In our first lengthy journey of the trip, we head south in search of stories from two centuries ago. Traces are there, but larger meanings remain elusive. — [Editor’s Note: Over the course of 2022 and 2023, New American History Executive Director Ed Ayers is visiting places where significant history happened, and exploring what has happened to that history since. He is focusing on the decades between 1800 and 1860, filing dispatches about the stories being told at…

After decades of reading, writing, and teaching about the American past, I’m setting out to see how that past is remembered in the places where it happened. — [Editor’s Note: Over the course of 2022 and 2023, New American History Executive Director Ed Ayers is visiting places where significant history happened, and exploring what has happened to that history since. He is focusing on the decades between 1800 and 1860, filing dispatches about the stories being told at…

A journal of my road trip to the formative decades of American history. — I recently finished a manuscript for a book about the first six decades of the 19th century. The book argues that as that century began, the United States remained unscripted — an experiment, a speculation. …

Reflections on lawmakers’ latest attempts to constrain the teaching of American history. — Young Americans know a great deal about American history. They absorb ideas and impressions of the past through video games, field trips, dinner-table conversations, church sermons, monuments, and SNL parodies. That history comes to them in fragments and shards, in mismatched pieces. It is up to history teachers to give…

The mainstreaming of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” language demands a different way of understanding the past. — Around corporate and university board tables, the phrase “diversity, equity, and inclusion” has become a common, almost ritualistic phrase, deployed on PowerPoint slides and on strategic plans, on bulletin boards, and on job descriptions. …

Congress is poised to make a big investment in history education. What can we learn from these sorts of efforts in the past? — Those who care about the teaching of history and civics are holding their breath as they wait to learn the fate of the billion-dollar, bipartisan Civics Secures Democracy bill currently before both houses of Congress. …

But it can’t stop there. — I became, back in graduate school, a devotee of what was then called “the new social history” — the history of everyday people. The field, which was just emerging in the 1970s, democratized history and opened up new possibilities for learning about the past. I loved it. I probably also…

How Two Centuries of Black Migration Shaped Today’s Political Parties — The subtleties and surprises of the 2020 presidential election have been explored from every possible angle: ethnicity and gender, the suburbs and the cities, continuities and changes between 2016 and 2020. In many ways, however, the broad outlines of the election of 2020 — like the elections of the last…

The sudden transition to online schooling has shone a light on the state of digital history. What we’ve seen hasn’t been very encouraging. Can we do better? — When we began creating the tools of New American History several years ago, we imagined them as a complement to non-digital teaching. We assumed teachers and students would always share classrooms and libraries. …