Historical Figures Whose Reputations Scholars Reexamined

Shakespeare’s Richard has a withered arm and a body that advertises his villainy. The skeleton identified at Leicester let researchers check parts of that picture directly. They found significant scoliosis and no skeletal evidence of a withered arm. The bones can tell us about his spine while the play shows how a later age used his appearance.

Look at the Met’s statues of Hatshepsut. Some show the female pharaoh in a male royal form, and inscriptions on some of those statues use her name or feminine grammar. The excavated fragments and their reconstruction have given historians material evidence for her kingship and for the later destruction of her monuments.

For years scandal stories helped define Grant’s presidency. Historians and curators now give more attention to the federal response to white supremacist violence during Reconstruction. Put his administration’s enforcement of civil rights alongside the scandals to see what was missing from the old shorthand for his presidency.

Writing about Mary’s reign often treated her restoration of Catholicism as a failed interruption. Historians working on the Marian church have examined how clergy went about rebuilding it in practice, and how some of its approaches fit European Catholic reform. That line of research changes what readers can ask about the five-year reign, alongside the persecution for which it is remembered.

The story that Nero started the fire of Rome sits beside another record of his response. The fire broke out in AD 64, and the surviving accounts include relief efforts and reconstruction. The British Museum’s reexamination places the charge in the context of hostile later writing, leaving room to ask what the evidence establishes about his actions.

Expedition journals record Sacagawea recognizing landmarks and note that a woman traveling with the party helped signal peaceful intentions. They offer little evidence that she led the expedition across the plains, a role often given to her later. Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara historians also preserve accounts that differ from the journals, which makes whose record survives part of the story. The image is a detail from Edgar S. Paxson’s 1912 mural, painted more than a century after the expedition.

Start with the testimony her son Madison published in 1873. His recollections are central to Monticello’s exhibition on Hemings. A research committee also reconsidered the family evidence after the 1998 DNA study, which linked descendants of her son Eston to the Jefferson male line. The documentary and family records help place Hemings’s own life at the center.

Begin with the work she made and signed rather than with a single event in her life. The National Gallery’s examination follows her career across several cities and uses the self-portrait as Saint Catherine to look at how she represented herself. It is a route from a familiar biographical story into the painter’s decisions and professional standing. She appears at work in the self-portrait shown here, The Allegory of Painting.

The Prado now credits Anguissola with a portrait of Philip II that an inventory from 1686 assigned to Juan Pantoja de la Cruz. Compare it with her self-portraits, where she shows herself reading, playing an instrument, or painting, to see how court conventions and a painter’s identity operate in the same career.

The 1843 notes on Babbage’s Analytical Engine are where to start with Lovelace’s reputation as a computing pioneer. Note G sets out a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers. Historians can also examine her surviving correspondence and math exercises to trace her education and see what the paper alone cannot tell us about the collaboration.

The title warrior queen captures only one part of Njinga’s rule. Linda Heywood’s study also follows her diplomacy and decisions about alliances. Pair it with the Smithsonian’s account of her political strategy for a view of how a ruler facing Portuguese expansion used negotiation alongside military resistance.

In researching Black Spartacus, Sudhir Hazareesingh returned to archives to examine how Louverture made political choices within the revolution in Saint-Domingue. That view puts the ideas and strategies of Black revolutionaries at the center. It gives readers a way to assess portraits that explain him chiefly through his relationship to France.