The Great American State Fair on the National Mall was supposed to be the crown jewel of the nation’s 250th birthday celebration, the moment when a president who had staked his second term on spectacle delivered something genuinely historic. Instead, reports of Confederate flag displays, sparse attendance, and electrical failures have defined the opening days of the fair.

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For a president who prizes crowd size above nearly all else, the irony is almost too rich to fully appreciate.

It would be tempting to read the thin crowds as a form of civic protest, as evidence that the American public has grown sophisticated enough to recognize a partisan project dressed in patriotic clothing. There is something to that reading.

The event was not organized by a bipartisan commission with deep roots in the historical community, but by Trump’s own Freedom 250 commission, a body that has shown far more interest in staging loyalty to the president than in honoring the complexity of the American experiment.

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Perhaps ordinary people, arriving at their own conclusions, decided they would rather spend a sweltering July week elsewhere than stand in the heat watching a political rally disguised as a birthday party.

But wishful thinking only goes so far. Heat is heat and Washington in summer has driven away more determined tourists than any political grievance ever could. Despite the anticipation of large crowds, high temperatures in DC will likely push even the most civically motivated visitors toward air conditioning rather than the open Mall.

We should resist the urge to over-interpret absence.

What we cannot resist interpreting, however, is the profound failure of imagination that produced this event in the first place. The 250th anniversary of American independence was always going to carry political weight.

Every major national anniversary has. The centennial of 1876 was staged in Philadelphia by a nation still recovering from civil war and bleeding from Reconstruction’s racial violence, desperate to project unity it did not yet possess. The bicentennial of 1976 landed in the middle of post-Watergate exhaustion, the end of the Vietnam War, and urban fiscal crisis.

No major anniversary unfolds in a vacuum and no one should pretend otherwise.

But there is a meaningful difference between an anniversary that reflects the tensions of its moment and one that actively narrows the meaning of the nation to fit the preferences of a single man. Trump has no apparent interest in American history beyond its usefulness as a backdrop for his own mythology.

A president genuinely curious about the Declaration of Independence might have seized on the extraordinary opportunity that this summer presented. The United States is hosting the World Cup. People from all over the world are visiting. Billions of people around the world are watching this country, many of them from nations whose own independence movements drew directly on the language Jefferson wrote in 1776.

The Declaration’s famous second paragraph did not stay in Philadelphia. It traveled. It was borrowed, adapted, and invoked by movements on nearly every continent that dared to argue that their own people were created equal and endowed with unalienable rights.

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An administration with even a passing interest in American history could have built something around that story. It could have used the convergence of the 250th and the World Cup to show the world, and Americans themselves, how a single document shaped the modern imagination of human freedom and self-governance. That would have been a celebration worth attending in the July heat.

Instead, we have electrical problems and Confederate flags on the National Mall.

The sparse crowds may or may not tell us something meaningful about public appetite for this administration’s version of patriotism. But the quality of the event tells us something definitive about the man who commissioned it. A president interested in the nation’s story would have told it. What we got instead was a fair organized around the one subject this president finds endlessly fascinating: himself.

At 250 years old, the United States deserved better than that. Most Americans, regardless of their politics, probably know it.

I have been writing about Civil War memory for over two decades and I have learned not to take anything for granted when it comes to readers’ time, attention, or generosity. What I received instead was something that genuinely moved me: an outpouring of support that I am still trying to fully absorb.

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So, simply and sincerely: thank you.

The Southern Historical Society Papers are available online, but there is something about working with a physical set that no digital scan can replicate. The fifty-two volumes represent one of the most significant collections of Confederate primary source material ever assembled and having them on my shelf rather than on a screen will change how I work.

I’ve had my eye on a set for quite some time and yesterday they arrived.

Research of this kind is not linear. It requires browsing, returning, cross-referencing, and sitting with material long enough to notice what it is not saying as much as what it is. For me, a hard copy makes that kind of sustained, exploratory engagement possible in ways that scrolling simply does not. For a project like this one, that difference matters.

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That project, as many of you know, centers on the enslaved laborers who accompanied the Army of Northern Virginia during the Gettysburg Campaign. This is not a story that has been told with the seriousness and sustained attention it deserves. The men who were forced to march north with Lee’s army in the summer of 1863 have been largely invisible in the historiography, mentioned in passing if at all, their experiences subordinated to the military narrative that has dominated Gettysburg scholarship for well over a century.

I want to change that. I believe the evidence exists to write a history that places these men at the center of the story rather than the margins and your support has brought that work measurably closer to completion.

There is something fitting about this particular community helping to fund this particular research. Many of you have been reading and thinking alongside me for years, working through questions about memory, myth, and the long aftermath of the Civil War. You understand why it matters to recover histories that have been suppressed or ignored, and you understand the slow, unglamorous work of archival research that makes that recovery possible.

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This project is, in many ways, a direct extension of the conversations we have been having together.

The response to last week’s appeal went well beyond what I anticipated and I want you to know that every upgrade, Venmo contribution, every note of encouragement, every expression of interest in this project has registered. This is the kind of work that is genuinely difficult to sustain without an engaged and generous readership and I have one. I do not take that lightly.

I will keep you informed as the research develops.

Nobody who has been paying attention to the Trump administration’s handling of America’s 250th anniversary should be surprised that a Confederate flag turned up at the Great American State Fair on the National Mall. It was discovered at the North Carolina booth and in its own small way tells you everything you need to know about this whole production.

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The controversy erupted after footage circulated showing the North Carolina exhibit featuring altered versions of the state flag with the Confederate battle emblem superimposed over the design. Governor Josh Stein’s office condemned the display, calling it a misrepresentation of North Carolina and demanding that organizers remove it.

The flag was pulled. Problem solved, in the narrowest possible sense.

But the details here matter. North Carolina’s official state flag has never included the Confederate battle symbol in any version of its design. Not in 1861, not in 1885, not ever.

Whoever put together that video display didn’t just stumble into Lost Cause territory by accident. They had to go out of their way to attach a symbol that the state itself had never chosen to fly.

As historian Stephen Jackson noted, unlike former flags from Georgia and Mississippi, the official flag of North Carolina has never incorporated the Confederate battle flag in its design. The alteration wasn’t heritage. It was invention.

Corporate sponsor Mt. Olive Pickle Company withdrew from the exhibit after learning about the display, saying the company stands on values of human dignity, opportunity, and freedom.

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That’s a pickle company with a cleaner moral compass than the people running the booth.

The episode is a concentrated version of the sloppiness that has defined this event from the start. At least ten states declined to send official delegations. Oregon Governor Tina Kotek’s office was explicit about why her state withdrew, citing the cost of participating and growing concerns that the event was shaping up to be a more partisan affair than originally presented.

When you’re trying to celebrate the birth of the nation and you can’t get half the nation’s states to show up, something has gone wrong at the planning stage.

The fair itself has drawn criticism for its cheap and shoddy appearance. The Washington Post’s Philip Kennicott offered this review:

America’s 250^th might have been celebrated with a genuine festival of state fairs, or a 21^st century version of the national and international expositions of art and science that were popular in the 19^th century. The Trump administration could have let the Smithsonian stage a giant festival of American folkways, music, dance, art, craft and food. It could have defaulted to something like a theme park, which would at least have produced a seamless illusionism and a facsimile of the same folkways that are absent in the Trump show.

And it might have given the states the time, funding and freedom to create their own pavilions, representative of the magnificent diversity of this country’s architecture and design. Instead, everything is stuffed into a fake agora with Doric columns and arched niches painted onto cheap theatrical flats, which look like someone scaled up the photo murals found in a tatty Greek diner that sells gyros, moussaka and heart-bomb platters of pastitsio.

Growing up in Atlantic City in the 1980s, I watched Donald Trump build his casinos into monuments of gaudy spectacle, none more so than the Taj Mahal. The man has always had a gift for making expensive things look tacky and tacky things look expensive, sometimes simultaneously.

Mark Twain coined the phrase “Gilded Age” to describe an era when glittering surfaces concealed rot underneath, when the display of wealth mattered more than its honest foundation. Trump has always been the living extension of that tradition. His casinos were all surface and no structure. The fair fits the pattern.

The model of the Memorial Arch that Trump wants placed near Arlington National Cemetery, on display at the fair, apparently looks like something assembled in a hurry and not meant to hold anyone's gaze for long. That's a fitting symbol.

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Arlington is consecrated ground. The men and women buried there earned their place in the American story through sacrifice. Placing a grandiose decorative arch nearby, conceived as a monument to Trumpian taste and rushed into existence as a prop for a Semiquincentennial celebration, is not an act of patriotism. It is the same gilded gesture we have seen before: something big and shiny put up fast, before anyone can ask whether it belongs there.

The Confederate flag at the North Carolina booth is a fitting symbol of how this whole enterprise has been managed. A symbol that the state itself never chose, attached to its flag without permission, displayed at an event meant to celebrate American unity, discovered because someone happened to be filming.

It was removed. The video was taken down. Organizers said they were reviewing how it occurred.

We know how it occurred. Nobody was watching, and nobody thought they needed to.

My current book project is a reexamination of the Gettysburg Campaign from the perspective of the thousands of enslaved laborers that traveled with General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. I am rethinking every stage of the campaign, including the army’s initial advance north from central Virginia in mid-June 1863.

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The army marched with a confidence born of recent victory. Chancellorsville had electrified the Confederate officer class and rank and file. Lee believed the moment had come to carry the war into United States territory. But among the thousands who moved through the Shenandoah Valley and toward the Potomac River were men who had no stake in Confederate victory and every reason to watch the campaign unfold with a very different kind of attention.

Enslaved laborers, forced to serve the army as teamsters, cooks, and personal servants, moved alongside their enslavers through a landscape transformed by the meaning of a single document signed just six months before.

Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863. It was imperfect in its reach, exempting Union-held territory and applying only to Confederate states, but its meaning was not lost on the enslaved. They had long since learned to read the politics of their situation through whatever information they could gather, and the Proclamation announced something new: the war had become, officially, a war against slavery.

The enslaved men attached to the Army of Northern Virginia would have known this. They listened carefully to conversations among Confederate officers and soldiers who were furious about the Proclamation and genuinely alarmed by what it portended. That fury itself was informative. It confirmed that something real was shifting.

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General Richard Ewell’s Second Corps led the advance, moving down the Valley with Albert Jenkins’s cavalry screening their front. The first serious obstacle was Winchester, Virginia, then under the command of Union General Robert H. Milroy.

I keep coming back to Milroy when I think about this phase of the campaign. He was unlike most Union commanders in his willingness to act on emancipationist principles. He had made it a point to enforce the Proclamation in Winchester and the surrounding area, freeing enslaved people and enraging the local white Confederate population.

Confederates despised him for it. A Georgian in John Gordon’s brigade wrote: “Milroy, the Yankee general, who commanded in Winchester, was a brutal tyrant, who used to burn the people’s plows to prevent them for tilling the ground, stealing n—ggers, and sending nearly all the Secesh families south.”

When Ewell’s forces swept aside Milroy’s command on June 15 and captured thousands of Union soldiers, the Confederate reaction was loud and self-congratulatory. The defeat of Milroy was understood not just as a military victory but as a rebuke to the politics he represented.

What did the enslaved laborers make of that reaction? I find myself sitting with that question. They had just watched their enslavers cheer the removal of one of the few Union officers who had tried to make the war’s promise real in that corner of Virginia. Milroy had stood for something and the Confederates celebrating his defeat understood exactly what that something was. The enslaved surely understood it too.

The army crossed the Potomac at Williamsport and entered Maryland. The welcome was cold. Maryland was a border state with divided loyalties and Confederate soldiers expecting cheering crowds found instead a population that received them warily, if at all. For the enslaved moving with the army, I wonder how that shift in atmosphere registered. Gone were the excited crowds that welcomed Confederates at Winchester and other small towns across Virginia.

The Confederacy’s authority over people did not travel north with the army the way its weapons did.

Pennsylvania made that even clearer. Once across the Mason-Dixon Line, Confederate soldiers encountered a population that was openly hostile, and they were now operating in territory where slavery had no legal standing whatsoever. The irony is almost too stark to state plainly: an army fighting to preserve slavery had marched its enslaved laborers into free territory.

Whatever discipline and social coercion kept those men in place, it was not the law of the land around them.

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We have no testimony from the enslaved men who made this march. They left no letters, no diaries, no accounts that have survived. What we have instead is the historical context that surrounded them, and it is rich enough to demand our attention.

These men heard officers curse Lincoln’s proclamation. They watched Confederate soldiers celebrate the silencing of a general who had tried to free people like them. They crossed into a state where slavery did not exist. They moved, day after day, in the direction of freedom.

I keep returning to that last point.

Enslaved? Yes. Deaf and blind? No.

Further Reading: Robert J. Wynstra, At the Forefront of Lee’s Invasion: Retribution, Plunder, and Clashing Cultures on Richard S. Ewell’s Road to Gettysburg.

I want to tell you about a source that has become central to the book I am writing and why your support makes the research possible.

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As many of you know, this project is about the Gettysburg Campaign as experienced by the thousands of enslaved men who traveled with the Army of Northern Virginia in the summer of 1863. Forced to serve as cooks, teamsters, laborers, and body servants, they moved through Maryland and Pennsylvania along with the army fighting to preserve the institution that held them in bondage.

Their story is one of the least examined dimensions of the campaign and recovering it requires working with sources that were never designed to illuminate their lives at all.

That is where the Southern Historical Society Papers come in.

Published between 1876 and 1959, the Papers represent one of the most extensive archives of Confederate memory ever assembled. Veterans contributed battle reports, personal reminiscences, correspondence, and unit histories, producing a record that runs to dozens of volumes. The explicit purpose of the organization was to shape how the war would be remembered, and it succeeded.

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The Lost Cause as a coherent historical mythology owes a great deal to the work done in those pages.

For a historian, that presents both a problem and an opportunity.

The problem is obvious. These are postwar sources, written by men with powerful incentives to romanticize the Confederate cause, minimize slavery’s centrality to the conflict, and craft a usable past for a defeated society. They must be read with considerable skepticism and a firm grounding in the broader literature.

The opportunity is what some historians call “reading against the grain.” When Confederate veterans wrote about their enslaved servants, they rarely intended to tell us anything meaningful about those men’s inner lives, their resistance, their grief, or their experience of a march through free territory. They were writing about loyalty, devotion, and the paternalist mythology that justified slavery in their own minds.

But in doing so, they left traces. An offhand remark about a man named George who disappeared outside of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. A note about an enslaved cook who “behaved strangely” as the army crossed the Potomac. A complaint about servants who required watching once the column entered Pennsylvania.

These fragments, read carefully and set against what we know about the experiences of enslaved people more broadly, begin to tell a different story than the one the authors intended.

The Southern Historical Society Papers are the richest single repository of this kind of evidence I have encountered. A complete set runs between $800 and $1,300, a significant research expense that falls entirely outside any institutional support. I am writing this book independently, which means the cost of sources like these comes directly out of my own pocket.

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This is where paid subscribers can make a concrete difference.

Upgrading your subscription unlocks every video, dispatch, and deep-dive I publish here, including the ongoing research and writing connected to this project. It also helps fund the acquisitions that make the research possible in the first place.

Every paid subscription is a direct investment in work that takes seriously the lives of people history has too often ignored.

If this project matters to you, I hope you will consider upgrading today.

Yesterday I had the privilege of speaking inside the Massachusetts State House to the Doric Docents, the volunteers responsible for leading tours of one of the most historically significant buildings in the country. My presentation focused on Robert Gould Shaw and the monument to Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Infantry that stands just across the street, on the Boston Common.

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The monument is one of the great works of American public art, and its dedication in 1897 offers a window into how the Civil War was being remembered, contested, and reshaped more than three decades after Appomattox.

One of the points I emphasized was that the dedication came at a particular moment in the nation’s memory culture. Confederate monuments were going up across the South at a rapid pace, largely through the organizing efforts of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

The UDC was not simply engaged in an act of mourning. It was conducting a deliberate campaign to shape how the Civil War would be understood by future generations. Through monument building, textbook lobbying, and the promotion of what became known as the Lost Cause, the UDC worked to transform Confederate defeat into something that looked, from a certain angle, like a moral victory.

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The Confederacy had lost the war, the argument went, but it had fought nobly for a way of life worth honoring. Slavery was minimized. States’ rights were elevated. The Confederate soldier became a tragic hero rather than a man who took up arms against his country in defense of human bondage.

During the Q&A, someone asked a question that I found genuinely interesting: why did the Grand Army of the Republic never engage at that level? Why didn’t Union veterans mount an equivalent memory campaign?

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We were pretty much on the same page in terms of what we see coming from the Trump administration. Major anniversaries and public commemorations of history have always been politicized, but what we are witnessing is something fundamentally different and dangerous.

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Both of us are also in agreement that Trump’s influence on local 250th commemorations has thankfully been minimal, though we worry about the long-term consequences for agencies like the National Park Service.

I hope you enjoy our conversation.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s new video, “Does the South Have an Identity Issue?”, part of its Curiosities of the South series, is worth your time. Producer Koralie Barrau explores the roots of Southern identity and Southern hospitality, and discovers what most of us already know: Americans still disagree about their history and what it means. No surprise there.

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Barrau takes viewers to Stone Mountain, home to the largest Confederate monument in the country and the site where the modern Ku Klux Klan was reborn in 1915. She visits a small Georgia town that reenacts the arrival of Sherman’s March.

The result is an engaging piece of visual storytelling. It also leans on familiar tropes about the Confederate flag, the causes of the war, and the persistence of the Lost Cause.

No one disputes that Lost Cause mythology still shapes how many Americans understand the Confederacy. But the video never asks how that influence has changed over the past few decades. This video could have been produced in 2015. It could have been produced in 2000.

That gap points to a real difference between how journalists and historians work. Reporters tend to capture what they find at a given moment, a snapshot of belief as it exists right now. Historians have to do something harder. We track change over time, asking not just what people believe but why that belief looks different than it did a generation ago, and different still from the generation before that.

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So let me ask the questions the video didn’t. How has the grip of the Lost Cause loosened, or tightened, over the past few decades? The removal of Confederate monuments after Charleston in 2015 and again after George Floyd in 2020 did not happen in a vacuum. It reflected decades of scholarship dismantling the moonlight-and-magnolias version of the Confederacy piece by piece, and decades of activism by Black Southerners who never accepted that version in the first place.

PBS’s recent Natchez, which premiered on Independent Lens in May, makes the point better than I can. The film follows a Mississippi River town whose tourist economy was built on hoop-skirted mansion tours and Gone with the Wind nostalgia.

One tour guide in the film suggests that tourism revenue is down roughly 30 percent over the past seven years, as millennials and Gen Z visitors stop showing up for the antebellum fantasy. Natchez is watching its bottom line erode because younger Americans want a fuller, harder history than hoop skirts can supply. That is change over time, measured in ticket sales, and exactly the evidence the AJC video needed.

What other Southern narratives have emerged? Renewed attention to Reconstruction, to Black political power in the postwar South, to a civil rights movement that didn’t begin in 1954 or end in 1968, has reshaped how the region understands itself.

So has the growing public reckoning with how slavery built Southern wealth, not as an abstraction but as a documented economic system with names, ledgers, and bodies attached. You can now find it at any number of new museums and historic sites.

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And are we watching a generational shift that cuts across old racial lines? The numbers out of Natchez suggest yes. Younger Southerners, white and Black, are encountering a version of this history in classrooms, museums, and historic sites their parents never had access to. That shift is uneven and contested, but it is real, and it is the story.

The South has always sold itself as a place where nothing changes, the front porch, the magnolia, the same old story on a loop. That was never true and Natchez is just one example. The mansions are still standing, but the people who visit them are starting to ask different questions, and the ticket sales are starting to show it.

The AJC video told us what the South still believes. It never asked why that belief is losing ground or what other narratives have already taken root.

Today is Juneteenth. Yesterday, a federal appeals court handed the Trump administration a victory and a defeat for honest public history. A three-judge panel of the Third Circuit unanimously overturned an injunction that had required the National Park Service to restore interpretive panels telling the individual stories of nine people enslaved by George Washington at the President’s House in Philadelphia.

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The administration may now install its own version of history in their place.

The new panels are not silent on slavery. They acknowledge its brutality. They note that Washington expressed discomfort with the institution and include language from his writings and his last will, which emancipated his enslaved people upon his death.

The Third Circuit found this sufficient, concluding that the proposed exhibits offer “historical context” and remind visitors of the “essential humanity” of the nine individuals enslaved at the site.

But essential humanity is not the same thing as historical agency. And that distinction is precisely what is at stake here.

One of the proposed panels suggests that the people enslaved at the President’s House “experienced a greater modicum of autonomy than elsewhere in the South,” even noting that Washington sometimes purchased theater tickets for them.

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This is the kind of framing that historians have spent decades working to dismantle, because it asks us to measure the lives of enslaved people against the preferences of their enslaver rather than against their own desires, decisions, and acts of resistance. It substitutes a portrait of paternalistic accommodation for the more demanding and more accurate story of people who, even in bondage, were never simply waiting for someone to free them.

Consider Ona Judge. She was among the nine people enslaved at the President’s House. In 1796, while Washington was president and the household was in Philadelphia, she walked out the door and did not come back. She made her way to New Hampshire, built a life, married, had children, and refused Washington’s repeated efforts to reclaim her, even in old age.

She freed herself.

The government’s new panels, which soften Washington’s role as enslaver and frame his relationship to his human property in terms of discomfort and eventual emancipation, have no real place for Ona Judge. She is pushed into the shadow of the man who claimed to own her.

This matters on Juneteenth precisely because the holiday is so often misread. Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865, the day that enslaved people in Texas learned of their emancipation more than two months after the Confederacy’s surrender.

But the story of freedom in America did not begin in 1865, and it was never delivered from above.

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For four hundred years, enslaved people seized freedom at extraordinary personal risk. They ran. They resisted. They organized. They testified. Freedom was something they claimed long before any president signed any document or any army arrived at any courthouse door.

This is not to diminish the importance of the United States Army or Lincoln’s role in emancipation. It is simply to note that the story of enslaved people is the story of American freedom, not a footnote to it.

Minimizing the individual histories from a site that stands a block from Independence Hall is not a neutral curatorial decision. It is a political one. The President’s House was built to ask hard questions about liberty and bondage in the same city where the founders declared all men created equal.

Softening that confrontation does not resolve it. It only makes the contradiction easier to ignore.

Happy Juneteenth.

This week I watched a white historian, host of a hugely popular TikTok channel, explain that he was ceding the story of Juneteenth entirely to African Americans. According to him, ‘It’s not my story to tell.’

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I understand the impulse. For generations, the history of slavery and emancipation has been minimized, distorted, or simply written out of the national narrative by white Americans. The story of Juneteenth survived because Black families carried it forward, year after year, while the broader culture looked away or invented comforting fictions in its place.

Acknowledging that debt matters.

But Juneteenth is a federal holiday now. It belongs to the country, which I understand to mean that it belongs to all of us, and not in some abstract, ceremonial sense. Emancipation did not simply liberate four million enslaved people and leave everyone else untouched. It rewrote the Constitution, redefined citizenship, and forced a reckoning over federal power that still shapes our politics. It launched a fight over Reconstruction whose outcome determined who could vote and who counted as a full citizen, a fight whose unfinished business runs through Jim Crow, through the civil rights movement, and into our own disputes over voting rights and equal protection.

White Southerners rebuilt their economies and their politics on the ruins of war and eventually on the backs of African Americans. White Northerners argued over what kind of nation should follow. Immigrants who arrived in the decades afterward entered a country whose racial order and legal structures had already been remade by it.

None of us, whatever our ancestry, lives outside the world that emancipation built.

I am not ceding anything. This is part of my history too, not because I share an ancestral claim to bondage or liberation, but because I am an American living inside the consequences of that rupture and the story of how four million people moved from slavery to freedom is the central drama of this nation’s history.

To set that history aside as someone else’s story to tell is its own kind of evasion. It lets the rest of us off the hook for the work of remembering and for reckoning with how much of our present world that emancipation built. It makes it easier to brush it off as someone else’s story.

That work looks different depending on who is doing it. Black Americans inherited Juneteenth as lived memory, as family history, as a chain of testimony passed down with a weight and intimacy I will never replicate. Nor do I have any interest in attempting to do so.

My understanding comes from documents, archives, and other people’s stories, a different kind of knowledge but certainly not a lesser form of responsibility. Neither of us owns the full picture alone. We need both. A richer, more honest national memory depends on multiple perspectives pressing against each other, testing and correcting one another, not on one group standing aside so another can carry the whole weight alone.

So read the historians who can speak from inside that inherited memory. Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth is essential, a meditation on Texas, family, and freedom from someone who grew up inside this history. Kidada Williams’s I Saw Death Coming recovers the violence that followed emancipation through the voices of the freed people who survived it. Blair LM Kelley’s new Black Freedom: A Visual History of Juneteenth and Emancipation Days gives the holiday a visual and material history it has rarely received.

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And then keep reading. David Blight’s work on Frederick Douglass and the long contest over Civil War memory, Eric Foner’s histories of Reconstruction, and Manisha Sinha’s accounts of abolition and its radical politics are not optional extras. They are part of the same conversation, written by historians who have spent careers insisting that slavery and its undoing sit at the center of American history rather than at its margins.

Nobody should cede this story. Juneteenth is the only national holiday that celebrates the freedom of over four million people, in a nation that has long claimed to be ‘exceptional’ in advancing freedom.

We should all be reaching for it, from wherever we stand, both as historians and students of history. Because a nation that only half remembers its emancipation has not yet finished becoming free.

I have spent the better part of six years researching and writing a biography of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw’s short life, so it should come as no surprise that I have strong feelings about the AI-generated images now circulating of him.

What strikes me first is the simple and obvious fact that we don’t need them. Shaw was photographed. The regiment that helped to make him famous—the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment—was photographed. We have an incredibly rich visual record for a man who died at twenty five and yet that record is being supplemented, even displaced, by invention.

But the deeper problem is not fabrication for its own sake. It is what gets fabricated and what gets left out. Every AI image I have seen places Shaw exclusively within the world of the 54th Massachusetts and specifically its assault on Fort Wagner—a visual record made famous by the 1989 film Glory.

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None acknowledge the eighteen months he spent in the 2nd Massachusetts Infantry, the regiment in which he first learned to be an officer and where his understanding of the war took shape.

The algorithms generating these images are not drawing on Shaw’s actual life. They are drawing on the popularity of a movie, on the version of Shaw that has been frozen into our collective imagination because it is attached to Black soldiers and a stirring death scene. AI’s training data has its own selective memory and it aligns directly with what already sells.

For the sake of argument, however, let’s play devil’s advocate. After all, the famous engravings of the assault on Fort Wagner, the ones that ran in Harper’s Weekly and elsewhere, were also created by people who were not present, often working decades after the fact from secondhand descriptions, photographs, and artistic convention.

Those images are not accurate either. Soldiers stand in impossible poses, the topography is wrong, the chaos of an actual nighttime assault under fire is rendered with a clarity that real combat never has.

So am I being inconsistent if I tolerate one kind of invented image and not the other?

I don’t think so, though admittedly the distinction isn’t as sharp as I first thought.

The Harper’s Weekly engraver was still doing something recognizable as historical interpretation. He made choices about composition and meaning, however flawed, in conversation with an actual event and an actual set of sources. In the end, he was wrong in the way that human memory and artistic limitation make people wrong.

The AI image is not wrong in that sense at all precisely because it has no relationship to the sources whatsoever. It is pattern matching against the most circulated, most monetized version of the historical narrative and what gets erased in that process is exactly what an honest historian or serious student of history would want preserved: the parts of Shaw’s life that complicate the heroic frame, the granular evidence of who he actually was before he became a martyr to the cause of emancipation.

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The danger, then, is not simply that these images look fake or feel uncanny. It is that they reinforce a public memory that was already too narrow and they do it with none of the friction that the work of remembering requires.

A bad illustration from 1887 still asked something of its maker. AI-generated images exist entirely in a vacuum.

Pre-order A Glorious Fate: The Life and Legacy of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw today.

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Staring at the photographs this morning of a green Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, I couldn’t help but think that there is a metaphor here too perfect to ignore. Donald Trump promised he could clean the Reflecting Pool, a job his construction background supposedly made him uniquely suited to finish, he claimed, where the Biden and Obama administrations had only let it deteriorate.

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He awarded the work through a no-bid contract, the kind of arrangement that asks the public to trust the deal simply because the man making it says so. The price climbed well past what he promised. The water went back in and within days the pool turned green again, just weeks before the nation’s 250th birthday.

The actual causes remain easily predicatable. Algae blooms when nutrients accumulate, when water sits still, and when a shallow basin catches the summer sun. None of that required a no-bid contract to understand.

It required patience and the unglamorous work of monitoring conditions that do not make for catchy Truth Social posts. Instead the renovation used darker, tinted concrete meant to make the water look more reflective, a cosmetic fix aimed at how the pool would photograph rather than how it would function. The algae did not care how the surface looked. It grew anyway, feeding on what the renovation never addressed.

This is also how the administration has approached the nation’s history as it heads into its Semiquincentennial. The instinct is the same. Paint over what looks unattractive, declare the problem solved, and let the cameras capture the gleam before anyone checks what lies underneath.

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Confederate monuments get reframed as innocent heritage. Slavery and anything else that detracts from a white-centered narrative gets minimized into a footnote on the road to national greatness. Parks and battlefields lose funding for substantive preservation while money flows toward the president’s personal projects in DC, developed solely for celebratory ribbon cuttings. The myths are tinted concrete.

They make the surface look right for exactly as long as it takes someone to notice that nothing underneath actually changed.

History, like a reflecting pool, does not stay clean because someone insists it is clean. It requires the slow, deliberate labor of people willing to study what lurks beneath the surface, and to keep doing that work long after the cameras have moved on.

The 250th anniversary of the birth of this nation is just weeks away, and there is no shortage of people eager to tell you how to feel about it. Most will frame their appeal around some version of history. Some will package it in a heroic narrative, one that smooths over complexity and asks you to accept a story of unbroken progress toward an ever-more-perfect union.

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Others will offer a catalog of indictments, a case for why everything the nation has stood for deserves not celebration but condemnation.

Both will present their version with confidence. Both will be selling something.

Don’t buy it.

Decide for yourself how you want to spend July 4th, 2026. Go to the parade or skip it. Watch the fireworks or don’t. Feel pride or feel ambivalence or feel both at once. That is your business. But whatever you do, don’t let someone else’s predetermined narrative do your thinking for you, because neither version on offer has much to do with serious history.

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History in service of an agenda is not history. The heroic narrative asks you to see the founding generation as visionaries whose ideals were always destined to triumph, conveniently setting aside the fact that those same men enslaved people, dispossessed indigenous nations, and wrote documents full of contradictions they either could not see or chose not to resolve.

The indictment narrative asks you to see those same facts as the final word, as though the suffering and exclusion baked into the founding were not also contested from the very beginning, as though the people left out of “We the People” did not spend the next two and a half centuries fighting, arguing, and dying to be included.

Neither version can hold what actually happened. The history of the founding of this nation, and everything that followed, is far too expansive, too contradictory, too human to be reduced to a tagline of worship or resistance.

It contains people doing remarkable things for terrible reasons and terrible things for reasons they genuinely believed were just. It contains movements that failed and movements that succeeded and movements that failed and then succeeded a generation later. It contains suffering that should not be minimized and resilience that should not be sentimentalized and arguments that have never actually been resolved.

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That is what serious history looks like. It is not comfortable and it does not resolve cleanly into a lesson you can fit on a banner or a TikTok video.

So when someone hands you their version of American history this July and tells you the only appropriate response is celebration or the only appropriate response is rejection, ask yourself whose interests that framing serves. Then put it down and go read something harder.

That’s what I’ve been doing.

This nation’s history is worth understanding, but you must be the one to confront it in all of its complexity.

The American Battlefield Trust’s latest video fundraiser has a new tagline: “The Land Remembers.” It is an incredibly catchy and provocative phrase—just what is needed in service of a fundraising effort.

And it is not only a fiction, it is a dangerous one.

The land does not remember. The land does not do anything at all. Soil has no cognition, grass no grief, trees no testimony. The fields at Gettysburg hold no knowledge of the tens of thousands of men who became casualties there over three days in July 1863. The land at Antietam did not mourn the roughly 22,000 soldiers who fell on September 17, 1862.

It absorbed them. It moved on, the way land always does, indifferent to the human drama that plays across its surface.

The problem with claiming “The Land Remembers” is that it quietly overshadows the people who actually do the remembering, who have always done the remembering, often at great personal and political cost.

Let me explain why this matters.

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Three weeks before this country’s 250th birthday, a federal judge in Massachusetts has issued a ruling that should embarrass every official who went along with the Trump administration’s effort to sanitize the National Park Service.

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Judge Angel Kelley of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts has temporarily blocked the administration from removing, covering, or revising signs, films, and exhibits at national parks that were targeted for making Americans feel uncomfortable about their own history. She has also ordered the restoration of any materials already dismantled, with a deadline that lands squarely on the eve of the semiquincentennial.

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The executive action at the center of this story demanded the removal of materials deemed to “inappropriately disparage Americans” or portray the United States “in a negative light.” That language sounds reasonable until you ask what it actually means in practice.

It means that the story of enslaved people over the course of four centuries and the continued struggle for civil rights gets scrubbed. It means that exhibits at battlefield parks explaining why Southern soldiers fought, and for whom, become candidates for the ash heap. It means that the National Park Service, one of the few institutions in American public life still capable of telling hard truths to millions of visitors each year, gets conscripted into the service of nostalgia rather than history.

As I’ve said from the beginning, this has never been about protecting Americans. It has been about replacing history with mythology, the kind that asks nothing of us and forgives everything done in our name.

Underneath it all, it has been about advancing a narrow and destructive political agenda that would turn the clock back by decades.

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Judge Kelley’s ruling does not resolve that fight. Courts move slowly, administrations appeal, and the political will to gut public history has not disappeared. But this ruling does something important. It reminds us that this assault on our historic sites is not inevitable, that it can be challenged, and that the institutions designed to constrain executive power have not entirely collapsed.

We are three weeks from July 4. The parks will be full. Families will stand at battlefields and memorials and monuments and try to make sense of what this country has been and what it might yet become. They deserve exhibits that trust them with the full story.

Bonus!

Trump’s name came down from The Kennedy Center late last night.

The International African American Museum in Charleston is located at Gadsden’s Wharf, where as many as 40 percent of all enslaved Africans brought to North America first touched American soil. The museum was built there deliberately, as an act of historical reckoning in a community and a nation that had spent centuries refusing to remember what happened on it.

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The urgency of that reckoning cannot be separated from what happened eleven years ago at Mother Emanuel AME Church, just a few miles away. Dylann Roof walked into a Bible study and murdered nine Black parishioners in an act of white supremacist terror, driven in part by a grotesque co-optation of slavery’s history into a modern ideology of racial hatred.

The response from Charleston and from the nation was to do the opposite of what Roof intended. It invested in honest memory, to reckon with what that history actually meant and whom it actually harmed. The IAAM was not built despite that massacre. It was built, in part, as an answer to it. That is why watching it financially struggle now carries a particular sting.

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Just ahead of its third anniversary, the museum has announced it will furlough its entire staff, including leadership, for a total of 20 days staggered between July 1 and December 31. Museum officials cited “the shifting political and funding environment” as a central factor. That is careful, institutional language, but we all know what this really means.

One third of the 511 museums surveyed by the American Alliance of Museums had government grants or contracts cancelled due to executive orders and federal actions in 2025 and most reported not being able to replace those lost funds. The African American Civil War Museum in Washington, DC has still not opened because of funding issues. The IAAM is not an outlier. It is part of a pattern.

When an administration characterizes the honest teaching of slavery and Black history as divisive, as an attack on patriotism rather than an expression of it, that rhetoric does not stay contained to school board meetings and executive orders. It shapes the funding environment. It emboldens unqualified young white men with the instinct to defund, to redirect, to starve institutions that refuse to tell a more comfortable story.

There is a particular cruelty to the timing. The America 250 Semiquincentennial is supposed to be a national celebration of what this country is and what it has strived to become. But a commemoration that papers over slavery, that treats the history of enslaved people as a source of division rather than a source of understanding, is not a celebration. It is a performance.

The IAAM exists precisely to hold that tension honestly, to insist that Gadsden’s Wharf, Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, and so many other historic sites are chapters in the same story. Furloughing the staff of a museum like this, in a year like this, sends a message, whether or not that was the intent.

The museum operated at a deficit of over $883,000 in 2024, with government grants accounting for nearly $2.2 million of its revenue that year, down from over $4.3 million the prior year. The numbers tell the story plainly. Institutions like the IAAM depend on public investment to do public work. It’s as simple as that.

And when government retreats from that investment while simultaneously questioning the legitimacy of the history being preserved, the damage is compounded. Museums cannot fundraise their way out of a hostile political climate.

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What is being lost here is not just operational capacity. It is the accumulated expertise of staff who know how to hold a space like this one with care, who understand the weight of what they are curating, who have spent years building relationships with descendants and scholars and visitors who come to Wharfside Street looking for the truth their education withheld.

Dylann Roof tried to use the history of slavery as a weapon. The IAAM was built to ensure that history belongs to everyone and that it is told with honesty rather than rage. A government that defunds that work while wrapping itself in the flag is not celebrating America. It is celebrating and promoting propaganda.

Now that my Shaw biography is finally completed and in production, I can get back to work on my book about slavery and the battle of Gettysburg. One of the things that I am trying to do in this post is place Lee’s invasion in a broader historical context. Thanks to local historian Debra Sandoe Macauslin and Alisha Wansel for sharing these runaway slave ads with me.

Sometime in the 1850s, a reader picking up a Gettysburg newspaper might have found, tucked among advertisements for dry goods and farm equipment, a notice placed by a slaveholder. It would have described a man or woman by name, by physical appearance, by trade or skill, and by the direction they were believed to be traveling. It would have offered a reward for their capture and return.

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These notices appeared regularly in Pennsylvania newspapers throughout the antebellum period. Their presence in a free state was not considered remarkable enough to require explanation or apology. They were simply part of the reality of public life, occupying the same columns as auction announcements and legal notices.

That ordinariness is itself a historical fact worth some reflection. In a state that had passed gradual abolition legislation in 1780, the institution of slavery printed itself into the local press as a routine matter of business.

For the free Black residents of Gettysburg and Adams County, however, these ads were something other than routine. They constituted a painful reminder about the nature of their freedom. Pennsylvania law said they were free. The ads in the paper said that the reach of slavery did not recognize that freedom as a barrier.

Enslaved people fleeing north passed through the same landscape that free Black Pennsylvanians farmed and worshipped and raised children in. The ads described roads and towns and physical descriptions that free Black readers would have recognized immediately. The geography of slavery and the geography of their own lives overlapped completely.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 had made it federal law that enslaved people could be seized and returned from free states, that local officials were required to assist in their capture, and that any Black person accused of being an escaped slave had no right to a jury trial or to testify on their own behalf. The act transformed every free Black community in the North into a place where freedom was legally provisional.

But in Adams County, the ads in the paper had been making that point for years before Congress reinforced the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 in 1850. The runaway notices were, in effect, a recurring announcement that the Mason-Dixon line was a political boundary and not a moral or practical one, that the slave system’s claim on human beings did not stop at the state border, and that Black freedom in Pennsylvania existed only as long as no one with legal authority chose to contest it.

What the ads created, over years and decades of publication, was a community living with a specific and well-founded understanding of precariousness. Freedom in Adams County was real. The churches, the schools, the households and farms and community institutions that free Black Pennsylvanians built were real achievements, earned across generations and defended with determination. But that freedom existed in tension with a surrounding environment that did not fully recognize it.

This is the historical context in which Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia crossed into Pennsylvania in late June 1863.

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The Washington Post is reporting today that the Trump administration has laid out an aggressive two-to-three-year timeline for completing a 250-foot triumphal arch near the Lincoln Memorial. During a public hearing of the Commission of Fine Arts this past May, commissioners were told that 99.5 percent of the more than 600 public comments received opposed the structure. The commission approved it anyway. The administration has further argued that because Congress approved a structure on that plot of land back in 1925, no further congressional authorization is required.

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This is not an isolated episode. Construction crews have already removed a section of the White House East Wing to make way for a new ballroom, and the administration has moved aggressively to restore the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall as part of its broader campaign to reshape the capital’s appearance.

[I recently talked with NPR about this planned arch and why it is a bad idea.]

Whatever one thinks of any individual project, the pattern is consistent: established review processes, public input, and longstanding norms about how Washington’s monumental landscape is managed are being treated as obstacles rather than guardrails. The construction of monuments is, above all else, an exercise of political will.

It has always been so. The triumphal arch as a form is not accidental. It descends from Rome, where emperors built arches not merely to celebrate military victories but to inscribe those victories permanently into the landscape of the capital. To walk through the Arch of Titus or the Arch of Constantine was to pass through a carefully curated version of history, one in which the emperor’s glory was literally the gateway to the city.

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The form announces, as much as it commemorates: I had the power to build this, and therefore you will remember what I want you to remember.

As I have noted before, this dynamic is not ancient history. It is also the story of Civil War commemoration in America. The great wave of Confederate monument-building that crested between roughly 1890 and 1920 was not a spontaneous welling-up of grief. It was an organized, politically coordinated campaign, funded by groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy, carried out in courthouses, state capitals, and public squares across the South.

The monuments went up precisely when and where white Southern Democrats had reestablished political dominance, when Jim Crow was being codified into law, and when the federal government had largely abandoned Black Southerners. The statues of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis were not simply memorials. They were territorial markers, statements of who controlled the present and therefore the past.

The same logic operated in the North, though the monuments told a different story. For example the Shaw Memorial on Boston Common, dedicated in 1897, honored Robert Gould Shaw and the men of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry. It was a remarkable artistic achievement, but it too emerged from a specific political moment, namely a desire among certain Northern reformers and veterans to consolidate a particular narrative of the war as a struggle for Black freedom, at a time when that narrative was under sustained assault.

Memory does not float free of power. It is always anchored to someone’s agenda, someone’s preferred version of what the nation is and what it owes.

What is striking about the triumphal arch episode is not that a president wants to reshape the monumental landscape of Washington. Presidents have always done that. What is striking is the near-total transparency of the process. Normal review procedures have been compressed or sidestepped. Public opposition, almost unanimous in formal comment, was noted and then ignored.

The form chosen, the triumphal arch, carries no ambiguity about what it is meant to say. It is not a memorial to sacrifice. We already have such memorial in nearby Arlington National Cemetery.

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It is a monument to victory, to dominance, to the ruler who commissioned it.

That transparency is, in its own way, useful for historians and citizens alike. It strips away the comforting fiction that monuments arise organically from collective grief or collective pride. They arise from power. They are built by people who have the resources, the authority, and the will to impose their vision on shared space.

The question that monuments always ask, whether we are standing before a Confederate general on a courthouse lawn or a gilded arch on the Potomac River, is not only whom we are remembering. It is who decided that, and why, and what they wanted the rest of us to feel standing in the shadow of the stone.

In this case, President Trump has said from day one that the arch is intended as a monument to himself. It now looks as though that is exactly what we will soon see.

There is still time to leave a comment on the National Park Service’s website for the planned construction of the arch. I am not naive enough to think that it will make a difference, but I do believe that we have an obligation to voice our approval or disapproval.

I still can’t believe Gordon Wood is gone. He died yesterday after being struck by a car in a parking lot near his home in Rhode Island—a jarring, senseless end for someone who gave so much to our understanding of who we are as a nation.

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In 1993 I was a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Maryland, studying epistemology in historical studies. My master’s thesis focused on how historians explain the past. I was writing about why certain historical explanations of a specific subject are said to supplement one another rather than compete. I quickly realized I needed a historical case study and settled on the American Revolution, a subject I knew almost nothing about beyond what I had picked up in high school.

Somehow I talked my way into a graduate reading course on the Revolution co-taught by Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman. I was a fish out of water from the start. The syllabus alone sent me into a tailspin: two books a week, plus scholarly articles.

In my philosophy seminars we might, for example, work through a couple of chapters from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and a handful of responses—nothing remotely like what I was now facing.

The first book up for discussion was Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution, which had just recently been published. I had no framework for it, no historiographical vocabulary, no sense of where it fit in a larger conversation.

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I can still recall the joy of reading it. For the first time, the Revolution was exciting and so much more expansive than I ever thought possible. Wood made this period of history come alive and forced me to acknowledge its relevance. I couldn’t wait to share this with the class.

That next session, I didn’t say a word as the other students rattled off the names of historians I had never heard of and various schools of thought: the Progressives, Whigs, neo-Whigs, and neo-Progressives…

I just wanted to talk about what I had learned.

That afternoon I stopped by Professor Hoffman’s office. He’d asked to meet, wanting to know why a philosophy student was in his course. Fortunately, he was intrigued by what I was working on and helped me find my footing.

Things gradually improved. I kept up with the readings, participated more, and began to understand the broader conversation I had stumbled into. But nothing in those months hit me quite the way Wood had in that first week and few history books have gripped my imagination since.

I understand now that his arguments have been challenged from various directions. That’s how the field of history advances, how understanding deepens. But reading Radicalism at that particular moment, as an outsider to the discipline, did something to me. I eventually lost interest in philosophy and gradually drifted toward a career teaching and writing American history.

I have to think Gordon Wood had something to do with that.

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As readers of Civil War Memory, you understand better than most what is at stake here. The Memorial Avenue corridor, Arlington National Cemetery, and the Lincoln Memorial are among the most sacred landscapes in the American commemorative tradition.

The Lincoln Memorial in particular was deliberately sited a century ago to anchor the western axis of the Mall—a carefully considered act of national memory. Placing an enormous triumphal arch in that sight line is not a neutral act. It is an intervention in how we remember and who gets to shape that memory.

The NPS is required under the National Historic Preservation Act to consider public input.

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Your voice matters.

Here are some visual before and after renderings of the proposed arch if you are not already convinced of the damage that will be done to the commemorative landscape in our nation’s capital.

I have to lead teachers from around the country on a monument tour of DC in a couple of weeks and I have no idea how I am going to keep my cool.