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. The interviews were stored as Boston College as part of the Belfast Project but the...
Historical Memory
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.
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 a cold calculating slaveholder who did horrible things to black people in order to profit....
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.
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. They were adolescents — three were fourteen years old, and the fourth, Denise McNair, was...
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.
Excellent Peter Birkenhead piece at Alternet on the exclusion of slavery on private plantation home tours in the South. Slave cabins are being turned into spas and restaurants rather than.
I am intrigued by Matthew Frye Jacobson's project to create a modern archive by collecting materials and interviewing people about present-day events. Here's a write-up about it. Jacobson, most noted as the author of Whiteness of a Different Color, and Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival...
If you haven't read Ta-Nehisi Coates' piece on why African-Americans avoid centering the Civil War in their history, why the Civil War is so associated with whites in public memory,.
Historiann has a good post on the problems with teaching the American Revolution: the extreme nationalism of the students on the subject It’s not just that it’s difficult to teach.