"A birthday celebrated without honesty about what happened in the years between is not a celebration of the country’s full story. It is a narrow-minded and self-serving performance of comfort."

"The association has had a partnership with the park service for nearly 75 years, going back to the early 1950s. They operated a gift shop at the visitor ctr and assisted with publishing free trail guides and other informational items to help guests enjoy the park." www.kfyrtv.com/2026/05/29/n...

State offices in Alabama are closed today in observance of Confederate president Jefferson Davis's birthday. I have some thoughts. #CivilWarMemory open.substack.com/pub/kevinmle...

"The state cloaks killing in the vocabulary of medicine because acknowledging the reality plainly would force us to confront what executions truly are: acts of deliberate violence carried out in the name of justice." www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/o...

State offices in Alabama are closed today in observance of Confederate president Jefferson Davis's birthday. I have some thoughts. #CivilWarMemory open.substack.com/pub/kevinmle...

Alabama state offices are closed today for Jefferson Davis’ birthday, which is still a state holiday. I wrote this column in 2024 about how honoring Davis — a vindictive mediocrity even Lost Cause historians struggled to deify — shows that Alabama’s values haven’t really changed.

Re: Sally Hemings. "That Jefferson managed to evade the scrutiny of white Americans for nearly two centuries tells us a great deal about the power of enslavers to bend reality to their will." (p. 100) Really enjoying this book. #booksky

This short commentary is honest and hopeful, even as it responds to backwardness and the lies some continue to tell themselves.

Alabama Closes Its Offices For Jefferson Davis #CivilWarMemory open.substack.com/pub/kevinmle...

Alabama Closes Its Offices For Jefferson Davis #CivilWarMemory open.substack.com/pub/kevinmle...

Apparently, what I heard earlier this afternoon was the sound of a meteor entering the atmosphere just east of Boston. www.bostonglobe.com/2026/05/30/m...

"The application also says the library would hold his papers. There is no role for the National Archives, which gives Mr. Trump freedom to determine how the exhibits portray his presidency." Let's be clear. That's called propaganda. Not history. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/30/u...

"The small gathering in that video looks less like a movement and more like a memorial to a memorial." #CivilWarMemory kevinmlevin.substack.com/p/protesting...

Breaking: Max Headroom has pulled out of Freedom 250

Lonnie Bunch is a national treasure. This just makes me so sad on so many levels. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/28/a...

And That's a Wrap on "A Glorious Fate" #CivilWarMemory open.substack.com/pub/kevinmle...

Today is the anniversary of the dedication of the Robert E. Lee monument in Richmond in 1890. I wrote this piece for the Atlantic back in 2020 to help readers understand how Confederate monuments physically altered race relations in the city. #CivilWarMemory www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

Today is the anniversary of the dedication of the Robert E. Lee monument in Richmond in 1890. I wrote this piece for the Atlantic back in 2020 to help readers understand how Confederate monuments physically altered race relations in the city. #CivilWarMemory www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

And That's a Wrap on "A Glorious Fate" #CivilWarMemory open.substack.com/pub/kevinmle...

Lonnie Bunch is a national treasure. This just makes me so sad on so many levels. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/28/a...

There is history and meaning in the placement of the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington. Historian Kevin Levin @civilwarmemory.bsky.social explains beautifully why Trump's Arch disrupts that connection. kevinmlevin.substack.com/p/a-memorial...

The easy fix for maintaining the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and every other national park would be to fully fund the National Park Service instead of massively cutting expenditures. Trump is not restoring this site. He is merely recreating it in his own image. #NationalParks

"The Park Service had a backlog of deferred maintenance projects around the country that came to an estimated $23 billion at the end of 2024, the latest year for which data is available. The projects included repairs to bathrooms, campgrounds, roads, visitor centers and other aging infrastructure."

A great opportunity to be Trump's arch nemesis. Comment by noon on June 3. savingplaces.org/monumental-a...

Historian here so honored to have curated the 250th exhibition, The Second American Revolution, at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield based on my new book #theriseandfallofthesecondamericanrepublic starting next week. presidentlincoln.illinois.gov/News/135/New...

Do not let the White House convince you that they are dictating what happens for the 250th. They're doing a bunch of stuff, but it's all fleeting spectacle. There is genuine, thoughtful, history-focused programming happening all over the United States. Get offline and go find it.

"There is something admirable, even moving, about a person who shows up alone to recite Frederick Douglass at a Confederate Memorial Day ceremony. The impulse comes from a good place: a refusal to let harmful mythology go unanswered, a conviction that silence implies consent..."

My response to this video. kevinmlevin.substack.com/p/protesting...

My response to this video. kevinmlevin.substack.com/p/protesting...

"The small gathering in that video looks less like a movement and more like a memorial to a memorial." #CivilWarMemory kevinmlevin.substack.com/p/protesting...

I have found this to be true: "Readers will be more inclined to seek out a book if they feel they know the author—through articles, essays, presentations, social media posts, and the like." substack.com/home/post/p-...

"Now that the repair work is underway, however, other documents indicate that the same contractor had — at least initially — not been able to perform one of the most critical parts of its repair job: sealing the gaps between the concrete slabs at the pool’s floor." www.nytimes.com/2026/05/27/u...

Will We Ever See a "Band of Brothers" Treatment of the American Civil War? #CivilWarMemory open.substack.com/pub/kevinmle...

Will We Ever See a "Band of Brothers" Treatment of the American Civil War? #CivilWarMemory open.substack.com/pub/kevinmle...

Did the promises of the Declaration of Independence find their way into the Constitution? Join @emilysneff.bsky.social, @sarageorgini.bsky.social, and Mary Sarah Bilder as they discuss how how America’s founding documents are related. Register here: www.masshist.org/events/draft...

The Colonel on the Breastworks: William Carney, Robert Gould Shaw, and the Battle for #CivilWarMemory open.substack.com/pub/kevinmle...

just finished this and i think it is extraordinarily relevant to our political moment. highly recommended. www.newamerica.org/insights/bos...

Getting ready to talk about Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts at LaGuardia Community College.

Band of Brothers never gets old. Why can't they do this for the Civil War?

The Unknown "In the [Civil] war’s aftermath, 46 percent of the 300,000 Union soldiers and sailors buried in 74 national cemeteries were unidentifiable. That figure was even higher for the U.S. Colored Troops. . . About two-thirds of their dead were never identified."

May 24, 2026

Douglass’s faith was not naive. It was hard-won by a man who had been property, who had taught himself to read in secret, who had escaped bondage and then spent his life arguing that the promise of the Declaration of Independence was worth fighting to redeem. kevinmlevin.substack.com/p/what-frede...

"[Frederick Douglas] was describing the collapse of Reconstruction, the rise of paramilitary terror, and the slow legal dismemberment of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. But the vocabulary is so contemporary that readers could be forgiven for thinking it was written last week."

The Pope proves he is not a neo-Confederate apologist.

"Trump's proposed arch obscures Lincoln and spotlights Robert E. Lee's front door..."

A Memorial Day Question: Who Exactly Are We Honoring? cc: @hcrichardson.bsky.social #CivilWarMemory open.substack.com/pub/kevinmle...

A Memorial Day Question: Who Exactly Are We Honoring? cc: @hcrichardson.bsky.social #CivilWarMemory open.substack.com/pub/kevinmle...

Finished the index! Need to double-check page numbers and think through a few headings and sub-headings, but it is pretty much done. Now, if you will please do me a favor and pre-order the book. 😉 bookshop.org/p/books/a-gl...

one of my unfinished projects is to read YA & MG historical fiction that's set during the american civil war or reconstruction, and make a spreadsheet of which ones contain the lie that Black confederate soldiers existed @civilwarmemory.bsky.social's book inspired me to document it in fiction

"We live in a culture that has conflated forgiveness with amnesia, and civility with the erasure of accountability. Douglass would have recognized the confusion immediately and rejected it just as quickly."