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.
This public-facing, evolving map surfaces histories often excluded from official narratives and traces how naming continues to shape land, power, and collective memory.
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.
Across city blocks, prison farms, borderlands, sacred sites, rivers, mountains, monuments, and sacrifice zones, The Other 250 reveals the stories embedded in the names we pass every day — and the histories those names obscure, erase, carry, and contest.
The map brings together stories from Indigenous renaming efforts, Black geographies, immigrant histories, labor struggles, carceral landscapes, borderlands, sacrifice zones, and queer and trans memory — showing how names shape struggles over history, justice, and belonging.
How to participate
Anyone can contribute. We invite short public history posts of approximately 500–750 words focused on specific place-names. Each post should help readers understand the histories and worldviews embedded in a place-name: how that name came to be, what it obscures or reveals, and how it connects to present-day material conditions, public memory, or community struggle.
We are 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.
We are launching with an initial set of commissioned posts and will continue building toward 250 entries through the year.
Before submitting, please review the Contributor Guidelines
