What Is Colonial Williamsburg For?
Telling the full story of the town’s past is an easy way to make a lot of people mad.
Clint Smith
Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of the new poetry collection Above Ground. He is also the author of the poetry collection Counting Descent, which won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, and of the No. 1 New York Times best-selling book How the Word Is Passed. He is the host of the Crash Course Black American History YouTube series.
Latest
Illustration by Matt Huynh Actually, Slavery Was Very Bad
The president’s latest criticism of museums is a thinly veiled attempt to erase Black history.
Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture Twenty Years After the Storm
What home meant before, and after, Hurricane Katrina
Courtesy of Clint Smith How Toni Morrison Changed Publishing
At night, she worked on her novels. By day, as an editor at Random House, she championed a new generation of writers.
Jill Krementz What It Means to Tell the Truth About America
And what happens when empirical fact is labeled “improper ideology”
Jon Elswick / AP Republicans Tear Down a Black Lives Matter Mural
Symbols aren’t just symbols.
Chip Somodevilla / Getty How Do You Forgive the People Who Killed Your Family?
Thirty years after the genocide in Rwanda, survivors and perpetrators live side by side.
Illustration by Dadu Shin The Magic of Old-Growth Forests
Photographing some of the oldest—and largest—living organisms on the planet
Photograph by Mitch Epstein. Courtesy of Steidl Publishers / Yancey Richardson Gallery What Children Remember About Their Fathers
A reading list on fatherhood and the memories that stick
Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Getty. When Soccer Was an American Afterthought
In a 1979 Atlantic article titled “Sportspeak,” soccer warranted only one sentence.
Matteo Giuseppe Pani; Source: Getty
