Lloyd Kramer

It’s a long journey from the mountains of North Carolina to the ICE-covered, winter streets of Minneapolis. One of our state’s native sons, however, has made this personal and professional trip to secure his place in contemporary American history as the recent “commander-at-large” of the United States Border Patrol.

Often attributed to Mark Twain — perhaps mistakenly, since no historical source shows he actually...

While most Americans are preparing for the winter holidays and happy family reunions, millions of our immigrant neighbors are fearing authoritarian knocks on their doors or hiding from possible detainments and deportations. 

Americans have begun celebrating the 250th anniversary of the revolutionary war that freed our nation from Britain’s monarchy and eighteenth-century empire.

Dismissing carefully developed expertise as a threat to national values, the authoritarian assaults on long-serving experts in military affairs, government agencies, environmental management, judicial systems, immigrant rights, historical museums, public education, and medical research profoundly endanger the expanding knowledge and transnational exchanges that have shaped America’s global influence over the last 80 years.

The recent actions of authoritarian regimes and the dehumanizing violence of current global conflicts evoke haunting historical memories of anti-democratic violence and warfare in the 1930s and 1940s.

The most important civic descriptions of American identity affirm the beliefs in human equality and democratic self-government that shaped the Declaration of Independence and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

Current government campaigns to deport immigrants, expel foreign students, defund scientific funding, and dismantle all programs for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) have become the most far-reaching crackdown on targeted populations and ideas in modern American history.

The Board of Governors (BOG) that oversees the University of North Carolina’s sixteen constituent institutions has created a new graduation requirement for students who enroll at UNC-system universities this fall.

Some of Trumpism’s most notable recent actions confirm what historians have long asserted: historical knowledge matters because historical beliefs and historical forgetting always influence the exercise of state power and the meaning of national identities.