Memory

As museums formulate their approach to re-contextualization, they must also recognize their own histories of complicity.

Warnings against "normalizing" outrageous political acts misstate the problem. It’s never the immediate present that gets normalized — it’s the not-so-distant past.

Only a small percentage of historical interpreters are black, and Cheyney McKnight is trying to change that.

The Koch Foundation is often praised for its higher-ed funding, but the money is going to some radical professors.

Nuclear heritage and nuclear stewardship in a quiet desert town.

A mix of journalistic mistakes and partisan hackery advanced a pernicious lie about Democrats and the Klan.

The myth of Irish slavery has found fertile ground in Internet memes as a way to derail conversation about the need for affirmative action today.

On the job with a pair of men who dig up bodies for a living.

How do museum gift shops at Civil War sites shape historical memory?

The duck-and-cover school exercises from the nuclear era are being invoked as a parallel to active shooter drills.

Are a few bombastic speeches really enough to wash the bloodstains off Churchill’s racist hands?

"Masterless Men" shows how poor whites benefited from slavery's end, but does not diminish the experiences of the enslaved.

A case study from Texas in how Lost Cause mythology was promoted and reified.

The assumptions of white priority and white domination suffuse every chapter and every theme of the thousands of textbooks that have blanketed the schools of our country.

To begin with, her formal name was Amonute.

Confederate monuments were essential pieces of white supremacist propaganda.

For years, she’s injected subtle, deft works of cultural history into the New York Times.

The people who make it past 100, who watch the most history unfold, are almost all women.

Partisanship is much more polarized by racial attitudes than it was 20 years ago.

But her memoir caused a rift with Mary Todd Lincoln.

During the Civil War, slave pens held captive Confederate soldiers. After, they became rallying points for a newly empowered community.

A historian probes the ‘tragedy’ of the famed scholar's failed WWI history.

A conversation with the creator of a virtual reality experience that takes you inside the protests leading up to MLK Jr.’s death.

When an online news outlet goes out of business, its archives can disappear as well. The new battle over journalism’s digital legacy.

Once John E. Washington started to dig, he found an incredible wealth of untapped knowledge about the 16th president.

Why have Americans been obsessed with this one loss rather than dozens of victories?

Former slaves claimed the president came to plantations disguised as a beggar or a peddler, telling them they’d soon be free. 

Determined researchers are finally drawing the lines between higher education and America's original sin.

Were the founders really warning us about Trump, or were they just playing politics, too?

After my son died, how could I know anything for certain?