Roundup

The Congressman Who Spied for Russia

by Peter Duffy

The strange case of Samuel Dickstein.

The Yasukuni Shuffle: China and Japan duke it out via T.V. Serials on the Wrongs of WW II

by Philip J Cunningham

Everyday hundreds, if not thousands of Chinese and Japanese kill one another on Chinese television.

Criminals and Culture Makers

by L.E. Neal

Detroit’s story of bankruptcy and rust is a quintessential Great Recession tragedy, but it is not the first major American city to grapple with bankruptcy amid structural economic change, class tensions, and pervasive urban desolation.

Obama’s misguided in claiming he knows which is the right side of history

by Jonah Goldberg

We’ve heard a great deal lately about the “wrong side of history.” Although a slogan that glorifies history, it is a statement about the future, not the past.

6 Mind-Blowing Tactical Tricks That Turned The Tide Of War

by Jeremy Bender

Technology and manpower never guarantee a military victory by themselves.

Welcome to Coca-Cola Town, USA: America’s scary corporate naming problem

by Jonathan Zimmerman

We now live in a world with KFC-sponsored manholes and McDonalds-issued report cards. Here's why it's killing us.

Hunger Growls in Egypt

by Daniel Pipes

Egypt, famed for millennia as the "breadbasket of the Mediterranean," now faces alarming food shortages.

The Real Reason It's Nearly Impossible to End the Cuba Embargo

by Peter Kornbluh and William M. LeoGrande

Bill Clinton tried engaging Castro. After Havana shot down two U.S. planes, it all fell apart.

West Point historian asks … What good is war?

by Gregory A. Daddis

"War has not left us with a more stable international environment. And it seems increasingly incapable of deterring future war."

Hippocrates Didn't Write The Oath, So Why Is He The Father Of Medicine?

by Helen King

The reality is that not just the Oath, but the 60 or so other ancient Greek treatises on medicine that we call “the Hippocratic corpus,” are all anonymous.

War re-enactors get no respect

by Jonathan Zimmerman

For the past 30 years, I've been urging my students to put themselves in the shoes of people who lived in the past. So why do we make fun of Americans who do that as a hobby?

Even if we defeat the Islamic State, we’ll still lose the bigger war

by Andrew J. Bacevich

As America’s efforts to “degrade and ultimately destroy” Islamic State militants extend into Syria, Iraq War III has seamlessly morphed into Greater Middle East Battlefield XIV.

How the Pill Overcame Impossible Odds And Found a Place in Millions of Women's Purses

by Ann Friedman

The pill is now so common—four out of five sexually active women have used it—that it’s easy to forget that oral contraception was once the stuff of fantasy.

Roundup Top 10!

This week's broad sampling of opinion pieces found on the Internet, as selected by the editors of HNN.

Lessons from French Morocco: “Fanaticism Anxiety” about Muslims has been with us since the Colonial Era

by Edmund Burke, III

French Algeria was a veritable bestiary of what not to do, ranging from such Islamophobic policies of closing mosques, libraries and Islamic schools to demonizing sufi brotherhoods as the sources of alleged pan-Islamic insurgency.

The Real History of Multicultural Britain

by Jonathan Healey

We are a nation of migrants. It’s a phrase that gets thrown around a lot these days, but is it true?

How Not To Understand ISIS

by Alireza Doostdar

Sensationalist accounts of “shari‘a justice” notwithstanding, we do not have much information about how ISIS administers the lives of millions of people who reside in the territories it now controls.

Here’s What Happened The One Time When The U.S. Had Universal Childcare

by Bryce Covert

Nothing before or since has been like the Lanham Act, though you probably haven’t heard of it.

The Instrumentalisation of History

by Dr Huw J Davies

In reality, history can be misleading, its so-called ‘lessons’ proving counter-productive if their context is not properly understood.

On the importance of independent, objective policy analysis

by Richard S. Grossman

How do we avoid excessively ideological economic policy?