;

public history



  • The Victims of Communism Museum is a Propaganda Machine for Normalizing the Hard Right

    by Billie Anania

    The museum, which counts numerous Nazi sympathizers among its founders, peddles a spurious notion of "double genocide" that lets fascists off the hook by promoting the number of 100 million victims of communism. How do they get that tally? Including every German soldier killed on the eastern front and every victim of COVID-19. 



  • Exhibiting the Black Panthers' Ephemera

    An exhibition of the radical group's posters illustrates the importance-and difficulty-of documenting political movements that used visual communications through ephemeral media like postering and newspapers. 



  • 8 Sites Illuminating African American History Show the Need for Preservation

    The National Trust for Historic Preservation is working against time and redevelopment to prevent the loss of key sites of African American history across the nation. So far the project has helped protect a museum of the Buffalo Soldiers, Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church, and Louis Armstrong's house in Queens, among other sites. 


  • The Heroes of Ripley, Ohio

    by David Goodrich

    David Goodrich bicycled 3,000 miles along the routes of the Underground Railroad, encountering the places of history from a new perspective. This excerpt follows him through the Ohio-Kentucky borderland and across the river that marked free territory. 



  • Native Wikipedians Fight Back against Erasure of Indigenous History

    by Kyle Keeler

    While the internet is often seen as a hotbed of revisionism and "political correctness," Wikipedia editors who seek the inclusion of indigenous perspectives on American history often are stymied by resistant editors and the platform's rules, which discount the reliability of new, critical scholarship. 



  • Bemoaning Alabama's King-Lee Holiday Misses a Bigger Point

    by Kevin M. Levin

    While white Alabama still embraces the "lost cause" mythology embodied by Robert E. Lee, outrage about the holiday he shares with Martin Luther King, Jr. shouldn't blind the public to the ongoing struggle to change the commemorative landscape—in Montgomery and nationwide. 



  • Push Confederates Out of Gettysburg for Good

    by Kevin M. Levin

    Why are the forces that fought to preserve slavery, and who invaded the free state of Pennsylvania and kidnapped free Black Americans into slavery in 1863, allowed to march in Gettysburg's Remembrance Day parade? 



  • Monuments to the Unthinkable

    by Clint Smith

    German and European memorials to the Holocaust contrast starkly with an American memorial culture where the Confederate dead are revered, former slave plantations are tourist attractions, and state legislatures are seeking to ban the teaching of the nation's history in full.