Historians/History

A Spirit, "Unbroken"

by Kinue Tokudome

The B-24 Liberator bomber Green Hornet, on which Louis Zamperini served as bombardier. Credit: National Archives.“Culmination of my seven-year journey into ‘forgiveness’”, that is how Ms. Laura Hillenbrand describes her book, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption (soon to made into a major motion picture) This is a book about the experience of B-24 bombardier Louis Zamperini who became a POW of the Japanese. As a track runner, he had competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

1965: When the "Sixties" Really Started

by James T. Patterson

Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson during the Christmas season, 1965. Credit: LBJ Library/White House.On December 18, 1964, Lyndon Johnson turned on the lights of the National Christmas Tree and proclaimed, “These are the most hopeful times in all the years since Christ was born in Bethlehem.” He added, “Today -- as never before -- man has in his possession the capacities to end war and preserve peace, to eradicate poverty and share abundance, to overcome the diseases that have afflicted the human race and permit all mankind to enjoy their promise in life on this earth.”

Jacques Barzun, 1907-2012

With Light from a New Dawn, a profile painting of Jacques Barzun in 1959, by Eric Morse, 2005.In MemoriamJoseph Epstein: Jacques Barzun: An Appreciation (10-26-12)I first met Jacques Barzun in the autumn of 1974. I had just been named editor of The American Scholar, the quarterly magazine published by Phi Beta Kappa, and he had long been on its editorial board and was among its leading contributors. He seemed to embody the best of the magazine in its intellectual aspirations and cultural standard. He had earlier told me, by letter, that he was planning to leave the editorial board, and the prospect so alarmed me that I made a special trip from Chicago to New York to try to dissuade him from doing so.

The Inevitability of the Cold War

by Michael Dobbs

Credit: Wikimedia Commons/HNN staff.As a historian and a journalist, I am interested in hinge moments in history. I witnessed one such moment as a reporter for the Washington Post in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe at the end of the Cold War. My new book, Six Months in 1945: FDR, Stalin, Churchill, and Truman -- from World War to Cold War, focuses on another, equally momentous, historical transition from one era to another.Historians pretty much agree that the Cold War ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. But when, why, and how it began has been the subject of much debate. Traditionalist historians emphasize the Sovietization of Eastern Europe, culminating in the Communist-led coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948 orchestrated by Josef Stalin. Revisionists accuse President Truman of setting the stage for the Cold War with the bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945 and his embrace of “atomic diplomacy” against the Soviet Union.

The Importance of Doing Recent History

by Renee Romano and Claire Potter

Credit: Wikimedia CommonsJournalists, it has been said, provide the “first rough draft of history.” Presumably historians come to the scene some time later and draw on a variety of sources -- including those first journalistic accounts of events -- to revise that “rough draft” into something more finished and considered. But while historians do not cover events as they unfold like journalists do, in fact some historian has to be the one to write that first draft of history.

The Curious Creation (and Unintended Consequences) of the Electoral College

by Ray Raphael

Congress Hall in Philadelphia in 2007. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.What were the framers of the Constitution even thinking? Why did they bequeath to us the Electoral College, which grants the people of Ohio the power to choose the nation’s president and which has produced four winners who actually lost the popular vote?The short answer: the men who wrote the Constitution believed they were producing a system not only different from but antithetical to the one that soon emerged.

The History Lesson in an Offensive Fashion Design

by Damon B. Akins

A week ago, fashion designer and Greensboro native Mark McNairy found himself at the center of a social media firestorm. His new clothing line for The Gap drew sharp criticism for a solid black T-shirt with the words “Manifest Destiny” on the front. As a historian of the American West, this is a core part of my teaching, and while my students would find this obvious, it is nonetheless worth a few words on why Manifest Destiny is a fundamentally offensive fashion statement.Manifest Destiny was a phrase coined by John O’Sullivan in the lead-up to the Mexican War (1846-1848). He touted westward expansion as a critical part of the United States’ inevitable fulfillment of “our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”

An Open Letter to Southern Historians on the Alabama Immigration Law

by T.R.C. Hutton

An anti-HB56 rally in Alabama on August 11. Credit: Flickr/Steven Ross Photography.In early November historians and historians-in-training will gather in Mobile, Alabama for the seventy-ninth annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association (SHA). A lot of regular attendees call it, “the Southern.” The SHA’s members look forward to their annual meeting not only for the diverse array of panels but also for the conviviality that most academic conferences don’t have. Since I first attended in 2003 I’ve found the Southern to be an unmatched combination of professional development and recreation. Many of us consider it one of our favorite annual holidays.

Farewell, Columbus Day -- Hello, Exploration Day

by Tom Diehl

Map of the United States, 1823. Credit: University of Nevada, Reno.Exploration is in our DNA. Without that innate curiosity, our world would be so different; yet, our schools shortchange students through what has traditionally been a sanitized, Euro-centric recollection of America’s past. No Child Left Behind has further eroded history education by placing the emphasis on math and language arts.As a former school board president of a district of 10,000 students, I witnessed much of this first hand. Because of my experiences, when recently approached by another former board member to have Columbus Day rededicated to Neil Armstrong Day, I was fascinated. I countered with Exploration Day, which would honor all explorers, and we began a modest journey of our own.In the process of honing our message, I came across the account of Moncacht-apé, a Native American explorer who lived in the late 1600s and early 1700s. Antoine Simon Le Page Du Pratz, details his travels in “Histoire de la Louisiane,” originally published in Paris in 1758.

JFK's War Against Leaks

by David G. Coleman

CIA director John McCone (foreground left) with President Kennedy on November 29, 1961. Credit: JFK LibraryPresidents don't like it when classified information appears on the front page of the New York Times. Unless, of course, they're the ones doing the leaking.Mr. Obama is the latest to confront the problem. His administration has prosecuted more cases of leaks of national security information than all other presidents combined. The FBI has assigned agents to hunt down leakers. The Justice Department has investigations underway. New rules have been put in place restricting who can talk to reporters. And legislation designed to introduce new levels of accountability for government officials talking to reporters is winding its way through Congress.

David Maraniss on the Unlikely Odyssey of Barack Obama

by Robin Lindley

Senator Barack Obama in Fayetteville, North Carolina in 2008. Credit: Flickr/Wondermonkey2k.I believe that life is chaotic, a jumble of accidents, ambitions, misconceptions, bold intentions, lazy happenstances, and unintended consequences, yet I also believe that there are connections that illuminate our world, revealing its endless mystery and wonder. I find these connections in story, in history, threading together individual lives as well as disparate societies—and they were everywhere I looked in the story of Barack Obama.--David Maraniss, “Introduction”, Barack Obama: The Story (2012)

Noam Chomsky and the Cuban Missile Crisis

by Sheldon M. Stern

President John F. Kennedy and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in an ExComm meeting during the Cuban Missile Crisis, October 1962. Credit: White House.Noam Chomsky’s October 15 TomDispatch article (cross-posted on HNN) on the Cuban missile crisis quotes extensively from my work. Unfortunately, he also distorts the historical record and decontextualizes my conclusions. His insistence that the crisis was actually about U.S. “ownership of the world” tell us little or nothing about how real people behaved in real circumstances in October 1962.Several of Chomsky’s key contentions require additional discussion:

The Week the World Stood Still

by Noam Chomsky

Jupiter IRBM installation in Alabama, similar to those in Turkey and Italy. Credit: U.S. Army.The world stood still fifty years ago during the last week of October, from the moment when it learned that the Soviet Union had placed nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba until the crisis was officially ended -- though unknown to the public, only officially.

The Cuban Missile Crisis ExComm Meetings: Getting it Right After 50 Years

by Sheldon M. Stern

It is just over thirty years since, as historian at the JFK Library, I listened for the first time to the then classified recordings of the Cuban missile crisis White House meetings of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (ExComm).

What If Nixon Had Been President During the Cuban Missile Crisis?

by Harvey Simon

Credit: Flickr/Wikimedia Commons/HNN.Fifty years ago this month, the world got lucky. With a show of force and a secret trade, President John F. Kennedy persuaded Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to dismantle a clandestine nuclear missile base the U.S. had discovered in Cuba without a single shot -- or missile -- being fired.Ever since, scholars, statesmen and academics have plumbed the Cuban Missile Crisis for lessons about leadership, nuclear weapons and international relations, focusing on the possible miscalculations or accidents that could have sparked World War III during those tense thirteen days in 1962.But these what-if scenarios leave out the most revealing counterfactual of all: Would there have been war without Kennedy as president?

Obama Wasn't the First President Who Hoped to Bridge the Partisan Divide

by Ray Raphael

Obama was not the first president to arrive at the office with hopes of bridging a partisan divide, only to see the center collapse and the chasm widen. George Washington was.The nation had divided over ratification, and the first president wanted to heal the wounds. Although allied to the Federalists, he broke with them and supported a Bill of Rights to appease Anti-Federalists, who had opposed the new Constitution. Transcendent leadership to check partisan bickering -- that’s exactly what the framers of the Constitution had hoped the president would provide, and that’s why they finally decided, less than two weeks before they adjourned, that the president should not be elected by Congress. They did not want him subject to the “intrigue” and “cabal” they suspected would characterize that body.

Eric Hobsbawm's Brilliance ... and His Blindspot

by Kelsey McKernie

Eric Hobsbawm in 2009. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.Just a few days after Eugene Genovese’s passing, another prominent Marxist historian has died. Eric Hobsbawm, one of the most influential British historians of any political persuasion, lost his battle with pneumonia and leukemia on Monday, October 1, at the age of 95. He leaves behind a large family, well over a score of books, and a very controversial legacy -- for unlike Genovese, who left behind his Marxist beginnings and moved toward Catholic traditionalism, Hobsbawm remained an unrepentant Marxist to the very end.Born in Alexandria, Egypt to a Jewish father of Polish heritage and a Viennese mother, Hobsbawm was raised first in Vienna and then in Berlin. He joined the Sozialistischer Schülerbund (“Socialist Schoolboys”) at the age of twelve, and the Communist Party in 1936, three years after his family moved to Britain.

Eugene D. Genovese, R.I.P.

by Paul Gottfried

Betsey and Eugene Genovese in an undated photograph from the 1960s. Credit: Tina Trent.

Eric Hobsbawm, 1917-2012

Eric Hobsbawm in 2009. Credit: Wikipedia. Table of Contents Michael Burleigh Niall Ferguson Eric Foner Roy Foster Stephen Kotkin Catherine Merridale David Priestland Timothy Snyder Associated Press Commonweal Guardian (UK) New York Times Jonathan Jones Ed Miliband   Michael Burleigh

Eugene Genovese, Historical Giant, Leaves Behind Legacy of Achievement and Principle

by Kelsey McKernie

It takes a particular kind of fearlessness to stand by an unpopular personal belief, a particular kind of brilliance to defend it persuasively, and a particular kind of integrity to gain the respect of those who disagree. Historian Eugene Genovese had all three of these qualities in abundance, and his death on Wednesday, September 26, at the age of 82, has left the world a little less colorful. Best known for his revolutionary work Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, Genovese was one of the most prominent and influential historians of American slavery -- as well as, at varying times, a Marxist, a socialist, a Roman Catholic, and finally a traditionalist conservative.Born in 1930 to an Italian family in Brooklyn, Genovese was active in the Communist Party from 1947 to 1950, but was finally expelled for, as he put it, “having zigged when I was supposed to zag.” He continued to call himself “a Marxist and a socialist,” and in 1965, while a professor at Rutgers University, he made his opinions perfectly clear by stating, “I do not fear or regret the impending Viet Cong victory, I welcome it.”