HISTORY

America's 250th anniversary naturally draws attention toward its great monuments: Independence Hall, the National Mall, Revolutionary battlefields and the buildings where presidents and statesmen shaped a new republic. But another America survives beyond those familiar landmarks. It can be found in a Black-owned hotel in Montgomery, an immigration station in San Francisco Bay, an adobe church near the Rio Grande, a Quaker meeting house in Massachusetts, an ancestral landscape

There are places where history is displayed, and places where it still seems to occupy the rooms. Versailles belongs emphatically to the latter. Behind its gilded gates and ceremonial façades lies not only the story of the French monarchy but an unexpectedly consequential chapter in the creation of the United States. In 2026, as America marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the Château de Versailles is bringing that shared history back into view thro

History feels different when it is encountered through the objects people once held, the newspapers they read, the places where they gathered and the ideas they left behind. On August 23, FQM Washington, D.C. Correspondent Dr. Bruno Mazali attended The Marcus Garvey Royal Collection, a historical exhibition presented by the Heritage Gallery UNIA-International Museum and Archive in Washington, D.C. The gathering became part of a broader encounter with African American history;

The Statue of Liberty may be one of the most recognizable images on earth, which is precisely why it has become so difficult to really see. We know the outline before we consider the sculpture itself: the crown, the torch, the tablet, the lifted arm. She appears on postcards and protest signs, in campaign imagery and cartoons, in films, advertisements and schoolbooks. Over nearly 150 years, Liberty has become less a single monument than a visual language through which America

On the Normandy coast, the tide continues to come and go as it always has. Children walk along the sand. Families look out toward the English Channel. Wind moves through the grasses above the cliffs. At first glance, there are stretches of coastline where nothing about the landscape seems capable of explaining the enormous weight of history beneath one's feet. And yet, on June 6, 1944, this shore became the stage for one of the defining military operations of the twentieth ce

Dr. Judy Staveley. Photo: Barry Morgenstein. History has always depended upon witnesses. Before archives become authoritative and anniversaries acquire ceremony, someone must first decide that a moment is worth recording. A letter is saved. A photograph is captioned. An interview is transcribed. A journalist notices what others have passed by. Speaking with Dr. Judy Staveley, Founder and CEO of The Platform Magazine, during America’s 250th anniversary year, I was struck by ho

Harry H. Pace, The founder of Black Swan Records. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons / Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain). History occasionally introduces individuals who understand the future before the rest of society has found the language to describe it. Harry Herbert Pace was one of those individuals. Today, Black Swan Records is frequently remembered as America’s first major Black-owned record company. The description is accurate, yet profoundly incomplete. To reduce Black Sw

America's greatest museums were not built overnight. Nor were they created solely through public commissions or royal patronage, as was often the case in Europe. Their foundations were laid by a remarkable generation of industrialists who looked across the Atlantic and saw more than beautiful paintings and magnificent furniture. They saw civilization itself. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the United States emerged as the world's foremost industri

At the end of a long private drive in Huntington, on Long Island’s celebrated Gold Coast, OHEKA Castle rises above its formal gardens with the improbable authority of a French château transported across the Atlantic. Its steep slate roofs, pale limestone walls, monumental staircase and disciplined garden axis suggest inherited European aristocracy. Yet OHEKA is unmistakably American; not because it rejects Europe, but because it transforms European grandeur into a story of am