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The Boston Tea Party, Top to Bottom

A historian attends the 250th anniversary of the Tea Party, and reflects on the ways Americans remember one of the Revolution's main set pieces.
Costumed re-enactors at the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum in Boston.

The Boston Tea Party Turns 250

How does the most famous act of politically motivated property destruction in American history speak to our own polarized moment?
A white mob poses for a photograph in front of the charred remains of the Daily Record building they burned.

Majority-Black Wilmington, N.C., Fell to White Mob’s Coup 125 Years Ago

The 1898 Wilmington massacre overthrew the elected government in the majority-Black city, killed many Black residents and torched a Black-run newspaper.
QR code on a historical monument.

In San Antonio, Remembering More Than the Alamo

Innovators are using digital tools to tell stories of the city’s Black and Latinx history.

Memorializing Racial Terror

An interactive map of lynching markers in the United States.
Modoc leader Captain Jack.

150 Years Ago, the US Military Executed Modoc War Leaders in Fort Klamath, Oregon

A small band of Modoc warriors held off hundreds of U.S. soldiers in California. Ultimately, the conflict left the Modoc leaders dead and the tribe divided.
Chilean President Gabriel Boric at the forty-seventh anniversary of the assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Karpen Moffitt.

The Pinochet-Era Debt that the United States Still Hasn’t Settled

Chile’s president was in Washington over the weekend to mark a grim anniversary. Congress is still asking questions about the U.S. role in the 1973 coup.
Design drawing for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial Competition, 1947.
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A Gateway to the Past

The Arch in St. Louis stands as a monument to contradictory histories.
At the microphone: Louis Armstrong, surrounded by his orchestra, 1931

De-Satch-uration

Louis Armstrong’s complicated relationship with New Orleans.
A man wearing sunglasses holding a sign

Kool Herc and the History (and Mystery) of Hip-Hop's First Day

Even as the world celebrates hip-hop turning 50, the debate over rap's birth date spins on.
Artist Vinnie Bagwell's proposal for a Harriet Tubman statue.

Philadelphia Unveils Proposals for New Harriet Tubman Statue

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

The True History of 'Custer's Last Stand'

We're talking about the Battle of Little Bighorn all wrong.
Lt. Gen. Arthur Gregg attends a ceremony on April 27, 2023, in which a military base was renamed in his honor.

Forts Cavazos, Barfoot and Liberty — New Names for Army Bases Honor New Heroes and Lasting Values

The last relics of ‘lost cause’ ideology are being removed, as a federal panel renames US military bases that honored Confederate generals.
A man speaking to a veteran.

Treason Made Odious Again

Reflections from the Naming Commission, and the front lines of the army's war on the Lost Cause.
A portrait of Jackie Robinson in his Brooklyn Dodgers uniform, circa 1945.

Jackie Robinson Was More Than a Baseball Player

Jackie Robinson is popularly portrayed as the man who broke baseball’s color line by quietly enduring racist abuse. But that narrative is much too narrow.
Protestors gathered at Wounded Knee in 2022, waving the flag of the American Indian Movement and an upside down United States of America flag. (Photograph by Eunice Straight Head)

The Siege of Wounded Knee Was Not an End but a Beginning

Fifty years ago, the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization invited the American Indian Movement to Pine Ridge and reignited a resistance that has not left.
Lithograph of the Haymarket riot.

Chicago Never Forgot the Haymarket Martyrs

Ever since the execution of labor radicals in 1886, reactionaries have tried to tarnish their legacy — and leftists have honored them as working-class martyrs.
A hand-colored 1892 print of the Battle of Fort Pillow, which shows Confederate soldiers massacreing Black soldiers and civilians with knives and bayonets.

At Fort Pillow, Confederates Massacred Black Soldiers After They Surrendered

Targeted even when unarmed, around 70 percent of the Black Union troops who fought in the 1864 battle died as a result of the clash.

A Known and Unknown War

Twenty years later, I am living through the making of the Iraq War as history.
Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia outside the U.S. Capitol in 1965.

The U.S. Senate Has Three Buildings. Why Is One Still Named for a White Supremacist?

Georgia’s Richard Russell was an unrepentant racist. You’d think a name change would be a no-brainer. And yet...
Workmen on the faces of Mount Rushmore, Pennington County, South Dakota, late 1930s. Roosevelt has scaffolding over his face.

President’s Day Is a Weird Holiday. It Has Been Since the Beginning.

How should a republic honor its leaders?
The back of the Hollywood sign at sunset.

The Hollywood Sign Debuted 100 Years Ago in 1923, the Year of L.A.’s 'Big Bang'

The year 2023 marks the centennial of many iconic L.A. landmarks, including the Hollywood sign, Memorial Coliseum, Biltmore Hotel and the Angelus Temple.
For most of her 74 years, Ruth Ann Hills took a certain innocent pride in her family’s story and its place in Staten Island history.  Generations of her family had resided in Mariners Harbor on the island’s North Shore. She and her brother David Thomas live in the house their grandfather built on Van Pelt Avenue. They had found Black ancestors on Staten Island as far back as the 1700s, and incredibly they had all eluded slavery.  Or so Hills thought.   All of that changed one day in 2021, when Hills received a visit from a filmmaker. Heather Quinlan was working on a documentary about a nearby graveyard. Over the course of her genealogical research, Quinlan had discovered that one of the people buried there was Hills’ great-great-great-grandfather.  Neither Hills nor Thomas had ever heard of the man, Benjamin Prine, but his death in 1900 at the age of 106 had been covered by the New York Times and the wire services. Prine, a U.S. veteran of the War of 1812, had been the last enslaved person born on Staten Island, Quinlan told them.  A photograph of a man, seated, holding a cane. The photograph has a long caption beneath, that is headlined "THEY CAN'T TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME." Hills' and Thomas' great-great-great-grandfather, Benjamin Prine.  Staten Island Historical Society. Prine had once been enslaved by Peter Van Pelt, a highly influential Dutch Reformed Church minister – meaning that the street on which the siblings now live took its name from the same white family that enslaved their ancestor.  “I thought I was a big history buff. ‘Oh, I know about history,’” Hills said. “I guess I was naive.”  A crosswalk scene underneath two large street signs that both read "Van Pelt Av." The intersection of Van Pelt Avenue and Forest Avenue on Staten Island. Reece T. Williams/Gothamist

How the Remains of Formerly Enslaved People Came to Rest Beneath a Staten Island Strip Mall

Benjamin Prine's descendants didn’t know about their family ties – or their connection to his enslaver.
Tourists taking photos at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
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Martin Luther King Jr. and the Coca Cola Strategy: Selling King’s Dream to the World

Martin Luther King’s words are available publicly — for a price.
Unionists in East Tennessee Swear Loyalty to the Union Flag in 1862.

Remembering Southern Unionists

Confederate monuments helped to erase the history of those white and black southerners who remained loyal and were willing to give their lives to save the United States.
Company of Black infantry at Fort Lincoln

The Civil War and Natchez U.S. Colored Troops

The Natchez USCT not only contributed to the war effort but was essential to establishing a post-war monument honoring President Lincoln and emancipation.
Brian (Bryan) Farm House, Gettysburg

Walking with Enslaved and Enslavers at Pickett’s Charge (and Retreat)

Today, it’s still nearly impossible to see the Black people whose presence, tramped down for a century and a half, is why this commemorative landscape exists.
Royal Fusiliers War Memorial, 2011. Photograph by Robert Scarth.

Monuments with Mission Creep

On “all wars” memorials.
Photo of the Penn and Slavery Project augmented reality tour

A Bare and Open Truth: The Penn and Slavery Project and the Public

When a university denied its legacy, students and faculty stepped in to do the research.
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Tidying Up the Past

A history tour at Harper’s Ferry suggests that “commemoration” and “desecration” might be two sides of the same coin.

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