Time, however, is an artist of erasure. The name Ms Americana faded from headlines, not because people stopped caring but because the public’s attention obeyed the centrifugal pull of new emergencies. In classrooms, in art, in quiet conversations, fragments of her persisted—an image here, an audio clip there—like fossils embedded in a sedimentary civic archive. They taught the next generation how stories could be weaponized and also how they could be tended.