forgetting — Bunk History

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In 1968, Three Students Were Killed by Police. Today, Few Remember the Orangeburg Massacre

The shootings occurred two years before the deaths at Kent State University, but remain a little-known incident in the Civil Rights Movement.

by Lorraine Boissoneault via Smithsonian on February 7, 2018

The Lost Giant of American Literature

A major black novelist made a remarkable début. How did he disappear?

by Kathryn Schulz via The New Yorker on January 29, 2018

Man holding a Veterans for Trump sign at a rally.

Forgotten Men

The long road from FDR to Trump.

by Lawrence B. Glickman via Boston Review on December 12, 2017

What to Do with Monuments Whose History We’ve Forgotten

Few who are memorialized in stone could fully pass moral muster today. Is that a problem?

by Nicholas Lemann via The New Yorker on November 26, 2017

The Amnesia Plot

How 1940s films reinvented the ways stories are told onscreen.

by David Bordwell via Lapham’s Quarterly on October 25, 2017

Title card for Burns and Novick's Vietnam War documentary.

Making History Safe Again: What Ken Burns Gets Wrong About Vietnam

Vietnam was not a "tragic misunderstanding" but a campaign of "imperial aggression."

by Christian G. Appy, Patrick Lawrence via Salon on October 15, 2017

Uncovering Hidden History on the Road to Clanton

Documentary filmmaker Lance Warren interrogates the silence around lynching in the American South.

by Lance Warren via Longreads on October 13, 2017

Was the Declaration of Independence Signed on July 4?

How memory plays tricks with history.

by Ray Raphael via Journal of the American Revolution on October 10, 2017

The 'Slave Block' in a Town in Virginia: Should it Stay or Should it Go?

This is not a monument, it’s a piece of history. But should it be removed from view?

by David Caprara via The Guardian on September 1, 2017

American Sphinx

Civil War monuments erased an emancipated Black population, but the Sphinx looked to an integrated Africa and America.

by Colin Dickey via Longreads on August 31, 2017

Robert E. Lee Statue in Charlottesville.

Why We Need Confederate Monuments

They force us to remember the worst parts of our history.

by Caroline E. Janney via Made By History on July 27, 2017

Why the Civil War West Mattered – and Still Does

The West cared very much about the Civil War.

by Megan Kate Nelson via HistoryNet on June 30, 2017

Oscar Dunn And The New Orleans Monument That Never Happened

New Orleans at 300 returns with a story about a monument that was supposed to be erected in the late 1800s, but never happened.

by Laine Kaplan-Levenson via New Orleans Public Radio on May 25, 2017

Carrie Buck with her mother Emma.

The Forgotten Lessons of the American Eugenics Movement

It's impossible to revisit the history of America's quest for racial purity without sometimes being reminded of the current public discourse.

by Andrea DenHoed via The New Yorker on April 27, 2016

George Washington's pewter bedpan

The Strange Saga of George Washington’s Bedpan

Even the most mundane of objects associated with the Founding Father have a story.

by Cassandra A. Good via Smithsonian on August 20, 2015

There's No National Site Devoted to Reconstruction—Yet

The National Parks Service, which preserves many Civil War sites, is finally looking for a way to mark the struggles that defined its legacy.

by Gregory P. Downs, Kate Masur via The Atlantic on April 29, 2015

Library card catalog card reading "Forgetfulness: see memory."

Historical Amnesias: An Interview with Paul Connerton

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

by Paul Connerton, Sina Najafi, Jeffery Kastner via Cabinet on June 30, 2011

The Colfax Riot

Stumbling on a forgotten Reconstruction tragedy, in a forgotten corner of Louisiana.

by Richard Rubin via The Atlantic on August 22, 2003

Gertrude Berg.

The Forgotten Inventor of the Sitcom

Gertrude Berg’s “The Goldbergs” was a bold, beloved portrait of a Jewish family. Then the blacklist obliterated her legacy.

by Emily Nussbaum via The New Yorker on June 9, 2025

Painting by Hiroki Kawanabe titled Wide Street.

Legacies of Japanese American Incarceration

Brandon Shimoda’s book about the memorialization of Japanese internment camps also speaks to the brutal system of migrant detention that continues to this day.

by Francisco Cantú via New York Review of Books on April 3, 2025

Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln's Duel

In the summer of 1842, young Abraham Lincoln’s razor-sharp wit almost got him into a whole heap of trouble.

by Harold Holzer via The Saturday Evening Post on February 12, 2025

A row of nuclear missiles aimed at a cloudy sky.

The Forgotten Epidemic

The bishops once used their influence to encourage nuclear disarmament. Can they do so again now?

by Alexander Stern via Commonweal on December 21, 2024

An old, crumbling Victorian house with figures from horror, including Toni Collette in Hereditary, a zombie, Edgar Allen Poe, and Stephen King.

American Horror Stories

It just might be the great American art form. You can thank the residents of Salem for that.

by Laura J. Miller via Slate on October 19, 2024

Hideki Tojo in a courtroom testifying at the Tokyo Trial, guarded by American soldiers.

The Hypocrisies of International Justice

A recent history revisits the Tokyo trial.

by Colin Jones via The Nation on September 18, 2024

Collage art of Supreme Court Justices.

Science Historian Naomi Oreskes Schools the Supreme Court on Climate Change

Scientists and lawmakers in the 70s knew more than we think they did about climate change and the impacts of fossil fuel regulations.

by Naomi Oreskes, Jessica McKenzie via Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on August 15, 2024

President Ronald Reagan, pictured waving to a crowd shortly before John Hinckley Jr. tried to assassinate him on March 30, 1981.

The History of Presidential Assassination Attempts, From Andrew Jackson to Teddy Roosevelt

Before last weekend’s attack on Donald Trump, would-be assassins targeted Ronald Reagan, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and seven other presidents or candidates.

by Meilan Solly via Smithsonian on July 17, 2024

State troopers and deputies stand at the entrance to a University of Alabama building in Tuscaloosa on the day in 1963 that George Wallace, Governor of Alabama, said he would defy a Federal order making it mandatory to admit two African American students.

We Must Remember Tuscaloosa's 'Bloody Tuesday'

Black citizens fought for justice and were met with violence. They persevered.

by John M. Giggie via Made By History on June 7, 2024

Person in a red veil.

Connecting with Trans History, Rebellion, and Joy, in “Compton’s 22”

Transgender people's reactions to watching oral histories of the legacy of a 1966 riot in the Tenderloin that was nearly lost to history.

by Drew de Pinto via The New Yorker on June 5, 2024

Lucretia Howe Newman Coleman

Finding Lucretia Howe Newman Coleman

Once a powerful voice in the Black press, Coleman all but disappeared from the literary landscape of the American Midwest after her death in 1948.

by Ashawnta Jackson, Jennifer Harris, H. A. Tanser via JSTOR Daily on May 27, 2024

Ansel Williamson, the trainer whose horse won the first Kentucky Derby, is depicted on the right in the 1864 painting “Ansel Williamson, Edward Brown, and the Undefeated Asteroid,” by Edward Troye.

They Were Born into Slavery. Then They Won the First Kentucky Derby.

As the 150th Kentucky Derby kicks off, the achievements of jockey Oliver Lewis and trainer Ansel Williamson at the first Derby have been largely forgotten.

by Dave Kindy via Retropolis on May 4, 2024

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