Making the Memorial

Maya Lin recounts the experience of creating the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
Sign reading "take it down" in front of Confederate flag

Rebel Yell

The recent march in South Carolina, demanding removal of the Confederate flag from the state Capitol is the latest episode in a long-running debate over slavery's legacy.
A woman in a bathing suit cooling off from an open fire hydrant.

Arthur Miller on Sweltering Summers Before Air-Conditioning

The city in summer floated in a daze that moved otherwise sensible people to repeat endlessly the brainless greeting “Hot enough for ya?”

Who Was Marjory Stoneman Douglas?

A name, now famously associated with a mass school shooting, belonged to a strong advocate for the Everglades.

Who Owns Anne Frank?

The diary has been distorted by even her greatest champions. Would history have been better served if it had been destroyed?
Nuclear weapon mushroom cloud

Mythologizing the Bomb

The beauty of the atomic scientists' calculations hid from them the truly Faustian contract they scratched their names to.
Antiwar protest against the Vietnam War outside the White House.

Viet Guilt

Were the real prisoners of war the young Americans who never left home?
John McCain in 1974.

John McCain, Prisoner of War

John McCain's harrowing account of nearly six years as a North Vietnamese prisoner of war, in his own words.
Martin Luther King, Jr. being arrested in Montgomery, 1958.

Martin Luther King Was a Law Breaker

On the second anniversary of MLK's assassination, political prisoner Martin Sostre wrote a tribute emphasizing his radical disobedience.
Painting imagining John Brown (bearded man embracing Black child), being escorted by authorities.

Eugene Debs’s Stirring, Never-Before-Published Eulogy to John Brown at Harpers Ferry

In 1908, Eugene Debs eulogized John Brown as America's "greatest liberator," vowing the Socialist Party would continue Brown's work. We publish it here in full.
Olauda Equiano.

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano

Olaudah Equiano, native of Africa, survivor of the Middle Passage and enslavement, tells his story.
RuPaul in American flag bodysuit and gloves at 1993 March on Washington.

LGB and/or T History

“Transgender” has gone from an umbrella term for different behaviors, to an umbrella term for different identities.
Portrait of George Washington

Conotocarious

When Native Americans met George Washington in 1753, they called him by the Algonquian name "Conotocarious," meaning "town taker" or "devourer of villages."
The date "1619" bolded against a gray background.

Engaging The 1619 Project

A collection of resources challenging the notion that the U.S. was built on nothing but injustice and subjugation.