In an essay for the New York Times in June 2021, the novelist Jonathan Lee declared that a reawakened commitment to historicity was now shaping the contemporary novel. He described how ‘For the past two decades, the novels celebrated for defining our time have almost always been books set within our time’, with historical fiction perceived as ‘fusty’ and ‘easy to caricature’. Yet more recently ‘the tone of such conversations has begun to change’, with the historical novel undergoing a revival, increasingly ‘embraced and reinvented’: witness, for instance, Colson Whitehead’s 2017 Pulitzer for The Underground Railroad, and his second for The Nickel Boys three years later. Even authors usually drawn to contemporary contexts, such as George Saunders and Lauren Groff, have ‘swerved into the past’ for their most recent works, driven backwards by a feverish cultural mood that feels altogether too transient to narrate. The current study examines a group of twenty-first-century novels profoundly shaped by the historical consciousness Lee describes, yet they also remain anchored, at least in part, to a present-day setting. In that sense they accomplish two feats at once: firstly, they reflect on the tumultuous events that have punctuated the new century, with references (both oblique and overt) to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, President Obama’s election victory, the 2008 financial crash, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the climate emergency. And secondly, alongside this sustained attention to the politics and culture of the new century, these novels are conceptually linked through their shared engagement in historical archaeology: each of them examines how aspects of America’s past exert various types of pressure on the contemporary moment. This forms the central concern of this study: it takes a group of novels largely set in a recognisable, present-day America (C. E. Morgan’s The Sport of Kings, Hari Kunzru’s White Tears, Ben Lerner’s 10:04, Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document and Innocents and Others, What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell, Christodora by Tim Murphy, Zone One by Colson Whitehead and Omar El Akkad’s American War), and explores how scenes and memories from an earlier period or periods repeatedly interrupt the contemporary narrative in ways which underline the past’s continued relevance to the characters’ lives.