So last weekend I was in Washington, D.C. to give a talk at a union conference and then I spent a couple days traveling through Virginia. That part of the trip was funded by grave donations and I assu
Our history is all around us and yet most of us don’t know it because there is no way to know it. Especially for much of our problematic history, there aren’t sites of memorialization or r
One thing that is interesting in the United States right now is that unlike ever before in our history, at least nearly everyone left of center is willing to deal in some way with our unsavory history
During Trump’s grotesque response to Charlottesville, he noted that if we take down statues of our heroes Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, where does it stop? Do we take down the Washington an
Historic homes of famous old white people was one of the first ways Americans began remembering their past. But they have tons of problems. Largely, those problems can be summed up in the word boring.
A central piece of the rhetoric about taking the Confederate flag down from state property and official state symbols is that “it belongs in a museum.” Actually it doesn’t belong in
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 a traditionally oppressed group and I saw word
They say that Orange County is home to the Happiest Place on Earth. For most people, that’s Disneyland. For a cynical left-wing historian, it is the Nixon Library. When I visited Orange County l