About the other 250
The Other 250 is a counter-atlas of place-names, contested landscapes, and living struggles, launching in the lead-up to the United States’ 250th anniversary.
The project responds to renewed federal efforts to erase, sanitize, and rewrite public history — stripping interpretive content from public sites, renaming geographic features by executive order, censoring school curricula, and advancing a narrow, nationalist account of the past.
The Other 250 surfaces the histories being suppressed. Across city blocks, borderlands, sacred sites, and industrial zones, it reveals the stories embedded in the names we pass every day — and the worlds those names obscure, erase, carry, and contest.
As you click on the map, explore stories of naming and renaming across many terrains: Indigenous sovereignty, Black geographies, immigrant memory, labor struggle, incarceration, environmental justice, militarized borderlands, and queer and trans life — tracing how place-names shape past and present struggles over land, power, justice, and belonging.
How to participate
The Other 250 kicks off with several dozen posts from place-based historians, Indigenous knowledge-holders, geographers, and community organizers across the country—then grows to 250 through an open call and partnerships with educators, universities, public-history organizations, and community groups.
We invite short public history posts of approximately 500–750 words focused on specific place-names. We’re especially interested in stories where naming is not only symbolic, but connected to active struggles over land, labor, memory, migration, incarceration, ecological harm, public space, and collective repair.
To submit a post for consideration, please review the Contributor Guidelines.
Project Team
Editorial: Zoltan Grossman, Raquel de Anda, Steve Lyons, Beka Economopoulos
Production: Andrea Rollefson, Lincoln Cornshucker (Cherokee)
Project Design: Jason Jones, Steve Lyons, Beka Economopoulos
Map & web development: Mapster
Web & graphic design: The Public Society
The Other 250 is the newest chapter of Words Are Monuments, an ongoing public history project of The Natural History Museum — a nonprofit “museum for the movement” led by artists, activists, and scholars. Words Are Monuments examines how place-naming has been used to seize land and erase worlds — and how it can be mobilized for resistance, cultural resurgence, and collective repair.
