Historians, Editors, and the N-Word

Facing the ugliness of the past in print

Photo by Koshu Kunii on Unsplash

With the very first submission for the very first number of my forthcoming magazine, I was faced with a problem: how to edit a piece that included the N-word in a quote from a historical source.

Now, American historians encounter this word very often in our sources—in newspapers, in letters, in journals, in…