Historians/History

The Hard Years at the Harvard History Department

by Morton Keller and Phyllis Keller

After 1970 as before, History was the most troubled of Harvard’s social science departments. An Old Guard fought with tenacity for decades to fend off threats to the quality of what (with some reason) it regarded as one of Harvard’s great departments. Historical metaphors come readily to hand: Leonidas and his band at Thermopylae; Bourbons who learned nothing and forgot nothing; perhaps most apt, Canute ordering the tide not to come in.

How Race Relations Touched Me During a Long Lifetime

by Vaughn Davis Bornet

This is a particularly personal essay about American race relations as I witnessed them during my very long lifetime. 

The Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti: Eighty Years After

by Ron Briley

T. S. Elliott once described April as the cruelest month. Perhaps he should have considered August. Recent weeks have witnessed observations marking the sixty-second anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet, the eightieth anniversary of the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti on August 23, 1927 is drawing less attention. Of course, we are talking about the lives of two men as opposed to thousands. But just as with the atomic bomb

Was the Marshall Plan as Good an Example of Bipartisanship as People Say?

by Greg Behrman

On June 5, 1947, Secretary of State George Catlett Marshall arrived at Harvard University’s 286th Commencement with a bold idea.  World War II had decimated Europe.  Beyond the physical destruction and death, the continent’s economies were in an acute state of commercial and financial dislocation.  National Communist Parties – in France and Italy, in particular – were finding fuel in the want and despair.  To the east, the Soviet Union emerged a contin

Whatever Happened to August First?

by J. R. Kerr-Ritchie

Two weeks ago, hurricane dean swept Jamaica.   One hundred and seventy six years previously, a human hurricane hit the British colony in the form

Why Vincent Bugliosi Is So Sure Oswald Alone Killed JFK (Interview)

by Robin Lindley

Dallas, Texas. Friday. November 22, 1963. President John F. Kennedy died after a sniper attack on his motorcade. For many, the assassination remains a mystery. A 2003 Gallup Poll revealed th

Interview with Elliot Jaspin: Racial Cleansing in America

by Rick Shenkman

Elliot Jaspin, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize (1979), is the author of the just-published book, Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hiden History of Racial Cleansing in America (Basic Books), the March HNN Book of the Month. He is the System Editor for Cox Newspapers, where he specializes in computer-assisted reporting. In 2006 he wrote a series for the Cox chain about a number of campaigns to force blacks out of largely white comm

How Paranoid Was Nixon?

by Kenneth J. Hughes, Jr.

It wasn’t the crime, but it wasn’t the cover-up, either. Something more basic took down a president 33 years ago. Long before prosecutors identified him as an unindicted coconspirator, Richard Nixon was a conspiracy theorist. In the last 10 years, the government has systematically declassified hundreds of hours of White House tapes recorded on a voice-activated system that President Nixon had the Secret Service install in the oval office. They reveal a textbook example of w

What's with the Silence About Amerigo Vespucci?

by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

Strangely, in the western hemisphere today, and in the United States in particular, there is almost no discernible interest in commemorating the 500th anniversary of the naming of America. On April 25th, 1507, printers finished type-setting the book which first proposed naming this part of world after the Florentine adventurer, Amerigo Vespucci, but the opportunity to stimulate scholarship and debate has passed almost without notice. The four hundredth anniversary of the founding of

Origins of a Misnomer: The “Expulsion” of the Soviet “Advisers” from Egypt, 1972

by Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez

The most surprising aspect of this paper and presentation is that it should have interested the organizers of this conference in the first place. The various components of the term and concept "the expul

It's Time to Face the Whole Truth About the Atlantic Slave Trade

by Sheldon M. Stern

"Readers must understand that this terrible traffic in millions of human beings had been ... a joint venture."

Why Hiroshima Day Events Matter

by Lawrence S. Wittner

The 62nd anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima occurs today, August 6, 2007, bringing with it thousands of commemoration ceremonies in cities and towns around the world. Such events have become part and parcel of the nuclear era, and include the lighting and floating of lanterns in memory of the dead, silent vigils, religious observances, the chalking of human "shadows" on the ground, readings of John Hersey's Hiroshima, and leafletting.

The Miracle of Jewish History

by Benjamin Blech

Over three hundred years ago King Louis XIV of France asked Blaise Pascal, the great French philosopher of his day, to give him proof of the existence of miracles. Without a moment's hesitation, Pascal answered,"Why, the Jews, your Majesty-the Jews." We don't have to speculate what Pascal meant when he gave this answer, because he took the trouble to spell it out. In his masterwork, Pensees, he explained that the fact that the Jewish people had survived until the seventeenth century-the t

150 Years After the Civil War Can We Finally Remember It the Way We Should?

by Robert Cook

Planning is now underway to mark the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War (2011-2015). Nearly fifty years ago the Civil War centennial came close to being an unmitigated disaster. Why was this so and what lessons can be learned from that sobering experience? Centennial organizers in the late 1950s wanted the event to be a genuinely popular and national one. To achieve this end, two of the three leading parties involved – the National Park Service and amateur enthusiasts be

The Art Collector Who Wanted to Stage a Fascist Coup Against FDR

by Nicholas Fox Weber

It sounds like a fabrication whenever I mention that, in researching the great art collector Robert Sterling Clark—proud owner of thirty-nine Renoirs and of the only significant altar piece by Piero Della Francesca in

Lady Bird Johnson: First Lady Innovator

by Lewis Gould

The death of Lady Bird Johnson marks the passing of the most innovative first lady of the second half of the twentieth century. During her five years plus in the White House, Claudia Alta Taylor “Lady Bird” Johnson created the modern structure of how presidential wives operate. Though not the international celebrity that Jacqueline Kennedy was, Mrs. Johnson brought an adroit style to her duties that had been fashioned in running a radio and television station in Texas and in watc

Do the New Nixon Tapes Tell Us Anything New?

by Richard A. Moss and Luke Nichter

The Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library—now officially integrated into the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)—and its director, Dr. Timothy Naftali, should be commended for the release of Nixon tapes that occurred on July 11, 2007. The release, totaling 165 conversations recorded between November 3 and November 19, 1972, was both symbolic and substantive. The release was symbolic, coming as it did on the first day of the Library’s new federal status

How Hard Is the Job of Nixon Archivists? You Decide.

by Maarja Krusten

When the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) accepted the Nixon Library and Museum into its system of Presidential Libraries on July 11, 2007, its officials were all smiles. Library director Timothy Naftali explained that “tribal squabbles” were behind them. But while Richard Nixon was alive and his records still held by NARA’s Nixon Project in the Washington, DC area, his lawyers fought the Archives ov

Why Did Rome Fall? It's Time for New Answers

by Peter Heather

The Roman Empire stretched from Hadrian’s Wall to northern Iraq, and from the mouth of the Rhine to the Atlas Mountains of North Africa.  It was the largest state that western Eurasia has ever seen.  It was also extremely long-lived.  Roman power prevailed over most of these domains for five hundred years -- and all this in a period where the speed of bureaucratic functioning and of military response rattled along at 45 kilometres a day, something like one tenth of modern

We Are Not Free of History

by Bernard Bailyn

President DeGioia, Dean Barbari, graduates in the Arts and Sciences, ladies and gentleman: Someone once said that Heaven is where the chefs are French, the police British, the mechanics German, the lovers Italian, and it is all organized by the Swiss. Hell where the chefs are British, the police German, the mechanics French, the lovers Swiss, and it is all organized by the Italians. But please don’t go around saying things like