Over the past decade or so, a notable trend among American historians, particularly those prioritizing social justice in their research, has been to frame the unsavory facets of United States history as the defining features of the society. One useful way to think of this is as a version of the American exceptionalism the same people often criticize, only in photo negative. For example, it imagines, or might lead a reader to imagine, that America was uniquely guilty of or capable of wars of conquest or systematic racial subjugation in ways that the historical record taken in its fullness cannot support. 

Two kinds of work tend to come out of this process: ones that help us reexamine the ways we should think about the past by providing nuance to American “progress” and others that distort our understanding of the past by oversimplifying darker aspects of history, often taking events out of their proper national and world context.