WRITING JANUARY 6 INTO MEMORY

Five years after the U.S. Capitol attack, the argument is no longer only about what happened in the building. It is about how democracies decide what counts as history—through trials, pardons, plaques, and textbooks.

- TDG NETWORK

On January 6, 2026, the United States marks five years since a violent crowd breached the U.S. Capitol as Congress met to certify the 2020 presidential election. The video record is indelible: officers pinned in doorways, lawmakers evacuated, and a seat of government turned into a crime scene.

But anniversaries do not simply recall. They select. A democracy “writes” traumatic events into public memory through institutions—commissions and prosecutions, memorials and museum exhibits, official reports and classroom materials. Those mechanisms look neutral, even routine. In practice, they are where politics meets history: what is named, what is honored, what is punished, and what is forgiven.

January 6 is unusually difficult to settle into a shared national narrative because it was not a foreign attack. It was violence aimed at the constitutional transfer of power, committed by citizens and wrapped in competing claims of patriotism. That makes the fight over memory feel like a fight over national identity: who counts as a defender of democracy, who counts as a dissenter, and what the rules are when elections are lost.

THE RECORD, AND THE REWRITE

In the years immediately after the attack, the American state responded in the way modern democracies often do: it built a legal archive. Federal authorities pursued what became one of the largest criminal investigations in U.S. history, charging more than 1,500 people with offenses ranging from unlawful entry to assaults on police and broader conspiracies. Court proceedings generated the raw material historians and editors depend on—sworn testimony, video evidence, and judicial findings—turning a chaotic day into a documented sequence.