Historians/History

Can Historians Be Helpful in Addressing the Climate Crisis?

by Steven A. Leibo

So there I was, sometime around January 2005 finishing up one of the very frequent public talks I often give on international issues when an audience member walked up to me. It had been a good discussion of critical challenges from Iraq and China to Globalization and Global Warming and I was feeling pretty positive when the guy ever so politely said “I much appreciated your talk but your explanation that some of the rising ocean levels we have seen of late comes from heated waters taking

Leopold and Loeb: Why It Was Time for a New Book About the Case

by Simon Baatz

Few crimes in American history have achieved a notoriety comparable to the murder of a young boy by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb in Chicago in 1924.  Leopold, a nineteen-year-old student at the University of

A Biographer Explains Why He Thinks Another Biography of Jefferson Was in Order

by Kevin J. Hayes

As my recent biography, The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson (Oxford University Press, 2008), neared completion,

Who Was Uncle Sam? And Why Did He Want "You"?

by Christopher Capozzola

Sitting in his Manhattan studio on a summer day in 1916, James Montgomery Flagg took off his glasses, looked in the mirror, and saw there the image of

Remembering an American Hero

by Thomas Fleming

In my 2003 book,

How History and Psychiatry Are Alike

by Daniel Costa

Looking at various vocations and the similarities between them can be enlightening. Here, I will bring to your attention historians and psychiatrists. Historians study complex facts and narratives that not infrequently confli

David Gelernter’s Facts and The Weekly Standard’s Standards

by Donald Lazere

Last spring a student in an argumentative writing class I was teaching at the University of Tennessee used as a source for a research paper on public education David Gelernter’s article “A World Without Public Schools” in The Weekly Standard (TWS) of June 4, 2007.  She brought to my attention two quotations that Gelernter cites from The Official SAT Study Guide that struck me as being of questionable contextual accuracy. Since the article did not provide

What I Saw the Day the Pentagon Came Under Attack

by Liz Crowe

Last night, Monday, September 10, 2001, I toiled over tables of authorities and contents at the law firm of Mintz Levin where I am a legal secretary. My attorneys needed to file a brief by midnight and my fingers couldn't seem to type fast enough. Upon leaving the office, a finished product with copies in their hands, they reassured me that I could take my time coming in today. My morning commute consists of a bus ride to the Pentagon Metro station and a train ride to the Archives/Navy Me

Medicine in the Gulag Hell

by Vlad Jecan

A new study is about to begin on the medicine that may have saved lives in Stalin’s death camps. Dr. Dan Healey from Swansea University has recently received a grant of 101,000 pounds from the Wellcome Trust, a medical charity from the U.K., for his research project entitled “Medicine in the Gulag Archipelago”. The three-year project will focus on the medicine in the Soviet Union’s network of labour camps, located in different parts of the country, also known as

Franco Was Worse than You Thought

by David Wingeate Pike

"Not Worth a Bucket of Warm Spit"

by Patrick Cox

When it comes to commentary about the office of vice president of the United States, no statement is more repeated than John Nance Garner’s observation that “the vice presidency is not worth a bucket of warm spit.” Garner’s statement is part of the lexicon of studies on the vice presidency. The crusty, sharp-tongued Texan, known during his lifetime as “Cactus Jack,” built his reputation on biting commentary and one-liners. But regarding the “bucket&r

The Greatest Hoax In American History: Japan’s Alleged Willingness to Surrender During the Final Months of World War II

by Robert James Maddox

A staple of Hiroshima Revisionism has been the contention that the government of Japan was prepared to surrender during the summer of 1945, with the sole proviso that its sacred emperor be retained.  President Harry S. Truman and those around him knew this through intercepted Japanese diplomatic messages, the story goes, but refused to extend such an assurance because they wanted the war to continue until atomic bombs became available.  The real purpose of using the bombs was not to defeat an already-defeated Japan, but to give the United States a club to use against the Soviet Union.  Thus Truman purposely slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Japanese, not to mention untold thousands of other Asians and Allied servicemen who would perish as the war needlessly ground on, primarily to gain diplomatic advantage.

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A Journalist on the History Beat

by Tony Horwitz

I wanted a way back to studying history, but lacked the temperament or skills set. All I knew how to do was catch planes to strange lands, improvise once I got there, and chat up people entirely unlike me. Gradually it occurred to me that I could apply this m.o. to history. By going to the places where history happened and reporting on what I saw and the memory-keepers I met. A journalist on the history beat.

Lessons Not Learned at the Bay of Pigs

by Howard Jones

On April 17, 1961, a small band of 1500 Cuban exiles invaded their former homeland at the Bay of Pigs in an attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro. Masterminded by the CIA, the operation hinged on covert action, a pre-em

The Reflections of JFK’s Closest Advisor, Ted Sorensen (Interview)

by Robin Lindley

For the past four decades, Ted Sorensen has led a distinguished career in international law.  Despite his many achievements as an attorney, however, he is best known as the closest advisor to Pres. John F. Kennedy—and is seen by many commentators as the greatest American presidential speechwriter. 

60 Years After Truman Beat Dewey: The Man From Missouri v. The Gangbuster

by Mark Weisenmiller

As Senators Barack Obama of Illinois and John McCain of Arizona slog through the hot summer months continuously campaigning, this is a good time to review the 1948 Presidential campaign. That particular election eventually provided the most surprising upset in U.S. Presidential election history. Vice President Truman became President Truman in April, 1945 after the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Considering the numerous ways in which F.D.R. redefined the role of the Presidency, Truman, u

Was the Doctor Convicted of Killing His Wife Guilty? A London Mystery Involving an American Adulterer

by Ronan Thomas

LONDON--‘Hilldrop Crescent is a quiet suburban place, although in the inner ring of the Metropolis, and reasoning specifically, it would be the last spot one would have dreamt of for the scene of a sordid murder’. Thus did the British newspaper The Islington Gazette for 15 July 1910 describe the location of one of Edwardian London’s most notorious crimes; the poison murder by Michigan-born Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen of his German-American wife Cora at number 39 Hilldrop Crescent,

Vice Admiral Ross T. McIntire: A Reassessment of an American Hero

by Steven Lomazow, M.D.

Ross T. McIntire was personal physician to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, from 1932 to 1945. During that time, he rose to the rank of Vice Admiral and Surgeon General of the Navy. The widespread presently-held view of Mcintire’s performance in that capacity is as an excellent and competent wartime administrator but as an abject failure as Presidential physician. While the former is undoubtedly correct, the latter could not be farther from the truth. As a result of intense research which

Why this Is a Good Time to Remember Eugene V. Debs

by Ernest Freeberg

In June 1918, as American troops were entering the trenches of France, the socialist leader Eugene V. Debs gave a speech in Ohio declaring that rich men profit from wars, while poor men die in them. “You need to know,” he told his followers, “that you are fit f