It is time to build a new foundation for American history. Its old paradigms have grown thin and worn. For so long, the field’s exclusive focus on Europeans and their descendants has left us with more problems than answers. Generations of other imperialists, for example, preceded the Puritans, who we have been told governed a commonwealth in the “wilderness.” Similarly, histories that celebrated pioneers upon western “frontiers” have remained incomplete without attention to broader tales of expansion and empire. If history provides the common soil for a nation’s growth and a window into its future, it is time to reimagine U.S. history and to do so outside the tropes of discovery that have often bred exclusion and misunderstanding. To find answers to the challenges of our time—racial strife, climate crisis, and domestic and global inequities, among others—will require new concepts, approaches, and commitments. It is time to put down the interpretive tools of the previous century […]