Historians/History

Reporter's Notebook: Highlights from the 2006 Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association (Philadelphia)

by Rick Shenkman

IndexNews News About the Convention in the Mainstream Media and BlogsHNN Daily Reports Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Podcasts HNN Audio Interviews with HistoriansArticles Articles About the Convention and Papers Presented at the Convention

Reporter's Notebook: Highlights from the 2004 Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association

by Rick Shenkman

Related LinksReporter's Notebook: The 2003 Annual Meeting of the AHA2003 OAH Annual Meeting: What Historians Against the War Want

Discrediting the Politicization of History

by Keith Windschuttle

 The University of Colorado’s dismissal of Ward Churchill for academic fraud was not only a welcome decision in support of scholarly standards, it will also go some way towards discrediting one of the most depressing tendencies of our era, the politicization of history. In Australia, Churchill has long been frequently cited by historians of Aboriginal affairs. In their introduction to a special “genocide” edition of the academic journal Aboriginal Histo

Ike's Wise Restrained Response to Sputnik

by Yanek Mieczkowski

A half-century ago, on October 4, 1957, the Space Age began.  The Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite, signaling a new era.  The event still resonates.  In September 2007, Russia announced plans to send men to the moon by 2025, prompting media chatter about a renewed "space race." Sputnik initiated the first "space race"—and prompted harsh criticism of President Dwight Eisenhower.  As in today's war on terror,

Nixon vs. the Imaginary “Jewish Cabal”

by Kenneth J. Hughes, Jr.

On Monday September 24, 2007 the Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center publishes a collection of transcripts that illustrate the evolution of Nixon’s conspiracy theories about Jews, intellectuals and the Ivy League in the aftermath of the publication of the Pentagon Papers. The Federal Reserve is catnip to conspiracy theor

What is Wrong with Quotas? Equality, Democracy, Bias, and Balance in American Society

by Jules R. Benjamin

I was thinking the other day about the issue of academic freedom.  Conservative scholars have discovered the secret control of liberal arts departments by, of all people, liberals.  The remedy suggested is balance, achieved by ending the liberal bias of current hiring and tenure decisions.  Who can oppose balance or support bias?  It seems true that if the controlling liberals say, in a department of English or of Sociology, would eliminate the bias that h

They Don't Have Anything Like Our Presidential Libraries, but Brits Now Do Have the Churchill and Thatcher Archives and that's Something

by Jeff Shear

“If you want to learn about Stalin, study Henry VIII. If you want to learn about Mrs. Thatcher, study Henry VIII,” Alan Bennett’s Tony Award winning “The History Boys” tells us. While the playwright makes an interesting point, the history boys who run the Churchill Archives at Churchill College Cambridge hurry to add that if you really want to learn about Baroness Thatcher make an appointment. The Churchill

When's a Palace an Emblem of Democratic Aspirations?

by Ron Briley

A recent visit to Hawaii during the annual meeting of the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association offered an opportunity to observe the impact of historical narratives well beyond the narrow confines of the history conference papers and sessions. Visits to the Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor and the ‘Iolani Palace, the royal residence constructed by King Kalakaua in 1882, offer contrasting historical narratives regarding the American presence in Hawaii. The Pe

The Manhattan Project: A Great Work of Human Collaboration

by Richard Rhodes

No other story resonates quite like the story of the Manhattan Project. When I wrote my history The Making of the Atomic Bomb, I thought of it as the tragic epic of the twentieth century: Humankind invents the means of its own destruction. But the discovery of how to release the enormous energies latent in the nuclei of atoms has led to a world where world-scale war is no longer possible. Is that tragedy, or cause for celebration? Nuclear power came out of the Manhattan Pro

The Saudi Billionaire vs. Cambridge University Press

by Robert O. Collins

On April 3, 2007 Kevin Taylor, Intellectual Property Manager for the Cambridge University Press (CUP), contacted Millard Burr and myself that the solicitors for Shaykh Khalid bin Mahfouz, Kendall Freeman, had informed CUP of eleven “allegations of defamation” in our book Alms for Jihad: Charities and Terrorism in the Islamic World and requested a response. On April 20 CUP received our seventeen page “robust defence,” but it soon became apparent that CUP had de

Was Grant a Drunk?

by Edward G. Longacre

Credit: Wiki Commons/HNN staff.

How Race Relations Touched Me During a Long Lifetime

by Vaughn Davis Bornet

This is a particularly personal essay about American race relations as I witnessed them during my very long lifetime. 

The Hard Years at the Harvard History Department

by Morton Keller and Phyllis Keller

After 1970 as before, History was the most troubled of Harvard’s social science departments. An Old Guard fought with tenacity for decades to fend off threats to the quality of what (with some reason) it regarded as one of Harvard’s great departments. Historical metaphors come readily to hand: Leonidas and his band at Thermopylae; Bourbons who learned nothing and forgot nothing; perhaps most apt, Canute ordering the tide not to come in.

The Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti: Eighty Years After

by Ron Briley

T. S. Elliott once described April as the cruelest month. Perhaps he should have considered August. Recent weeks have witnessed observations marking the sixty-second anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet, the eightieth anniversary of the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti on August 23, 1927 is drawing less attention. Of course, we are talking about the lives of two men as opposed to thousands. But just as with the atomic bomb

Was the Marshall Plan as Good an Example of Bipartisanship as People Say?

by Greg Behrman

On June 5, 1947, Secretary of State George Catlett Marshall arrived at Harvard University’s 286th Commencement with a bold idea.  World War II had decimated Europe.  Beyond the physical destruction and death, the continent’s economies were in an acute state of commercial and financial dislocation.  National Communist Parties – in France and Italy, in particular – were finding fuel in the want and despair.  To the east, the Soviet Union emerged a contin

Whatever Happened to August First?

by J. R. Kerr-Ritchie

Two weeks ago, hurricane dean swept Jamaica.   One hundred and seventy six years previously, a human hurricane hit the British colony in the form

Why Vincent Bugliosi Is So Sure Oswald Alone Killed JFK (Interview)

by Robin Lindley

Dallas, Texas. Friday. November 22, 1963. President John F. Kennedy died after a sniper attack on his motorcade. For many, the assassination remains a mystery. A 2003 Gallup Poll revealed th

Interview with Elliot Jaspin: Racial Cleansing in America

by Rick Shenkman

Elliot Jaspin, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize (1979), is the author of the just-published book, Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hiden History of Racial Cleansing in America (Basic Books), the March HNN Book of the Month. He is the System Editor for Cox Newspapers, where he specializes in computer-assisted reporting. In 2006 he wrote a series for the Cox chain about a number of campaigns to force blacks out of largely white comm

How Paranoid Was Nixon?

by Kenneth J. Hughes, Jr.

It wasn’t the crime, but it wasn’t the cover-up, either. Something more basic took down a president 33 years ago. Long before prosecutors identified him as an unindicted coconspirator, Richard Nixon was a conspiracy theorist. In the last 10 years, the government has systematically declassified hundreds of hours of White House tapes recorded on a voice-activated system that President Nixon had the Secret Service install in the oval office. They reveal a textbook example of w

It's Time to Face the Whole Truth About the Atlantic Slave Trade

by Sheldon M. Stern

"Readers must understand that this terrible traffic in millions of human beings had been ... a joint venture."