Memory

Reflections on the creativity of the founders — and on a few of the historians who have set out to understand them.

“It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.”— Robert E. Lee, at Fredericksburg

An argument against looking at our past through the lens of today.

Was the 'first Thanksgiving' merely a pretext for the bloodshed, enslavement, and displacement that would follow in later decades?

Maya Lin recounts the experience of creating the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

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.

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

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

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

The beauty of the atomic scientists' calculations hid from them the truly Faustian contract they scratched their names to.

A review of Columbus's impact on the political, economic, and religious effects within the Renaissance period of Europe and the beginning of global exploration.

Were the real prisoners of war the young Americans who never left home?

John McCain's harrowing account of nearly six years as a North Vietnamese prisoner of war, in his own words.

On the second anniversary of MLK's assassination, political prisoner Martin Sostre wrote a tribute emphasizing his radical disobedience.

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.

Olaudah Equiano, native of Africa, survivor of the Middle Passage and enslavement, tells his story.

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

When Native Americans met George Washington in 1753, they called him by the Algonquian name "Conotocarious," meaning "town taker" or "devourer of villages."

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