Timothy Naftali

Timothy Naftali is a senior research scholar in the Faculty of International and Public Affairs at Columbia SIPA, a presidential historian, author, and CNN presidential historian. He previously served as the founding director of the federal Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, where he curated a nonpartisan Watergate exhibit and oversaw major archival releases.

Public Memory Must Show Its Work When History Is Contested

At the Aspen Ideas Festival panel “The Architecture of Remembrance,” historians and designers argued that public memory should neither preserve comforting myths nor replace them with a single corrective story. Jane Kamensky, Walter Hood and Carol Quillen made the case that monuments, historic sites and civic landscapes should show evidence, recover erased people and places, and trust visitors to confront contradiction. Their shared premise was that remembrance is an active public practice, shaped by discovery, design and democratic process.

The Aspen InstituteJun 30, 202620 min read