memory

And the grandmother who wouldn’t let him get away with it.

Two new books attempt to grasp Thoreau’s seeming contradictions without reconciling them too easily.

Touring the palimpsests of cities.

Maintaining the internet data of dead people.

For decades, Americans have argued over the icon’s legacy. But his archives show that he had his own plans.

The divisive Confederate monument, the focus of the deadly “Unite the Right” rally, was melted down in secret and will become a new piece of public art.

It’s because the rapper’s life and work were a cascade of contradictions that we’re still trying to figure him out today.

Conservative curricula are being pushed into tax-funded history classrooms.

One La Jolla family’s story illuminates a persistent gap in our collective memory.

Over a century after one of New York City’s deadliest industrial accidents, the names of its victims, most of them women, are being enshrined in steel.

The famous disaster razed a metropolis and spread a pack of colorful lies. To sift through the ashes today is to encounter some uncomfortable truths.

The storytellers who taught me over the course of my career all knew how to bring Black history vividly to life.

Pence invoked them at the Republican debates, but a true reckoning with their history provides a different vision of the nation’s future.

Fifty years ago, parents united to get the far-right John Birch Society out of their schools.

Two new books model radically different ways of studying the past.

A work of millennial scope by a self-taught African-American historian.

Former Secret Service agent Paul Landis, largely silent for 60 years, says he found a bullet in Kennedy’s limo. Here's why that’s so significant, if true.

Few realize that the approval process for these outdoor signs varies widely by state and organization, enabling unsanctioned displays to slip through.

When women are missing from the history we tell, sometimes it’s because of how their stories were preserved and told in the past.

"The Day After Trinity" and "The Strangest Dream" evacuate the mythical tropes of the tortured genius biopic that Hollywood loves to rehearse.

Ron DeSantis wants to retrofit history to conform to conservative ideology.

In 2026, we will celebrate the nation’s semiquincentennial, and also the fifth anniversary of the January 6th uprising.

J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project scientists are a rare example of weapons designers who have gone down in history.

Even as the world celebrates hip-hop turning 50, the debate over rap's birth date spins on.

The movie has no interest in reducing the atomic bombings to a trivializing, exploitative spectacle, despite what some would want.

After a year of controversy, the city has narrowed down five options for a monument to the activist and abolitionist.

Our ideas about sexuality and gender have changed before, and now they’re changing again.

What happens when radical historians write for the public.

At 12 years old, Martha Hodes was on board a hijacked plane and was taken hostage for a week. How did she forget much of the experience?

That history has nothing to do with culture wars, and everything to do with what real justice looks like in the United States, and who has access to it.