Restorative History Isn't Just Saying Sorry – It's Taking Back the Narrative
Alright, let’s talk about American history. We all know the standard version, right? It’s heavy on the glory, light on the guts, and almost entirely skips over the parts where real people had to fight like hell against abusive power just to claim a sliver of dignity or justice. That sanitized history isn’t just boring; it’s a weapon used to keep us quiet and compliant.
My work, especially my upcoming book A Resistance History of the United States, is about tearing down that façade. It’s about looking at how real resistance—that critical moment when people stop asking permission and take direct, often extra-institutional, action to force change—has always been a part of the American story. And, crucially, it’s about why that kind of powerful assertion so often gets cut short, its revolutionary fire doused by a system that’s incredibly good at protecting itself through co-optation and myth-making.
So, how do we fight back against a history that’s been deliberately distorted and weaponized? One of the most powerful tools we have, and one that I’m focusing on in my own work, is something that’s already out there, gaining traction in public history: Restorative History.
Now, Restorative History, as it’s often practiced today (and I deeply respect the folks doing this vital work), draws a lot from the principles of restorative justice. It’s about addressing past harms, centering the communities who’ve been marginalized or erased from the dominant narrative, fostering understanding, and working towards a kind of healing by telling fuller, more inclusive truths. This is essential. And many contemporary practitioners of Restorative History are already engaged in profound acts of resistance, simply by insisting on telling these suppressed stories.
What I’m doing in my own resistance history framework is taking this existing, powerful concept of Restorative History and explicitly sharpening its edge as an active and assertive tool of resistance. It’s not enough to be defensive or reflexive when you’re up against centuries of deliberate myth-making designed to uphold abusive authority. For Restorative History to truly fulfill its potential in dismantling those structures, it needs to be wielded with force and precision.
My assertive application of Restorative History involves:
Unyielding Historical Assertion: This is about more than just adding voices. It’s about confidently and forcefully stating the often brutal, suppressed truths about oppression. It means dragging the evidence of elite malfeasance and popular defiance out into the public square. It means highlighting the full agency and intellectual labor of those who engaged in resistance against the powerful.
Aggressive Myth Deconstruction: American public memory is a minefield of nationalist myths—American Exceptionalism, the sanitized Patriot Myth, the poisonous Lost Cause. These aren’t just stories; they’re ideological bulwarks. An assertive Restorative History takes a direct aim at these myths, deconstructs their origins, and exposes how they function to legitimize injustice and truncate resistance.
Centering Resistance, Not Just Victimhood: While acknowledging suffering is vital, my approach to Restorative History emphasizes the recovery and prioritization of active resistance, the volition, the strategies, the moments of assertion by those who were oppressed. This restores their full humanity as agents in their own history, not just passive recipients of harm.
Forging a Usable Past as a Weapon for Today: The whole point of digging through this often-horrifying past is to make it usable for present struggles. By understanding the mechanics of how abusive power protects itself through narrative control, and by reclaiming the stories of effective assertion, we build a playbook. This kind of Restorative History helps people recognize the game being played now and consider how to fight back more effectively.
My book traces this dynamic through a periodization of American history that resonates with how a growing number of historians today understand the nation's transformative crises. I look at the First Republic built on slavery; the Second American Republic created as a result of the Civil War and Reconstruction (a concept powerfully explored in Sinha's recent work, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic), whose revolutionary promise of multiracial democracy was tragically overthrown; and then a current Third Republic, born from the New Deal and World War II, with its own sophisticated ways of managing dissent and upholding power. In each era, you see the same pattern: courageous assertion met by systemic truncation, often greased by those national myths that even well-meaning liberal nationalism props up by clinging to the First Republic's foundational narratives.
So, when I talk about Restorative History in my work, I’m talking about a practice that is inherently confrontational because it has to be. It’s about actively restoring not just a more complete historical record, but also restoring our capacity to see power clearly and resist it effectively. It’s about taking an existing, valuable tool and ensuring it’s as sharp and effective as possible in the ongoing fight for a more just future, a future built on truth, not on convenient lies.
