Historians/History

Who’s Afraid of I.F. Stone?

by D.D. Guttenplan

Response to this article by the Wilson CenterD.D. Guttenplan's Response to the Wilson Center

The Way It Wasn’t: Cronkite and Vietnam

by Chester Pach

In the remembrances of Walter Cronkite’s remarkable career, none of his television reports has attracted more attention than his famous broadcast about the Tet Offensive in February 1968 in which he concluded that the Vietnam War was “mired in stalemate.” In reaction, President Lyndon B. Johnson reportedly declared, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.” Many commentators, including the Washington Post’s Tom Shales (Jul

McNamara's Other War

by Patrick Sharma

Retrospectives of the life of Robert McNamara have, unsurprisingly, focused on his tenure as U.S. secretary of defense during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, particularly his role in and reaction to the American war in Vietnam. Yet a case can be made that McNamara’s most important years came after his time at the Pentagon. For thirteen years following his tearful departure from the Defense Department, McNamara continued to put his stamp on history in a subtler but no less profound

HNN Hot Topics: Robert McNamara's Legacy

Related Links NYT ObituaryHNN Hot Topics: Vietnam: Atrocities and War Crimes Commentary Patrick Sharma: McNamara's Other War James Hershberg: Michael Jackson, Robert McNamara, Whatever …

What We Can Learn from Harlem's Encounter with Columbia University Forty Years Ago

by Stefan Bradley

The story is all too common:  large institution wants to expand; local residents oppose large institution; large institution expands anyway.  There are countless instances, from sprawling Super Walmarts provid

Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground at Forty

by Ron Briley

Forty years ago, the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) faction of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) drafted a statement to be employed in a factional dispute with the Maoist Progressive Labor (PL) wing of the organization.  At the June 1969 Chicago convention of SDS, the RYM group, now known as the Weathermen, expelled the PL wing and effectively dismembered SDS as a national student organization.  The Weather Manifesto—based upon lyrics from Bob Dy

A Jamestown Shipwreck 400 Years Ago this Month Awakened Shakespeare’s Muse

by Hobson Woodward

News of  shipwrecks reached London regularly during the lifetime of William Shakespeare. The frequency of travel by water and the fragility of wooden sailing vessels made disaster at sea a relatively c

What We Can Learn from a Biography of Hellen Keller's Teacher

by Kim E. Nielsen

Few of us leave instructions for our future biographers. Anne Sullivan Macy did so. The woman best known as the teacher of Helen Keller wanted to be remembered as a skilled and innovative educator—but without the idolization that came along with working

The Secret to Interviewing Historians on the Radio

by Ken MacDermotRoe

You hear the creak of an opening door – not quite human footsteps – a canine starts barking and said canine’s owner responds.  Sounds like a harmless event but this one occurred in the middle of recording an interview with a distinguished historian for the radio series “History Counts.”There are some things you just can’t anticipate.  But for the most part, the key to making a success of a big interview with a historian is preparation, prepara

Did Postwar Jews Really Ignore the Holocaust for Several Decades?

by Hasia R. Diner

        Of all the books that I have written over the course of my career, We Remember With Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence After the Holocaust, 1945-1962 is one that I should have not had to write. The previous 10 b

The Harlem Hellfighter's Struggle for Freedom in WWI and Equality at Home

by Peter Nelson

The triumphant return from World War I of the U.S. 369th Infantry Regiment, 93rd Division, known popularly as “The Harlem Hellfighters,”

Michael Jackson, Robert McNamara, Whatever …

by James G. Hershberg

The juxtaposition of the recent deaths of Michael Jackson and Robert McNamara couldn’t have seemed more random, and aside from rising to fame in late twentieth-century America, the two couldn’t have lived more different lives. Yet in November 1995, in the Vietnamese (i.e., former North Vietnamese) capital of Hanoi, I witnessed a moment where the two, or at least their personae, seemed eerily conflated. In the cavernous, largely deserted dining hall of the Metropole, the restore

The Trollope Ploy Myth Lives On: Robert McNamara and the Cuban Missile Crisis

by Sheldon M. Stern

The death of Robert S. McNamara severs one of the last profoundly personal links to some of the most contentious events of the 1960s. McNamara, of course, is principally remembered for his role in the escalation of the American phase of the war in Vietnam. Not surprisingly, most people who viewed Errol Morris’s Academy Award winning (2003) documentary film, “The Fog of War,” have been principally interested in McNamara’s agonizing memories about Vietnam. However, McNamara’s account of his role in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, an event which was far more likely than Vietnam to lead to an all-out nuclear war, has received far less attention.

Robert S. McNamara: The War Wizard Passes

by John Prados

Americans no doubt will view the death of Robert S. McNamara with considerable ambivalence. The 93-year old McNamara has fingerprints on many of the key events of his era, whether it be innovation of the nuclear doctrine of “mutua

Why Did I.F. Stone Sidestep the Hiss Case?

by Max Holland

Any reconsideration of I. F. Stone should specifically address how he viewed the Cold War spy and loyalty controversies—or chose not to—even if one accepts a minimalist interpretation of Stone’s brushes with Soviet intelligence. Stone often commented about the cases that rocked the country in the late 1940s and were responsible for the repression, fear, and culture of conformity that he repeatedly decried. Most frequently, Stone wrote in passionate defense of government officials, high and

Annette Gordon-Reed and the Jefferson DNA Myth

by D. M. Giangreco

Annette Gordon-Reed recently received a rare feather in her cap when the former, long-time head of the of the ACLU, New York Law School’s Nadine Strossen, stated that the professor and prize-winning author fully met the criteria set out by the president for the high court seat being vacated by Justice David Souter.  Gordon-Reed was described by Strossen, interviewed in a National Law Review article, as a “self-taught historian” and “genuine intellectual&rdqu

Stalin’s Wars: An Interview with Professor Geoffrey Roberts

by Aaron Leonard

In 2006 Professor Geoffrey Roberts published Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939-1953. In this work he challenges a good chunk of the received wisdom about Soviet leader Joseph Stalin: the longevity of the pre-war Stalin-Ribbentrop pact, Stalin’s

Obama, Buchenwald, and the Children

by Kenneth Waltzer

President Obama visited Buchenwald recently, following the path of his great uncle Charlie Payne, who was with General George Patton’s U.S. Third Army.  He connected Buchenwald with the larger story of the Nazi destruction of the Jews, accompanied by survivors Elie Wiesel and Betrand Herz, and the laid a wreath at the Buchenwald memorial. While he was there, Dr. Volkhard Knigge, director of the Buchenwald museum, highlighted the saving of children, who were kept alive in an organized

The African Diaspora as a Perspective on the World

by Patrick Manning

When I agreed in 1990 to write a history of the African diaspora, I found it an exciting but frightening task—exciting as a chance to link the work I had done in African history and in world history; frightening because it meant taking positions on importan

How Do Historians Think?

by Michèle Lamont

My recent book How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgement (Harvard University Press 2009) analyzes how social scientists and humanists go about evaluating the research of the