historiography

Over the past year, two prominent historians have invited readers to rethink the master narrative of US history.

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

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

The more that historians make their own experiences an explicit part of their work, the harder it will become to let the sources speak clearly.

It is impossible to understand the U.S. without understanding its Indigenous history, writes Ned Blackhawk.

How to understand Adam Smith’s politics.

An overview of historical scholarship and socio-cultural developments in America to explain how racism became institutionalized against Black Americans.

Scholarly accounts of slavery have been changing, but these correctives sometimes say more about historians than the historical subjects they're writing about.

It erases the fact that, for the first 70 years of its existence, the US was roiled by intense, escalating conflict over slavery – a conflict only resolved by civil war.

Or, a lost freedom story I found while looking for something else.

There is no American history without the histories of Indigenous and enslaved peoples. And this past has consequences today.

A new way to think about the American Revolution.

We need to do far more than “give voice to the voiceless" to win justice.

How not to learn about the American past.

Lepore’s framework insists that the “self-evident” truths of the nation’s founding were anything but.

Why did the historian come to fear the very movements he once would have celebrated?

How the Civil War-era historian effectively invented a distinctly American tradition of historiography.

Exploring freedpeople’s struggle against police brutality during Reconstruction.

The Editor of the American Historical Review weighs in on recent historiographical debates around the New York Times' 1619 Project.

Supporters of traditional narratives are fighting to keep their grip on the public imagination.