Abstract: Jean Howard argues that one way to understand Angels in America’s deep engagement with history is through the angel archive the play creates and the new configuration of knowledge produced through it. Some critics such as David Savron have claimed that in Angels in America Kushner has bought into a specific myth of American history, i.e., the myth of American exceptionalism and destined progress toward perfectibility. Howard argues that Kushner has done so only by radically queering and transforming that myth, not simply by showing the centrality of gays in American history, whether in the persons of Roy Cohn or gay Mormons like Joe Pitt; rather, his play queers history by rewriting, interrupting, and co-mingling received narratives as a way of moving beyond their limitations, including narratives of national exceptionalism, special election, and progress. In Angels in America Kushner summons, fragments, and re-arranges pieces of national history in order to create a tentative theatrical intimation of a different, less injurious future. The best way to understand Kushner’s vision of American possibility is, however, to explore the particular archive of angels his play assembles and creates, for it is through that luminous and difficult archive that secular national history is probed and opened to the winds of change.