Memory

You can bury it. But you can’t escape it.

The National Archives museum is backsliding into a sanitized retelling of American history. Don’t assume truth will prevail.

The unraveling of this long-buried atrocity is forging a path toward reconciliation.

The current political moment is reshaping the narrative about the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet.

Is the United States a prisoner of its own mythology?

The driving question of scholarship should be “what is the evidence for your argument?” Instead, it has become “whose side are you on?”

On Joan of Arc’s much-maligned and forgotten haircut.

What role do we really want history to be playing in our public life? And is the history we have actually doing that work?

The Power Broker leaves us ill-equipped to understand or confront the struggles that face the city today.

Civic thought and leadership institutes will thrive if they promote strong scholarship and courses in traditional fields the mainstream academy slights.

Richard Beck’s “Homeland” traces the far-reaching aftereffects of the attacks and tries to recover the events of the day, as they happened.

There’s hagiography, then there’s...whatever this is.

A new California bill would commemorate 'a dark part of our American history' known as the Mexican 'repatriation' of the 1930s.

On the making of a centuries-old obsession at the heart of American national identity.

Today’s battles over issues like gender nonconformity and reproductive rights have antecedents that have been lost or suppressed. What can we learn from them?

A half-century ago, "Saturday Review" asked some of the era's visionaries for their predictions of what 2024 would look like. Here are their hits and misses.

In the 1920s, many in the U.S. fought for a living Constitution. Plenty of others wanted it dead.

Shedding light on the truth of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.

Questions linger about the assault on Fort Wagner, which took place on this day in 1863.

People who study the past don’t always have special insight into politics. Recent events have made that crystal clear.

How the Wakasa stone, a memorial to a Japanese man murdered in a Utah internment camp, became the flash point of a bitter modern dispute.

Finding a story in the ways Robert Ray Hamilton, John Dudley Sargent, and Edith Sargent weren’t quite forgotten. 

The power of history, numbers, and nostalgia.

The removal of Indigenous people was a national priority with broad consensus.

“Night Flyer” expands Harriet Tubman’s legacy to include her family, community and “eco-spiritual worldview.”

Myths to explain American history and chart a path to the future once helped to bind the country together. Today, they are absorbed into the culture wars.

Appeals against the war in Gaza are often framed through the lens of the future: “You will regret having been silent.” What about the present tense?

A firsthand account of freedom’s earliest celebrations.

And neither do white players from the segregation era.

Eighty years after D-Day, few know one of its darkest stories: the thousands of civilians killed by a carpet-bombing campaign of little military purpose.