In the opening pages of Broca’s Brain, Carl Sagan describes standing in a Paris museum holding the preserved brain of Paul Broca, the nineteenth-century physician who gave the book its name. Broca was the man who first mapped the region of the brain responsible for speech, a genuine scientific achievement, and someone thought that achievement significant enough to justify keeping his brain in a jar long after the rest of him was gone. Sagan’s observation is simple and devastating: the object is never merely material. It carries the assumptions of the people who decided it was worth saving. Someone always decides what survives.

Tiya Miles begins All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family’s Keepsake from the same premise, and arrives somewhere Sagan never quite went.

The object at the center of Miles’s book is a cotton sack, roughly the size of a pillowcase, embroidered with a message sewn by a woman named Ruth Middleton sometime in the early twentieth century. The message records what Ruth’s grandmother Rose had packed inside the sack before being sold away from her nine-year-old daughter Ashley at a South Carolina slave auction. A tattered dress. Three handfuls of pecans. A braid of Rose’s own hair. The embroidery closes: It is filled with my love always.

The sack passed through generations of the same family, mother to daughter, carried forward through Reconstruction, through Jim Crow, through the twentieth century, through everything. Then, in the early years of this century, it ended up in a bin of rags at a Tennessee flea market. A shopper noticed something unusual, read the embroidered inscription, bought the entire bin, took it home, searched the name stitched into the fabric, traced it to a prominent Charleston family and eventually contacted the Middleton Place Foundation, who received it as a donation. The sack spent several years on loan to the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture before returning to the Middleton Place House Museum in Charleston, where it originated.

Everything we know about Rose and Ashley exists because a stranger at a flea market slowed down before the bin went to the dump.

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Miles is a historian at Harvard, a MacArthur Fellow and a two-time recipient of Yale’s Frederick Douglass Prize, and she spent five years on this book. She describes finding direct testimony from enslaved people as feeling “like a shooting star in the sky,” rare and never guaranteed.

The conventional archive is not empty on the subject of Rose and Ashley. It’s full of records: bills of sale, probate inventories, census data and property records. Rose appears in those documents as property. The archive preserved the transaction; it had no particular interest in preserving the woman.

This is the machinery Miles is working against, and her method is precise. She reads each object Rose packed as a text. The tattered dress becomes an entry point into the vulnerability of enslaved girls on the auction block and the ways enslaved women used clothing as a fragile assertion of dignity in conditions designed to deny it. The three handfuls of pecans open into a history of land, labor and ecological knowledge, the survival skills Black women cultivated in relationship to the natural world. The braid of hair is evidence of maternal attachment so intimate it never would have occurred to a slaveholder to document it. Miles supplements the sack with plantation records, Freedmen’s Bureau documents, slave narratives and Black feminist scholarship, building a kind of scaffolding around the object that lets her read what the object alone cannot say.

She is transparent about where documented fact ends and contextual inference begins, which matters. Her predecessor in this kind of work is Saidiya Hartman, whose method of "critical fabulation" uses carefully bounded speculation, always accountable to evidence, to recover lives the archive considered beneath recording. Miles works in the same tradition, reconstructing the conditions of Rose's life from analogical evidence and comparative documentation, transparent with the reader about exactly where that reconstruction begins, which is itself a model for what historical practice looks like when the archive has been structurally shaped by violence.

The book’s most ambitious move comes at the end, where Miles draws on Ursula K. Le Guin’s “carrier bag” theory to extend the sack into a philosophical model for how objects carry memory and communal obligation across time. It’s the moment where the argument stretches hardest, where the specific gravity of Rose and Ashley risks dissolving into something more universal. Miles earns the latitude by how carefully she’s worked to get there, but readers will feel the pull. The particularity is the power. When it generalizes, something is lost.

What remains, and it is considerable, is a book that restores emotional and historical depth to lives the official record largely chose to ignore. The sack survived a flea market bin. Ruth’s embroidery survived decades of handling. The love Rose packed into that cotton sack survived a slave auction, survived Reconstruction, survived everything American history could throw at a Black family trying to hold itself together.

The official archive preserved the bill of sale; the family preserved everything else.

Sagan left the Musée de l’Homme carrying the question of what it meant that Broca’s brain had survived when so much else had not. Miles leaves you holding a sack and asking something harder: not what survived, but who decided what was worth keeping, and what it cost everyone else when they decided wrong.

The answers are in the embroidery.

Every historical narrative ends somewhere between the archive and the gift shop. This section features essays ranging across history, culture and public memory: following what gets lost in transit and who benefits from the losing.

We have been arguing about who burned the Library of Alexandria for two thousand years. The Romans, the Christians and the Arabs have all been blamed at one point or another, and the argument shows no sign of resolution.

That ongoing dispute is itself the lesson: the story of a loss can matter more than the loss itself, and institutions fail quietly long before anyone thinks to assign blame. The Library did not disappear in a single catastrophic moment. It faded through neglect, underfunding and the accumulated indifference of people who stopped believing their collections were worth defending.

Every archivist, museum curator and historic site interpreter working today is still answering for that failure every time someone asks whose story gets preserved and whose gets left to burn.

Every communications professional learns the same thing eventually, usually the hard way: the official version of events is never the whole story. Someone decided what to include, what to soften and what to leave in the parking lot with the other inconvenient facts. Institutions call this messaging; historians spend careers figuring out what got left in the parking lot.

I have spent more than three decades helping institutions tell their stories, and a considerable portion of that time writing fiction, which is a polite way of saying I have made a career out of understanding that narrative is never neutral. Someone always chooses where the story starts, whose voice carries it and what the silence at the end is supposed to mean. Public history, it turns out, has the same problem and is at least more candid about it.

The field sprawls across three broad professional domains: archives, museums and historic sites, each with its own institutional culture and its own answer to the question of who history is actually for.

Archives are the infrastructure of the discipline, where the raw material lives: the letters, the ledgers, the photographs, the legal documents that historians mine for evidence and that communities depend on to prove their own existence. The archivist’s traditional role has been custodial — acquire, preserve, organize, provide access — painstaking and unglamorous work that most people only notice when something has been lost.

What scholars like Rose Miron have made clear is that custody is never a neutral act. Deciding what gets collected, what gets cataloged and what gets quietly left out of the finding aid is an editorial decision with historical consequences. Archives tend to reflect the priorities of the institutions that fund them, which is another way of saying they reflect the priorities of power.

Museums occupy a different position in the public imagination. They are where civilians actually show up, usually on school field trips or tourist itineraries, which means they carry an outsized responsibility for what the general public believes history looks like. The exhibit label, the display case, the curatorial argument embedded in what gets placed next to what: these create meaning rather than simply presenting it.

Steven Lubar’s account of the Jenks Museum at Brown University is instructive precisely because it is such an unglamorous story. The museum did not fail because anyone set out to destroy it. It failed because the institution never developed a genuine relationship with any community that might have fought for it.

Collections exist in relationship, and relationships require ongoing negotiation and some willingness to let the community’s needs shape the institution’s priorities. A museum that treats itself as the sole authority over its collection is already beginning the slow process of making itself irrelevant. The Library of Alexandria did not burn all at once either.

Museums also carry their own version of political exposure, and the Smithsonian’s Enola Gay episode makes the point uncomfortably well. When the National Air and Space Museum attempted to present the atomic bombing of Hiroshima with genuine historical complexity, veterans’ organizations pressured Congress to intervene and the exhibit was gutted. The objection was not to the evidence. It was to the feeling the history produced, which left the museum in an impossible position: how do you interpret evidence responsibly when the resistance is not to the evidence?

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The answer, in that case, was that the institution couldn’t, and the result was not a more honest exhibit but a more comfortable one. Institutions that cannot hold their interpretive ground against political pressure are not doing public history. They are doing public relations.

Historic sites are the most exposed of the three domains, and not only because they exist in physical space. A museum can control its threshold. An archive can restrict its reading room. The historic site exists on a street corner, in a neighborhood, at the end of a red line painted on a sidewalk where people who never signed up to engage with public history are going to encounter it anyway.

The interpretive sign at a battlefield, the walking tour script, the reconstructed cabin at a plantation site; these are arguments made in public space about what happened there and what it means. Seth Bruggeman’s account of how Boston leveraged its Revolutionary past shows exactly what happens when that power goes unexamined. City officials and developers used Boston’s historical identity as economic engine and justification for urban renewal decisions that marginalized working-class neighborhoods and non-white residents whose histories did not fit the preferred narrative.

The Revolutionary past was not recovered so much as manufactured, selectively assembled to serve a vision of the city that required certain people and certain stories to disappear. Preservation without shared authority defaults to serving whoever has the most institutional leverage, which is rarely the people the history actually belongs to.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot provides the structural explanation for why this keeps happening. Silences in the historical record are not accidental gaps. They are produced through deliberate choices about what gets preserved, recorded and taught. His analysis of how scholars minimized the Haitian Revolution shows that events can be erased not because evidence is missing but because they disrupt comfortable assumptions about race, power and who qualifies as a historical actor. Shared authority cannot be a surface gesture if the deeper structures that produced those silences remain intact.

Tiya Miles makes the same argument from a different angle. The cotton sack at the center of All That She Carried is an object that should not have survived, documented by people with every institutional reason to ignore it. Miles’s recovery of Ashley and Rose’s story required her to work against the archival grain, to read absence as evidence and silence as data. Her methodology is itself an ethical position about whose knowledge counts and how historians should conduct themselves when the archive has already failed the people they are writing about.

David Blight’s account of Civil War memory makes the civic stakes explicit. The reconciliationist narrative that dominated American culture by the early twentieth century was not organic cultural development. It was a construction, built deliberately by veterans’ organizations, politicians, novelists and journalists who found that a story about brave men on both sides served certain interests considerably better than a story about slavery, emancipation and the violent suppression of Black political life. Bad public memory is not an academic problem. It is a civic one, with legislative, social and often lethal consequences.

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My grandfather, Robert E. Trevathan, was a historian by profession and the author of more than thirty western novels, each one built on archival discipline that most fiction writers I know hardly bother with. He understood that storytelling without historical honesty is just entertainment, and that historical honesty without a story nobody wants to read is just fancy filing. At his knee, I learned to read the gap between those two things before I knew there was a name for it.

I have spent my career in institutional communications, a field built on the understanding that organizations have stories they want to tell and those they would prefer not to. That requires a specific kind of attention to what is being left out, who is not in the room and what the silence at the end of an official statement is actually saying. It turns out this is also a reasonable description of public history.

I was a teenager when my family stopped at the Jefferson Davis Memorial in Fairview, Kentucky (shown above), and I decided quietly that I wasn’t going inside. The monument is hard to miss: 351 feet of concrete rising out of flat western Kentucky farmland, built to honor the president of the Confederacy on his birthplace. My family went in. I waited outside in the heat, certain of something I couldn’t yet name.

What I understood instinctively was that the monument was making a claim I did not believe. That is what public history does in all three of its domains — archives, museums, historic sites — when it is working honestly: it makes arguments about what happened and what it means, and the public argues back, whether the institution is ready for that conversation or not.

Shared authority is not a methodology. It is a disposition: a willingness to accept that the historian does not own the history, that the community has standing the institution did not grant and cannot revoke, and that the most honest work happens in the negotiation between what the record shows and what the people most affected by it know in their bones to be true. A historic site that has not asked the surrounding community what it believes the place means, and genuinely listened to the answer, has not shared authority; it has performed the gesture while keeping the interpretive controls firmly in institutional hands. Anyone who has watched an organization manage a slow-motion crisis will recognize the move immediately.

The past is not inert: it gets used. The question public historians spend their careers answering, whether they frame it that way or not, is used by whom and toward what end. The answer to that question is not academic. It is, as Blight made clear about Civil War memory and Bruggeman made clear about Boston’s Freedom Trail, the difference between history that serves the public and history that serves the institution.

I would rather do that work outside, where the history cannot be managed and the public cannot be curated, than behind glass where the institution controls the light.

There is a recurring feature in the human story that historians tend to address with clinical detachment and the rest of us with a kind of horrified fascination: the moment when the person holding absolute power stops being merely difficult and becomes genuinely unhinged.

It happens more than you’d think; it happens in ways that, with the benefit of centuries of distance, read as almost comic. Almost.

Start with Caligula, because everyone does, and everyone does for good reason. Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (Caligula was a nickname, roughly translating to “little boots,” a soldier’s affectionate tag from when he was a child mascot in his father’s military camps) inherited the Roman Empire in 37 A.D. to widespread relief and genuine popular enthusiasm. His predecessor, Tiberius, had been a paranoid recluse who governed largely through terror. Caligula, young and charming, seemed like the morning after a long night.

Within a year, the morning had curdled.

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Ancient sources, Suetonius chief among them, catalog the slide with almost bureaucratic thoroughness: declarations of personal divinity, reported conversations with the gods (Jupiter specifically, though reviews of those conversations are mixed), the appointment of his horse Incitatus to the Roman consulship, and the compulsive public humiliation of senators whose cooperation he simultaneously required. Modern historians debate how much of this is reliable reportage and how much is the ancient equivalent of opposition research.

What isn’t really disputed is the pattern: grandiosity, vindictiveness, an apparently sincere belief that normal rules did not apply to him, and a governing style that mistook cruelty for strength and chaos for dynamism.

He was assassinated in 41 A.D., four years in, by members of his own Praetorian Guard. They had, by that point, run out of patience. History does not record whether Incitatus had any comment.

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Across the Mediterranean and roughly fifteen centuries forward, Charles VI of France offers a different flavor of the same problem. Charles came to the throne in 1380 at age eleven, governed capably through his early years, and then, in 1392, something broke.

Riding through a forest with his troops, Charles drew his sword and began attacking his own knights. He killed four men before being subdued. It was the first episode of what would become a lifelong pattern of psychotic breaks. During his worst periods, and there were many, Charles failed to recognize his wife and children, denied that he was king or even that he was human, and became convinced that he was made of glass and would shatter if touched. He reportedly had iron rods sewn into his clothing to prevent this.

One imagines the tailors had questions.

France, during the thirty years Charles spent on the throne in varying states of incapacity, descended into civil war, lost major territory to England, and was governed by a rotating cast of regents and factions competing viciously to control the king’s intermittent lucid moments for their own purposes. The country did not collapse entirely; countries rarely do. Instead, they absorb the damage in ways that take generations to fully reckon.

George III of Britain is the most sympathetic figure in this particular catalog, which is worth noting if only because sympathy is usually in short supply when we discuss the powerful and the erratic.

George was, by most accounts, a decent man in a job that asked more than any man could reasonably provide. Conscientious, morally serious, devoted to his family and his faith, he was also, beginning in 1788 and recurring periodically until his final decade, periodically and catastrophically ill. Contemporary observers described feverish agitation, incoherent speech that went on for hours, paranoid accusations, and physical aggression toward attendants. He once shook the hand of an oak tree in Windsor Great Park under the firm conviction that it was the King of Prussia. The tree, to its credit, held its composure.

The medical consensus now leans toward porphyria, a metabolic disorder whose symptoms can include the neurological and psychiatric presentation George exhibited. Whether that diagnosis is entirely correct is still argued. What isn’t argued is that during his episodes, Britain was governed by crisis management and committee, and that the spectacle of a king visibly losing his grip on reality had political consequences his ministers spent years trying to contain.

George lived until 1820, the last decade of his life spent blind, deaf, and thoroughly detached from the world his policies had done so much to shape. He never knew that Napoleon had been defeated at Waterloo; he never knew that the American colonies, whose loss had genuinely grieved him, had become a nation of their own. In his final years, he spoke frequently and fondly with people who were not in the room.

Then there is Emperor Justin II of Byzantium, who reigned from 565 to 578 A.D. and whose madness was both witnessed in real time and recorded with a specificity that is either careful historical documentation or the most elaborate ancient shade ever thrown.

Justin, by multiple accounts, was wheeled through the palace corridors in a specially constructed cart, screaming. He reportedly bit the attendants who tried to calm him. He was soothed, according to the historian John of Ephesus, by organ music played continuously, which bought occasional intervals of relative calm. His wife, Sophia, effectively ran the empire, which turned out to be a perfectly workable arrangement under the circumstances.

What makes Justin’s case particularly instructive is not the madness itself but the institutional response to it. The Byzantine bureaucracy, ancient and practiced at continuity, simply worked around him. The machine kept running, the emperor remained the emperor, the symbolism intact, the ceremonies observed, while actual governance proceeded through other channels. It was, in its way, a masterclass in the difference between a title and a function. The Byzantines, whatever their other faults, understood that the office and the occupant were not the same thing, and acted accordingly.

The figures described above at least had the bureaucratic inheritance of functioning states, which constrained them even when they resisted constraint. History also provides a more instructive subspecies: the ones who wanted that kind of authority badly enough to manufacture it from scratch. Jim Jones built a church, then a movement, then a compound in the Guyanese jungle where 918 people died on November 18, 1978, most of them by cyanide-laced Flavor-Aid (rather than the Kool-Aid of cultural memory…aka “drank the Kool Aid”), after Jones had spent years methodically dismantling every social connection his followers had to the outside world.

David Koresh retrofitted an existing religious sect in Waco, Texas, declared himself the final prophet capable of opening the Seven Seals of Revelation, and parlayed that claim into absolute authority over several hundred people, including, by his own assertion, exclusive rights to the women among them. Both men shared with their more historically prominent counterparts the same core features: the grandiosity, the carefully engineered isolation, the punishment of dissent, and the absolute conviction that the rules governing other human beings simply did not apply to them. The wreckage from Waco didn’t stay in Waco. Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, the second anniversary of the day the Branch Davidian compound burned, and was explicit that Koresh’s end was his reason. I worked at the hospital complex that received the survivors and the dead that morning. The chain from one man’s God complex to that day is not abstract to me.

The difference between these men and their more historically prominent counterparts is one of scale, not of kind. Caligula had the Roman Empire. Jones had Jonestown. Koresh had Waco, and Waco had an afterlife none of his followers anticipated. The psychology is the same; the Jonestown or Waco compound is just what you build when the empire isn’t available.

None of these men was stupid; several were genuinely capable in the early portions of their tenures. Caligula showed real political instincts before the wheels came off. Charles VI had his lucid stretches. George III, in his saner years, was a respectable if limited monarch. Jones, before the paranoia metastasized, was a genuine organizational talent who built a racially integrated congregation in 1950s Indiana, which was not a small thing.

What they share is the way power, when it operates without meaningful constraint, tends to amplify whatever was already inside the person holding it. The grandiosity that is merely a character note in a private citizen becomes policy in an emperor. The vindictiveness that a normal person has to suppress, or at least disguise, gets expressed without apology when there is no one positioned to say no. The isolation that high office imposes, the managed access, the people whose livelihoods depend on your favor, the absence of anyone who will actually tell you an uncomfortable truth, accelerates whatever was already moving in the wrong direction.

History is not short of examples. It is, in fact, almost embarrassingly well stocked.

There is a temptation, when cataloging these figures, to treat them as anomalies, mere aberrations…the exception to a rule that normally operates cleanly.

They aren’t, they are, instead, a recurring proof of a principle that democratic institutions were specifically designed to address: that concentrating unchecked authority in a single human being is a bet against human nature, and human nature does not have a great track record of covering that bet.

The Romans figured this out eventually, after several tries. The British formalized it in ways that took centuries to stabilize; the French worked it out the hard way, more than once, and then a few more times after that for good measure.

Every civilization that has grappled seriously with the problem of power has arrived at roughly the same answer: the structures matter more than the person inside them.

Constraints are not insults to a capable leader; they are the architecture that makes leadership possible at all, because leaders, all leaders, regardless of their self-assessment, are human, and humans operating under conditions of unchecked authority have a documented tendency to behave in ways that look, from sufficient historical distance, almost comic.

Almost.