Who Writes the World's History?
Who Writes the World’s History?
History is not simply a complete record of everything that happened. It is produced through choices about which events deserve attention, which sources are considered credible, whose experiences are preserved, and who has the authority to interpret the past. Historians play a central role in this process, but they are not the only people who write history. Governments, schools, archives, museums, publishers, journalists, filmmakers, families, community organizations, technology companies, and online volunteers all influence what societies remember.
Historical knowledge depends on evidence, critical inquiry, contextualization, and comparison. Yet the available evidence is never neutral or complete. Records are created by institutions with particular purposes. Some documents are preserved while others are destroyed, censored, neglected, privately held, or never created. Communities with political power have traditionally possessed greater opportunities to document their experiences and present their interpretations as universal history.
The question of who writes history is therefore also a question of power. It concerns who controls archives, educational systems, cultural institutions, media platforms, technologies, and public spaces. It also concerns how people excluded from official records recover their histories through oral testimony, family collections, community archives, art, music, literature, photography, and collective memory.
Historians, Objectivity, and Interpretive Power
Professional historians seek to reconstruct and explain the past through evidence. They examine the origin of sources, compare competing accounts, evaluate reliability, establish context, and distinguish documented claims from speculation. Historical objectivity remains an important aspiration because it requires scholars to test their interpretations against evidence rather than simply repeating political beliefs or inherited myths.
Complete neutrality, however, is difficult to achieve. Historians decide which subjects to investigate, which questions to ask, which sources to prioritize, and how to organize events into a meaningful narrative. Their interpretations are influenced by the intellectual, cultural, and political circumstances in which they work.
Historical narratives may emphasize political leaders, military victories, social movements, economic structures, cultural practices, ordinary lives, or marginalized communities. Each emphasis reveals some aspects of the past while leaving others less visible. The responsibility of historians is not to pretend that interpretation does not exist, but to make their methods transparent, acknowledge uncertainty, consider competing explanations, and remain accountable to evidence.
Political institutions also use history to legitimize authority. Governments may celebrate certain national achievements while minimizing conquest, exploitation, racism, displacement, or resistance. Historical narratives can define who belongs to the nation, who is treated as an outsider, and whose suffering is considered worthy of recognition.
Archives, Silences, and the Limits of Evidence
Archives are among the most powerful institutions in the production of history. They determine which records are collected, classified, described, preserved, digitized, and made available to researchers. Archival systems can give authority to some memories while rendering others difficult to find.
Many archives were created by governments, colonial administrations, churches, corporations, universities, military institutions, and wealthy families. Their records often document the priorities of administrators rather than the experiences of the people being governed. Colonial archives may describe Indigenous peoples, enslaved people, workers, migrants, women, or political dissidents through the language of surveillance, classification, punishment, or control.
Absence in an archive does not necessarily mean that an event did not happen. It may indicate that certain lives were not considered important enough to document, that records were deliberately destroyed, or that people communicated through traditions that institutions did not recognize as legitimate evidence. Silence can therefore reveal how power operated during the creation of the historical record.
Censorship also shapes historical production. Governments and institutions may restrict access to documents, prevent publication, remove subjects from school curricula, intimidate researchers, or suppress public commemoration. Social pressure can produce similar effects when scholars avoid controversial subjects because of professional, financial, or political consequences.
Decolonizing archives involves more than adding overlooked materials to existing collections. It may require changing descriptive language, recognizing community ownership, returning cultural materials, sharing decision-making authority, and questioning the assumption that institutions have an automatic right to possess and interpret records obtained through colonial domination.
Decolonizing History and Challenging Eurocentrism
Eurocentrism presents European experiences, institutions, concepts, and timelines as universal standards for understanding the world. Other societies are then described according to how closely they resemble or differ from European models of civilization, development, literacy, government, religion, science, or modernity.
Decolonizing history challenges this structure. It does not mean rejecting all European history or replacing one exclusive narrative with another. It means examining how colonial power shaped historical categories, archives, academic disciplines, museums, borders, and ideas about legitimate knowledge.
Indigenous historical practices may preserve the past through oral traditions, ceremonies, landscapes, songs, genealogies, material culture, and relationships between generations. These practices cannot always be evaluated according to methods developed for written state records. Respecting Indigenous historical authority requires attention to community protocols, sovereignty, language, and control over cultural knowledge.
Global history attempts to move beyond isolated national stories by examining migration, trade, empire, intellectual exchange, environmental change, and connected political movements. However, global history can reproduce Eurocentrism when Europe remains the assumed center from which ideas and institutions spread outward. A more balanced approach recognizes multiple intellectual traditions and avoids treating any one region as the sole source of historical change.
Decolonization also transforms national histories. Accounts of empire that emphasize exploration, administration, modernization, or national prestige may obscure conquest, forced labor, land seizure, racial hierarchy, cultural destruction, and resistance. Rewriting these narratives requires the inclusion of colonized peoples as historical thinkers and political actors rather than passive subjects of European expansion.
Recovering Indigenous, Black, Women’s, Queer, and Trans Histories
Many people were not entirely absent from historical records but were recorded through the perspectives of those who controlled institutions. Indigenous individuals might appear without their names in colonial photographs. Enslaved people might be listed as property. Women’s intellectual contributions might be attributed to male colleagues. Queer and trans lives might be classified as criminal, medical, immoral, or socially deviant.
Recovering these histories requires reading records against the intentions of their creators. Historians combine official documents with oral testimony, family records, photographs, songs, memoirs, community knowledge, newspapers, legal records, and material objects. They also examine how cataloging systems and historical language reproduce earlier forms of exclusion.
Indigenous history increasingly centers sovereignty, survival, adaptation, land, resistance, and cultural continuity. Survivor testimony has become especially important in documenting boarding schools, forced removals, massacres, and policies intended to erase Indigenous identities. Repatriation and the restoration of personal names challenge institutions that treated Indigenous people and cultural belongings as anonymous research objects.
Black history has transformed understandings of slavery, freedom, labor, family, migration, citizenship, and national development. The archives of slavery often record Black lives through transactions, punishment, surveillance, and violence. Historians therefore use family memory, oral tradition, music, community records, and critical interpretation to reconstruct lives that official institutions documented only partially.
Women’s history demonstrates how recognition is shaped by authorship, ownership, professional networks, and public commemoration. Women have frequently performed intellectual, artistic, scientific, political, and physical labor that later histories credited to men or treated as secondary. Recovering their contributions changes the broader narratives of institutions and historical periods.
Queer and trans histories depend heavily on community archives, personal testimony, diaries, cultural production, and records created by hostile institutions. These histories challenge the assumption that heterosexual and cisgender life represents a timeless social norm. They also preserve experiences of activism, intimacy, care, persecution, grief, creativity, and survival.
Oral History, Family Memory, and Community Archives
Oral history expands the historical record by preserving the testimony of people whose lives may not appear in official documents. Interviews can record everyday experience, emotion, memory, language, community relationships, and the effects of major events on individual lives.
Memory is not an exact recording of the past. It changes over time and is influenced by later experiences, public narratives, trauma, and the circumstances in which a story is told. This does not make oral testimony historically useless. Written records also contain omissions, errors, strategic language, and institutional bias. Oral and written sources must both be interpreted critically.
Living witnesses can challenge official accounts, but interviewing them creates ethical responsibilities. Historians must consider consent, privacy, trauma, ownership, cultural protocols, and the possible consequences of making testimony public. Survivor-centered projects allow participants to exercise greater control over how their experiences are recorded and used.
Family albums, letters, diaries, clothing, songs, recipes, and inherited objects can preserve histories that institutions overlook. Personal archives connect large historical events to intimate experience. They can reveal how war, migration, colonialism, racism, economic change, and political repression affected families across generations.
Community archives allow people to preserve their own records rather than surrendering authority to distant institutions. Local history and history from below emphasize workers, neighborhoods, social movements, families, and ordinary life. These approaches show that historical knowledge is produced not only in universities but also through community organizations, cultural centers, local museums, activist networks, and family collections.
Museums, Restitution, and Colonial Collections
Museums shape history by deciding what to collect, display, interpret, and store. Their exhibitions can transform selected objects into evidence of civilization, national identity, artistic achievement, or scientific knowledge. These decisions are never purely technical.
Many museum collections were assembled through colonial conquest, military expeditions, archaeological removal, missionary activity, racial science, unequal trade, and coercive collecting. Human remains and sacred objects were often taken without the consent of the people or communities concerned.
Restitution and repatriation debates ask whether museums have legitimate ownership of such collections. Returning ancestral remains and cultural materials can acknowledge historical injustice and restore community authority. Restitution may also include shared stewardship, revised descriptions, digital access, community consultation, and changes in institutional governance.
Decolonizing museums requires more than changing exhibition labels. It involves examining staffing, funding, acquisition policies, leadership, interpretation, and relationships with source communities. Museums must decide whether they will continue speaking about communities or create structures that allow communities to speak with authority for themselves.
Museums can also become places of recognition, healing, and public dialogue. Presenting incomplete or contested histories openly may be more honest than claiming that an institution has produced a final and universally accepted narrative.
Monuments, Textbooks, and National Memory
Monuments give historical narratives a physical presence in public space. They honor selected people and events while making particular interpretations appear permanent. The construction of a monument is itself a political act shaped by the circumstances in which it was commissioned.
Debates over colonial monuments, Confederate memorials, medical figures, explorers, and national heroes are not simply arguments about whether history should be remembered. They concern which version of history receives public honor and whether commemoration conceals violence, exploitation, or exclusion.
Removing a monument does not erase history. Monuments are not neutral textbooks; they are forms of public celebration. Communities may choose removal, relocation, reinterpretation, counter-monuments, or new memorials that acknowledge people previously excluded from civic memory.
School textbooks and curricula exercise similar power. They organize complicated histories into accessible narratives for young people, often presenting contested interpretations as settled facts. Political authorities may influence textbook content by defining educational standards, approving materials, or creating state-designed curricula.
Textbooks can reproduce national myths through omissions, euphemisms, heroic storytelling, and unequal attention to different communities. Curriculum reform may integrate Indigenous, Black, immigrant, Asian American, women’s, labor, and queer histories into the main narrative rather than placing them in isolated side sections.
Educational conflict reflects a broader struggle over national identity. What students learn about slavery, colonialism, racism, war, protest, citizenship, and social change influences how they understand present-day institutions and inequalities.
Wikipedia, Artificial Intelligence, and Digital Gatekeepers
Digital platforms have created new forms of historical authority. Wikipedia is often the first source people consult about a person, event, institution, or cultural movement. Its volunteer editors make decisions about reliable sourcing, neutrality, notability, article structure, terminology, and the amount of attention given to different subjects.
Wikipedia’s transparent revision system allows disagreements and corrections to be documented publicly. At the same time, gaps in participation and source availability can reproduce inequalities found in traditional publishing. Women, Indigenous peoples, communities in the Global South, and subjects documented primarily in non-English sources may receive less coverage.
Organized editing projects attempt to close these gaps by creating articles, improving citations, and developing editor communities in multiple languages. These efforts demonstrate that digital historical authority depends on participation as well as technology.
Artificial intelligence introduces another layer of mediation. Language models can summarize documents, identify names in large archives, analyze recurring narratives, and improve access to oral histories. Computational tools can help researchers find people and events hidden within enormous collections.
Algorithms are not neutral historians. Their outputs depend on training data, classifications, ranking systems, modeling choices, and institutional priorities. Biased or incomplete archives can produce biased digital results. Automated summaries may remove context, create unsupported connections, or present uncertain claims with excessive confidence.
The historical use of artificial intelligence therefore requires transparency, human review, source verification, and attention to communities represented in the data. Technology can assist historical research, but it cannot eliminate the ethical and interpretive choices involved in producing knowledge.
Photography, Film, Literature, and Popular Culture
Images do not merely illustrate history. Photographers, editors, publishers, museums, and media platforms determine which images circulate and how they are captioned. Colonial photography often classified people according to racial and cultural hierarchies while concealing the unequal circumstances in which images were produced.
Recovering visual history requires attention to the photographer’s position, the identity and consent of the people depicted, the original purpose of the image, and the institutions that later preserved it. Missing photographs can be as significant as surviving ones when conflict, neglect, censorship, or unequal collecting practices have shaped the visual record.
Film, television, novels, music, fashion, games, and travel writing also influence public understandings of history. Popular narratives may reach much larger audiences than academic scholarship. They can recover forgotten experiences, but they can also repeat myths, simplify complex events, or elevate individual heroes while erasing collaborators and collective labor.
The myth of the universal genius is one example of narrative power. Achievements in science, art, politics, and technology are often attributed to exceptional individuals even when they depended on networks of assistants, workers, communities, predecessors, and institutions. Reexamining these stories reveals the collective nature of historical change.
Popular culture is therefore one of the principal places where societies negotiate the meaning of the past. Historical authority is exercised not only through factual accuracy but also through storytelling, emotional identification, repetition, and visibility.
War, Genocide, and the Ethics of Testimony
Histories of war, genocide, incarceration, massacre, and forced displacement depend on the preservation of names, testimony, documents, landscapes, and material evidence. States and military institutions often create records that justify their actions, minimize responsibility, or reduce victims to numbers.
Survivors, descendants, researchers, and community organizations work to restore individual identities and document experiences excluded from official narratives. Naming victims challenges processes that transform human lives into anonymous statistics.
Testimony can preserve experiences of the Holocaust, colonial massacres, Indigenous violence, Japanese American incarceration, partition, atomic bombing, and other historical traumas. Literature and art may also communicate dimensions of fear, loss, uncertainty, and survival that administrative documents cannot capture.
These histories require careful interpretation. Testimony should not be treated as raw material detached from the people who provided it. Historians and institutions must consider dignity, trauma, consent, political context, and the possibility that public representation may reopen wounds or expose communities to further harm.
Historical recovery can contribute to recognition and healing, but it cannot automatically repair injustice. Archives, memorials, museums, and public apologies have meaning only when accompanied by accountability and material action.
Conclusion
No single person or institution writes the world’s history. History emerges from a continuing struggle among scholars, governments, archives, communities, survivors, educators, cultural institutions, media producers, technology platforms, and audiences.
Those who control records, institutions, funding, education, and public visibility possess enormous influence over what becomes accepted as history. Yet historical authority is never absolute. Official narratives can be challenged by newly opened archives, oral testimony, community research, repatriated collections, family records, digital collaboration, artistic expression, and the recovery of suppressed voices.
A more inclusive history does not simply add forgotten individuals to an unchanged story. It asks why they were excluded, how historical categories were created, who benefited from dominant narratives, and what forms of knowledge were dismissed. It also redistributes authority by allowing communities to participate in the preservation and interpretation of their own histories.
The question “Who writes history?” must therefore remain open. Every generation revisits the past with new evidence, questions, technologies, and ethical responsibilities. The goal is not to produce a final narrative beyond disagreement, but to build historical practices that are transparent, evidence-based, self-critical, inclusive, and accountable to the people whose lives they represent.
Historians, Objectivity, and Power
On History, Objectivity, and Inquiry
| Suzanne Marchand | Perspectives on History | 19 March 2026
Examines why historical objectivity remains an essential aspiration even when historians recognize that evidence is incomplete and interpretation is shaped by the present.
Teaching Critical Thinking with Historical Methodology
| American Historical Association | Perspectives on History | 2025
Shows how sourcing, contextualization, corroboration, and argument can help students distinguish historical inquiry from unsupported claims.
Political Bias in Historiography: An Experimental Study
| L. Schiekiera et al. | F1000Research | 2025
Tests how political predispositions may influence judgments about historical narratives, evidence, and scholarly credibility.
The Power of History: How Does Writing History Influence Notions of Power and Legitimacy in Politics?
| Aleksa Andrejevic | Roar News | 23 November 2023
Explores how political actors use accounts of the past to validate authority, define national identity, and marginalize competing interpretations.
Is History History? Identity Politics and Teleologies of the Present
| Carlos Eire | Perspectives on History | 17 August 2022
Questions how present-day identities and political concerns affect the selection, organization, and moral framing of the past.
The People Who Decide What Becomes History
| Louis Menand | The New Yorker | 11 April 2022
Reviews the institutions, conventions, and gatekeepers that determine which events and people enter widely accepted historical narratives.
History in Public: Power and Process, Harm and Help
| Catherine A. Romein et al. | History | 2022
Considers historians’ public responsibilities and the ways historical interpretation can reinforce power, cause harm, or support communities.
Just the Facts, Ma’am
| Jill Lepore | The New Yorker | 24 March 2008
Reflects on the tension between evidence, storytelling, and authority in the production of historical knowledge.
How Do We Learn from History?
| Lynn Hunt | Perspectives on History | 1 January 2005
Explains why history rarely supplies simple lessons and why responsible comparison requires attention to context and difference.
Bias in Historical Description, Interpretation, and Explanation
| C. Behan McCullagh | History and Theory | 2000
Distinguishes several forms of bias and asks when perspective becomes a distortion rather than a defensible interpretation.
Archives, Silences, and Erasure
Modalities of Censorship in History Production
| Antoon De Baets | On Education | 23 April 2026
Maps the ways states, institutions, and social pressures suppress historical research, publication, teaching, and commemoration.
Absence in the Archives
| Ciara Breathnach | Cambridge University Press | 2026
Treats gaps, losses, and omissions not as empty spaces but as evidence of how archives were created and whose lives were considered recordable.
Unsettling Feelings: Colonial Archives, Decolonial Possibilities
| A. Finden | Global Studies Quarterly | 2026
Examines the emotional and political demands of working with colonial records while seeking decolonial forms of knowledge.
Artifacts and Stories: On Decolonial Method
| The Archive Revisited | The Archive Revisited | 29 December 2025
Proposes reading archives beyond narrow standards of proof by attending to objects, stories, relationships, and community knowledge.
Filed Silences: How Archives Authorize Memory and Make History
| The Swarajya | Medium | 2025
Explains how classification, preservation, and institutional access give some memories authority while leaving others difficult to recover.
Tin Trunks and Other Archives of Trauma
| Rose Miyonga | History Workshop | 1 February 2024
Uses family-held records in Kenya to show how private collections preserve histories of violence that official archives may neglect.
Please Stop Calling Things Archives: An Archivist’s Plea
| Melissa D. Gatter | Perspectives on History | 22 January 2021
Clarifies the professional labor, structures, and power relations that distinguish archives from undifferentiated collections of material.
Archives, Epistemic Injustice and Knowing the Past
| K. Landström | Journal of Applied Philosophy | 2021
Connects archival exclusion to epistemic injustice, showing how unequal record-making limits what later generations can know.
Catching the Activist Archivist Fever
| History Workshop | History Workshop | 27 July 2020
Describes archival practice as activism when communities preserve endangered records and challenge institutional definitions of significance.
See No Evil: Can Archives Prevent Offense? Should They?
| American Historical Association | Perspectives on History | 4 March 2019
Considers how archives should balance access, context, privacy, harm, and the preservation of disturbing historical evidence.
Decolonizing History
On Eurocentrism
| Verfassungsblog | Verfassungsblog | 9 February 2026
Analyzes how European experiences are treated as universal standards and how scholarship can recognize this structure without replacing it with another simplification.
Indigenous Historical Practices
| Mary Katherine Newman | History Workshop | 20 May 2025
Challenges the assumption that legitimate history must follow Western academic forms by examining Indigenous ways of preserving and interpreting the past.
Decolonizing and/or Re-Appropriating the Archive?
| BOASblogs | Decolonizing Anthropology | 22 April 2024
Asks whether colonial archives should be reinterpreted, returned, reorganized, or placed under the authority of source communities.
Successful Approaches to Decolonizing Archives
| American Library Association | ALA News | 9 August 2023
Presents practical approaches to description, access, collaboration, and reparative work in libraries and archival institutions.
The Anthropocene: History and Legacy of the Colonial Mindset
| American Historical Association | Perspectives on History | 16 August 2022
Links environmental history to colonial extraction and questions narratives that distribute responsibility for ecological crisis equally.
Can Photography Be Decolonial?
| Public Books | Public Books | 11 June 2020
Examines whether photographic practices can escape colonial habits of looking, collecting, categorizing, and speaking for others.
The National History Center’s New Teaching Decolonization Resource Collection
| American Historical Association | Perspectives on History | 19 March 2018
Introduces teaching resources that place twentieth-century decolonization within connected global struggles over sovereignty, labor, race, and empire.
Imperial History Wars
| Kim Wagner | History Workshop | 19 March 2018
Explores public disputes over the British Empire and the resistance to histories that center colonial violence and Indigenous perspectives.
Decolonizing the US History Survey
| American Historical Association | Perspectives on History | 2018
Shows how Native voices and digital sources can restructure the standard United States history survey rather than merely supplement it.
Decolonising Archives
| L’Internationale Online | L’Internationale Online | 2016
Collects arguments and practices for confronting the colonial origins, categories, ownership, and interpretation of archival collections.
Indigenous Peoples and Historical Authority
Project Naming
| History Workshop | History Workshop | 28 August 2025
Describes efforts to restore names and identities to Indigenous people represented anonymously or inaccurately in colonial photographs.
Indigenous History in Rap Music Videos
| History Workshop | History Workshop | 26 June 2025
Shows how Indigenous musicians use popular media to narrate colonization, survival, land, and identity outside academic institutions.
Sites for All
| American Historical Association | Perspectives on History | 15 January 2025
Examines efforts to make historic sites more accountable to Native communities and more inclusive in their interpretation of contested landscapes.
Histories of Resilience
| American Historical Association | Perspectives on History | 5 December 2024
Highlights histories that foreground Indigenous persistence and adaptation rather than presenting Native peoples only through narratives of disappearance.
Healing Soul Wounds: Grappling With the Indian Boarding School Era
| Maddie Henderson | Smithsonian Magazine | 30 September 2023
Centers survivor testimony and community healing in confronting the history and continuing effects of Indigenous boarding schools.
A Case Study on Record Matching of Individuals in Historical Archives of Indigenous Databases
| Matthew Currie and Ramon Lawrence | arXiv | 15 February 2023
Demonstrates methods for connecting fragmented records while acknowledging the ethical and technical problems in colonial databases.
Listening to Alaska Native Elders
| American Historical Association | Perspectives on History | 11 August 2022
Shows how oral history and digital platforms expand national narratives by placing Alaska Native knowledge at the center.
New Study Adds to Decade-Old Repatriation of Sitting Bull’s Belongings
| Abigail Eisenstadt | Smithsonian Magazine | 9 November 2021
Connects scientific research, museum collecting, and repatriation debates surrounding belongings associated with Sitting Bull.
Indigenous Oral Histories and Primary Sources
| The Canadian Encyclopedia | The Canadian Encyclopedia | 30 October 2020
Explains the status of oral tradition as primary evidence and the need to evaluate it according to Indigenous contexts and protocols.
The Futures of Native American History in the United States
| American Historical Association | Perspectives on History | 1 December 2012
Surveys changing methods and priorities in Native American history, including sovereignty, borderlands, community collaboration, and Indigenous epistemologies.
Oral History and Living Memory
As Native American Boarding Schools Project Ends, Survivors Describe Feeling Honored and Restored
| Associated Press | AP News | 23 June 2026
Reports on a survivor-centered oral-history project and the value participants place on having their experiences formally heard and preserved.
The Shape of Testimony
| Itamar Trainin et al. | arXiv | 20 May 2026
Studies the structures through which testimony becomes evidence, narrative, and collective memory in digital historical collections.
The Archive as Activism
| History Workshop | History Workshop | 3 March 2026
Shows how recording lived experience can turn archiving into a political practice that protects threatened communities and environments.
Large Language Models for Oral History Understanding
| Komala Subramanyam Cherukuri et al. | arXiv | 8 August 2025
Evaluates how language models might help search and interpret oral histories while raising questions about context, bias, and automation.
Preserving Living Memory
| Smithsonian Institution | Smithsonian Magazine | 12 May 2025
Describes initiatives that preserve firsthand memory while supporting community ownership, education, and intergenerational transmission.
From Place to Place
| History Workshop | History Workshop | 30 January 2025
Uses memory, movement, and place-based storytelling to recover histories that are difficult to locate in official documentary records.
Accessing Collective Memory: The Role of Oral History in Inclusive Archives
| Emerald Publishing | Collection and Curation | 17 October 2023
Argues that oral-history programs can widen archival participation and preserve experiences excluded by institutional collecting practices.
New Collections: Pandemic Oral History Project
| Ben Gillespie | Smithsonian Magazine | 6 May 2021
Documents how interviews with artists captured immediate experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic for future historical research.
How Do We Write the History of Our Lifetimes?
| History Workshop | History Workshop | 9 September 2020
Considers the opportunities and ethical difficulties of writing histories whose participants, witnesses, and consequences remain present.
The Memory Keeper
| Masha Gessen | The New Yorker | 19 October 2015
Profiles the struggle to preserve personal and collective memory against state violence, forgetting, and the disappearance of witnesses.
Black History and the Archives of Slavery
How a Leading Black Historian Uncovered Her Own Family’s Painful Past
| Sara Georgini | Smithsonian Magazine | 5 March 2025
Follows historian Martha S. Jones as she combines family records and public archives to reconstruct lives shaped by slavery and racism.
Going “Black to the Future”
| JSTOR Daily | JSTOR Daily | 4 April 2024
Examines Black speculative practices that use history to imagine futures beyond archives structured by racial violence and exclusion.
How the Memory of a Song Reunited Two Women Separated by the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
| Joshua Kagavi | Smithsonian Magazine | 29 February 2024
Shows how oral tradition preserved a connection across generations and continents when written records could not.
On Black Cultural Memory
| History Workshop | History Workshop | 21 November 2023
Explores the practices through which Black communities remember, transmit, contest, and reinterpret experiences omitted from official narratives.
Thavolia Glymph Presidential Address
| Thavolia Glymph | American Historical Association | 2023
Uses family memory and Black women’s history to reflect on archives, freedom, labor, violence, and the historian’s craft.
Slavery’s Archive: Confronting Jesuit Slaveholding at Georgetown University
| American Historical Association | Perspectives on History | 2022
Examines how institutional records can expose slaveholding while descendants and communities reshape the meaning of that evidence.
How Saidiya Hartman Retells the History of Black Life
| Alexis Okeowo | The New Yorker | 19 October 2020
Profiles a historian whose method combines archival research and critical imagination to recover Black lives recorded mainly through violence.
A Difficult Past: Interpreting Slavery at Presidential Plantations
| American Historical Association | Perspectives on History | 16 February 2018
Discusses how historic sites negotiate resistance to presenting enslaved people as central actors in presidential history.
Retracing Slavery’s Trail of Tears
| Edward Ball | Smithsonian Magazine | November 2015
Reconstructs the forced migration of enslaved people through records, landscapes, and family histories often overshadowed by national mythology.
The Legacies of British Slave-Ownership
| Katie Donington | History Workshop | 3 November 2014
Uses compensation records to reveal how slavery’s wealth and influence permeated British institutions, families, and public life.
Women Who Were Written Out
She Wrote the History of Photography. Then They Cruelly Erased Her From It
| Digital Camera World | Digital Camera World | 2026
Revisits Lucia Moholy’s foundational photographic work and the processes through which authorship, ownership, and recognition were taken from her.
Honoring the Overlooked Contributions of Women Anthropologists in the National Anthropological Archives
| Smithsonian Institution | Smithsonian Magazine | 13 March 2024
Recovers women’s intellectual and fieldwork contributions hidden by cataloging practices and male-centered disciplinary histories.
Woman on a Mission
| JSTOR Daily | JSTOR Daily | 21 September 2022
Reconsiders a woman’s historical agency through records that reveal a more complex life than conventional summaries allow.
Unreal Realism: Chicago’s Avant-Garde Women
| Public Books | Public Books | 3 May 2022
Highlights women artists whose experimental work was marginalized in standard accounts of modern American art.
Elizabeth Keckley’s Memoir, Behind the Scenes
| JSTOR Daily | JSTOR Daily | 10 March 2022
Reads Keckley’s memoir as an assertion of Black female authorship against efforts to discredit her testimony and control her story.
Radical Objects: ‘These Are Not Ordinary Women’
| History Workshop | History Workshop | 9 August 2021
Uses photographs of women workers in wartime India to question colonial representations and restore women’s labor to historical view.
Public Thinker: Annette Joseph-Gabriel on Black Women, Frenchness, and Decolonization
| Public Books | Public Books | 9 October 2020
Discusses Black women thinkers whose political and intellectual work changes established narratives of France and decolonization.
Beyond ‘Misbehaviour’: Sally Alexander in Conversation
| History Workshop | History Workshop | 11 March 2020
Reflects on feminist history, collective scholarship, and the struggle to make working-class women visible as historical actors.
Why We Need to Start Building Monuments to Groundbreaking Women
| Liza Mundy | Smithsonian Magazine | 1 March 2018
Shows how the scarcity of public monuments to women shapes assumptions about who made history and deserves civic remembrance.
Sports History Forgot About Tidye Pickett and Louise Stokes
| Matt Osgood | Smithsonian Magazine | 15 August 2016
Recovers two Black women athletes whose Olympic achievements were diminished by racism, sexism, and selective sports memory.
Queer and Trans Histories
The Oral Histories of the AIDS Crisis
| Liz Tracey | JSTOR Daily | 3 June 2026
Surveys oral-history collections that preserve everyday experience, activism, grief, care, and survival during the AIDS crisis.
Queer Non-Monogamy in Edwardian London
| History Workshop | History Workshop | 19 May 2026
Uses scattered records to reconstruct relationships that did not fit legal or social categories preserved by conventional archives.
Against American Cistory
| Public Books | Public Books | 6 February 2026
Challenges official narratives that erase queer and trans experience by treating heterosexual and cisgender life as historically universal.
These LGBTQ+ Archives Defy Erasure, One Memory at a Time
| WIRED | WIRED | 13 July 2025
Profiles community archives protecting LGBTQ+ materials from political suppression, institutional neglect, and digital disappearance.
Honouring Trans Lives, Historicising Trans Death
| Jamey Jesperson | History Workshop | 20 November 2020
Examines how memorial practices can honor trans people without reducing their histories to violence and death.
And a Fabulous LGBTQ History Month to You, Too!
| JSTOR Daily | JSTOR Daily | 10 October 2020
Introduces scholarship that expands queer history beyond celebrated individuals to communities, institutions, culture, and resistance.
Why We Need a Queer History of the Holocaust
| Anna Hájková | History Workshop | 19 February 2020
Argues that sexuality and gender are necessary to understand persecution, survival, intimacy, and memory during the Holocaust.
Gentleman Jack: From History Workshop to HBO
| Jill Liddington | History Workshop | 10 December 2019
Traces how Anne Lister’s diaries moved from archival scholarship into television and global popular culture.
Underneath the Arches: Gilbert & George, Homosociality and Post-War Reconstruction
| History Workshop | History Workshop | 28 January 2019
Uses art and urban history to examine sexuality, masculinity, and belonging in postwar Britain.
Queer Filing Cabinets to Take Over the Streets of London
| History Workshop | History Workshop | 17 November 2016
Describes a public-history project that brings queer archival material into city streets and challenges institutional control of memory.
Museums, Restitution, and Colonial Collections
Q&A: ‘It Was Important Not to Wait for a Finished Narrative’
| Museums Association | Museums Journal | 19 February 2026
Discusses presenting incomplete and contested histories openly rather than waiting for institutions to declare a single authoritative account.
Hunterian Returns Ancestral Human Remains to South Africa
| Museums Association | Museums Journal | 17 October 2025
Reports on repatriation and the ethical reassessment of collections created through colonial extraction and racial science.
Global Majority Cultural Space to Open in London
| Museums Association | Museums Journal | 2 October 2025
Describes a cultural institution intended to give historically marginalized communities greater authority over representation and interpretation.
All of This for All of You
| History Workshop | History Workshop | 14 August 2025
Reflects on museums as contested public resources and asks who collections, exhibitions, and institutional expertise are meant to serve.
University of Edinburgh Reviews Historic Links to Slavery and Racism
| Museums Association | Museums Journal | 4 August 2025
Covers an institutional investigation into how wealth, scholarship, and collecting were connected to slavery and racial hierarchy.
Q&A: ‘Archives Can Offer a Cathartic Moment That Transcends Time and Space’
| Museums Association | Museums Journal | 6 June 2025
Explores how archives can support recognition, emotional connection, and repair for communities separated from their histories.
Is There Really Fashion in Jamaica?
| History Workshop | History Workshop | 29 May 2025
Challenges Eurocentric museum definitions of fashion and centers Jamaican creativity, history, and cultural authority.
Coloniality and the British Museums
| Meriem El Fassi | History Workshop | 22 February 2024
Examines how colonial assumptions continue to shape museum ownership, classification, display, and claims of universality.
Profile: ‘I’ve Always Thought Museums Have a Spiritual Part to Play’
| Museums Association | Museums Journal | 12 August 2022
Considers museums as spaces of cultural responsibility, ancestry, healing, and relationship rather than neutral storehouses.
Supporting Decolonisation in Museums
| Museums Association | Museums Association | 2021
Offers guidance for changing museum governance, collecting, interpretation, workforce practices, and relationships with communities.
Monuments and Public Memory
The History of Racism and Racist Violence: Monuments and Museums
| American Historical Association | American Historical Association | 16 June 2024
Provides resources for understanding how museums and monuments construct public narratives about racism and racial violence.
Monuments and Public History
| American Historical Association | History in Focus | November 2023
Discusses how monuments gain authority, why they become contested, and how public historians interpret their changing meanings.
Land Acknowledgments: Helpful, Harmful, Hopeful?
| American Historical Association | Perspectives on History | 5 October 2022
Evaluates whether land acknowledgments promote historical accountability or become symbolic statements detached from material action.
Debating ‘Discoveries’: Colonialism and Public History in Portugal
| History Workshop | History Workshop | 17 February 2020
Examines disputes over monuments and commemorations that celebrate Portuguese exploration while minimizing colonial conquest and slavery.
The Costs of the Confederacy
| Brian Palmer and Seth Freed Wessler | Smithsonian Magazine | December 2018
Investigates the continuing public expense and political influence of Confederate monuments, museums, cemeteries, and heritage organizations.
Can We Right the Past? Memory and the Present
| Caroline E. Janney | Perspectives on History | 12 April 2018
Considers what removing, relocating, or reinterpreting monuments can and cannot repair about historical injustice.
What Should We Do With Confederate Monuments?
| Dane Kennedy | Perspectives on History | 30 October 2017
Reviews possible responses to Confederate memorials and the historical claims embedded in their creation and preservation.
Memory and Medicine: A Historian’s Perspective on Commemorating J. Marion Sims
| American Historical Association | Perspectives on History | 17 September 2017
Uses a medical monument controversy to show how commemoration can obscure exploitation and exclude the people who bore its costs.
Whose Memory? Whose Monuments?
| James Grossman | Perspectives on History | 1 February 2016
Argues that monument debates concern public power and ethical responsibility, not simply whether historical facts should be preserved.
Timeliness and (Holocaust) Memory
| History Workshop | History Workshop | 6 October 2014
Reflects on how the timing and political context of commemoration shape what societies remember about mass violence.
Textbooks and Curriculum Wars
Texas’ New History Curriculum Could Give State Unprecedented Control
| Houston Chronicle | Houston Chronicle | 13 July 2026
Reports on a state-designed curriculum that raises questions about political control over textbook narratives and classroom interpretation.
UCLA Online Textbook Gives Voice to AAPI History
| Associated Press | AP News | 9 May 2026
Describes a digital textbook designed to integrate Asian American and Pacific Islander experiences often omitted from standard surveys.
On School History Textbooks
| Independent Social Research Foundation | ISRF | 19 January 2026
Explores textbooks as political and cultural artifacts that define legitimate knowledge about nations, identities, and conflict.
Collective Memory and History Textbooks: A Review
| I. Sakki et al. | Current Opinion in Psychology | 2025
Reviews how textbooks transmit collective memory, national identity, intergroup narratives, and selective interpretations of the past.
What’s Being Taught? Mapping the Landscape of US History Education
| American Historical Association | Perspectives on History | 2 May 2024
Maps variation in history standards and curricula to show how students encounter sharply different versions of the national past.
What Reading 220 History Textbooks Taught One Scholar About Racism in America
| Olivia B. Waxman | TIME | 27 September 2022
Examines how textbooks normalized white supremacy through omissions, euphemisms, narrative structure, and the presentation of racial inequality.
Decolonising the History Curriculum: Considering National Narratives
| Tina van der Vlies | EuroClio | 11 May 2021
Compares national textbook narratives and proposes ways to reveal their assumptions, exclusions, and global entanglements.
Misusing History: Lessons Learned From Studying History Textbooks
| The Disorder of Things | The Disorder of Things | 20 July 2020
Shows how textbook narratives can turn contested interpretations into apparent facts and reproduce political myths.
A Literature Review on New Insights From History Textbook Research
| Maria Grever and Tina van der Vlies | London Review of Education | 2017
Surveys research on textbook production, narrative, images, reception, national identity, and the perspectives excluded from school history.
The Right Kind of History: Teaching the Past in Twentieth-Century England
| History Workshop | History Workshop | 2 January 2012
Traces recurring political struggles over which histories schools should teach and what kind of citizen those histories should produce.
Global History and Eurocentrism
Centrisms
| Cambridge University Press | Rethinking Global History | 14 November 2024
Analyzes how geographical and civilizational centers organize global narratives and offers ways to avoid replacing one center with another.
Eurocentrism and Global Intellectual History
| Oxford Centre for Intellectual History | University of Oxford | 18 October 2024
Considers how global intellectual history can address unequal archives and conceptual traditions without treating Europe as the universal source of ideas.
Why Play at Orientalism?
| Public Books | Public Books | 24 June 2021
Examines how games and popular culture reproduce imagined East-West divisions inherited from imperial scholarship.
Africa’s Ancient Scripts Counter European Ideas of Literacy
| D. Vance Smith | Aeon | 17 June 2021
Uses African writing systems to challenge colonial definitions of literacy that shaped claims about civilization and historical capacity.
How to Be a Global Historian
| Public Books | Public Books | 15 September 2016
Discusses the scale, methods, and ethical choices involved in writing histories that cross borders without flattening local difference.
Why Caribbean History Matters
| Ada Ferrer | Perspectives on History | 1 March 2014
Shows how Caribbean history transforms understandings of empire, revolution, slavery, race, migration, and the making of the modern world.
Overcoming Eurocentrism? Global History and the Oxford Handbook
| Anne-Charlotte Martineau | European Journal of International Law | 2014
Assesses whether global historical approaches genuinely displace European frameworks or merely extend them to a wider map.
Is European History Passé?
| Lynn Hunt | Perspectives on History | 1 November 2002
Asks how European history should change when it is no longer treated as the default framework for world history.
Eurocentrism and Its Discontents
| Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom | Perspectives on History | 1 January 2001
Explores critiques of Eurocentrism and the challenge of building broader narratives without abandoning comparison or chronology.
Taking Stock: Five Years of Editing the AHR
| Michael Grossberg | Perspectives on History | 1 September 2000
Reflects on how a leading historical journal’s editorial choices influence fields, methods, geographic coverage, and scholarly visibility.
National Narratives and Empire
An Unreliable Archive of Internationalism
| History Workshop | History Workshop | 2 June 2026
Uses unstable and partial records to examine how internationalist movements are remembered through national and institutional frames.
The World’s Memory: Why Nigeria Is Burying Its History Under a Mountain in Svalbard
| The Guardian | The Guardian | 17 March 2026
Reports on Nigeria’s effort to safeguard cultural records and asks who controls the technologies and locations of long-term historical preservation.
Forgotten Horses: How Two Grand Histories Gallop Past Power’s Real Engine
| The Economic Times | The Economic Times | 2026
Argues that sweeping histories can overlook animals, labor, and material systems that made conquest and state power possible.
The Thiaroye Massacre in Senegal in 1944 Marked the Reestablishment of Colonial Order
| Le Monde | Le Monde | 25 October 2025
Reframes the killing of West African soldiers as a foundational act of postwar colonial repression rather than an isolated military incident.
History Workshop: A South African Movement
| History Workshop | History Workshop | 5 November 2024
Traces a movement that joined scholarship and activism to write histories of workers, communities, apartheid, and resistance from below.
‘I Was in Tears’: Exhibition Tells Human Stories of Portugal’s Colonial Legacy
| The Guardian | The Guardian | 30 August 2024
Describes an exhibition using family photographs and diaspora voices to challenge sanitized national memories of Portuguese empire.
Where Is the Archive, Anyway? A Conversation About Empire and Filipinx Studies
| Public Books | Public Books | 19 October 2023
Discusses how Filipinx histories are dispersed across imperial institutions, family memory, migration, and cultural production.
The British Empire Was Much Worse Than You Realize
| Daniel Immerwahr | The New Yorker | 28 March 2022
Reviews evidence of systematic violence and archival concealment that undermines benevolent narratives of British rule.
Imperialism: A Syllabus
| Public Books | Public Books | 14 May 2021
Provides readings for understanding empire as a political, economic, cultural, and intellectual system with continuing effects.
Black and Asian Soldiers and the White Man’s War
| John Siblon | History Workshop | 26 April 2021
Examines the unequal commemoration of colonial troops and how imperial racial hierarchies continued into war graves and official memory.
Community History and History From Below
Reflections on a Radical Archive
| History Workshop | History Workshop | 16 April 2026
Reflects on community-controlled collections that preserve movements and everyday lives excluded by traditional archival priorities.
New Campus Cartographies
| American Historical Association | Perspectives on History | 30 September 2025
Shows how mapping campus histories can expose relationships among land, labor, slavery, Indigenous dispossession, and institutional memory.
History Hiding in Plain Sight
| Smithsonian Affiliations | Smithsonian Magazine | 8 September 2021
Highlights local objects and places whose significance emerges when communities participate in interpreting their own histories.
Local History: A View From the Bottom
| History Workshop | History Workshop | 5 December 2016
Argues that local history can reveal structures of power through ordinary lives rather than serving only antiquarian or nostalgic interests.
The Power of Public History
| Vicki L. Ruiz | Perspectives on History | 1 February 2015
Shows how historic sites and public projects can recover hidden violence and create space for communities to challenge dominant memory.
History Harvests: What Happens When Students Collect and Digitize the People’s History
| American Historical Association | Perspectives on History | 1 January 2013
Describes partnerships in which students digitize family and community materials while leaving ownership with participants.
Negotiating Histories: Perspectives on Public History
| American Historical Association | Perspectives on History | 1 May 1999
Examines public history as negotiation among scholars, institutions, audiences, funders, communities, and political authorities.
Public History in the New South Africa
| American Historical Association | Perspectives on History | 1998
Considers how museums, memorials, and public institutions reinterpreted national history after apartheid.
Who Owns History? History in the Profession
| American Historical Association | Perspectives on History | 1 November 1996
Asks how professional authority relates to the claims of communities, audiences, institutions, and people represented in historical work.
The Education-Entertainment Continuum
| American Historical Association | Perspectives on History | 1 March 1995
Explores the compromises involved when public history competes for attention through spectacle, storytelling, and commercial media.
Wikipedia and Digital Historical Authority
Wikipedia Celebrates 25 Years of Knowledge at Its Best
| Wikimedia Foundation | Wikimedia Foundation | 15 January 2026
Reflects on a quarter-century of collaborative knowledge production and the global communities that decide what Wikipedia records.
Meet the Young Wikipedians Writing the Front Page of Music History
| Pitchfork | Pitchfork | 2026
Profiles volunteer editors whose sourcing and classification decisions shape the first historical account many readers encounter about music.
Keeping Information Reliable in the Digital Age
| Wikimedia Foundation | Wikimedia Foundation | 18 September 2025
Explains Wikipedia’s systems of citations, volunteer review, transparency, and revision amid growing online misinformation.
‘We’re Writing History’: Spanish Women Tackle Wikipedia’s Gender Gap
| The Guardian | The Guardian | 12 June 2024
Profiles editors creating biographies of women and confronting the structural reasons women remain underrepresented online.
Six Years, 100,000 Articles: WikiGap Is on a Mission to Close Wikipedia’s Gender Gap
| Wikimedia Foundation | Wikimedia Foundation | 8 March 2023
Documents a global campaign to expand coverage of women while developing editor communities in multiple languages.
Don’t Ask Wikipedia to Cure the Internet
| Noam Cohen | WIRED | March 2018
Warns that relying on Wikipedia to correct other platforms ignores the labor, limits, and governance of its volunteer knowledge system.
Analysing Timelines of National Histories Across Wikipedia Editions
| Anna Samoilenko et al. | arXiv | 24 May 2017
Compares language editions to show how national communities emphasize different events and periods in their historical timelines.
Teaching Digital History With Wikipedia
| Wiki Education | Wiki Education | 26 January 2017
Shows how editing Wikipedia makes students confront sourcing, public audience, neutrality, notability, and gaps in historical coverage.
Women Through the Glass Ceiling: Gender Asymmetries in Wikipedia
| Claudia Wagner et al. | arXiv | 19 January 2016
Measures differences in the representation, language, and visibility of women and men across Wikipedia biographies.
First Women, Second Sex: Gender Bias in Wikipedia
| Eduardo Graells-Garrido et al. | arXiv | 9 February 2015
Analyzes how biography selection and wording reproduce gendered ideas about achievement, relationships, and historical importance.
Artificial Intelligence and Algorithmic History
WikiSTAR: The Hidden History of Scientific Wikipedia Articles
| Omer Ehrlich et al. | arXiv | 14 July 2026
Uses revision histories to study how scientific knowledge changes through collaborative editing, dispute, correction, and accumulated labor.
Historians On: AI in Teaching and Research
| American Historical Association | History in Focus | 18 December 2024
Discusses opportunities and risks of generative AI for historical research, classroom practice, evidence, authorship, and trust.
Teaching and Pedagogy in the September Issue of the American Historical Review
| American Historical Association | Perspectives on History | 18 September 2023
Introduces scholarship on historical learning in an era increasingly shaped by digital tools and automated text generation.
Why Modeling? The Visual as a Reflection of Intellectual Perspectives in Medieval History
| Nicolas Perreaux | arXiv | 6 September 2023
Shows how data models and visualizations encode historians’ assumptions rather than offering neutral pictures of the medieval past.
Unsilencing Colonial Archives via Automated Entity Recognition
| Mrinalini Luthra et al. | arXiv | 3 October 2022
Uses computational methods to surface people and places in colonial records while confronting biased language and archival structure.
RELATIO: Text Semantics Capture Political and Economic Narratives
| Elliott Ash et al. | arXiv | 3 August 2021
Develops tools for detecting recurring narratives in large text collections and demonstrates how computational choices shape interpretation.
Curating China’s Cultural Revolution: CR/10
| Rongqian Ma | arXiv | 4 April 2021
Explores digital curation of Cultural Revolution materials and the challenges of preserving fragmented, censored, and politically sensitive histories.
Visualizing a Large Spatiotemporal Collection of Historic Photography
| Taylor Arnold et al. | arXiv | 4 September 2020
Presents an interface for exploring photographic archives while considering how search and visualization direct historical attention.
Machine Learning Based Analysis of Finnish World War II Photographers
| Kateryna Chumachenko et al. | arXiv | 22 April 2019
Uses computer vision to study wartime photography and reveals both the possibilities and limitations of algorithmic interpretation.
History by Diversity: Helping Historians Search News Archives
| Jaspreet Singh et al. | arXiv | 24 October 2018
Designs search tools that expose diverse perspectives rather than ranking only the most conventionally relevant archival results.
Photography, Film, and Visual Archives
Cinema, Revolution and Popular Education
| History Workshop | History Workshop | 31 March 2026
Examines film as a means of producing political memory and teaching history outside formal classrooms.
Who Controls the Image? Memory, Power, and Fashion
| Vogue | Vogue | February 2026
Considers how images create cultural memory and how ownership, circulation, and fashion institutions determine what remains visible.
This Adoptee Discovered a Trove of Documents in a Nun’s Basement
| Nina Strochlic | Smithsonian Magazine | 8 October 2025
Shows how rediscovered records complicate the heroic public narrative surrounding Operation Babylift and restore adoptees’ perspectives.
Algeria Through Pierre Bourdieu’s Lens
| Le Monde | Le Monde | 3 January 2025
Reconsiders photographs made during the Algerian War as historical evidence shaped by colonial violence and the photographer’s position.
Voicing Silences in the Colonial Photographic Archive
| Paul Basu | Visual Anthropology Review | 2025
Experiments with methods for confronting the absent voices, coercive contexts, and colonial classifications embedded in photographs.
A Massive Archive Tells the Story of Early African American Photographers
| Richard Grant | Smithsonian Magazine | July/August 2023
Highlights a vast collection that expands the history of photography through Black studios, clients, communities, and visual self-representation.
Dissecting the Value of Photographic Histories
| Gale Review | Gale Review | 20 December 2022
Explains how editorial selection, captions, and publication context affect the historical meaning of photojournalism archives.
The Photo Album That Succeeded Where Pancho Villa Failed
| Smithsonian Magazine | Smithsonian Magazine | 9 February 2022
Shows how a constructed photographic album shaped foreign perceptions of revolution more effectively than military action alone.
When the Nazis Murdered Thousands by Sending Them on Death Marches
| Livia Gershon | Smithsonian Magazine | 18 May 2021
Uses survivor testimony, photographs, and research to document a phase of the Holocaust long overshadowed in public memory.
Paradise in Missing Pictures: A Brief and Incomplete History of Sri Lankan Photography
| History Workshop | History Workshop | 15 July 2019
Reads absences in Sri Lanka’s photographic record as consequences of colonial collecting, conflict, loss, and unequal preservation.
Family History and Personal Archives
The Emotional Textures of the Archive
| Alisa Kuzmina | Perspectives on History | 20 August 2025
Connects immigration research with the author’s own bureaucratic experience to show how archival documents carry personal emotion and state power.
Strangers in the Family Album
| Public Books | Public Books | 31 July 2025
Reflects on Soviet family photographs as unstable records of intimacy, identity, political change, and unknown lives.
Thousands of Desperate, Vivid Diaries Remain From Occupied Europe
| Nina Siegal | Aeon | 31 July 2023
Argues that unpublished wartime diaries preserve perspectives that complicate official histories and familiar narratives of occupation.
Time and the Middle-Aged Historian
| History Workshop | History Workshop | 23 March 2023
Reflects on aging, family memory, scholarly identity, and how a historian’s location in time changes the questions asked of the past.
Who Inherits? A Conversation Between Tao Leigh Goffe and Hazel V. Carby
| Tao Leigh Goffe and Hazel V. Carby | Public Books | 3 February 2020
Discusses family archives, Caribbean migration, race, inheritance, and the reconstruction of lives scattered across imperial geographies.
Summoning Seventeenth-Century Scholars: Researching The Weight of Ink
| JSTOR Daily | JSTOR Daily | 10 October 2017
Shows how letters, manuscripts, and scholarly traces can be transformed into a historically grounded account of private intellectual life.
Joe Gould’s Teeth
| Jill Lepore | The New Yorker | 20 July 2015
Investigates the uncertain archive behind a celebrated claim to have recorded an enormous oral history of ordinary people.
Finding Your Place in Letters
| JSTOR Daily | JSTOR Daily | 2 October 2014
Explores correspondence as evidence of identity, intimacy, mobility, and the everyday construction of personal history.
I Remember: An Artist’s Chronicle of What We Wore
| Smithsonian Magazine | Smithsonian Magazine | 16 April 2013
Uses remembered clothing and illustration to create an intimate social history from details rarely preserved in formal archives.
The Memory Thief
| Philip Gourevitch | The New Yorker | 14 June 1999
Examines the unstable boundary between recovered memory, testimony, evidence, and the stories people construct about their own pasts.
War, Genocide, and Testimony
The Novelist Reimagining the Japanese American Incarceration
| The New Yorker | The New Yorker | 20 April 2026
Examines literary reconstruction of Japanese American incarceration and the questions official government records were designed to impose.
Researchers Have Identified the Names of Five Million Victims Murdered in the Holocaust
| Smithsonian Magazine | Smithsonian Magazine | 2025
Reports on the long effort by survivors, descendants, and researchers to restore individual names to people reduced to statistics.
How Recovering the History of a Little-Known Lakota Massacre Could Heal Generational Pain
| Smithsonian Magazine | Smithsonian Magazine | 2024
Combines military records and Lakota testimony to reconstruct a massacre and support community efforts toward recognition and healing.
Seventy-Five Years After Indian Partition, Who Owns the Narrative?
| The New Yorker | The New Yorker | 2 January 2023
Explores how literature, oral history, national politics, and family memory compete to define the meaning of Partition.
You Can Retrace the Footsteps Jewish Refugees Took on a Hike Through the Alps
| Rebecca Frankel | Smithsonian Magazine | January/February 2023
Connects landscape, survivor routes, and public commemoration to the history of postwar Jewish flight from Europe.
The Holocaust Memorial Undone by Another War
| Masha Gessen | The New Yorker | 11 April 2022
Shows how war and politics disrupted efforts to commemorate the mass murder at Babyn Yar and renewed disputes over its historical meaning.
Nine Harrowing Eyewitness Accounts of the Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
| Smithsonian Magazine | Smithsonian Magazine | 2020
Presents survivor testimony that preserves experiences often submerged beneath strategic and diplomatic histories of the atomic bombings.
These Pioneers Created the First Reliable Record of the Holocaust
| Brigit Katz | Smithsonian Magazine | 1 March 2019
Profiles early researchers who gathered testimony and documents before the Holocaust had an established archive or scholarly field.
The Human Rights Historian and the Trafficked Child
| American Historical Association | Perspectives on History | October 2013
Considers the ethical burden of using testimony, photographs, and bureaucratic records to write histories of mass violence and individual trauma.
Hiroshima
| John Hersey | The New Yorker | 31 August 1946
Reconstructs the atomic bombing through six survivors, establishing a landmark model for history centered on individual witness.
Popular Culture, Narrative, and the Uses of History
All Travelers Are Infiltrators: An Introduction to the Study of Travel Writing
| JSTOR Daily | JSTOR Daily | 21 October 2024
Shows how travel writing produces historical knowledge through unequal encounters, selective observation, and assumptions about foreign societies.
A Tale of Two Visionaries
| JSTOR Daily | JSTOR Daily | 13 December 2023
Examines how reputations are constructed by later storytellers who elevate some figures while diminishing collaborators and rivals.
The Destructive Myth of the Universal Genius
| Ryan Skinnell | JSTOR Daily | 14 June 2023
Challenges heroic history that attributes collective achievements to exceptional individuals and erases networks of labor and knowledge.
The Matter of Time
| Sherene Seikaly | Public Books | 29 January 2021
Reflects on how chronology, crisis, waiting, and political power determine which historical experiences appear timely or obsolete.
Reinhart Koselleck’s Theory of History for a World in Crisis
| Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann | Aeon | 1 September 2020
Explains how concepts of time and expectation shape historical consciousness, especially during periods of upheaval.
History and Philosophy Should Make Us Feel Baffled and Strange
| Marnie Hughes-Warrington | Aeon | 30 October 2019
Argues that history should unsettle familiar categories rather than simply confirm present-day identities and moral expectations.
Bad Historical Thinking: ‘History Is Written by the Victors’
| Exploring the Past | Exploring the Past | 15 February 2016
Critiques the famous slogan by showing that defeated, colonized, and marginalized people also preserve records and shape later interpretation.
Telling the Story
| American Historical Association | Perspectives on History | 2014
Considers narrative craft as a central historical method that determines emphasis, causation, character, pace, and meaning.
The Making of the English Working Class Fifty Years On
| History Workshop | History Workshop | 2 May 2012
Reassesses a landmark history that placed working people’s agency and experience at the center of historical explanation.
Left Behind
| The New Yorker | The New Yorker | 22 September 2003
Examines the making and remaking of intellectual reputations, showing how historical canons emerge through argument, fashion, and institutional power.
