Historians/History

Norman Borlaug's Complicated Legacy

by Nick Cullather

Norman Borlaug never liked being called the father of the green revolution.  It was “a miserable term,” he felt, for the modernization of global agriculture, and he knew no one scientist could claim all the credit. His obituaries this week repeated it anyway, along with another accomplishment he never disputed, that his work had saved “hundreds of millions of lives.” It is a low estimate.  Writers for The Atlantic and Reason magazines

Judging Henry Hudson

by Peter Mancall

            Three of the most noteworthy bodies of water in North America—the Hudson River, Hudson Strait, and Hudson Bay—take their nam

Was Henry Hudson a Spy?

by Douglas Hunter

Was Henry Hudson a spy on his 1609 voyage—an intelligence-gatherer working surreptitiously for powerful men in England? It’s a credible explanation for his otherwise strange behavior on the extraordinary voyage tha

The American Revolutionary War Hero U.S. Historians Have Ignored

by Alex Storozynski

One of the most overlooked figures in history is Thaddeus Kosciuszko, a Pole who arrived in Philadelphia in the summer of 1776 and played a major ro

Long Ago: A Total War in the Pacific Came to an Unimaginable End

by Vaughn Davis Bornet

In 1941 to 1945 America’s fighting forces fought a desperate war with a dedicated and ruthless adversary, the Empire of Japan, which the enemy began with a surprise attack and which for nearly four years they did everything—fair and foul alike—to try to win.

The Legacy of Florence Harding, a Most Modern First Lady

by Katherine A. S. Sibley

This past spring, first lady Michelle Obama invited some Washington school children to join her in planting an organic kitchen garden on the White House

The Evolution of the History Department in the United States, 1940-1980

by William Palmer

So perfect was the order as the Yale history department sat down for lunch in the Branford College dining hall in the fall of 1940 that it resembled an academic great chain of being.  The Bran

Why Is Civil Rights Hero T.R.M. Howard Still Ignored?

by David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito

Fifty-four years ago this month, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old Chicago boy visiting family in Mississippi, was abducted, mutilated and murdered. Several days later, his horribly disfigured body was

Distorting the Holocaust: Why Numbers Matter

by Alex Grobman

Holocaust denial is ongoing challenge for the Jewish community. Equally problematic are those who acknowledge the Holocaust, but insist on being incl

The Uses and Abuses of History: An Interview with Margaret MacMillan

by Aaron Leonard

Historian Margaret MacMillan has just published Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History, July's HNN Book of the Month. In it she examines the ways in whi

How the New York Times Missed the Underlying Ugly History Behind a Fun Story About a Georgia Gold Rush

by David Austin Walsh

In Villa Rica, Georgia, history can mean business. The town, about 30 miles east of Atlanta, is currently embroiled in a dispute with Dahlonega, 75 miles to the northeast, over which town was the site of the first gold rush in American history. For both communities, the claim could lead to increased tourism and therefore increased revenues. Douglas Mabry, an amateur historian in Villa Rica, recently revived the claim, based on an 1830 map identifying Villa Rica as “gold country” and

What Should We Make of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Racism?

by Richard Klayman

Nathaniel Hawthorne was the quintessential man of letters, the Great Romancer as he was known, but he was also a tireless racist. The trail examining Hawthorne as an artist versus efforts to probe Hawthorne the racist have been unequally pursued. What might be called a respectful recognition of Hawthorne’s troublesome racial pronouncements is best surmised by Philip McFarland, author of an often eloquent inquiry about Hawthorne’s marriage and life in Concord: “We would prefer

Building the Erie Canal Was Messy: It's Worth Remembering That!

by Gerard Koeppel

The iconic Erie Canal is one of those pieces of Americana that exists today largely in the imagination. The Brooklyn Bridge, which joined Manhattan and Brooklyn in 1885, or the Panama Canal, which joined the

Diplomatic History Isn't in Decline

by Thomas W. Zeiler

We in the field of American diplomatic history (U.S. foreign relations) beat ourselves up about our supposed irrelevance to the historical profession. Some ignore the situation but others seek remedies by engaging other fields. I half joke that

What's Wrong with the New History: An Interview with David Kaiser

by Mark Dragoni

This interview was prompted by a discussion on H-Diplo about the decline of diplomatic history. Professor Kaiser, a professor of strategy and policy at the Naval War College, blogs at History Unfolding. His latest book is

The Continuing Relevance of William Penn

by Kevin Kenny

William Penn founded Pennsylvania in 1682 as a “holy experiment,” a place where European colonists of all religious backgrounds could li

Of Butterflies and Tipping Points: The Calamitous Summer of 1914

by William J. Astore

In chaos theory, the flapping of a butterfly’s wings off the coast of South America creates a minor disturbance which, propagating non-linearly and increasing in intensity, leads to a killer hurricane that devastates the east coast of the United States.  Large results can stem from small, even seemingly inconsequential, causes, especially in complex and unstable systems.  The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist 95 years ago this June was the butterf

The Midwestern Voice in American Historical Writing

by David Brown

It began in California. Nine summers ago, I flew to the Bay area for research on a biography I was writing of Richard Hofstadter. Not until a fe

Historians' Muted Response to the Vassiliev Papers Is Surprising

by Steve Usdin

The recent public release, in defiance of the Russian government, of 1,115 pages of notes from the KGB archives has received a surprisingly muted response from historians. The notes, taken by Ale

Pitfalls with the Nixon Tapes and How to Avoid Them

by Richard A. Moss

On July 20, 2009, Secrecy Newsreported that the Office of the Historian at the U.S. State Department had quietly revised the preface to latest volume of the Foreign Relations of the United States to be published, an electronic-only volume on