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 words like "colored" or "savage" every time I...
Historical Memory
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.
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 who planned a slave rebellion in the heart of the slavery beast. There are some...
[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.
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 the hagiography that plagued early literature on the United Farm Workers, he is still the...
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..
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 Gehry-designed memorial would dare to depict the great man as an average boy growing up...
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.