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On Hearing Obama Speak Paine’s Words

by Harvey J. Kaye

Knowing of my lifelong admiration and affection for the Revolutionary patriot and pamphleteer Thomas Paine, and my recent efforts to redeem his life and labor

Inauguration 2009: Obama's Break with Tradition

by Elvin T. Lim

President Barack Obama has been accused of being a celebrity and a poet, but we now know that his ambitions for our country go beyon

Farewell to Campaign Finance Reform--Good Riddance!

by Thomas Fleming

I am astonished that in the aftermath of the epochal presidential election of 2008, almost no one in the media has mentioned the second most important reason for calling the contest historic. Just behind the stunning and justly celebrated choice of our first African-American president is the  total destruction of the worst hypocrisy concocted by American politicians in their storied struggles for power, campaign finance reform. Is it because the man who delivered the coup de grace, P

What Would King Tell Obama?

by Michael Honey

What would Martin Luther King, Jr., whose birthday we celebrate on January ninetenth, say to Barack Obama, inaugurated as President of the United States on Janua

Could Obama's Internationalism Cost Him Support at Home?

by Tim Roberts

President-elect Barack Obama will take office during the bicentennial of the birth of Abraham Lincoln.  Pundits have noted many similarities between the two presidents.   Obama has cited Lincoln as his leadership example, invoking Lincoln’s words, “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” to emphasize his commitment to bridge our racial division.  But Lincoln’s most important impact on Obama will be his determination to make the United States a gl

Why Do Presidential Inaugurals Often Sound So Much Alike?

by HNN Staff

What we have, from the earliest years of the republic, is a collection of beliefs, symbols and rituals with respect to sacred things and institutionalized in a collectivity ... American civil religion has its own prophets and its own martyrs, its own sacred events and sacred places, its own solemn rituals and symbols. It is concerned that America be a society as perfectly in accord with the will of God as men can make it, and a light to all the nations.-

Is It Time for a Green New Deal?

by Neil M. Maher

Tuesday, January 20th, marks the beginning of Barack Obama’s first 100 days in office.  On that day the new President will begin tacklin

Obama Can Learn From Carter, too

by John R. Bawen

Jimmy Carter was the last president to ask the nation for collective sacrifice. Barack Obama ought to do the same. How should he do so? He should ask Congress to approve an economic stimulus plan and then specifically outline the sacrifices Americans will have to make over the next four years to achieve the national goals he sets for them. These goals include a strengthened military, universal health care coverage, energy independence and a balanced budget. The president-ele

The Power of Oratory: Why Churchill is Still Relevant

by Carlo D’Este

On May 10, 1940 Winston Churchill became prime minister of Britain on what one Member of Parliament aptly described as “perhaps the darkest day

A Pardon for Libby?

by Jeffrey Crouch

Will he or won't he? 

Can Obama Change America’s Understanding of Class and Dissent?

by Donna Haverty-Stacke

Class conflict.  Political dissent.  What it means to be an American.  Many people assume these things are incompatible.  Throughout America’s history, most U.S. citizens denied the reality of class divisions in their midst, seeing them as either European or somehow related to Soviet communism.  And political dissent has not been understood to be central to American political culture either. By its very nature, dissent bucks the mainstream.  Because this protest has often been staged by radicals (anarchists, socialists, and communists) many Americans have traditionally seen it as essentially foreign. That there could be indigenous sources for class divisions and political dissent in the United States is a notion most Americans struggle to accept. 

Lincoln, FDR, Bush: Which Doesn't Belong?

by Robert J. Spitzer

As we enter a new political year and the beginning of the Obama presidential era, can we at last dispense with the canard that George Bush's vast claims of executive power, taken mostly in the name of fighting terrorism, are no different than those of Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt? In recent weeks, the outgoing administration has ramped up its parade of interviews justifying its actions, none more so than Bush's executive power architect, Vice President Dick Cheney, who proclaime

The War on Drugs Redux

by Eric Schneider

Opium is in the news again.  Afghanistan is producing bumper crops of opium poppies, funding Taliban attacks and simultaneously enriching some o

“So Help Me God”: A George Washington Myth that Should Be Discarded

by Peter R. Henriques

One of the most widely held myths about George Washington is that immediately after he took the prescribed oath to become the nation’s first President, he solemnly added the words, “So help me God” and thus began a tradition that has been followed ever since.  Unfortunately, this myth, accepted by such fine historians as David McCullough and Kenneth C. Davis, is given further credence in a video released by The Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies maintained by the Senate Rules Committee. Entitled 'So Help Me God,' it shows president after president uttering the words and authoritatively declares that George Washington first used the phrase. In fact, an examination of the historical evidence demonstrates that such a claim is almost certainly false.

Can Illinois Again Lead by (Bad) Example?

by David E. Kyvig

Illinois politicians' sordid reputation for selling seats in the U.S. Senate to the highest bidder is, sadly, at least a century old. As embarrassing as that history may be to residents of the Land of Lincoln, it is a past that suggests ways to deal with the current mess. One hundred years ago the corrupt marketing of an Illinois Senate seat brought about both state and federal electoral reforms, including passage of the U.S. Constitution's Seventeenth Amendment, which mandated popula

Should We Be Wary of Political Dynasties?

by David Liebers

Stephen Hess began seriously studying American political dynasties while stationed in Frankfurt, Germany in the military.  Flipping through the pages of an extensive volume on American political history, he was struck by the frequency and size of the clusters of shared last names.  Of course, some weren’t so surprising—the Adamses, Roosevelts and other household names—but more local names, like the Frelinghuysens of New Jersey, prompted Hess to craft elaborate genealo

Bigotry Still Rules

by Lisa Szefel

In the summer of 2006 I attended the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard. One of the guest presenters was ninety-five year old Johnnie Carr, the woman who took over the Montgomery Improvement Association in 1956 after the successful bus boycott when Martin Luther King, Jr. went on to form the Southern Christian Leadership Convention. Carr told stories and fielded questions. I'm not sure how the topic of gay people came up but at the m

An Ancient Athenian’s Advice to President-Elect Obama

by Josiah Ober

Tom Paine, American revolutionary patriot, ardent democrat, and author of the 18th century bestseller, Rights of Man, predicted that, “What Athens was in miniature, America will be in magnitude.” Paine was prescient. By leveraging its democratic government and culture, America -- like ancient Athens

The Eisenhower Lesson Obama and the Democrats Need to Learn

by Michael Bowen

Historians make their living seeing the past in the present. The recent landmark election of Barack Obama has led to an outpouring of presidential comparisons. So far, the two that have become consensus link Obama to either Franklin D. Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln. Time magazine saw fit to Photoshop Obama, complete with top hat, monocle, and cigarette holder, into the famous photo of FDR driving his roadster and make it the cover image of its November 24th issue. CNN, the New York T

Republicans Should Look Back to the Future

by Robert Brent Toplin

When Republicans met at a governors' conference recently to consider their party's future, many of them complained that conservatives had lost their way. They pointed to Ronald Reagan's victories in the 1980s as the best model for rebuilding the GOP after its 2008 defeat. Reagan proved successful, they argued, because he stressed bedrock conservative principles. But they're wrong. This isn't the Reagan era. Republicans would be better off looking for a model more relevant to our time