Week of October 15, 2012
The Cuban Missile Crisis at Fifty
 Noam Chomsky and the Cuban Missile Crisis He gets Kennedy and the ExComm tapes very, very wrong. |
 Washington Looks Back at the Cuban Missile Crisis Part 1 of an ongoing blog series on D.C.-area Cuban Missile Crisis events |
 The Week the World Stood Still The Cuban Missile Crisis and the ownership of the world. |
 The Cuban Missile Crisis ExComm Meetings: Getting it Right After 50 Years RFK was far from a dove during the Crisis -- he consistently advocated for invading Cuba. |
 What If Nixon Had Been President During the Crisis? Kaboom. |
 The Cuban Missile Crisis: The View from Okinawa Six months earlier, the U.S. secretly brought near-identical missiles to the ones on Cuba to another small island -- Okinawa. |
 HNN Hot Topics: The Cuban Missile Crisis The best of commentary from historians, political scientists, journalists, diplomats, and politicians from around the web. |
Historian's Take: The Second Presidential Debate
 Obama Did More than Simply Win the Debate He came across as a powerful president who is genuinely with expanding the middle class. |
 Nothing Has Changed Except for the Media Narrative This was a classic pseudo-event, a media-generated moment that fit into the narrative many reporters were looking to right. |
 Obama and Romney Have Fundamentally Different Visions |
 My Fantasy Questions for Obama and Romney Town-hall questions are general short-sighted and ill-informed -- here's what should have been asked of the candidates. |
 "Was It a Good Show?" Above all, the debates are TV entertainment, and on that basis, both candidates won. |
 Romney's Lost Libya Opportunity The president's vulnerable on the Libya attacks, but Romney found a way to make it a negative for himself. |
 Obama Was Hurt on Libya And that matters more than who "won" the debate. |
Blogs
 Fact-Checking the Candidates: A Sacred Ritual in the Theater State Even the wonky fact-checkers emphasize performance over substance. |
 Individuals and Collectives Paul Ryan's Randian nightmare. |
 The New “New Normal”: Saving Ourselves From the Cliff When did government leaders decide to completely abdicate responsibility for our common interest? |
News at Home
 How History Shaped Barack Obama’s View of National Identity Historian Ian Reifowitz on the president's concept of "one American family." |
 Mormons and African Americans Have Criss-Crossed Political Identities |
 Return of the Paranoid Style The spirit of Joe McCarthy is alive and well in Jack Welch's job numbers paranoia. |
_0.jpg) Obama Wasn't the First President Who Hoped to be a Uniter George Washington faced an intense partisan divide. |
News Abroad
 The Vietnam War as You've Never Seen It ... From Hanoi Lien-Hang Nguyen discusses her new book, Hanoi's War: An International History of the War in Vietnam |
Historians & History
 A Historian Taught by History Eugene D. Genovese, R.I.P. |
Culture Watch
 The Irish Troubles Still Troubling Thirty Years Later Brian Friel's Freedom of the City gets the revival treatment at the Irish Repertory Theater. |
 The N-YHS Takes a Look at the Big Apple in World War II The city that never sleeps slept little during that particular dust-up. |
Books
 Review of Louis P. Masur's Lincoln Hundred Days Louis Masur successfully makes the story of the Emancipation Proclamation the story of the Civil War itself. |
 Review of Shawn Francis Peters's The Catonsville Nine The Catonsville Nine, a group of anti-war Catholic priests, turned the protests against Vietnam from radical to mainstream. |