Historians/History

History without Reading

by Jim Cullen

Imagine, if you will, the study of history without reading. No primary source documents to ground a discussion. No monographic studies to situate a discourse. Not even a textbook for background information. How much a sense of the past could you possibly have? This is not a rhetorical question. Nor is it solely an invitation to consider the ongoing deprivations and inequities that riddle our educational system. Actually, the situation I'm describing is probably the de facto

Backup of Highlights of the 2010 Convention

HNN Daily Reports Day 1 Related Links HNN Coverage: Past AHA & OAH Conferences News San Diego Tsunami A Grim Year on the Academic Job Market for Historians H

The Hall of Fame for Great Americans: Organizational Comatosis or Hibernation?

by William N. Thompson and Ernita Joaquin

The world’s first organization that has been specifically designated as a “Hall of Fame” was established in New York City in 1900.  The Hall of Fame for Great Americans honors 102 Americans.  It has served as a model for hundreds of other “halls of fame,” the most prominent being baseball’s Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, established in 1939.  While the Hall of Fame for Great Americans remains the original icon in a history of popular cul

Why Did the Bush White House Copy and Print Every Email It Received? It's a Long Story

by Nneoma Amadi-obi

Who owns the President’s papers? Prior to the passage of the 1978 Presidential Records Act, American presidents claimed legal ownership of the records generated during the course of their presidency, and established public access to these historical materials at their own pleasure. The 1978 Presidential Records Act essentially put an end to this tradition by establishing that ownership and control of presidential records belonged to the United States. The PRA requires Presidents upon leavi

The Extraordinary Story of the Hanging of the Black Man Who Owned Slaves

by J. William Harris

The bare bones of the story are simple.  A black man, Thomas Jeremiah, was accused in 1775, in Charleston (then, Charles Town), of trying to organize a slave insurrection.&nb

The Historian as Time Traveler

by Ian Mortimer

For most historians, the idea of actually visiting the past is something of a joke. For a start, it is impossible. What’s more, it always will be – if anyone in the future were to invent a time machine capable of going backwards in time, by

A Closer Look at "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell

by John J. McLaughlin

Americans rightly  regard General Joseph W. Stilwell as a hero. Few know that he was a total failure with respect to his primary  mission which was to be the Commander of American Forces in the China Burma India  theater (CBI) and Chief of Staff to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek! That story has not been told. Stilwell became an iconic hero in the annals of World War II. His famous "walk out from Burma," his salty language, and his later  retaking of Burma

HNN Debate: The Lincoln Murder Mystery

The question of why John Wilkes Booth killed Abraham Lincoln was settled long ago as far as most historians are concerned. Booth in league with a ragtag group of Southern misfits was out to change the outcome of the Civil War. But do we know the full story? This sounds like a question one might hear on a bad TV show about the Kennedy assassination. But it's been raised anew in the aftermath of the publication of the book, Dark Union (John Wiley & Sons, 2003), which claims that a fellow

The Christmas Eve Freedom Fighters

by William Loren Katz

This Christmas Eve marks the 172nd anniversary of a battle for liberty in 1837 on the banks of Lake Okeechobee, Florida, that helped shape the United States of America. An estimated 380 to 480 freedom-fighting African and Indian members of the Seminole nation threw back an advance of more than a thousand US Army and other troops led by Colonel Zachary Taylor, a future President of the United States. The Seminoles so badly mauled the invaders that Taylor ordered his soldiers to fall back, bury t

Rethinking Franklin D. Roosevelt: Getting Past the Gospel According to Bruenn

by Steven Lomazow

On the twenty-fifth anniversary of Roosevelt’s death, in 1970, cardiologist Howard Gerald Bruenn presented a paper in the highly respected medical journal,

What We Can Learn By Studying the Lives of the Jews Who Went to Palestine in the 1920s

by Donna Robinson Divine

Exiled in the Homeland: Zionism and the Return to Mandate Palestine, examines the immigration of Zionists to Palestine during the 1920s in years when their experiences were turned into myth and when their personal struggles to make the land of Israel thei

Vietnam: What War Stories Need to Accomplish

by Wayne Karlin

My new book, Wandering Souls: Journeys With the Dead and the Living in Viet Nam, almost did not get written. Friends, in America and in Viet Nam

We Know the Truth About Sacco and Vanzetti

by Richard Newby

            In The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair: America on Trial, Moshik Temkin says (p. 2): &ldqu

A Historian of Golf Rethinks What's Relevant in History After the Tiger Woods Scandal

by George B. Kirsch

Recent revelations of Tiger Woods’s fateful automobile encounter with a fire hydrant and a tree, followed by his plea for privacy, confession of “

Howard Zinn on TV: A Review

by Brian J. Trautman

"The People Speak" premieres on The History Channel Sunday, December 13, 2009 at 8:00p.m. (ET). In January 2008 I had the great privilege of being part of a live audience at Cutler Majestic Theatre in Boston, MA for the filming of a cutting edge documentary called The People Speak. Waiting in line to gain entry to the theatre, I made new friends who shared common interests for being there, including the understanding that we were about to partake and share in something

What Historians Make of James Bradley's Claims About Teddy Roosevelt's Responsibility for Pearl Harbor

by Jonathan Tremblay

James Bradley, in his recent book The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War, alleges that President Theodore Roosevelt encouraged Japanese imperialism. Bradley argues that the Taft-Katsura agreement reached between the United States and Japan in 1905 amounted to a ‘secret treaty’ that left the door open to Japanese imperialism in the Far East and even led to the fateful bombing of Pearl Harbor 68 years ago. Bradley has repeated these arguments in an o

John Brown's Dream

by Jesse J. Gant

Last week brought to mind a landscape of a different sort for John Brown and those who remember him.  One hundred and fifty years ago, on December 8, 1859, Brown was buried near his small cabin at North Elba, New York, following his one-week journey from the gallows at Harper’s Ferry.  Blacks and whites, men and women, came together in the Adirondacks to remember and mourn those executed for the raid on Harper’s Ferry.  Yet we rarely associate John Brown and the other

Teddy Roosevelt's Secret Deal with Japan: An Interview with James Bradley

by Aaron Leonard

James Bradley author of “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Flyboys” has just published The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War.  HNN contributor Aaron Leonard recently sat down with him in New York to discuss the book.Unlike Flags of Our Fathers -- with its iconic American flag raising on Mt. Suribachi -- this book shows the planting of the U.S. flag on foreign soil in

Slavery and Sectional Strife in the Early American Republic: An Interview with Gary Kornblith

by Seth Binder

Gary Kornblith is a professor of history at Oberlin College, where he has taught since 1981. His publications include The Industrial Revolution in America and, with Carol Lasser, Teaching America

65 Years Later: The Malmedy Massacre, December 17, 1944

by Joseph Cummins

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