Historians/History

The National Park Service Explores the History of Farm Labor in America

by Frank P. Barajas

Fifty years ago, a single mother from the state of Chihuahua in northern Mexico migrated to southern California with four young daughters.  The family caravanned up and down the state working the agricultural migrant circuit.  That young mother was my grandmother, my abuelita.   

Sam Houston, San Jacinto, and the Coming Civil War

by John Willingham

A 50-Year Perspective—JFK, Richard Bissell, and the Bay of Pigs

by Howard Jones

A Forgotten Site in Florida Where the Bay of Pigs Invaders Trained

by Don Bohning

It’s been a half century since a U.S.-trained Cuban exile brigade landed at the Bay of Pigs on Cuba’s South Coast on April 17, 1961, in a failed attempt to oust Fidel Castro; a controversial operation still being debated today. The main reasons for that failure have been well-chronicled:  a change in the landing site from Trinidad to the Bay of Pigs and the last minute cancellation of air cover as the brigade landed. Largely ignored as part of the operation, is the small, but important, role played by Useppa, a tiny island off Flo

The Bay of Pigs Fiasco After Fifty Years

by Yoav J. Tenembaum

Fifty years ago the Bay of Pigs fiasco marred the beginning of John Kennedy's presidency and led to a reassessment of the foreign policy decision-making process of the United States. A CIA plan inspired, devised and approved under the former president Dwight Eisenhower, it was aimed at launching an invasion of Cuba by a group of exiles with the aim of overthrowing the regime of Fidel Castro.

In Commemorating the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War, the Central Role of Slavery Must Not Be Forgotten

by John Gripentrog

In March 1865, with the Civil War's final days in view, President Abraham Lincoln said plainly in his Second Inaugural Address that "all knew" that slavery "was somehow the cause of the war." Today, as the nation commemorates the war's sesquicentennial, the war's fundamental cause—slavery—is obscured in mythmaking and selective memory. It's time we get it right. Only by facing the past honestly can we as a nation progress toward a more perfect union.

Fort Sumter Sesquicentennial: Charleston Changes Her Tune

by Ethan J. Kytle

Fort Sumter surrendered again this week—150 years after Confederate forces first bombarded the federal installation into submission.  Civil War re-enactors recreated the famous capitulation on the island fort, which sits in the center of the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, in a Thursday morning ceremony.  Once more Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard allowed U.S. Major Robert Anderson and his men to salute their flag before they relinquished control of the fort.

The Third Reich in History: An Interview with Richard Evans

by Aaron Leonard

The Blowback World of Chalmers Johnson

by Sheila K. Johnson

In going through my husband’s files, books, and papers after his death, I’ve been forcibly struck by two things.  First, contrary to what many of his obituaries said, his writings and thoughts were remarkably consistent throughout his life. In other words, he was not a right-winger who became more liberal and outspoken as he got older. More than most people suspected, he was a radical all along, whose intellectual impulses were tempered only by his birth in the Depression year of 1931

Henry Johnson and an Honor Long Overdue

by Chad Williams

Why Visit a Civil War Battlefield?

by Scot Faulkner

“A war was fought. The right side won. What else do we need to know?” That person’s comment was recently posted on one of my websites. Americans have been commemorating the 150th anniversary of our Civil War since October 16, 2009. On that date in 1859 a cataclysmic event wrenched America into its bloodiest war. John Brown’s Raid on Harpers Ferry, was the “September 11” of the 19th century. Commemorating the actual war begins on April 12, 2011 – the sesquicentennial of the bombardment

Why Literature Matters: A Historical Perspective

by Walter G. Moss

To paraphrase Harold Hill in The Music Man, “We got troubles, my friend, right here, I say, troubles right here in the USA.”  I needn’t enumerate them. A quick look at a week’s headlines does the job.  Or take the special March 28/April 4 issue of Newsweek entitled “Apocalypse Now.”  True, it also deals with more global problems like Middle East revolutions, economic crises, nuclear meltdowns, tsunamis, and earthquakes.  But in this globalized world, the effects of pro

Finding Harry Truman’s Chrysler

by Matthew Algeo

In the summer of 1953, Harry and Bess Truman, just five months removed from the White House, took a road trip. Unaccompanied by bodyguards or attendants of any kind, the former president and first l

Channelling George Washington: "So Help Me God"

by Thomas Fleming

“I see the historians are at it again.”“At what, Mr. President?”“Arguing about whether I added ‘So help me God’ at the close of my

How to Write a Trilogy Without Really Trying

by Mary Beth Norton

The final book in a trilogy I have been working on since the 1970s (gasp!) is being published this spring, under the title Separated by their Sex: Women in Public and Private in the Colonial Atlantic World (Co

Channelling George Washington: The Forgotten Soldiers of World War I

by Thomas Fleming

“I’ve got a beef.  Isn’t that what you modern slang-slingers call a complaint?”“I used to hear the word a lot in my days in the Navy.  

Channelling George Washington: The Greatest American General

by Thomas Fleming

“Who was the greatest American general?”“That’s a VERY large question. Robert E. Lee?”“A lot of people think so. But I feel his rep

Some Sociological Uses of History

by Herbert J. Gans

For a sociologist, or at least this one, history is of two kinds; one which deliberately studies the past to shed light on the present, and the other which recounts and analyzes the past as an end in itself.  Although the dichotomy is fuzzy and the labels I attach to it are inelegant, I think of the first as present-oriented and the second as past-oriented history. One can subdivide this dichotomy further: among other things, from the historians' and the readers' perspective

Remembering the Triangle Fire

by David Lee McMullen

March 25, 2011 marks the one hundredth anniversary of what is perhaps the most infamous industrial disaster in the history of the United States—the fire at

Highlights from the 2011 Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Houston, Texas

by David Austin Walsh

Index Day 1Day 2Day 3Day 4 VideosRelated Links HNN Coverage: Past AHA & OAH Conferences VideosEmilio Zamora: History Wars: The Texas Textbook Controversy