For those in later years, the bell’s value lay not in its powerful sound, but in its visual representation.

Even before the miniaturization of mokuks as souvenir items, these folded birchbark baskets served as trade items that also facilitated diplomacy between Native and colonial nations.

Historians have not only underestimated the sheer number of underage soldiers who fought for the Union, they have also overlooked the significance of the legal, political, and administrative battles these youths provoked.

While we strive to approach our discipline objectively—to maintain distance—we also want to bridge the gap between ourselves and the past. We want to understand it, to feel it, and distance makes that empathy difficult.

When facilitated responsibly, historical role-play can be an invaluable educational method because it encourages empathy and taking ownership of one’s participation in the classroom.

We are in danger of replicating past commemorations of the Civil War that stressed sectional reconciliation and nation-building at the cost of forgetting the long history of abolitionist activism and the entrenched racial inequalities that abolitionists fought against.

Although the film does effectively elicit laughs and outrage, its overall impact is less than the sum of its parts.

Little is known? One might well say that far too much is known to hold black lives within the comforting confines of a narrative biography.

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

It was far less labor intensive—and therefore less expensive—for a painter or engraver to render a head than a full figure posed against an elaborate background.

It might have been old age that dimmed his memory and robbed him of a garrulousness that likely tired his grandchildren. It might have been the diffidence of a habitual loser unaccustomed to telling officialdom something good about himself. It might have been a posttraumatic reluctance to delve too deeply into old memories of terror and pain.

By the summer of 1881, news of the recently discovered Luray Caverns in Virginia’s famed Shenandoah Valley had spread throughout […]

Civil War Monuments and the Funerary Sphere In a quiet glade amid the trees and lawns of Boston’s Forest Hills […]

The question of national integrity in Canada is a perennial one.

In September of 1776, the Continental Navy became the first American military branch to designate an official uniform. In March […]

To plan for the observation of the events central to the history of seventeenth-century New England, a partnership of organizations and individuals was formed as New England Beginnings in 2015.

Classroom Collaborations, Public Engagement and Adventure This past September, the commemorations of the terrorist attacks on New York City and […]

In conjuring an audience for which the rules of fictional narrative are more immediately recognizable and count as surer argumentative proof than the empirical facts of the everyday, Martin neatly distills some of the stickiest problems of his past and our present.

Dred Scott did not intend to become famous.

As a result of her exemplary efforts, McCaskill has given us not only our richest account of the Crafts’ remarkable lives but also made a significant contribution to African American print culture broadly construed.

Evocations of Survivance: Native Storiers in Word and Image in Remembrance of Sand Creek

Native oral traditions tell us not only about Native histories but also about global imperial conquest and can be interpreted as literal accounts of colonial interaction.

Americans love stories of the Revolutionary era, even if, as recent comments by leading politicians about Paul Revere, the geographic […]

Wandering too is a technique of not looking, a practice of studied indirection. In that way it’s like revising—whether a poem or an entire collection—which is also a way of denying one’s loss of a past through an attempt to re-experience the sensations that accompany originary composition.

The ruins of living beings provoked a twinned awe and horror at the transformative power of new technologies.

Sloane’s embrace of the past ran counter to a stream of thought that was prominent from the beginning of European settlement in North America, one that held that the “New World” represented an opportunity to turn away from the past, and from the ruins and relics of Europe in particular.

Living as I do in Williamsburg, Virginia, I am surrounded by the American Revolution. Here are the buildings where the […]

In Remembering the Civil War, Purdue University historian Caroline Janney challenges the prevailing narrative of Civil War memory, which contends […]

The Greeks were the cradle of the West. No others need apply.

A Cultural Historian’s View of Civil War Memorials at Appomattox, Fredericksburg, and Island Mound When I go to the battlefields, […]

For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground And tell sad stories of the death of kings  When we […]

Since the doleful events of September 11, one of the points made by almost everyone, from the president to television […]

Kentucky’s Belated Embrace of Abraham Lincoln Earlier this year, Skyler Hornback, a 12-year-old from Sonora, Kentucky, racked up $66,600 on […]

Domestic Violation, Women, and Remembrance in Missouri’s Guerrilla Theater The sound of gunfire cracked the morning silence. News that another […]

How does one create memory around an event that has long been lost to history?

Not until the end of the nineteenth century did people begin to think that Monticello, as a historical place, should be preserved in something like its “original state.”

A Historical Turn for the Better, or Worse? Scholars of early America have a complicated relationship with historical movies and […]

The questions and subjects that bring professional historians together at academic conferences deserve to be discussed in wider circles.

Narrative histories of action make us exceedingly conscious of the sequence of events over time. But time plays hide and seek in these small fragments.

It is hard for Kelso to shake off a heritage that seems at once so romantic and so compellingly patriotic.

The Sesquicentennial, the National Park Service, and a Changing Nation It’s a great irony of our history: the places of […]

The making of Civil War memory did not begin only after the war ended. Americans began shaping their memories of […]

“Memory is often owned, history interpreted. Memory is passed down through generations; history is revised.”

A generation away from the Sans Souci, we try to talk about what we see at museums, historic sites, and monuments.

For historians, perhaps the bottom line is whether one learns well or badly from a novel. Is Harrigan’s The Gates of the Alamo a good teacher about Texas in the mid-1830s?

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