It has been said that “Half of writing history is about hiding the truth”: so if we are not talking about it, we are probably not curating it. History is not, as someone once said, just one thing after another. History is about how people experience, study, and interpret the past. Don't we all review and rewrite history in the light of our own experiences and understandings? Just turn on the news and see that we often have disagreements about the meaning of events, the ways in which each event happened, and even, sometimes, whether those events happened at all. There is no single history that tells the whole story. There can be many different histories, telling many different stories, in many different ways.
American history, however, was for a long time written and taught as a single story, a narrative of nation building and unending progress that united its...
