Historians/History

The Author of Not Out of Africa Pens Her Memoir

by Mary Lefkowitz

Both the Left and the Right Misremember the Sixties

by Gerard J. DeGroot

"If you remember the sixties," quipped Robin Williams (and quite a few others), "you weren"t there." He was, of course, referring to the haze created by all those mind-expanding drugs the beautiful people popped, mainlined and smoked. In truth, however, time has proved an equally effective hallucinogen. As years go by, real events have given way to wild imagination. The decade has been transformed into a morality play, an explanation of how the world went astray

Samantha Power Talks About Her New Book (Interview)

by Robin Lindley

"Injustice anywhere threatens justice everywhere."--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The death of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the charismatic Brazil

Mr. Jefferson: Did You Ever Have Gonorrhea?

by Alan Pell Crawford

The question, posed by one of Thomas Jefferson’s intimates would make any historian with even the feeblest pulse sit up and take note. On May 11, 1825, Thomas G. Watkins, who was one of Jefferson’s physicians, asked the 82-year-old Sage of Monticello whether he ever had “gonorrhoea.”

"A Land Without a People for a People Without a Land"

by Diana Muir

According to the late Edward Said the phrase the ‘A land without people for a people without a land,’ was coined by a Zionist named Israel Zangwill for the purpose of making the false claim that Palestine was empty. Other scholars, most notably Rashid Khalidi of Columbia University in his book “Palestinian Identity,” have explained that the phrase became a widely-propagated Zionist slogan summing up the assertion that Palestine was empty. It ain’t n

Historians Should Take the Jihadi Rhetoric of 1948 Seriously

by Benny Morris

Historians have tended to ignore or dismiss, as so much hot air, the jihadi rhetoric and flourishes that accompanied the two-stage assault on the Yishuv [the Jewish residents of Palestine before the founding of Israel] and the constant references in the prevailing Arab discourse to that earlier bout of Islamic battle for the Holy Land, against the Crusaders.

The Five Years that Made Lincoln President

by John Waugh

Abraham Lincoln, who hated to condemn a deserting soldier to death, was given to putting the papers of tough cases aside and saying, “they are still in soak.” He might have said the same thing at one time about his political career. It was after his one term in Congress ended in 1849. He was not running for reelection, probably couldn’t have won if he did, because he had opposed the U.S. Mexican War, not a popular position in Illinois. It appeared to him that his p

Why It's Time to Rethink the 70s

by Bruce Schulman and Julian Zelizer

Why publish a book about one of the most underappreciated decades in contemporary American History? Until very recently, the 1970s seemed like little more than a cruel joke. When they thought about the period at all, historians, pundits, and the great majority of American citizens dismissed the decade as a bizarre interlude between the liberal achievements and eventual crack-up in the 1960s and the conservative revolution of the 1980s. The 1970s meant bad hair, bad mus

The Follies of Instant History: Another Meaningless Poll of Historians

by Larry DeWitt

Re: Robert S. McElvaine's, "HNN Poll: 61% of Historians Rate the Bush Presidency Worst" (4/1/08)Here we go again. We are engaged in another exercise in instant history, in the form of a poll of opinion in which historians assume the role of soothsayers, predicting the future judgment of the profession on the Bush presidency. This is a follow-up poll to one from 2004 that Robert S. M

Why TR Lost the Republican Nomination in 1912: What New Research Shows

by Lewis Gould

As the battle between Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama hurtles toward the Democratic National Convention in August, attention among historians

The Last Time I Saw César

by Richard Steven Street

César Chávez died on April 23, 1993. He was alone, book in hand, resting in a house near his childhood adobe outside of San Luis, Arizona. Most of us who knew him believe that he was worn-out by his many death-defying fasts and non-stop schedule. Two days on the witness stand at the end of a long, drawn-out legal battle with Salinas Valley lettuce grower Bruce Church Co. may have pushed him too far. When Chávez died, his hopes, dreams, and aspirations did not die wi

Reporter's Notebook: Highlights from the 2008 OAH Convention: Day 2

by Rick Shenkman

Related Links Past AHA & OAH Conferences OAH 2008: Day 1 OAH 2008: Day 2 OAH 2008: Day 3 Want to share your reflections on the OAH annual meeting? We've set up a special blog so you can. CLICK HERE

George W. Bush: As He Now Appears in a History Book

by Kathryn Moore

George W. Bush entered office under a cloud of doubt, with Democrats crying “Foul!” following the month-long drama of recounting ballots in Florida and court battles there and in the Supreme Court. But on January 20, 2001, Bush too

My Love-Hate Relationship with John Brown

by John Michael Cummings

I never expected John Brown to dominate the title of my first novel.  As a native of Harpers Ferry wh

Why We Should All Regret Jefferson's Broken Promise to Kościuszko

by Gary B. Nash and Graham Russell Gao Hodges

In March 1798, Tadeuz Kościuszko, a hero of the American and Polish revolutions, and Thomas Jefferson, Vice President of the United States, huddled in a cramped second-story room in Philadelphia to make a pact of ho

The Mystery of Oswald's Contacts with the CIA in Mexico

by Jefferson Morley

A small group of senior CIA officers may have been running an authorized counterintelligence operation involving Lee Harvey Oswald six weeks before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. That

Is the National Archives Preserving or Distorting the Heritage of the New Deal?

by Martin Halpern

In encouraging students to conduct research on important events in history, historians today have access to a wealth of resources on the Internet. I tell my students to view critically all sources but that sites managed by government agencies and university libraries are generally reliable. My experience with calling to the attention of the National Archives an important error on the www.ourdocuments.gov website will lead m

Can the State Kill Someone Twice? The Strange and Disturbing Case of the Death of Willie Francis

by Gilbert King

Having heard oral arguments in Baze v. Rees, the Supreme Court will soon decide whether the drugs used in lethal injection executions constitute cruel and unusual punishment as prohibited by the Eighth Amendment. It’s a question the Court has not addressed in more than sixty years, in a case that some legal scholars believe was botched just as badly as the state execution of a stuttering, seventeen-year-old African-American named Willie Francis by a drunken guard and inmate fro

Why Did Truman Fire MacArthur? (And Why Did He Wait So Long to Do It?)

by Michael D. Pearlman

That President Harry Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur will hardly be news to readers of the History News Network. The recently published Truman and MacArthur: Policy, Politics, and the Hunger for Honor and Reno

The Worst Massacre of Blacks by Whites in U.S. History--And the Lesson It Teaches Today

by Charles Lane

On April 13, 1873, the United States experienced the worst one-day slaughter of blacks by whites in its history. In tiny Colfax, La., white paramilitaries attacked lightly armed African American freedmen who had assembled in a local courthouse to defend their elected officeholders. By the time the Colfax Massacre was over, more than 60 black men lay dead. Most were killed after they had surrendered.