Historians/History

An Interview with Julian Zelizer: His Talk to Members of Congress

by Rick Shenkman

In April the American Historical Association invited Mr. Zelizer to deliver the inaugural address for the National History Center's Congressional Breakfast Seminar Series. The series introduces members of Congress and their staff to historians who discuss pertinent issues of the day ranging from congressional reform to Social Security.HNN interviewed Mr. Zelizer by email. Do you know how you happened to be picked to deliver the first talk?

Is Kent State in Denial About What Happened There 35 Years Ago?

by William A. Gordon

Kent State damages history when it consistently sends the message that the tragedy is not worth scholarly attention. 

Did Allen Weinstein Get the Alger Hiss Story Wrong?

by David Lowenthal

Allen Weinstein is now the Archivist of the United States. Despite concerns over the politics of the appointment and Weinstein’s scholarly record, the inaugural drew accolades. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who administered the oath of office, called Weinstein “a scholar whose work I have long admired.” Harvard’s Daniel Aaron termed him “always a sound historian, and always preoccupied with evidence.”1 Preoccupied wit

How One Historian Deals with Reporters Who Have a Question to Ask

by Donald Ritchie

It was the Washington Post publisher Philip L. Graham who coined the expression: “News is a first rough-draft of history.”1 If that’s true, then it is in the interest of historians to do

Are We a Peace-Loving Country or a Violent One?

by Ira Leonard

"Increasingly, Americans are a people without history, with only memory, which means a people poorly prepared for what is inevitable about life -- tragedy, sadness, moral ambiguity -- and therefore a people reluctant to engage difficult ethical issues."-- Elliot Gorn, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (April 28, 2000)In August 2002, President George Bush began to drum up a war fever in America with a view to toppling Iraqi dictator Sad

Gorsky Report: Dec 23, 1949

Translation of KGB file 43173 vol. 2 (v) pp. 46-55, attached to Alexander Vassiliev to Hartwig, 1 Feb 2002, in Alexander Vassiliev and Frank Cass & Co Ltd, High Court of Justice Queen's Bench Division Claim No. HQ1X03222, Amended Particulars of Claim Checked and corrected by Dr. Svetlana A. Chervonnaya against scanned photo copies of Jury Bundle pages 303, 304 & 305 (received from David Lowenthal, April 4, 2005) and Gors

Egads! Have the Radicals Really Taken Over Our History Departments?

by Chris Bray

The scene: Miss Havisham wanders the halls of her blog, where she has stopped all the clocks. Marxists and postmodernists line the tables, untouched since that fateful day in 1986… Oh, for the old days, when history professors like William Archibald Dunning and Frederick Jackson Turner just told the objective truth and kept their politics out of their scholarship. Today, our universities are crawl

Why We Are on Strike: A Yale Graduate Student's Story

by Philipp Ziesche

I am a sixth-year graduate student in early American history at Yale University, currently on strike with my union, the Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO). In Germany, my home country, market-oriented elite universities such as Yale and Harvard are commonly presented as a desirable alternative to our own overcrowded and under-funded public higher education system. Thus, when I came to Yale from the Freie Universität Berlin in 1999, I expected to spend most of my time in

Did Lincoln Love Ann Rutledge or Not?

by Douglas L. Wilson

The following excerpt is from Mr. Wilson's book, Honor's Voice, and addresses the question of Lincoln's love for Ann Rutledge, which has long bedeviled the president's biographers.Eventually Abraham Lincoln fell in love. William H. Herndon learned of this love affair from a wide variety of informants in the year following Lincoln’s death, but he so sensationalized it in a public lecture in 1866 and so offended Lincoln’s family and the public’s sensi

When Did the Gay Rights Movement Begin?

by Vern Bullough

On May 1 the Equality Forum plans to commemorate the 40th anniversary of a gay march held in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Some contend that this 1965 event marked the beginning of the gay rights movement. Frank Kameny, 79, who took part in the march, recently said,"We created the mind-set for the expression of dissent." MSNBC reports that the"The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission has approved a state historical marker near Independence Hall declaring the area the site of the first public demonstration for gay and lesbian rights."

When French Settlers Were the Victims of Ethnic Cleansing in North America

by John Mack Faragher

The story of the Acadian deportation is not pretty.

Interview with Michael J. Klarman, Winner of the 2005 Bancroft Prize

by Bonnie Goodman

Michael J. Klarman, the James Monroe Distinguished Professor of Law, Professor of History at the University of Virginia, recently won the 2005 Bancroft Prize for From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality. This book primarily examines the relationship between the Supreme Court and race relations in the United States. Klarman focuses on race related legal decisions that oc

In Defense of My Book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History

by Thomas Woods, Jr.

My friends in academia have been telling me to ignore the attacks on my book The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. Most of these attacks have avoided the book’s arguments altogether, resorting instead to smears and character assassination. This is the kind of treatment that anyone – left or right – who strays from the three-by-five card that constitutes the range of acceptable opinion these days can expect to receive. Such people, my friends insist, a

Why I Was Glad to Be Born an Irish-American in Jersey City

by Thomas Fleming

I was seven years old the first time I met Mayor Frank Hague of Jersey City. My father, Teddy Fleming, and I were on our way home from the opening day of the baseball season at Roosevelt Stadium, where the Jersey Giants pla

Agnes Smedley: On Proving What Her Worst Enemies Had Claimed (Much to My Regret)

by Ruth Price

My acquaintance with Agnes Smedley began in 1976 with a reprint edition of her 1929 novel, Daughter of Earth, but it was not until the mid-1980s that I took up my sojourn with this now largely forgotte

What Historians Are Saying About the Pope: Excerpts

by Bonnie Goodman

FACTS• Pope John Paul II, the 264th Pope, was elected on October 16, l978. He was the first-ever Slavic pope and the first non-Italian Pope in 455 years, and was installed when he was 58 years old, on October 22 (Sunday), 1978. • When Pope John Paul II died on April 2, 2005, he was 84 years old, the third-longest reigning Pope, his pontifcate lasted 26 years, 5 months, and 17 days, or a total of 9,665 days. • Historia

The Pope's Legacy

by Michael Radu

Karol Wojtyla, Pope John Paul II, was born in 1920, at the very time his country, Poland, was recovering its independence after more than a century of partition among its neighboring empires. He grew up in a Poland caught between the two greatest criminal regimes in history -- Hitler's Third Reich and Stalin's Soviet Union -- and experienced occupation by both. On the one hand, as a Pole -- and he was always a Pole -- Karol Wojtyla was painfully aware of the attractions as well as the dang

How Close to the Truth Was the Manchurian Candidate?

by Carol Bundy

The Manchurian Candidate takes place during 1952 and this fact is considered important. It is virtually the first thing we learn: “Korea 1952” we are told in the film’s initial scenes, a pseudo-documentary of a grotesque brainwashing experiment perpetrated upon GI prisoners by an evil fusion of the venerable Fu Manchu and the not-yet-in- existence Dr. Strangelove (1964). The movie then switches Stateside and follows the surviving GIs, (Captain, then Major, Marco, pl

How the NYT Missed the Story of the Holocaust While It Was Happening

by Laurel Leff

What did The New York Times report about the Holocaust and how did its coverage affect America’s response to the Nazi genocide?Throughout World War II, the American media published and broadcast timely, detailed, and accurate accounts of what was happening to the Jews in Europe. The New York Times alone printed nearly 1,200 articles about what we have now come to call the Holocaust, about one every other day. The articles in the Times and elsewh

The Shifting Explanations for the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague in Human History

by John Kelly

FOR THE LAST TWENTY YEARS, A SMALL BUT VOCAL GROUP OF scholars has been challenging the traditional view of the Black Death as a plague pandemic. The “origins” controversy, as it might be called, was ignited in