Historians/History

The First Bush Presidency: Made in China

by Jeffrey A. Engel

Recent calls for President George Bush to avoid the upcoming Beijing Olympics as a stand against China’s human rights record bring to mind that he is

Is the Pulitzer Prize Board Clueless?

by Markian Pelech

In December 2002, I started a correspondence with the Pulitzer prize board about the rogue in their gallery of excellence, Walter Duranty, the British-born reporter in Moscow for The New York Times between 1922 and 1934. His dispatches quickly degenerated into parroting of Soviet propaganda. In 1932, he won a Pulitzer prize for foreign correspondence for a series of 11 articles and two separate articles written in 1931. After receiving the prize, he denied the existence of th

The National Archives: Alone in a Clash of Cultures

by Maarja Krusten

An executive branch agency, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), staffs and administers the Presidential Libraries of Presidents from Herbert Hoover through Bill Clinton. Soon a George W. Bush Presidential Library will be added to that number.The Libraries have differing cultures and NARA's officials face many challenges. The National Archives' Inspector General expressed dismay when agency officials themselves tried to retrieve stolen Clinton Presidential documents fr

Why Historians Should Write Books Ordinary People Want to Read

by Jeremy Cameron Young

Ask any administrator or professor in the humanities what use their field is, and the amount of equivocation and soul-searching you'll receive in response will clue you into a little secret: this is a time of crisis for practitioners of the humanities.  Thanks to university budget cuts and conservative attacks on their fields, humanities scholars are increasingly forced to defend something many of them have in past taken for granted: the importance of their research to the modern experie

Why Is It So Hard to Get Documents from the National Archives About the National Archives?

by Anthony Clark

While researching my book on the history of presidential libraries, I discovered a shocking but perhaps not surprising situation: the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is improperly withholding its own records. Theoretically a non-partisan as well as non-political agency, NARA is at the center of some of the most controversial issues of our time, including government secrecy, executive privilege, and timely access to presidential records. Rather than abide by legislative req

Did Columbus and Cabot Begin as Partners?

by David Boyle

On August 6, 1497, almost precisely five years since Christopher Columbus had first set sail for the New World, his Venetian rival John Cabot navigated his tiny ship Matthew back up the River Avon to the

Was Dwindling US Army Manpower a Factor in the Atom Bombing of Hiroshima?

by D. M. Giangreco

The US Army had been grappling with the question of how to man its rapidly expanding force even before Pearl Harbor.   This was an increasingly critical, though largely unknown, problem throughout the war.   In the midst of a partial demobilization after the defeat of Nazi Germany, the Army called together some of its sharpest minds to examine the deteriorating situation as it geared up for the planned invasions of Japan in 1945 and 1946.   One of those men was Dr.

Conservatives Are in Denial About Their History

by Allan J. Lichtman

My new book White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement places conservatism within the big picture of modern American

The United States in 1960

by Vaughn Davis Bornet

Author’s Afterword (written in 2008)The wording of the following essay is precisely that placed in the mail on December 30, 1960.  It was written for the New International Year Book for 1961.  Although I was duly paid for this after working hours effort, the manuscript was returned to me, for there was a dispute between the publishers and the writer over the paragraphs dealing with Fidel Castro’s degree of attachment to Communism, for example,

The Problem with Middle East Studies: A Microscopic Investigation

by Daniel Pipes

As one of the few pro-U.S. and pro-Israel voices in the field of Middle East studies, I find my views get frequently mangled by others in the field – thus I have had to post a 5,000-word document titled “Department of Corrections (of Others' Factual Mistakes about Me)” on my website. Usually, the precise evolution of such mistakes escapes me. Recently, h

What Are We to Make of Pope Pius XII?

by Paul O'Shea

There have been few problems within contemporary Catholicism that arouse such passions as the subject of Eugenio Pacelli, known to history as Pope Pius XII (1876-1958). Pacelli has been the center of a storm since 1963.

A Historian's Daring Use of Fiction to Tell the Story of the Black Death

by John Hatcher

My new book is not a conventional history book. It combines solid history with fiction. Having studied and taught about the Black Death for more than thirty years I wanted to find a new way of adding to our knowledge and understanding of this massively important but very well-worked historical event. I therefore decided to try to write an intimate history of the tumultuous years of the mid-fourteenth century seen through the eyes of those who lived and died in the ferociously lethal epidem

Eat Out this Bastille Day ... It's a Tradition

by Tony Perrottet

Many of us will hoist a glass of bubbly and nibble a plate of paté in a Gallic eatery today in a misty-eyed hommage to Bastille Day -- that heart-warming moment in 1789 when a mob stormed a ne

The Myth of American Diplomacy

by Walter L. Hixson

The Myth of American Diplomacy emphasizes that U.S. foreign policy emanates from a culture of patriotic national identity. As the book derives from secondary sources, depends on theory for its essential argum

Reckoning with the “N” Word

by Andrew Ward

Over the course of writing three books about 19th century African American history, I have wrestled with the problem of what has come to be called the “N” word. It pops up in so many black and white 19th century sources that any historian bellying up to such material has to reckon with it, one way or another.

Black Founding Fathers: An Interview with Richard S. Newman

by David Liebers

Richard S. Newman is Professor of History at Rochester Institute of Technology.  His most recent book, Freedom's Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (NYU Press), is a long overdue biography of Richard Allen, a prodigious figure in the formation of the black Church. He was interviewed by email.

It's No Fault of Yours that You Don't Know About Thomas Jefferson's Sense of Humor

by Kevin J. Hayes

Habits of Empire: An Interview with Walter Nugent

by David Liebers

Historian Walter Nugent is the author of the just published book: Habits of Empire: A History of American Expansion (Knopf, 2008). He is a member of HNN's advisory board. He was interviewed by email in June.

Give’em Hell, George: The Bush-Truman Analogy

by Ron Briley

As we move to the end of the Bush presidency, there is considerable speculation as to the legacy of the nation’s forty-third President. Right-wing pundits, such as Ann Coulter, laud the President for protecting Americans from domestic terrorism by engaging Al-Qaeda in battle on the Iraqi front. On the other hand, historians seem to agree with the American public which has awarded the President record low poll numbers. In fact, most historians in a recent History News Network

Is Queer History, History with an Agenda? Sure.

by Vicki L. Eaklor

When I began writing Queer America: A GLBT History of the 20th Century a few years ago I did it to fulfill a need I have perceived in more than 25 years of teaching. Certainly in the last twenty years there has been an explosion of wonderful works in queer history and queer studies, but relatively few are addressed to readers not already part of the conversation. In attempting to present the variety of experiences of nonstraight Americans and their centrality to what we call "American history" I expect to be accused of having, and serving, an agenda. Guilty as charged.