What Dreams of Canada Tell Us About Race in America
By April Rosenblum
The Latest 
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The History of Presidential Misconduct Beyond Watergate and Iran-Contra
HNN Staff
At the AHA, James Banner, Kathryn Olmstead, Kevin Kruse, and Jeremi Suri discussed how they revived a long forgotten report on presidential misconduct.
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The History Behind the Border and Immigrant Detention Centers
HNN Staff
Families are separated at the border and people are indefinitely detained in overcrowded facilties. How a panel at this year's AHA conference examined the history of immigration.
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Roundup Top 10!
This week's broad sampling of opinion pieces found on the Internet, as selected by the editor of HNN.
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Blog
Reflecting on Martin Luther King Jr.'s Dream and Legacy
Steve Hochstadt
Two authors of distinguished books on the history of race in America just wrote articles for the New York Times for Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. Michelle Alexander and Richard Rothstein...
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What Will the Museums of the Future Be Like?
Help the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History by taking this brief survey to share what you’d like to see from *your* National Museum.
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Four Speeches by Dr. King That Can Still Guide Us Today
Alan Singer
Martin Luther King, Jr. challenged the war in Vietnam, U.S. imperialism, and laws that victimized working people and the poor, not just racial discrimination.
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Ross Douthat's Prescription for Academia Won't Solve the Real Problem
Ed Simon
Humanities departments have shrunk, tenure track jobs have disappeared, and the academy has increasingly come to rely upon an exploited underclass of contingent, part-time faculty. The argument of who exactly is responsible for this state of affairs rages on, but New York Times columnist Ross Douthat insists he knows the answer.
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George Orwell, 70 Years Later
John Rodden
Would the visionary author of Nineteen Eighty-Four have ever imagined that George Orwell might become the most important writer since Shakespeare and the most influential writer who ever lived?
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1917: The War Movie at Its Very Best
Bruce Chadwick
The movie is a story within a story – the two men within the greater war
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Edmund G. Ross Was a Profile in Impeachment Corruption, not Courage
David O. Stewart
The current impeachment proceedings have revived the historical error of proclaiming Kansas Senator Edmund G. Ross a hero for providing the vote that saved President Andrew Johnson’s job after the April 1868 impeachment trial.
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Jimmy Carter and The Myth That Gave the Iowa Caucuses Their Political Power
Wallace Hettle
Carter focused on the state and did well in the caucuses, which set him, an unknown, on the path to the nomination. Presidential hopefuls have flocked to the state ever since. However, Carter’s story is not quite that simple.
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The World is Losing another Historic Generation
Robert Mark Spaulding
We cannot prevent the passing away of China’s last generation from the pre-communist era, but we can do our part in helping to preserve the ancient culture they knew, so that it does not vanish completely with them.
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Poles Apart: Putin, Poland and the Nazi-Soviet Pact
Geoffrey Roberts
As the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II approaches, two of that war’s main victims – Poland and Russia – are once again embroiled in a highly emotional dispute about its origins. At the heart of the matter is the perennial controversy about the Nazi-Soviet pact of 23 August 1939.
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Strange Obsession: President Trump's Obama Complex
Robert Brent Toplin
While Trump’s dislike of Obama is complex and multifaceted, his behavior at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner may reveal an important source of the hostility.
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A Courageous Catholic Voice Against Antisemitism
Stephen H. Norwood and Rafael Medoff
As the harassment and beatings of Jews in the streets of Boston reached epidemic levels in 1943, one hundred Jewish boys and girls, ages 12 to 16, sent a poignant petition to the mayor.
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Remembering Dennis Showalter, Grandmaster of Military History
Paul A. Thomsen
On the evening of December 30, 2019, Dennis Showalter, a noted scholar of German, American, and military history, fought his last battle and rode off on a pale horse.
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A Play About Historical Reenactors Grapples With American Identity
Bruce Chadwick
Talene Monahon’s new play, How to Load a Musket, takes a deep, hard look at the re-enactors of two wars, the American Revolution and the Civil War.
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Digesting History: A Conversation with the Museum of Food and Drink’s Curatorial Director Catherine Piccoli
Chelsea Connolly
Food historian Catherine Piccoli describes how this Brooklyn museum encourages its visitors to literally "digest" history.
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The Supreme Court Historical Society: An interview with the President
Sam Mastrianni
An interview with the President of The Supreme Court Historical Society.
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Do Morals Matter in Foreign Policy?
Joseph S. Nye, Jr.
Examining 14 presidencies since 1945 shows that a radically skeptical view of morality is bad history. Morals did matter.
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Blog
Chief Justice John Roberts' Predecessors: The Supreme Court Chief Justices Who Presided Over Previous Impeachment Trials
Ronald L. Feinman
As Chief Justice John Roberts, appointed by President George W. Bush in 2005, readies himself for his historic role as the presiding judg...
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Roundup Top 10!
This week's broad sampling of opinion pieces found on the Internet, as selected by the editor of HNN.
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Stepping Back From the Brink of War
Alon Ben-Meir
Trump’s order to kill General Soleimani is one of the most reckless acts taken by a president, who once again has put his personal political interest above the nation’s security.
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Trump Checks all of the Impeachment Boxes: Will it Matter?
Donald J. Fraser
Unlike other presidents, Trump’s actions meet each of the requirements that the Framer’s laid out to impeach a president. Ironically, just as impeachment is needed most, the partisan tenor of the times may make it impossible to accomplish.
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Annual Jewish Film Festival, Following New Wave of Anti-Semitism, Offers Hope and Inspiration
Bruce Chadwick
Given the attacks on Jews all over the country, the Jewish Film Festival, one of the oldest in the United States, could not have come at a better time
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Painter of Disquiet: Félix Vallotton at the Metropolitan Museum of Art'
Sam Ben-Meir
Vallotton’s work unquestionably merits the renewed attention — his paintings possess a mysterious quality, narrative appeal, and attention to detail, as well as invoke a delicious sense of irony and wit.
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Depression Era Tenor Hits All the High Notes
Bruce Chadwick
It is 1934, at the height of the Depression, and an opera company in Cleveland is trying to make enough money to stay in business.
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Can America Recapture Its Signature Exuberance?
Tracy Dahlby
Walt Whitman understood transcendence of national mood is an uphill climb. Periods of division and strife sort new realities into a renovated sense of purpose. Yet periods of upheaval must necessarily lead to a refitting, not obliteration, of our common story or democracy is toast.
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Cinema Paradiso: The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures Will Be The Home of Movies, Past and Present
Andrew Fletcher
When it opens in 2020, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures will be an interesting landmark for historians and movie buffs alike.
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Why The West Is Losing The Fight For Democracy
Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes
We once had trouble imagining a future that is not essentially democratic and capitalist. That is not the way we think today. Most of us now have trouble imagining a future, even in the West, that remains securely democratic and liberal.
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The History of Fire: An interview with Stephen Pyne
Matthew Crawford
"Fire is a creation of the living world, but we have defined it as a phenomenon for physics and chemistry...we’ve mostly ignored the ideas and institutions that shape the social half of the equation."
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A New History of American Liberalism
Bruce W. Dearstyne
Liberals looking for an enlightening but sobering account of their movement's history should read James Traub.
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Capitalism Versus Socialism: Did Capitalism Really Win?
Walter G. Moss
The main task of voters in 2020 and thereafter will not be to choose whether we want capitalism or democratic socialism. Rather, it will be to decide the best pragmatic mix of the two (and best presidential candidate) to further the common good.
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Have Americans Usually Supported Their Wars?
HNN Staff
It wasn't just the Iraq War and Vietnam that proved unpopular.
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Winter Isn’t Coming. Prepare for the Pyrocene.
Steve Pyne
What does a full-blown fire age look like? We’re about to find out.
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Roundup Top 10!
This week's broad sampling of opinion pieces found on the Internet, as selected by the editor of HNN.
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A History of Climate Change Science and Denialism
David Carlin
Climate science is not a new discipline and the scientific consensus on climate change is far older than many people think.
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New PBS Documentary "McCarthy" Highlights a Tumultuous Time in Our History
Julia Brown
Director Sharon Grimberg discusses her new documentary "McCarthy," premiering on American Experience January 6, 2020.
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A Historian Reflects on the Return of Fascism
Lawrence Wittner
In the last decade or so, enormous headway has been made by movements and parties following the old fascist playbook, with rightwing demagogues trumpeting its key elements of virulent nationalism, racial and religious intolerance, and militarism.
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Blog
The Tea Party Revisited
Steve Hochstadt
The Tea Party no longer needs to attack the Republican Party from the right. They are the Republican Party.
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Trump is no Hitler: His Enablers are the Greater Problem
David Marks
The degree of Trump's success has been achieved only because of the leverage he has on political cronies.
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Reexamining the Mayflower 400 Years Later
Stephen Tomkins
The colonists seemed to have difficulty articulating exactly what compelled them to leave the Netherlands for America.
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A Personal History of Vietnam War Refugee Policies
Ron Steinman
The story of how a Vietnamese family came to America after the Vientam War and started a new life.
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A Civil War Heirloom, Ancestry.com, and the Importance of Tracing Our Family's Historical Roots
James Ottavio Castagnera
Retracing of the tap root of what made each of us an American can be a profound reminder of why we must put our democratic republic ahead of transient sectarian differences and deal with tomorrow’s existential challenges as, collectively, the American constitutional democracy.
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Little Women are Bigger Than Ever
Bruce Chadwick
Director Gerwig, who also wrote the screenplay, has made this a very modern look at life in the 1860s.
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Somewhere Over Their Rainbows - Deanna Durbin and Judy Garland
Bruce Chadwick
In the late 1930s and 1940s, Deanna and Judy, just teenagers, were two of the biggest stars in Hollywood. Deanna was not only a superb actress, but as a singer had the voice of an angel.
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Blog
Profiles in Courage and Cowardice
Steve Hochstadt
The great majority of young House Democrats who face difficult re-election campaigns in Trump districts acted courageously.
News
- The Titanic Wreck Will Now Be Protected Under a 'Momentous Agreement' With the U.S.
- Arrested for having sex with men, this gay civil rights leader could finally be pardoned in California
- Ancient aboriginal aquaculture system older than Stonehenge uncovered by Australia wildfires
- How the Government Came to Decide the Color of Your Food
- In 1851, a Maryland Farmer Tried to Kidnap Free Blacks in Pennsylvania. He Wasn’t Expecting the Neighborhood to Fight Back
- The Way We Write History Has Changed
- Rethinking How We Train Historians
- Building a digital archive for decaying paper documents, preserving centuries of records about enslaved people
- The Radical Lives of Abolitionists
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