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Mount Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota.

The Creator of Mount Rushmore’s Forgotten Ties to White Supremacy

Sculptor Gutzon Borglum was deeply involved with the Ku Klux Klan while designing the Confederate memorial at Stone Mountain, Ga.
People raising their fists and gathered around the Robert E. Lee Memorial in Richmond, Virginia

Europe in 1989, America in 2020, and the Death of the Lost Cause

A whole vision of history seems to be leaving the stage.
Painting of hand-to-hand combat between British Soldiers and American coloniststs.

Who Said, "Don't Fire Till You See the Whites of Their Eyes"?

Israel Putnam? William Prescott? British officers? Was the phrase even uttered at the Battle of Bunker Hill at all?
Boston's Emancipation Memorial depicting a black man kneeling in front of Abraham Lincoln.

Black Bostonians Fought For Freedom From Slavery. Where Are The Statues That Tell Their Stories?

Contrary to the image of the kneeling slave, Black abolitionists did not wait passively for the "Day of Jubilee." They led the charge.

George Washington Would Have So Worn a Mask

The father of the country was a team player who had no interest in displays of hyper-masculinity.

Baseball History and Rural America

Baseball's creation myth is bunk, and historians have shown how important cities were to the game's development. But it was still a rural passion.
Crowds at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis.

The Largest Human Zoo in World History

Visiting the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis.

Don’t Look For Patient Zeros

Naming the first people to fall sick often leads to abuse.

The Myth of the “Sixties”

When we mythologize the ’60s, we lose sight of what’s truly ahead of us.
Superman comic illustration

Why Superheroes Are the Shape of Tech Things to Come

Superman et al were invented amid feverish eugenic speculation: what does the superhero craze say about our own times?

6 Myths About the History of Black People in America

Six historians weigh in on the biggest misconceptions about black history, including the Tuskegee experiment and enslaved people’s finances.
Public art featuring silhouettes of enslaved people.

What Do We Want History to Do to Us?

Zadie Smith on Kara Walker, blackness and public art.

Slavery, and American Racism, Were Born in Genocide

Martin Luther King Jr. recognized that Imperial expansion over stolen Indian land shaped and deepened the American Revolution’s relationship to slavery.

Pioneers of American Publicity

How John and Jessie Frémont explored the frontiers of legend-making.
Photographs of Lilian Smith and Frank Yerby.

Frank Yerby and Lillian Smith: Challenging the Myths of Whiteness

Both Southerners. Both all but forgotten. Both, in their own ways, questioned the social constructions of race and white supremacy in their writings.

If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Batuu

To work, a theme park needs to collapse the mythic pasts that it depicts with the pasts of our own lives.

The Invention of Thanksgiving

Massacres, myths, and the making of the great November holiday.

The Legend of Big Ole

How one monument came to be at the center of Minnesota’s imagined white past.
The Bullion Mine, Virginia City, Nevada, in a village at the foot of a mountain.

Gold Diggers on Camera

Creating the myth of the gold rush with the help of daguerreotypists.
African-American cowboys in Bonham, Texas, circa 1913

The Real Texas

What is Texas? Should we even think about so large and diverse a place as having an essence that can be distilled?

The Vietnam Myth That Gave Us All Those ‘Rambo’ Movies

For decades, conspiracy theorists have clung to the fiction that thousands of soldiers are being held captive in Asia.

Who Speaks for Crazy Horse?

The world’s largest monument is decades in the making and more than a little controversial.

A Brief History of Mostly Terrible Campaign Biographies

“No harm if true; but, in fact, not true.”

"Poor Whites Have Been Written out of History for a Very Political Reason"

For generations, Southern white elites have been terrified of poor whites and black workers joining hands.

How Davy Crockett Became an American Legend

Was Davy Crockett a sellout? And does it matter?
Revolutionary War reenactment.

The Second-Amendment Case for Gun Control

It's a myth that the Founders opposed the regulation of deadly weapons.

Synecdoche, Illinois

A history of how Peoria became a stand-in for the country surrounding it.

The Myth of the Welfare Queen

The right turned Linda Taylor into a bogeyman. But her real life was much more complicated.
Portrait of George Washington with lips pursed.

George Washington's Biggest Battle? With his Dentures, Made From Hippo Ivory and Maybe Slaves' Teeth

The British were a pain, to be sure, but what really caused him trouble were his teeth.

How to Fight 8chan Medievalism—and Why We Must

White supremacists are co-opting the Middle Ages. Fighting back requires us to tell better, fuller stories about the period.

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