This week, our country turned 245 years old.

America, this young, arrogant nation, is a place where history has shaped our national

identity.

The monuments that we honor, the stories that we tell, and the spaces we return to, are ways

that we look to the past to better understand ourselves, because the memories that are

held in their walls, and in their soil, and in their spirits, are reflections of not

just who we were, but who we are.

In so many ways, we've long suffered a crisis of identity, and we're seeing now how the

politics of our memories have twisted and shaped us in ways that have largely centered

whiteness and white Americanness.

Over the past year, in particular, there's been a reckoning with that version of the American

history.

The movement to tear down monuments to the Confederacy and white supremacy has grown.

Statues have come crumbling down, and whole towns have been stripped of their racist

names.

And we're seeing how, through the course of American history, the black American experience

has been cast as an aside, deemed by the gatekeepers as lacking importance to who we are,

as if it's something separate from the American experience.

Of the nearly 95,000 entries on the National Register of Historic Places, just 2% focus on

black Americans, but the effort to identify, restore, and preserve African American historic

sites has recently been injected with new interest and a boatload of funding.

At the forefront is the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and their bold push

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