Are Historians Doing Enough to Address Climate Change?
By Walter G. Moss
The Latest 
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The Lavender Scare and Beyond: Documenting LGBTQ History from the Great Depression to Today
Eric Gonzaba
An illumiting interview with Josh Howard, the director of the Lavender Scare documentary, and historian Eric Gonzaba.
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The Vatican's Latest Official Document Is An Insult to the LGBTQ Community and History
Ed Simon
Our understandings of romance, family, sexuality, and gender have been in flux in the past – within the Church no less – and no amount of thundering about “How the Vatican views it now is how it has always been” can change that.
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Why is Brazil so American?
Marcos Sorrilha Pinheiro
Given Brazil's history, it is fully understandable that its current president, a retired military man from the Brazilian middle class, has a genuine admiration for Trump and his followers.
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The Origins of American Hegemony in East and Southeast Asia – And Why China Challenges It Today
Wen-Qing Ngoei
Examining the origins of American hegemony in this region helps us better understand the history of the Cold War.
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The Cold War Spy and CIA Master of Disguise Writing the History of CIA Tactics in the Cold War
Aleisha Smith
An interview with Jonna Mendez. A former Chief of Disguise with 27 years in the CIA, she discusses her latest book (co-authored with her husband Tony Mendez), her experience in the CIA, and her role at the Spy Museum.
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The Origins of the Lost Cause Myth
M. Andrew Holowchak
States’ rights and slavery, while theoretically distinct, were in praxis intertwined. Here's what a Jeffersonian analysis of Jubal Early’s lost-cause apologia can teach us.
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Silent Spring: Why Rachel Carson’s words still ring true today
Catherine Whitlock
Any future US president would do well to heed the likes of Rachel Carson and her successors and invest in clean energy policies, protect the environment, and promote biodiversity.
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Make History Accessible: The Case for YouTube
Rohit Kandala
Youtube presents a great opportunity for both professional history educators and amateurs to enhance the public’s interest in history.
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A Fresh Take on Watergate Illuminates the Present
James Thornton Harris
While Richard Nixon’s rise and fall has been repeatedly examined — there are more than a dozen biographies of him — John Farrell’s book, Richard Nixon, a Life, offers many new insights.
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Environmental Historian Sara Dant: "History Is As Relevant Today As Ever."
Korina Ike
"We have many challenges - environment, politics, social, cultural - that are the end-product of our historical arc. Understanding how we got here, what has worked and what hasn’t in the past, gives us the best chance of moving forward successfully."
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Ideologies and U.S. Foreign Policy International History Conference: Day 1 Coverage
Marcelo Carocci
The conference brought together academic and independent historians and political scientists from universities all-round the US and England to discuss the history of ideology and US foreign policy from many different points of view.
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Ideologies and U.S. Foreign Policy International History Conference: Day 2 Coverage
Miriam Lipton
What was the global significane of the Civil War? What exactly is the definition of “freedom?” How are Donald Duck, Indiana Jones, and anti-modernizationistsconnected? The second day of the Ideologies and U.S. Foreign Policy International History Conference was highlighted by experts’ bold answers to these ambitious questions.
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"Donald Trump and Ideology:" Dr. James Lindsay Delivers the Governor Tom McCall Memorial Lecture
Miriam Lipton and Marcelo Carocci
History and Trump's ideology of American power and foreign relations.
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Blog
Photographs From My First Trip to China
Steve Hochstadt
Steve Hochstadt shares images from China in 1989, about a month before the Tiananment Square Massacre.
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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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Material History and A Victorian Riddle Retold
Amy G. Richter
A historian of nineteenth-century American culture, I study the significance ordinary women and men gave to furniture, art, and decoration. Recently my mother's dementia challenged my scholarship by reminding me of the personal meanings of objects and the intimate work they do.
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Women Have Fought to Legalize Reproductive Rights for Nearly Two Centuries
Lauren MacIvor Thompson
The efforts of the second-wave feminist movement transformed older ideas of voluntary motherhood, which asserted that women both didn’t have to have sex or be pregnant, into the more radical notion that women could enjoy sex without fear of becoming pregnant.
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The President is Disrupting the U.S. Economy
Robert Brent Toplin
It is high time that leaders in Washington acknowledge the risks associated with the president’s trade wars and demand a more effective policy course.
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Political Corruption Underwrites America’s Gun-Control Nightmare
Thom Hartmann
The story of the rich politician whose extreme corruption inspired the 17th Amendment--and how the Citizens United ruling allows money to rule politics once again.
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What We Can't Forget As We Remember Anne Frank
Rafael Medoff
Today would have been her 90th Birthday. Here's how FDR could have done more to save Holocaust victims like her.
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What the Feud and Reconciliation between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson Teaches Us About Civility
Mike Purdy
The history of presidential insults cause us to reflect how we should treat one another – not only in the public square, but around the family dinner table, in our marriages, and in the workplace.
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Whatever Happened to an Affordable College Education?
Lawrence Wittner
Over the past 40 years, the average cost of attending a four-year college increased by over 150 percent for both public and private institutions.
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The Challenges of Writing Histories of Autism
Jonathan Rose
And how historians might overcome those obstacles.
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On the eve of Pride 2019, D.C. LGBT Community Reflects on its own history with Lavender Scare
Andrew Fletcher
The film screening gave viewers a chance to ask questions and tell their stories. The Lavender Scare is set to premiere on PBS on June 18th.
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Arbella Bet-Shlimon Got Into History to Counter False Perceptions of Middle East Region
Erik Moshe
She had a goal when she first started out in history: to use teaching, scholarship, and research to help offset spurious ideas that foster cruelty to Middle Easterners in the United States and prolong destructive foreign policy abroad.
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Here Comes the D-Day Myth Again
Kevin Kennedy
The successful Allied landings in Normandy accelerated Germany’s defeat, but they didn’t bring it about.
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How Should Historians Respond to David Garrow's Article on Martin Luther King, Jr.?
Andrea S. Johnson
How can and should historians address the history of gender and sexuality when it intersects with the histories of the civil rights movement, gender, American religion, and the development of the surveillance state?
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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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Why 2019 Marks the Beginning of the Next Cycle of American History
Ronald L. Feinman
America has had four major crisis turning points, each 74 years apart, from the time of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 to today.
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Remembering Murray Polner (1928-2019)
Ralph Seliger
“Murray played a big role at HNN and was instrumental in our success."
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D-Day 75 Years Later and the Quest for Peace
William Lambers
American and allied soldiers lost their lives on D-Day so that others may live free. The best way to honor D-Day veteran’s sacrifice is to work for that elusive, but achievable eternal world peace.
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Remembering Rome's Liberation
Gregory Sumner
Amid the anniversary of the D-Day invasion, it is important to note, too, the anniversary of an event that unfolded just two days earlier: the Allied liberation of Rome.
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Depicting the Devil: How Propaganda Posters Portrayed Nazi Ideology
Albinko Hasic
The poster became a cheap transmitter of these various messages and combined visual arts with psychological methods to incessantly repeat Nazi ideologies to the German public.
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Witch Hunt! How Europe’s Witch Mania Came to the New World
Elisa Carbone
Witch hunts in the New World began in Virginia, though Virginia’s alleged witches were imprisoned rather than executed.
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Donald Trump, the Humanities, and the Decline of American Values
Walter G. Moss
We overvalue such things as making money, “getting ahead,” glitz, and celebrity status and undervalue what the humanities and arts emphasize—beauty, truth, and goodness.
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The Bund was far from Perfect. It still matters to Jewish History
Joshua Meyers
The Bund embodied the aspirations and identity of millions of Jews for five decades and provided serious answers to the questions Jews faced then and now.
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A Brief History of the Theory Trump and Barr Use to Resist Congressional Oversight
Donald J. Fraser
Unitary executive theory from Alexander Hamilton to Donald J. Trump.
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The Occupation of The Atlantic Mind
Walter L. Hixson
The Atlantic magainze is distinguished by the intensity of its Zionist distortions of the past and present of the Palestine conflict.
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What I’m Reading: An Interview With Historian Mark Weisenmiller
Erik Moshe
"Historians should have perseverance, a strong set of eyes, and an unimaginably long reading list."
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What Should Historians Do About the Mueller Report?
Bruce W. Dearstyne
We need to be more emphatic in asserting history's role in bringing clarity to complex public issues.
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UPDATED Mueller Investigation: What Historians Are Saying
Historians' reactions to Mueller's public statement and findings.
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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
Good Intentions, But Still A Long Way To Go
Steve Hochstadt
Only once those who have enjoyed the privilege of belonging to dominant groups ask themselves whether other people also deserve the same rights will our society get beyond good intentions to equal...
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What the Fugitive Slave Law Can Teach Us About Anti-Abortion Legislation
Ed Simon
As the Fugitive Slave Act was motivated by an inhuman racism, so are these new laws mandating forced pregnancy defined by hideous misogyny.
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Clarence Thomas is Wrong: It’s Restrictions on Abortion that Echo America’s Eugenics Past
Molly Ladd-Taylor and Johanna Schoen
The animating belief of eugenics—the state should control the reproduction of poor people, immigrants, and women of color—is central to current abortion politics.
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Edwardian England’s My Fair Lady is Fairly Wonderful
Bruce Chadwick
They will have you dancing all night, and adoring it.
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A Day to Remember: Memorial Day 2019
Vaughn Davis Bornet
For some among us, Patriotism sometimes seems just “old hat.” Not for everybody.
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How About a Peace Race Instead of an Arms Race?
Lawrence Wittner
On September 25, 1961, dismayed by the Soviet Union’s recent revival of nuclear weapons testing, John F. Kennedy used the occasion of his address to the United Nations to challenge the Russians “not to an arms race, but to a peace race.”
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Leadership and Mimicry: What Plutarch knew about Elizabeth Holmes
Jeffrey Beneker
In business and in politics, philosophers and reporters tell us that no one can hide deficiencies in character forever.
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On Toad-Eating, Tyranny, and Trump
Frank Palmeri
What a writer in 19th-century England can teach us about Republicans, the press, and Trump.
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Where Did the Indigenous Community Mothers Go?
Candace Wellman
Indigenous community mothers seem to have been an uncomfortable truth for historians and other writers that did not fit with the Euro-American mythology they sought to build around “the first white woman” in town. The result was their now-conspicuous absence.
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The Chinese Threat to American Higher Education
Mark S. Ferrara
As President Trump’s nationalistic rhetoric and restrictive immigration policies have resulted in a 10 percent drop in international student enrollments on American campuses, China’s “Double First Class” plan aims to make forty-two of its universities into world-class institutions by 2050.
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Yes, you should have free speech on Facebook.
Andrew Joseph Pegoda
When blocking content or banning users, Facebook uses its ubiquitousness, power, wealth, and monopoly—made possible by neoliberal transferences of power from “real” governments to private businesses which function as unelected and unaccountable de facto governments—to silence.
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The Expansion of Presidential Power Since 1973
Ronald L. Feinman
Arthur Schlesinger Jr’s Imperial Presidency is now just the prelude to a far greater constitutional crisis that is possibly transforming the Presidency and destroying the separation of powers and checks and balances created by the Founding Fathers in 1787.
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For Anti-Racist Educator, Teaching History Was a Calling
Erik Moshe
The most valuable history is often the most difficult to find; it is what we don’t even know that we need to know that gets us into trouble.
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The Fall of Communism in TV’s The Weissensee Saga
Walter G. Moss
The most impressive educational aspect of The Weissensee Saga is that it presents a realistic and convincing portrait of the differing lives and reactions of East German individuals in the final decade of the GDR’s existence.
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All the President’s Humility: What We Can Learn From Young George Washington
Peter Stark
It took Washington many years to metamorphose from self-centered, impetuous young man burning with ambition to gain personal “honor” into a steady, selfless, seemingly unflappable leader.
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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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Susan Sarandon Shines in Happy Talk
Bruce Chadwick
Written by Jessie Eisenberg, Happy Talk focuses on a woman enthralled by South Pacific, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein show about life in the Pacific during World War II.
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