Historians/History

Are U.S. History Textbooks Still Full of Lies and Half-Truths?

by Ray Raphael

It’s been a quarter century since Frances Fitzgerald in America Revised critiqued our history texts, and a decade since Jim Loewen in Lies My Teacher Told Me revealed many of the biases that lingered on. Where are we now? Have we gotten any better?Textbooks in recen

I Don't Punish Students Who Disagree with Me

by John H. Morrow, Jr.

Response by David Horowitz, Publisher of FrontPageMag.comHNN has invited me to reply to an article by one of our university students, Bradley Alexander, entitled, “Profane Professor,” in the conservative Internet journal FrontPageMagazine.com (September 9, 2004), which refers to the first class meeting in my course on the World Wars at the University of Geo

The Face-Off: Bob Bateman Vs. the Associated Press

by Bonnie Goodman

On Saturday, August 28, 2004, C-Span 2 Book TV presented a "Debate Over No Gun Ri" with AP Journalist Charles Hanley and historian Robert Bateman. Charles Hanley is the co-author of The Bridge at No Gun Ri: A Hidden Nightmare from the Korean War, and Robert L. Bateman is the author of No Gun Ri: A Military History of the Korean War Incident. The debate was moderated by freelance broadcast journalist, John Callaway, and held at the Pritzker Military

Did the Associated Press Misrepresent the Events that Happened at No Gun Ri?

by Robert Bateman

Editor's Note In the following article Mr. Bateman criticizes the Associated Press account of the events that took place in late July 1950 at No Gun Ri during the Korean War. In an attempt at fairness, HNN sent Mr. Bateman's article to the authors of the Associated Press story. This prompted an interesting exchange. Readers may judge for themselves who gets the better of the argument.

How History Was Used at the Republican Convention

by Brandi Lux

How did Republicans attempt to use history to bolster their case for President George W. Bush? We asked HNN intern Brandi Lux to find out by compiling a list of the historical allusions, analogies and metaphors speakers employed. PRESIDENTSGiven that Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president, it is no surprise that his name was frequently invoked by the main speakers (five times). But FDR was cited three times to draw comparisons between t

Rethinking American History in a Post-9/11 World

by Eric Foner

In 1948, Roy F. Nichols, a distinguished scholar of the Civil War era, published a short essay about the Second World War’s likely impact on American historians. Nichols predicted a sweeping “reorientation of historical thinking.” “Any great disturbance in the world of action or intellect,” he wrote, “produces very noticeable effects upon the methods and controlling thought patterns of historians. It is probable that the recent war will prove no exception.&rdq

Interview with Richard Moser: Was Kerry Right About Vietnam Atrocities?

Much has been made recently of the Winter Soldier investigation, at which Vietnam veterans claimed they had been involved in -- or heard of -- war crimes and atrocities. To find out more about the investigation and the accuracy of John Kerry's testimony about it before the Senate in 1971, we turned to Mr. Moser, the author of

The Forgotten Anniversary of a Labor Strike... And Why That's No Surprise

by Mike Davis

September, 1, 1934: Millions of cotton spindles stopped spinning. Across the Southern Piedmont, mill whistles blew but workers didn't come to work. The most exploited industrial workforce in the United States – the"lint heads" of the Carolinas, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama – was on strike. As mill owners appealed frantically for injunctions, tear gas, and the National Guard, a vast, peaceful army of textile workers demolished the image of Southern labor as culturally servil

Do Liberals Owe An Apology to the Victims of Sterilization? The Case of Margaret Sanger

by Miriam Reed

Sterilization--or more particularly, compulsive sterilization--became an issue in America with the rise therein of Eugenics, the name given by the Englishman Francis Galton in 1883 to his newly created science of inquiry. Eugenics had as its purpose race betterment. Eugenics began by asking questions: Why were men what they were? What caused poverty? Why did blue eyes persist in generations along with alcoholism and insanity? The infant science proposed to answer these questions by,

2003 in Review: Which Articles on HNN Drew the Most Comments?

by Rick Shenkman, Jennifer Itskevich

Over the course of the last year readers posted more than 20,000 comments on the articles published by HNN. Which articles drew the most responses? Unsurprisingly, it was an HNN Poll on Iraq which inspired the most comments, more than 400 in all. The poll was posted on March 19, the day the war began. Readers, styling themselves with a panoply of names from the graveyard of ancient history--from Herodotus to Suetonius--argued

40 Years Ago: The Summer that Transformed America

by Ruth Rosen

Even though we’re rapidly approaching the 2004 presidential election, it often seems as though we’re still shadowboxing over the meaning of the 1960s. This is the 40th anniversary of a momentous summer that created many of the cultural, social and political divisions that make it so difficult to find independent voters who haven’t yet decided how they’ll vote in November. Consider what happened during the summer of 1964. More than 1,000 Northern college

Olympics Memories

by George Beres

The 2004 Games have evoked Olympics memories that transported me back twenty-five years to my only trip to Greece. It included a stop at a hallowed site: Olympia with its artifacts of the ancient Games. It looked to me in 1979 as it did on TV this August, when the Greek hosts of 2004 scheduled one event in Olympia for a link-up to symbolically span more than 3,000 years. Ironically, the event at Olympia was the shot put, a competition that was not part of the early Games. Fans wandered

The Vietnam Atrocities an Ohio Newspaper Exposed

by Mike Davis

In his dark masterpiece, Blood Meridian (1985), novelist Cormac McCarthy tells the terrifying tale of a gang of Yanqui scalp-hunters who left an apocalyptic trail of carnage from Chihuahua to Southern California in the early 1850s. Commissioned by Mexican authorities to hunt marauding Apaches, the company of ex-filibusters and convicts under the command of the psychopath John Glanton quickly b

The Strange Twists and Turns in Syrian-Israeli Diplomacy

by Daniel Pipes

One of the most secretive and unusual rounds of Arab-Israeli diplomacy took place in the summer of 1998, when three private American citizens, businessman Ronald Lauder, his aide Allen Roth, and magazine publisher George Nader, made nine trips to each of Damascus and Jerusalem, trying to secure a Syrian-Israeli peace treaty.(I provided the fullest account of these negotiations – and the dispute surrounding what exactly Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu offered – in"

Hitler's Ambitious Plans for the 1936 Olympics

by Jeffrey O. Segrave

There is no doubt that the 1936 Berlin Olympics served as a watershed moment in the panoply of modern Olympic games history. The Berlin games were by far the largest games held to date. A record 3.77 million spectators showed up to support a record 4,066 athletes (including a record 328 women) from a record 49 countries. The most up-to-date radio equipment helped to transmit the Berlin games around the globe, and the high powered, state run propaganda machinery that advertised the ga

Why I Think History Will Be Kind to Nixon

by Walter A. McDougall

An address to the Richard M. Nixon Library and Birthplace, August 5, 2004.To help my thinking about President Nixon's historical legacy, I accessed the Nixon Library's excellent web site and reread the eulogies made at the president's funeral. I was stunned to realize it's been ten years already since that sad and glorious day. Yet the fact that thirty years have passed since Nixon's resignation does not surprise me. The anxieties and cri

In the Shadow of William McKinley

by Stephen K. Tootle

After four years, the Karl Rove-George W. Bush political team can claim one narrow electoral victory in the presidential election of 2000, a series of domestic policy successes, victory in two major battles in the war on terror, and stunning gains for the Republicans in the 2002 midterm elections. Though it is too soon to assess whether or not Bush will realign American politics in the manner of William McKinley, the next test comes this November.To Rove, President McKinley was the master

The Not-So-Hidden Agenda of Global Studies

by Robert "KC" Johnson

Academic conferences showcase a field’s cutting-edge scholarship, which the professors in attendance can then incorporate into their classes. The agenda at the 2004 Global Studies Association conference speaks volumes at what’s occurring in classes in the faddish field of “Global Studies.” Participants at this year’s “Global Studies” event heard a paper from Carl Davidson offering “perspective on how progressives can independently interv

The Writing Life ... One in a Series

by Peter N. Stearns

I need to preface these remarks by insisting that HNN editor Rick Shenkman asked me to write on “how really productive scholars organize their time.” My comments will leave me vulnerable to various accusations, so I don’t want excessive pride to be needlessly exaggerated. Rick also insisted that I mention that I have a fulltime job in academic administration, as Provost of George Mason University, while still managing to write fairly regularly.I have written an

The Crazy Scheme Hatched by the Pentagon that Frightened Ike

by Tom Engelhardt

On August 12, 1960, while involved in preparations for developing the American military's initial Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP), Admiral Arleigh Burke met with Secretary of the Navy William B. Franke for a blunt discussion. He was disturbed that SIOP strategic planning would be lodged at Offutt Air Force Base because of its"vaunted computer capabilities." Bitter, and fearing that the Air Force was trying to take over all nuclear forces, he referred to his Air Force opposites