Culture Watch

Peace on Earth? Why Not?

by Ruth Rosen

EVER SINCE I was a little girl, I've wondered what it would take to end war. It's probably why I became a historian: I wanted to understand what drives truly profound social change. As a child growing up in the shadow of the atomic bomb, I used to pray every night, "Let there be no war," but no one seemed to be listening. No surprise, then, that I spent a decade peacefully protesting the Vietnam War. But I'm not a pacifist; I do believe in (the rare) just war and

Mein Kampf and the Koran

by HNN Staff

Should incoming students at the University of North Carolina be required to read the Koran? As Juan Cole reported in HNN in July, Fox's Bill O'Reilly compared"the class reading of a book about the Koran now to assigning Mein Kampf or a work about Japanese emperor worship during World War II." This got us wondering. Was Mein Kampf ever assigned to students during the thirties or forties? Unfortunately, we have not been able

America's Three Million Muslims: Who Are They?

by Daniel Pipes and Khalid Durán

Our respective bookshelves groan under the weight of books bearing titles like Islam and the West, The Future of Islam and the West, and The Islamic World and the West. What is striking about these books - all quite recently written and published - is the anachronism of their geographic premise. With millions of Muslims now living in the West, especially in North America and Western Europe, the old dichotomy of Islam and the West exists no more. This presence of Muslims in the West has profound

Books: Stephen Kantrowitz's Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (UNC Press)

by P.M. Carpenter

Putting the “Pol” Back in “Politics” In focusing on South Carolina’s post-Reconstruction resurgence of white supremacy as a “political program,” Stephen Kantrowitz has performed a valuable service to modern historiography. While not ignoring cultural and socially structural influences on the “reconstruction” of white hegemony, he reintroduces the centrality of raw politics in the development of systematic, violent, and degrading change. The 1868-1876 intercess

Since the End of Communism the U.S. Has Moved to the Right: The Reason Why

by Michael Parenti

For years U.S. political and economic leaders saw themselves in mortal combat with communist nations for the allegiance of peoples at home and abroad. The pressure of being in competition with an alternative economic system set limits on how thoroughly Western leaders dared to mistreat their own working populations. Indeed, pains were taken to demonstrate how much finer life was for workers under capitalism. Time and again, the argument was made that U.S. workers

TR: Man for All Seasons

by HNN Staff

Six times last week Teddy Roosevelt was mentioned in the New York Times, three times on the op ed page. An odd coincidence? Hardly. We may be entering a period of reform, which naturally plays to Teddy's strengths, though he wasn't actually as fervent a supporter of campaign finance reform as people imagine, as pointed out in these pages some time ago (see Media Watch: The NYT Falls for the TR Myth ). But what we th

Medical: Breast Cancer Prevention ... History of a Mistaken Approach

by Reimert Thorolf Ravenholt, MD MPH

Breast cancer has remained the foremost cause of cancerous death of U.S. women during the past century for those not smoking, despite much-publicized early detection campaigns with aggressive surgery, radiation therapy, chemotherapy, and anti-hormone therapy. Unfortunately, the early detection and aggressive treatment of breast cancers has failed to achieve progressive reduction in national breast cancer death rates. By contrast, prevention of fatal u

The Color Line: The Klansman Who Almost Got Away

by John Barnhill

And then there was one. Justice, delayed, cannot be denied. Even though four decades have passed, now that Bobby Frank Cherry is standing trial for the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Birmingham, Alabama, that sordid and painful episode will finally close. Nineteen sixty-three seems a lifetime ago, and it is a world away. For nearly a decade since the school desegregation cases in Brown v. Topeka, federal actions had slowly begun to tear down the walls of

Books: Max Boot's The Savage Wars of Peace

by Victor Davis Hanson

WHEN WE THINK of our wars, what come naturally to mind are the great conflicts, the landmark battles, and the intrepid names: the Revolutionary War and World War II, Gettysburg and Iwo Jima, Grant and Sherman, Pershing and Patton. Less well known is an entire parallel universe of conflict that was just as pivotal in protecting American interests and lives. Our"small" wars involved equal courage and risks, and saw soldiers every bit as bold and competent as a Stonewall Jackson or Matthew Ridg

The West: "I'll Not Kiss You Anymore, Until Next Time": Making the Hills and Mountains Ring in the Appalachian West

by Keith Miller

Read a good story not long ago from B. A. Botkin, ed., A Treasury of Southern Folklore: Stories, Ballads, Traditions, and Folkways of the People of the South (New York: Crown Publishers, 1949), pp. 10-11. It goes like this; the Republicans in an unspecified county of Kentucky were holding a rally shortly after a gubernatorial election. At the time a young woman, watching and listening from her front porch, had, as she claimed, a young man, whom she scarcely knew, hug an

A Cautionary Tale For The Student Of Any Age: Don't Take Interpretations Of History Uncritically (Even Mine)

by Keith Miller

Think for yourselves! That should become, if it is not already, your motto. And, with the help of such excellent web sites as this one--the History News Network--along with many fine libraries coast-to-coast in this country, as enhanced through such services as that of interlibrary loan, you can easily do your own thinking about history (and not only American) through your own research.Any study"worth its salt" demonstrates a truth (one which must be learned, and never

The West: "With a Draw From Either Hand" ... Gunslingers of the Old West

by Keith Miller

To this day my favorite motion picture remains the western classic Shane (1953), directed by George Stevens, with a fine cast, including Alan Ladd in the title role, as the gunfighter, who comes in the end to defend the homestead rights of the small farmers in a scenic Wyoming setting, against Jack Wilson, as played so well too by Jack Palance, dressed all in black and wearing two guns. Opposed by Shane in the climactic gunfight in the rustic-looking saloon toward the m

The West: The Cave-in-Rock on the Ohio River

by Keith Miller

From early in the nineteenth century boaters traveling downstream between Shawneetown (Gallatin County) and Golconda (Pope County) were fascinated by Cave-in-Rock (Hardin County), known in those early days as Rock and Cave, or in more colorful language, as the"House of Nature." This cave from a bluff on the north side of the Ohio, as it had Native Americans for centuries before, beckoned those who sought a brief respite and/or temporary shelter from the elements in

Ezra Pound --- Traitor/Poet

by Derek Alger

As John Walker, the so-called Taliban Yank, fades from the front pages, and Hanoi Jane of Fonda family fame becomes a footnote superseded by celebrity, the controversy over Ezra Pound and his actions during World War Two remains frozen in time -- was he a great poet or a traitor to his country?A patriotic debate over a poetry prize, one that was awarded in 1949 with the blessings of a literary panel appointed by the Library of Congress? Sounds hard to believe, but in its tim

The West: George Catlin and Native Americans in the West: An Apologist for Their Way of Life

by Keith Miller

The revisionist, sometimes disaffected, historians of the late twentieth century, especially of the American West, have sadly misinterpreted, if not disparaged outright, the paintings of many, probably most, artists of the nineteenth-century's trans-Mississippi frontier. That narrow-minded assessment, which in many ways culminated in The West as America exhibit at the National Museum of American Art in 1991, portrayed such laborers on canvas as George Catlin (1796-1872) as not much mo

The Color Line: Remembering Paul Robeson

by George Beres

During my 40 years in college athletics, I learned how pervasive prejudice against athletes who were black once was. Because of the prodigious talents Paul Robeson brought to areas of American life beyond sports, his story should be remembered today, when black athletes have come to be dominant and honored figures in sports that once demeaned their race.Robeson, remembered by many as a great musician on stage and in film, first became football's greatest player as a lineman f

"A Few Pebbles Picked up Along the Ocean Shore:" Some Stones I Have Gathered

by Keith Miller

Leo Lesquereux (1806-1889), the greatest paleobotanist of the nineteenth century, if not in Europe, then certainly in America, to which he had emigrated from Switzerland in 1848, held to the tenets of Lutheranism all his life. Humble, as one should be before God and man, Lesquereux has left to us a modest assessment of his remarkable accomplishments, especially concerning the study of fossils from the Carboniferous coal measures of Pennsylvania, but from the coal seams of several othe

The West: Buffalo Hunting on the Great Plains: Promoting One Society While Supplanting Another

by Keith Miller

The Buffalo Bill Historical Center at Cody, Wyoming, displays an-oil-on canvas painting (ca. 1888) by the great Albert Bierstadt, which he titled almost prophetically"The Last of the Buffalo." The painting depicts a solitary Indian spearing a buffalo with a lance from the back of a rearing white horse."Almost prophetically" is the right choice of words too, because by the date of that painting, the slaughter of the bison (perhaps the better word for the buffalo) by both Native America

The West: From the Mighty Mississippi to the California Gravel: With Emigrants Across the Great West

by Keith Miller

The inspiration for this essay comes from June Carter Cash's Press On, compact disc of Risk Record Group/Small Hairy Dog (1999) with beautiful renditions of such greats as"Diamonds in the Rough," written by A. P. Carter,"Gatsby's Restaurant," by June herself and Rosie Carter, and"I Used to Be Somebody," composed by June alone. June, who married Johnny Cash in 1968, is one of three daughters of Mother Maybelle (Addington) Carter. The latter, who died in 1978, was one of a talent

Books: Bill Ayers's Fugitive Days: A Memoir and Ronald Radosh's Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left, and the Leftover Left

by Kenneth Heineman

In August 2001 Beacon Press's publicity machine geared up for the release of Bill Ayers's memoir, Fugitive Days."Gonzo [anti-] Journalist" Hunter S. Thompson heralded the arrival of"A wild and painful ride in the savage years of the late sixties. A very good book about a terrifying time in America." Oral historian and radio fixture Studs Terkel said of Ayers's tome,"A memoir that is, in effect, a deeply moving elegy to all those young dreamers who tried to live decently in an i