Submit a pitch: “History in a Time of Forgetting”

2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Throughout the year, the US government is organizing and funding commemorations of the event. At the same time, the current presidential administration has taken concerted steps to shape and disseminate a very specific version of the nation’s history. Notably, their efforts involve limiting the stories that are told about our past to conceal difficult truths. Their version of history is also one that diminishes the experiences of and justifies policies targeting communities that have survived centuries of oppression, including Indigenous people and communities, people of color, immigrants, descendants of enslaved Africans, and queer individuals and communities, among others. These efforts to promote simplified and purportedly objective accounts of the nation’s history ignore real complexities from the historical record, undermine the difficult work of historical research, and seek to avoid the processes of interpreting and discussing the meaning of our past.

Who benefits from the official and unofficial narratives constructed about the nation’s collective history?

The contradiction that this revisionist project makes apparent is that seeking to consolidate a specific version of the country’s past actually proves both the elasticity of historical narrative and the flexibility of the body politic. This is made even more visible through the multiple ways in which efforts at rewriting history take shape. For instance, book bans and efforts to rewrite school curricula often include the erasure or denial of uncomfortable truths, while efforts to re-name army bases after Confederate leaders demonstrate a desire to return to past models of telling our shared story. The current surge in vaccine skepticism, meanwhile, substitutes a rosier version of the past that obscures the realities of diseases like measles and polio. Regardless of the form they take, these efforts to roll back the advances of decades of scholarship are born out of a specific ideological vision of what the United States can be and who belongs to it.

But we can also see the resistance to this rewriting and its erasures in the persistence of existing histories, as well as the continued proliferation of alternate histories in a variety of spheres and locations that are not subject to governmental control. While the academy is a critical site of this preservation of historical knowledge, it is not the only one.

This series invites writers to consider the present state of the American past—and writing and rewriting history as a political tool—through specific sites and cases of historical re-interpretation, erasure, and imagining. Please remember that Spark’s audience is broad; writers should include enough context within their analysis to make the specifics legible to a lay-reader. We welcome submissions related, but not limited, to topics including:

• Histories and lessons from past US foreign and colonial interventions that can shed new light on current events (such as the current war in Iran and recent political interventions in Latin America).
• Public health histories, such as those of vaccines, past diet fads, conversion therapy, and reproductive health, that may bring insights for our current moment and capture the complex relationships between individual actors and larger authorities.
• Cultural engagement with history, such as how artists and creators craft depictions of the past from the standpoint of the present moment (e.g., Sinners, adaptations or rewritings of canonical classics).
• Messy narratives and forgotten histories of resistance and their lessons for the present, or even the darker underbellies of progressive movements, such as how we deal with the complex legacies of movement leaders (e.g., Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King Jr., Margaret Sanger).