Historians/History

The Two Stories About the Bay of Pigs You Never Heard

by David M. Barrett

At the end of the film “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” a priceless ark which once held the Ten Commandments has been found by a Nazi-fighting U.S. agent, and is brought to the United States. Rather than being publicly displayed, however, it is placed in a crate

Teaching 9-11: What the Textbooks Say

by Jon Wiener

9/11 is history--but how is it being taught to students in history courses? George Bush and other conservatives maintain that the attacks were acts of evil; liberals, while they condemn the attacks, see them as having a social and political context that we need to understand. These differences are reflected in the debate over the textbooks written in the past three years. Conservatives complain that the teaching of 9/11 has been"simplified and sanitized" in an effort"not to...upset spe

The Medievalist Who Is Watchdogging the Media

by Richard Landes

“Citizens” of the USSR called it “information vertigo.”  When you can’t trust anything you hear about through the media, what do you do?   A friend told me that as a child, her father would sit her down, have her read an article in Pravda (“Truth”), and then say, “okay, tell me what you think really happened.”  That’s also what medieval historians do. Nowadays people from the whole political spe

The Great Flood of 1927: An Interview with Pete Daniel

by Rick Shenkman

It was the flood of all floods  –  and it changed America forever.

Interview with Willie Drye: Katrina and the Great Labor Day Hurricane of 1935

by Rick Shenkman

Willie Drye is the author of Storm of the Century: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, published by National Geographic Books.In your book you tell the story of the Great Labor Day Hurricane of 1935. It was deadly and killed some 400 people (most of them World War I veterans who were sent to the Florida Keys to work on a New Deal construction project). But hardly anybody remembers it. Why is that? For starters, the storm struck a part of the country that was literally the ends of the earth in 1935. Outside of Key West, maybe 1,000 people lived on the Florida Keys at that time. William Johns, who was a reporter for the Miami Daily News at the time of the hurricane, noted that no one paid any attention to the Keys before the World War I vets were sent there in November 1934. So the Keys were part of the world that just didn't matter.

The Horrible History of the "Comfort Women" and the Fight to Suppress Their Story

by Yoshiko Nozaki

[A] conference of historians, psychoanalysts, and artists, gathered to reflect on the relation of education to the Holocaust, watched the videotaped testimony of the woman in an attempt to better understand the era. A lively debate ensued. The testimony was not accurate, historians claimed. The number of chimneys was misrepresented. Historically, only one chimney was blown up, not all four. Since the memory of the testifying woman turned out to be

American Heritage Enters the 21st Century (At Last)

by Luke Hammock

Welcoming in the age of chips, bits and the World Wide Web, American Heritage magazine plans to debut a new website on September 6 which features articles, photographs and blogs. A beta version of the website, available here, features a comprehensive timeline of World War II, an article examining the influences and impact of the Baby Boomer generation, among others. The print version of the magazine of course has always featured intere

"A Corrective to the Pipes Worldview"?

by Daniel Pipes

Bediuzzaman Said Nursi (1877-1960), perhaps the most influential Islamic figure of modern Turkey, is the subject of a new book, edited by Ian Markham and Ibrahim Ozdemir, Globalization, Ethics and Islam: The Case of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi ( Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2005). The title puzzled me but Nursi being someone I know little about, I picked up the volume with interest and delved in. I did not get very far. The introduction (which Ashgate

History and Memory: They’re Different

by Thomas Fleming

Every time I walked through the vestibule of my family home in Jersey City in the 1940s, I saw Franklin D. Roosevelt's face on the wall, where many devout Irish-Catholic families hung a portrait of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. FDR was the hero of my youth, the almost mythical figure on whom the political fortunes of my father, leader of the gritty working class Sixth Ward, a vital cog in the city's powerful political machine, depended. The name Roosevelt had a magical aura, inducing total admi

Ann Lane's Dissertation

by Nathan Williams

Click here for Ann Lane's response to this article.EDITOR'S NOTEAfter the Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose stories broke earlier this year, HNN received an email

What Lies Behind the Multicultural Approach to History

by Clare Spark

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Why Indians Aren't Celebrating the Lewis and Clark Expedition

by David Mould

Allen Pinkham has been doing a lot of soul-searching about the 200th anniversary of the Lewis and Clark expedition.“This is a heart-wrencher,” says Pinkham (Five Rays of Light), a tribal leader of the Nez Perce (Niimiipuu). “My people were slaughtered. But you don’t read about that. All I read about is Lewis and Clark, the heroes of the day 200 years ago. Well, whose heroes? They’re not my heroes.”As nationwide events to mark the epic expediti

What Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin Got Wrong About Hiroshima

by Robert Newman

Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, two indefatigable Truman bashers, were at work for the 60th anniversary of Japan's surrender. They have a slightly new version of the big myth about this event: the bomb did not trigger surrender, Soviet entry into the war did. Their "Myths of Hiroshima" was syndicated by the Los Angeles Times. Of course, most Japanese, and some American Japanophiles, believe this. Bird and Sherwin, findi

Following is a statement approved by a group of historians at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association. (Their website: www.yachana.org/haw.) As of January 24, 2003, it had been signed by more than 1,000 historians. Click here for the developments at the OAH annual meeting 4-4-03.Click here

Einstein, Russell, and the Bomb: The 50th Anniversary

by Lawrence S. Wittner

July 9, 2005 will be the fiftieth anniversary of one of the most important statements ever issued about the threat posed by nuclear weapons to human survival. Usually referred to as the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, it was initiated by Bertrand Russell, the famed mathematician and philosopher, and Albert Einstein, the world's best-known scientist. After the annihilation of Japanese cities with atomic bombs in August 1945, both Ru

Why It's Time to Use the "E" and "I" Words to Describe American Policies for 200 Years

by Jeffrey Kimball

Several developments in recent years have revived the imperial question in mainstream discussions of American history. Among these, of course, were the traumatic events of September 11, 2001; the Bush administration’s ensuing rhetorical bluster; the expansion of U.S. military bases and commercial interests in Central Asia; the administration’s unprovoked invasion of Iraq; the critique of the invasion by the political and intellectual left-of-center; President Bush and Vice Presid

Remaining Questions Concerning Michael Bellesiles

by HNN Staff

 Will Columbia University's Bancroft Committee rescind its award to Arming America? ANSWER: YES Will the Organization of American Historians rescind the Binkley-Stephenson award, given to Bellesiles for his 1996 article on America's gun culture, which appeared in the Journal of American History. ANSWER: UNKNOWN Will Knopf withdraw Arming America from bookstores? (Will Knopf publish a new edition of Ar

The Sandbagging of Robert "KC" Johnson

by Ronald Radosh

HNN: The Case of KC JohnsonMedia coverageRobert David"KC" Johnson:"Why I Was Denied Tenure"

Letter in Support of KC Johnson

HNN: The Case of KC JohnsonMedia coverageRobert David"KC" Johnson:"Why I Was Denied Tenure"

The Year When We Got Caught

by Ralph Luker

Frankly, it’s been a dreadful year for historians -- the year when we got caught. It wasn’t the year when we first erred. Like Trent Lott, we had been doing it for years. It wasn’t even as though anything we did was unprecedented. All of us who were tagged in 2002 were benched for doing, writing, or saying things we’d seen others do, sometimes much better than we did. Yet, more of us seemed to get caught doing them -- some of us rather