Historians/History

It's Time for a National World War I Memorial

by Julian Saltman

Liberty Memorial in Kansas City (Wikipedia)On Monday Americans will gather to celebrate Memorial Day, a holiday on which we honor those who have served, and fallen, in our country's armed forces. Veterans and their descendants will participate in ceremonies and parades across the country, and many will be in Washington, D.C., to visit the national memorials dedicated to the wars in which they fought.But there is one glaring exception: World War I.Despite nearing the centenary of the war's outbreak, the United States still lacks a national memorial to the 4.7 million Americans who served during the conflict. Of those servicemen, nearly 117,000 perished during the war -- 53,402 in combat -- and another 204,000 were wounded. Many believe that the last man to die in the war was an American soldier, 23-year-old Henry Gunther of Baltimore. He was killed one minute before the 11 a.m. armistice of Nov. 11, 1918. In comparison, roughly 34,000 Americans died in combat during the Korean War, and some 47,000 died in combat in Vietnam.

At Last, Honor for Albert Wedemeyer, a Great American Soldier

by Thomas Fleming

Shortly after the Allies established a beachhead in Normandy in June 1944, George C. Marshall, the U.S. Army’s chief of staff, sent a cable to General Albert C. Wedemeyer telling him: “Your plan has worked.” Marshall was referring to the 147-page Victory Program that Wedemeyer and a small staff had written in 1941. It had been expanded and elaborated by Wedemeyer’s War Plans successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower and renamed Overlord. But Marshall still regarded the original plan as the key to the Allied success.This is a sample of the astonishing forgotten story that historian John J. McLaughlin reveals in his new book, Albert A. Wedemeyer, America’s Unsung Strategist in World War II.

Slavery and the Myth of the Alamo

by James W. Russell

Two and a half million people visit the Alamo each year where, according to its website, “men made the ultimate sacrifice for freedom,” making it “hallowed ground and the Shrine of Texas Liberty.”There can be no doubt that the symbolism of the Alamo is at the center of the creation myth of Texas: that the state was forged out of a heroic struggle for freedom against a cruel Mexican dictator, Santa Ana. It represents to the Southwest what the Statue of Liberty represents to the Northeast: a satisfying confirmation of what we are supposedly about as a people.But if Northeasterners can be excused for embracing a somewhat fuzzy notion of abstract liberty, the symbolism of the Alamo has always been built upon historical myth.

The Science (and History) of Disgust: Interview with Psychologist Rachel Herz on Understanding Human Repulsion

by Robin Lindley

Only humans experience disgust, an emotion that evolved initially to help us avoid toxic food and disease and morphed into a manipulable sense that infuses personal choices about cuisine and friends and sex partners as well as cultural decisions on economics, law, moral codes, politics, and allies and enemies.Whether something is disgusting varies from place to place and over history. In the 1600s, for example, New Englanders found lobster so foul that laws were enacted to bar slave owners from serving it to slaves more than three days a week -- yet now most people consider lobster a delicacy.

The Perils of Internet Research: The Case of LBJ and Affirmative Action

by Samuel Walker

Affirmative action in employment as official U.S. policy began with President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 Executive Order 11246. Designed to implement Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the order directed federal agencies to maintain “a positive, continuing program” to promote equal employment opportunity, and federal contractors to take “affirmative action” in that regard.E.O. 11246 had a tangled history with regard to women. LBJ deliberately omitted sex discrimination from it, even though Title VII specified “sex” along with the other protected classes. Under pressure from a resurgent women’s rights movement (the National Organization for Women was founded in 1966), he issued Executive Order 11375 in October 1967 revising 11246 to include sex discrimination.

OAH/NCPH Sessions “Chart the Future of Teaching the Past”

by Craig Thurtell

Teaching students to think like historians may be an idea whose time has arrived. The April annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians (OAH/NCPH)/National Council for Public History (NCPH) in Milwaukee certainly offered abundant evidence of its spread. This approach rests on several key premises. First, history is understood not in the popular sense, as everything that has ever occurred in human history, but rather as an interpretation of the relatively meager evidence that has been left to us by the past. Interpretation of this evidence, in fact, constitutes the essence of the discipline. If students do not have the opportunity to grasp and practice this essential activity, they will not grasp history; instead they will misunderstand it as a chronicle of forgettable events. A second premise recognizes that history, as practiced by historians, requires the application of certain understandings and cognitive skills that are unique to the discipline. For example, historians master a conceptual framework that includes causation, chronology, and many other concepts, and, in analyzing primary and secondary sources, they deploy specific cognitive skills like sourcing and inference in order to interpret these documents.

Response to John McAdams: "Fidel Knew that Oswald Intended to Shoot at Kennedy"

by Brian Latell

By daring to write about the Kennedy assassination in Castro’s Secrets: The CIA and Cuba’s Intelligence Machine I feel as if I have joined a fractious fraternity of experts all steeped in the minutiae of competing conspiracy theories. Since I make no claim to be a serious student of the assassination, and in fact it constitutes a relatively small portion of my book, I entered the fray with nagging misgivings.By concluding that Fidel Castro knew in advance that Lee Harvey Oswald would fire at John F. Kennedy that long-ago day in Dallas, I had no illusions about how taunting my findings might seem to some who are immersed in the subject. No one, after all, had ever argued quite the case that I make: not a Cuban murder plot, but a conspiracy of silence.

Someone Used My Research without Acknowledgement

by Richard Labunski

Update:  Regnery issues correction in Labunski disputeOn a Sunday night in January, I turned on “Book TV,” the weekend program on C-SPAN2 where authors talk about their non-fiction books and editors discuss the publishing industry. Chris DeRose, a Phoenix lawyer and political consultant, was explaining how the Bill of Rights became part of the Constitution. Focusing on the political and personal relationship of James Madison and James Monroe, he devoted particular attention to the crucial election between them for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in the First Congress.

The Baffling Harry White

by David Chambers

I write in response to Benn Steil’s New York Times op-ed “Banker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” Joan White Pinkham's New York Times letter to the editor "A Case from the Cold War," and Bruce Craig's HNN reply "Setting the Record Straight: Harry Dexter White and Soviet Espionage."First, it may be a bit early for Mr. Craig to say, "both Steil and Pinkham loosely played with the facts and twisted the truth." Mr. Steil's book is still to come: only a hint appears in his op-ed. Ms. Pinkham offered only an article by IMF historian James M. Boughton.Second, regarding whether White was involved in espionage, perhaps it is worth revisiting early insight from Whittaker Chambers (my grandfather). Although in Witness he tended to write off White like other New Dealers -- as communist dupes -- Chambers also recounts this story:

Understanding American Myths: Announcing the New Blog "MythicAmerica"

by Ira Chernus

The United States is a very real place, a political state full of very real land, people, things, resources, and much more. America is a mythic place -- the version and the vision of the United States that Americans conjure up in their minds when they imagine what their nation is, what it has been, what it could be; what its role in the world is, has been, and could be; what their own role in the nation is and might be; what it means to be an American.Soon I’ll be launching MythicAmerica, a blog housed on HNN to to explore the mythic expressions that have pervaded, and still pervade, American life -- especially political life, shaping Americans’ responses to national events in more ways than we are likely to suspect, as well as to experiment with new myths that might shape American life in the future. To invite you into the MythicAmerica community, I offer here some preliminary reflections on myth and American life.For a long time I avoided using the word myth because it means so many different things to different people. Academic experts on myth debate heatedly about what a myth is and how it functions in human life. In fact, with so many conflicting meanings and so much debate, some scholars have declared the word meaningless and abandoned it altogether.

Was the Economic Miracle of World War II Fact or Fiction?

by Richard Striner

In 1932, the economist John Maynard Keynes made a prophecy: the American depression would last and never end until the nation’s leaders could identify “some object which is admitted even by the deadheads to be a legitimate excuse for largely increasing the expenditure of someone on something!”Only spending on the scale of total war would do the trick.“In the past,” he observed, “we have not infrequently had to wait for a war to terminate a major depression. I hope that in the future ... we shall be ready to spend on the enterprises of peace what the financial maxims of the past would only allow us to spend on the devastations of war.”Many people after World War II would conclude that Keynes had been right.

Roosevelt, Hughes, and the Battle over the New Deal: Interview with James Simon

by Robin Lindley

This spring may see the issuance of one of the most significant U.S. Supreme Court decisions in decades as the Court weighs in on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act of 2010, President Obama’s major legislative achievement. A politically polarized Supreme Court, controlled by conservatives led by Chief Justice John Roberts, will determine the fate of the controversial new law by June. The decision may well go beyond the health care act itself and alter the course of the modern federal administrative state.Seventy-five years ago, the nation witnessed another conflict that pitted the Court against the chief executive. Then Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, a Republican, faced off against a popular Democratic president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who derided the Court for striking down several key New Deal laws including the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act.

No More Victory Days?

by Joseph E. Persico

May 8 marks the sixty-seventh anniversary of VE Day, marking victory over Nazi Germany in World War II. On that day Americans poured into the streets, horns blared, factory whistles shrieked, and churches filled. President Harry S. Truman proclaimed over the radio, “The flags of freedom fly over all Europe.”Since that day, we have known plenty of wars, but no VK Day, VN Day, VI Day, or VA Day marking conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.Why? What changed?For one thing, people grow war-weary. U.S participation in World War II lasted three years and eight months. By contrast, the Iraq War lasted eight years and nine months. Afghanistan has gone on for ten years and seven months and still counting.

How Did TV Remember the '92 L.A. Riots?

by Jill A. Edy

Twenty years ago last week, Americans were transfixed by TV images of Los Angeles burning. It was no Hollywood disaster movie. Four Los Angeles police officers charged with beating an African American motorist were acquitted of wrong-doing. Hours later, the city erupted in riots that left 51 dead and over $700 million in estimated damages. Last weekend, television news remembered, offering its particular brand of popular history.It may seem counterintuitive to think about news as a repository for history; after all, the main point of news is supposed to be to tell us what’s “new.” Yet news, and particularly television news, is a vital resource for developing publicly shared understandings of the recent past. For most Americans, a lot has happened since their last U.S. history class, and to get perspective on what happened and what it meant, many of them will turn to the narratives created by TV journalists. What do these TV histories teach us about the past?

Republicans, Mormons, and Jews: The Unlikely 1940s Alliance That Reshaped U.S. Mideast Policy

by Rafael Medoff

Herbert Hoover, a midwestern Quaker, was the only living ex-president of the United States.Senator Elbert Thomas, Democrat of Utah, was the most influential Mormon in America.Benzion Netanyahu and Hillel Kook were young Jewish activists from Jerusalem.In a span of just six months in 1943-1944, this unlikely interfaith alliance would help change the Roosevelt administration's response to the Holocaust, reshape U.S. policy in the Middle East, and redefined the role of Jews in American politics.* * * * *Netanyahu and Kook, born in Europe and raised in British Mandatory Palestine, traveled to the United States in 1940, hoping to mobilize U.S. support for rescuing Europe's Jews from Hitler and creating a Jewish state. "It was a brand new world for us," Netanyahu told me in one of my interviews with him. "I had never been to America. But I had to learn quickly -- there was no time. The world of European Jewry was going up in flames.

David Barton’s Jefferson

by Martin E. Marty

Our premier historian of late colonial and early republican America, Gordon Wood, while reviewing a book on Roger Williams warms up readers with references to Thomas Jefferson. “It’s easy to believe in the separation of church and state when one has nothing but scorn for all organized religion. That was the position of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson’s hatred of the clergy and established churches knew no bounds. He thought that members of the ‘priestcraft’ were always in alliance with despots against liberty. For him the divine Trinity “was nothing but ‘Abracadabra’ and ‘hocus-pocus’... Ridicule, he said, was the only weapon to be used against it.”If you wanted to promote the idea of “a Christian America,” one which would privilege one religion, a version of Christianity, and de-privilege all others, and if you want to get back to roots and origins, the last of the “founding fathers” on whom you’d concentrate would be Jefferson. Yet the most ardent public and pop advocate of privilege and virtual establishment, David Barton, cites Jefferson for Bartonian positions which are directly opposite of Jefferson’s. Never heard of David Barton? Most of the historians you would ever meet never heard of him, and if you told them about him and his positions, they would yawn or rage about listing him among those who deal honestly with Jefferson.

May Day: From the Haymarket Massacre to the Occupy Movement

by Lawrence S. Wittner

Many people might be surprised to learn that the May Day celebrations that occurred around the world yesterday were born more than a century ago out of a struggle by American workers for the eight-hour day.The late nineteenth century was a particularly hard and brutal time for working people in the United States. The rise of giant corporations fostered accelerated exploitation of workers in the interests of profit by the wealthy few. In the new, giant factories, it was common for workers to labor from 60 to 80 hours a week. Many workers had a six-day workweek, but a seven-day workweek was the standard for steel mills, oil refineries, paper mills, and other highly mechanized plants. The industrial accident and death rate soared to new heights -- not only thanks to new, dangerous machines and the use of child labor, but because of worker exhaustion. In 1881 alone, an estimated 30,000 American railway workers were killed or injured on the job.

I Did It My Way—By Accident: Lessons from an Unconventional Career

by Ray Smock

This talk will be, in part, a reflection on the history profession in the past half century, but what it is mostly about is stories from my career. I hope what I say has some bearing on the larger aspects of the profession. Historians can look at the big overarching themes when they tell their stories, but they can also try to see the universe in a grain of sand. What this talk is about is just one historian’s tale, one grain in the story of our profession.Just a few months ago reports from the American Historical Association (AHA) convention indicate that newly minted PhDs in history find the job market a frustrating experience. There are more people looking for traditional academic jobs than there are jobs available. A large part of this frustration can be laid at the door of too many history departments that continue to train history students the way they have been trained for the past 100 years. Pick a field of history, study under an expert in that field, read the literature of the field, pass a comprehensive exam, and then write a dissertation of your own based on original research. Next, get it published if at all possible. Find an academic job. Teach students, research, write books, and train another crop of students to follow the same path.

Setting the Record Straight: Harry Dexter White and Soviet Espionage

by R. Bruce Craig

With the recent publication of Benn Steil’s New York Times opinion piece, “Banker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” considerable interest has once again focused on whether Harry Dexter White – an assistant secretary of the Treasury and that department’s key figure in the founding of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – was a Soviet spy.  White’s daughter, Joan Pinkham responded to Steil’s assertions by claiming that the evidence the author cited did not establish her father’s guilt. In fact, both Steil and Pinkham loosely played with the facts and twisted the truth about Harry Dexter White’s role with both the founding of the Bretton Woods institutions and the Soviet underground.

The Pineapple that Ate Global History

by Alan Singer

When I was a teenager, Dr. West's Medicine Show and Junk Band recorded one of my all-time favorite tunes, "The Eggplant That Ate Chicago." The band played a blend of Appalachian jug music and banjo combined with sixties psychedelic hippie. The song's lyrics told the story of an alien invasion of planet Earth by space fruits and vegetables. It warned listeners, "You better watch out for the eggplant that ate Chicago, if he's still hungry, your whole country's doomed."It seems the eggplant is back again, this time disguised as a pineapple named "Common Core." It is still voraciously hungry, but instead of attacking cities it is attacking global history, content knowledge in the curriculum, and the education of American children, and if it's still hungry, our "whole country's doomed."