I want to take a moment to tell you what your Atlantic subscription makes possible.
Much of my work here at The Atlantic focuses on history and memory. I am not interested in simply recounting what happened during a particular historical period, but in excavating how a nation, a city, or a community tells the story of what happened. History, I have come to learn, is not simply about primary-source documents and empirical evidence; in many cases, it's a story that people tell. And these stories are shaped by the memorials, monuments, and museums that people build, the school curriculums they create. How a place tells the story of its past—through iconography and education—tells us a lot about the sort of society it is trying to create today.
In my reporting for The Atlantic, I have traveled to Rwanda to write about how the small East African nation memorializes the devastating 1994 genocide against the Tutsi that killed over 700,000 people. I drove across the country to visit the schools where children were murdered, the churches where people were slaughtered, and the mass graves where they were buried.
I have traveled to Germany to examine how the country that was once home to the Third Reich has built a physical landscape of memory that stretches across the nation to account for its crimes in the Holocaust. I saw monuments as massive as the 200,000-square-foot Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and as small as the 10-by-10-centimeter Stolpersteine, or "stumbling blocks," that line the streets of over 30 European countries, marking the homes where people were taken by the Nazis.
I have traveled to Canada to learn how our neighbors to the North tell the story of their relationship to slavery, the ways they both participated in it and served as a refuge from it. Tracing the path of Josiah Henson—often called the Frederick Douglass of Canada—helped me understand this history more clearly.
Here in the United States, I have visited one of the nation's largest Confederate cemeteries and met with members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. I have traveled to sites where lynchings took place and spent time with the descendants of the victims. I have seen the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in my hometown of New Orleans and examined how the legacy of that storm lingers today.
All of this work requires time, resources, and collaboration across the entire magazine. It requires editors, fact-checkers, photographers. It requires flights across oceans and drives across countrysides. It requires many weeks with experienced translators and many months with historical texts.
None of this would be possible without the subscribers of The Atlantic. Your support allows me to ask the questions, to do the research, and to follow the story wherever it takes me. If you're not a subscriber, please consider joining us and supporting this work.
Clint Smith
Staff Writer
