Historians/History

Why It's Time for Us to Confront Hiroshima

by Leo Maley III and Uday Mohan

August 6 marks the 60th anniversary of the atomic destruction of the Japanese city of Hiroshima during World War II. We Americans reflect on this event in sharply differing ways. Some Americans recall the event with shame and express their fervent hope that nuclear weapons never be used again. Others firmly believe that the use of atomic bombs saved American lives by ending the war prior to a bloody American invasion of Japan. More challenging to consider is whether it was an unjustif

Will Historians Distort A ‘Modern’ President’s Memory?

by Patrick Fagan

From watching the memorial of Reagan on TV and reading the many newspaper columns, do I get the feeling that Reagan as president solved the problems rather than caused them? Yes, but that is how I and undoubtedly many people remember him. That does not stop the presumption of some liberal historians that because a rosy picture of Reagan has been provided in the media and the literature, a negative one must exist somewhere.With the recent loss of a president, revisionist historians will wa

Why Did So Many People Hate Bill Clinton? An Exchange Among Conservatives

by David Horowitz, Paul Gottfried, Larry Schweikart and Gene Kizer

In a recent essay in the NYT Book Review of John F. Harris's The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House, Alan Ehrenhalt speculated about the reasons Clinton was so disliked. This sparked a rigorous debate on Richard Jensen's list, ConservativeNet. Below, a sampling of opinion. Alan Ehrenhalt's ReviewMillions of Americans desp

The Unknown Jefferson: An Interview with Andrew Burstein

by Rick Shenkman

Mr. Burstein is the author of the book, Jefferson's Secrets.In your book you look at Jefferson’s last years, the most neglected of his life. When did you reach the conclusion that this was a fruitful area of

Godzilla and the Bravo Shot: Who Created and Killed the Monster?

by Yuki Tanaka

The original Godzilla film was produced in 1954 and released in November that year, only nine years after the end of the Pacific War. The same production team produced a sequence of 22 Godzilla films between 1954 and 1995, and six more films were created in the years 1995 to 2004 by a different production team. The original Godzilla film, Godzilla, and its first sequel, Godzilla Raids Again produced in 1955, were the result of close cooperation between Producer Tanaka To

New Documents Show How the Story of the Bomb Was Suppressed

by Mark Selden

Sixty years after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, some of the first reportage of the deadly impact of radiation – before the term had come into popular use – has reemerged from behind the veil of US censorship, thanks to the uncovering of the dispatches of Chicago Daily News reporter George Weller. Weller evaded military censors to reach Nagasaki by rowboat and train, and documented the destruction and the fate of GI prisoner

America's Unfinished Revolution

by Gary B. Nash

"Who shall write the history of the American Revolution? Who can write it? Who will ever be able to write it?" Thus wrote John Adams in 1815 to Thomas Jefferson."Nobody," Jefferson replied from Monticello,"except merely its external facts. ... The life and soul of history

Deep Throat and the FBI's History of Hiding Its Own Leaks

by Athan Theoharis

The recent revelations—first, that former FBI Acting Associate Director W Mark Felt was Bob Woodward’s Deep Throat and then, that Felt had successfully orchestrated the FBI’s investigation into the source of this leak--has dominated news coverage. Yet, rather than understand this event as the actions of a crafty and sophisticated bureaucrat, we would do well to locate it in the broader context of the FBI’s history. For Felt’s role in containing an FBI investigati

Has Alan Dershowitz Got Chutzpah or What!

by Jon Wiener

Response by Alan DershowitzWhat do you do when somebody wants to publish a book that says you're completely wrong? If you're Alan Dershowitz, the prominent Harvard law professor, and the book is Norman Finkelstein's Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, you write the governor of California and suggest that he intervene with the publisher--because the publisher is the University of California Press, which conce

Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman: Interviewed on C-SPAN

by Bonnie Goodman

Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman said on C-Span's "Q&A" that they welcomed the recent press coverage concerning the liberal accusation that as Republicans they are pushing forth a conservative ideological agenda through their involvement with the New-York Historical Society, and specifically, last fall's Alexander Hamilton exhibit. "Frankly, I didn't mind any of the publicity, because the New-York Historical Society has been sort of a back number" was Gilder's comment."Yo

Ward Churchill: Links and Comments from Around the Internet

by Ralph Luker

The following entries were originally published by Ralph Luker at the group blog, Cliopatria. The following entries are posted in reverse chronological order.February 9(Click here for the original entry, along with posted comments from readers) Charlie Brennan,"'I do not work for taxpayer

Has Scandal Taken Its Toll on Joseph Ellis?

by Bonnie Goodman

On October 26, 2004 Pulitzer Prize winning historian Joseph Ellis's latest work, His Excellency, George Washington, was released. The book, which focuses on Washington's flaws, is the first Ellis has written since his own flaws were revealed in 2001.For nearly a decade, in his classes at Mount Holyoke on Vietnam and American culture, Ellis would enrich the course content by recounting his own experiences in the Vietnam War and the anti-war movement. In 2000,

Are We at a Turning Point in History?

by Robert S. McElvaine

“Predictions are difficult to make—especially when they’re about the future.” That line, attributed in various wordings both to the legendary baseball star and noted mangled-phrase-maker Yogi Berra and to Danish physicist Niels Bohr, often comes in handy. Historian Lawrence W. Levine reminded us with his book The Unpredictable Past that predictions are even difficult to make about the past. The most perilous predictions, however, are those a

When Government Writes History: The 9-11 Commission Report

by Ernest R. May

The 9/11 Commission was"set up to fail." So says its chairman, former Republican Governor of New Jersey Thomas Kean."If you want something to fail," he explains,"you take a controversial topic and appoint five people from each party. You make sure they are appointed by the most partisan people from each party--the leaders of the party. And, just to be sure, let's ask the commission to finish the report during the most partisan period of time--the presidential election season." He could have adde

Yasukuni Shrine: Ritual and Memory

by John Breen

Yasukuni is first and foremost a site for the performance of ritual before the kami (gods), those men, women and some children who sacrificed their lives for the imperial cause. This article examines the organizing of space and ritual at Tokyo's shrine to the war dead and the implications for memory.The most important of several ritual spaces is that within the Honden or Main sanctuary. This is the central, elevated building located along the east-west axis that runs up from the bottom

On the Trail of the FBI's KKK Source: What I Discovered

by Gary May

Perhaps I’ve read too many murder mysteries and police procedurals, seen too many movies and watched too much television—-especially the CSI shows that multiply like crab grass. It may explain why l

Is the Way We and the Japanese Now Remember World War II Significant?

by Laura Hein

One of the central lessons of the literature on the invention of tradition is that historical symbols are always available for reinterpretation in a variety of ways. Yet, there are some facts that are still rooted in the incontrovertible logic of the human life span. The sixtieth anniversary of anything means that those who were active participants are no longer making decisions in public capacities although some of them are still here. For example, this spring Lisa Fittko, who had helped such f

The Puzzling Story of NATO's Secret Armies During the Cold War: Just What Were They Up to?

by Daniele Ganser

After the Cold War had ended, then Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti confirmed to the Italian Senate in August 1990 that Italy had had a secret stay-behind army, codenamed Gladio – the sword. A document dated 1 June 1959 from the Italian military secret service, SIFAR, revealed that SIFAR had been running the secret army with the support of NATO and in close collaboration with the US secret service, the CIA. Suggesting that the secret army might have linked up with right-wing organiz

Interview with James F. Simon About Jefferson and Marshall

by Rick Shenkman

Mr. Simon, Martin Professor of Law and Dean Emeritus at New York Law School, is the author of What Kind of Nation: Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and the Epic Struggle to Create a United States (Simon & Schuster, 2003).

Abe Lincoln's Deep Throat

by Ralph E. Shaffer

With Mark Felt's surprise admission ending the decades-long search for "Deep Throat," scholars and pundits can now return to the still unsolved, century-old enigma posed by published revelations of an Abraham Lincoln confidante. Despite application of the latest high tech methods to determine authorship of The Diary of a Pu