Historians/History

Gilder Lehrman Summer Seminars: The Age of Lincoln

by Patrick A. McGravey

As an adolescent growing up outside of Boston, MA, I can remember watching a film entitled Oxford Blues starring 1980’s actor Rob Lowe. Looking back some twenty years later, I recall one line that always resonated with me: “Oxford, there is no substitute!” This was yelled by the main character, an American exchange student, throughout the film. On the screen, Oxford appeared as this magical place of higher learning with beautiful landscapes, age-old traditions, and

Muslim Propaganda at the University of Chicago

by Diana Muir

The Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago is Indiana Jones’ museum.  At least, it is the museum that Indiana Jones would have shipped the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant home to, if only he had been a real person. Not that even the Holy Grail would top the actual collections of the museum by much.  Chicago had lots of  archaeologists shipping stuff home.  Visitors can see the sixteen foot tall human-headed, winged, guardian bull from the palac

Gilder Lehrman Summer Seminars: Freedom and Slavery in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800

by Susan Bevington

Each summer the Gilder Lehrman Institute holds seminars for public, parochial and independent school teachers "designed to strengthen educators' commitment to high quality history teaching." More than 6,000 teachers have participated in the program through the years. In the summer of 2006 600 participants from 49 states and 6 foreign countries took part. HNN asked partic

I Don’t Want Candy: The Uses and Abuses of Marie Antoinette

by Caroline Weber

As a child of the nineteen eighties and a longtime Manolo Blahnik devotee, I expected to adore the MTV-worthy musical shoe shopping sequence in Sofia Coppola’s new biopic, Marie Antoinette. In this scene, Kirsten Dunst’s radiant, irrepressible teen queen chooses to ignore a political briefing from the Austrian ambassador to Versailles, and embarks instead on a buying spree that would have made Imelda Marcos proud. With the infectiously happy anthem “I Want Candy,&rd

Allen Dulles: “I’d have felt much better…if there had been…ten thousand people killed”

by David M. Barrett

In 2003, the Central Intelligence Agency declassified transcripts of certain conversations that the Director of Central Intelligence held in his office during the 1950s. One transcript gives vivid evidence of the DCI’s attitude toward the loss of life by Europeans in the lead-up to Hungary’s 1956 Uprising, in which 2500 died. The document was accessed at the CREST computer terminals in the library at National Archives II, College Park, MD. I came across them by using the searc

Gilder Lehrman Summer Seminars: Abraham Lincoln

by John McPherson

Each summer the Gilder Lehrman Institute holds seminars for public, parochial and independent school teachers "designed to strengthen educators' commitment to high quality history teaching." More than 6,000 teachers have participated in the program through the years. In the summer of 2006 600 participants from 49 states and 6 foreign countries took part. HNN asked partic

Gilder Lehrman Summer Seminars: The Colonial Era

by Barbara Markham

Each summer the Gilder Lehrman Institute holds seminars for public, parochial and independent school teachers "designed to strengthen educators' commitment to high quality history teaching." More than 6,000 teachers have participated in the program through the years. In the summer of 2006 600 participants from 49 states and 6 foreign countries took part. HNN asked partic

Gilder Lehrman Summer Seminars: America Between the Wars

by Jennifer Hellman

Each summer the Gilder Lehrman Institute holds seminars for public, parochial and independent school teachers "designed to strengthen educators' commitment to high quality history teaching." More than 6,000 teachers have participated in the program through the years. In the summer of 2006 600 participants from 49 states and 6 foreign countries took part. HNN asked partic

Why Richard Hofstadter Is Still Worth Reading but Not for the Reasons the Critics Have in Mind

by Jon Wiener

David Brown's biography of Richard Hofstadter has attracted an unusual amount of attention for a revised dissertation, riding the wave of nostalgia that surrounds the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and liberal icon of the 1950s and '60s. At the New York Times Book Review, the book was the subject of the longest review of the year, and one of the most admiring, written by the editor himself, Sam Tanenhaus, who declared Hofstadter"more relevant than ever." The New Republic ran

Shhh! Don’t Talk about Herbert Aptheker

by Jesse Lemisch

Public talk vs. private talk. If we consider, first, the volume of off-list private e-mail that I have received since History News Network published my "About the Herbert Aptheker Sexual Revelations"

Was the Dred Scott Decision Morally Wrong but Still Legally Correct?

by Mark A. Graber

Dred Scott has too long been considered the disreputable old maid of American constitutionalism. As in the card game, the party to a constitutional debate that gets stuck with the Dred Scott card loses. Proponents and opponents of such controversial decisions of Roe v. Wade repeatedly insist that their rivals are relying on the same principles of constitutional interpretation that Chief Justice Roger Taney used when he concluded in 1857 that slaveholders had a co

The Black Panthers: Their Dangerous Bermudian Legacy

by Mel Ayton

"The Sixties defined itself by its efforts to delegitimize the police as an ‘army of occupation’ while also celebrating crime as a form of existential rebellion and the outlaw as a perceptive social critic. There was a numbing barrage against what was derided as ‘law and order’ seen in slogans such as ‘off the pigs’, in the insistence that ‘all minority prisoners are political prisoners’, and in the romanticizing of murderers

Interview with David Cannadine: His New Biography of Andrew Mellon

by Rick Shenkman

Last week Knopf published Mr. Cannadine's latest book, Mellon: An American Life. The following interview was conducted by email.Was Mellon a cold fish? It's impossible not to start with this question. He was certainly a distant, fenced-in, taciturn man. It was said that he and the equally unloquacious Calvin Coolidge conversed in pauses. He was a very difficult man to get to know; I don't think anyone ever knew him well; and I'm not sure that he knew hi

History Doyen: Anne Firor Scott

by Bonnie Goodman

What she's famous for.

About the Herbert Aptheker Sexual Revelations

by Jesse Lemisch

My first reaction to the shocking news in Bettina Aptheker’s book that her father, Herbert, sexually abused her as a child (as described in Chris Phelps’s article in the Chronicl

Gilder Lehrman Summer Seminars: Interpreting the Constitution

by John McGoldrick

Each summer the Gilder Lehrman Institute holds seminars for public, parochial and independent school teachers "designed to strengthen educators' commitment to high quality history teaching." More than 6,000 teachers have participated in the program through the years. In the summer of 2006 600 participants from 49 states and 6 foreign countries took part. HNN asked partic

Gilder Lehrman Summer Seminars: New York in the Gilded Age

by Steve Laise

Each summer the Gilder Lehrman Institute holds seminars for public, parochial and independent school teachers "designed to strengthen educators' commitment to high quality history teaching." More than 6,000 teachers have participated in the program through the years. In the summer of 2006 600 participants from 49 states and 6 foreign countries took part. HNN asked partic

Why the Founding Fathers Count

by Joseph Ellis

During the past decade there has been a discernible surge of interest in the Founding Fathers. An electromagnetic field has always surrounded the founding generation, which is one reason we have felt obliged to capitalize and mythologize those “present at the creation.” But until recently the tendency has been to k

The Myth of Tokyo Rose

by Rick Shenkman

Even the NYT has been fooled.

Interview with Joshua Brown: The Historian as Illustrator (Or Illustrator as Historian)

by Kensington Hatcher

Every week it seems you turn out another illustration. This is an astonishing achievement. Does it wear you down? I enjoy the task of drawing and painting the weekly Life during Wartimeinstallments, but sometimes coming up with ideas is a bit of a drain. You want to avoid repeating yourself (although I'm all too aware how easily that happens). The essential challenge, though, is to devise a concept that is most po