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....
Historical Memory
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.
In a response to the growth of ethnically-oriented museums on the National Mall, Rep. James Moran (D-VA) supports the creation of a museum dedicated to the American melting pot as an alternative. Entitled the National Museum of the American People, it would celebrate how Americans...
Neil Genzlinger has a thought provoking piece on the dark side of Ellis Island and American immigration, which he rightfully says is underplayed at the museum: But there’s another side.
Miners experienced awful conditions in the coal regions of West Virginia in the early 20th century. Coal companies ruled the region like a fiefdom. Impoverished workers had few connections with.