In the Oklahoma version of the attack on AP U.S. History standards, the bill (now withdrawn) read: "founding documents of the United States that contributed to the foundation or maintenance of the representative form of limited government, the free-market economic system and American exceptionalism.” In...
Historical Memory
The Equal Justice Initiative has researched a new history of lynching, documenting nearly 4000 lynchings in the South, including attempts to find the precise locations where they took place. The.
The question with what to do with racist monuments is a difficult one. I can certainly understand the desire to change or erase them. If I am a member of.
It's hardly surprising once you think about it, but you probably don't think about it, so it's worth noting the role slavery had in building so many of our older institutions of higher education. Finally, some institutions are becoming serious about remembering that history and...
From a historian's perspective, the most interesting thing about the arrest of Gerry Adams on murder charges is the central role of oral histories given under an understanding of confidentiality..
2010 broke new ground in Confederate nostalgia arguments--defining Denmark Vesey as a terrorist. Global War on Terror indeed. But there's now a Vesey statue up in Charleston, honoring the man.
[ERIK SAYS] This podcast discusses Ari Kelman's new book, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek. It explores how different groups contest the historical meanings of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado. We then go on to talk about the contested...
This Henry Wiencek piece at Smithsonian on Thomas Jefferson's dark side has half-perplexed me, yet the reactions show why it is so necessary. The piece essentially argues that Jefferson was.
I am quite happy that President Obama has created the César Chávez National Monument. Although we are in a moment of much needed Chávez revisionism that begins to take apart.
Somewhat to my surprise this morning, I discovered that Conservapedia actually has an entry on the Pequot War. For you non-colonialists out there, the Pequot War was a war of extermination waged by the Puritans in Massachusetts and Connecticut against the Pequots in 1637. Unlike...
Angus Johnston with a provocative post commemorating the 49th anniversary of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham. First, the girls who were killed that day weren’t small children..
I've expressed my reservations before about the idea of a memorial for Dwight Eisenhower on the National Mall and scoffed at the protests by his granddaughters that part of the.