Recently Published

Did George McGovern Misremember His Past as a Bomber Pilot?

by Robert Huddleston

Credit: Wiki Commons/HNN staff.Mark Twain once observed, "As we grow older, we remember things that never happened." All who presume to publish a memoir need to be reminded of this reality -- as should editors and publishers.The late Senator George McGovern was rightly honored for his many years of public service, but also for his exceptional military service in the Second World War as a pilot pf a B-24 Liberator bomber.

When Assessing Zinn, Listen to the Voices of Teachers and Students

by Robert Cohen

Howard Zinn speaking in 2009. Credit: Wiki Commons.

Has a Tipping Point Finally Been Reached for Gun Control?

by Sheldon M. Stern

NRA spokesman Wayne LaPierre in 2011. Credit: Flickr/Gage Skidmore.

Survival Guide for the AHA Annual Meeting

by David Austin Walsh

The Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association can be pretty overwhelming even for (well-)seasoned attendees, let alone first-timers. Here's a survival guide to the AHA 2013 in New Orleans, formatted in a handy bullet-point list.

Highlights from the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association

by David Austin Walsh

Dispatches from the AHA Annual MeetingDay 1Day 2Days 3 & 4VideosThe Death and Life of Great American NewspapersA Conversation with John SaylesDavid Hackett Fischer: Open Societies at War: A Comparative History, 1939-1945Storytelling: Keynote Address by William CrononTaking a Longer View: The 2012 Election in Historical ContextAHA Roundup: The Rest of the WebAHA Survival Guide

The Grand Emancipation Jubilee

by Alan Singer

Among historians there is significant debate over the significance of the Emancipation Proclamation issued by Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863 and its actual and immediate impact on slavery in the United States. However these contemporary newspaper articles and speeches make clear that for the majority of abolitionists and free and freed black people, it had tremendous symbolic importance and was cause for a “grand emancipation jubilee.” Frederick Douglass later summarized these feeling in his autobiography. “The first of January, 1863, was a memorable day in the progress of American liberty and civilization. It was the turning point in the conflict between freedom and slavery. A death-blow was given to the slaveholding rebellion” (351).

Did George McGovern Misremember His Past as a Bomber Pilot?

by Robert Huddleston

Credit: Wiki Commons/HNN staff.Mark Twain once observed, "As we grow older, we remember things that never happened." All who presume to publish a memoir need to be reminded of this reality -- as should editors and publishers.The late Senator George McGovern was rightly honored for his many years of public service, but also for his exceptional military service in the Second World War as a pilot pf a B-24 Liberator bomber.

Gun Control and Arms Control

by Lawrence S. Wittner

Credit: Wiki Commons/HNN staff.In a number of ways, gun control issues are remarkably similar to arms control issues.

What About All the Thousands of Other Kids Killed with Guns?

by Susan J. Pearson and Blain Roberts

Massacre of the Innocents by Peter Paul Rubens, 1610-1612.The mass shootings in Newtown have affected us in a way that previous massacres in Aurora, Tucson, even Columbine, have not. Especially in the hours and days after the new broke, Americans responded in emotional, even visceral, terms. We spoke of aching hearts, sickened stomachs, and tightened throats.Why?Everyone knows the answer: because twenty of the victims were children."It's hard to believe that someone would kill children, innocent children," the grandmother of Charlotte Bacon, gunned down by Adam Lanza at age 6, told a CNN affiliate.

The Heavy Hand of Politics and the Historical Novels of Howard Fast

by Gerald Sorin

The Federal Government Should Hold On To General Motors

by Andrew M. Schocket

Most journalists, federal officials, and General Motors (GM) executives are celebrating the U.S. Treasury's recent announcement that the federal government is beginning to sell its share in the bailed-out auto giant.  They claim that the government's sell-off is good for GM and for the government, and it is the "American" thing to do.  But the success of both the GM bailout and the history of private/public partnerships in early American history suggest that they are wrong on all three counts.  The Treasury should hold onto GM stock as long as it can.

Lincoln, Spielberg, Sandburg, Kennedy, and Compromise

by Walter G. Moss

To say that Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln is a “hot topic” among historians and politicians is an understatement. As of 22 December, The History News Network (HNN) had links to 23 articles on it. President Obama hosted a White House screening of it on 15 November. And on 19 December, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell invited the entire Senate to a screening of it at which Spielberg and leading cast members also appeared.

How to Fight the Tragedy of Global Hunger this Holiday Season

by William Lambers

The holiday season is a time of giving to loved ones. It can also be a time of giving to those unseen or invisible: the world's hungry. In the winter of 1920-21, with the scars of World War I still fresh, helping an invisible guest became a centerpiece of holiday celebrations.The First World War left destruction far beyond the battlefields of Europe. Food supplies were devastated, and recovery would not come easily. The American Relief Administration, led by Herbert Hoover, provided food aid to Europe's hungry long after the guns fell silent following the 1918 Armistice.In 1920, because Europe’s food production had not rebounded enough for them to feed themselves, Hoover assembled a group of charities, including the Red Cross and church groups, to form the European Relief Council.

Picturing the History of Sexuality in America

by Thomas A. Foster

Close your eyes. What’s the first image that comes to mind when you think of the word “sex”? Think about what racial and class connotations are present. Ponder how this image came to be in your head. Perhaps you feel it was influenced by the multi-billion dollar pornography or advertising industries -- or maybe your religious beliefs or personal experience. Consider what emotions you connect to this image: pleasure, pain, anger? Seriously. Try it. Picturing sex can tell us a lot about ourselves and our society.How might those questions be answered differently if you were trying to picture “sexuality” or the “history of sexuality”? In trying to develop a cover for my new book, Documenting Intimate Matters: Primary Sources for a History of Sexuality, how best to capture the topic was a loaded enterprise.

Where Are the Pseudohistory Wars?

by Michael D. Gordin

Credit: Wiki Commons/HNN staff.Why don’t we hear about “pseudohistory” more often? Historians have plenty of terms to denigrate works about the past that they think are substandard, misguided, or just plain crazy. (You can use your imagination to populate the list.) But we do not, in general, deploy the notion of “pseudohistory.”Pseudohistory as a concept is derived directly from pseudoscience, a term with rather broad currency both among scientists themselves and the lay public. Some consideration of how scientists use it to police their own borders not only illuminates the problem that the term was designed to solve, but also perhaps suggests how we have accomplished similar ends in the past, and might in the future.

Improvising Digital History in the Deep South Digital Desert

by Michael Mizell-Nelson

New Orleans in 1991. Credit: Wiki Commons.My first glimpse of the new media revolution came in 1995, as I watched analog documentary video edits that had required months of scripting and work being digitized and transferred into an online editing system in a few minutes. The collaborative experience I had enjoyed working alongside filmmakers and videographers provided a wonderful counterpoint to the solitary labors required in graduate history programs. I had absorbed many lessons in narrative, but these as well as documentary video itself counted for nothing in a traditional academic setting; nevertheless, those experiences moved me toward a number of new media projects in a region that has seldom been kind to the digital humanities.

Where Howard Zinn's "A People's History" Falls Short

by Sam Wineburg

Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States has few peers among contemporary historical works. With more than 2 million copies in print, A People's History is more than a book. It is a cultural icon. "You wanna read a real history book?" Matt Damon asks his therapist in the 1997 movie Good Will Hunting. "Read Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States. That book'll ... knock you on your ass."The book's original gray cover was painted red, white, and blue for its Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition in 2003, and it is now marketed with special displays in suburban megastores. A week after Zinn's death in 2010, A People's History was number 7 on Amazon's bestseller list—not too shabby for a book first published in 1980.

Mandate Gunowners Purchase Firearms Liability Insurance

by Andrew Meyer

Credit: Wiki Commons.

Florida Historians Standing Up to Rick Scott

by John Willingham

Rick Scott devouring Florida's university. Credit: Flickr/Wiki Commons/HNN staff.In Florida, a task force commissioned by Republican governor Rick Scott has proposed lower tuition rates for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) majors, allegedly in the interest of the state’s economy, but many of the state’s historians see the plan for what it is -- a threat to the humanities.Historians from the University of Florida and supporters across the country have responded with a formal protest and a petition campaign in late November that so far has obtained more than 2,000 signatures."The punitive differential tuition model will lead not only to a decimation of the liberal arts in Florida," the historians said in the petition. "It will also have a destructive impact on the essential and transferrable skills that these disciplines teach."

Were U.S. Marines Used as Guinea Pigs on Okinawa?

by Jon Mitchell

U.S. Honest John missile warhead cutaway, showing M134 sarin bomblets circa 1960. Credit. Wiki Commons.Newly-discovered documents reveal that fifty years ago this month, in December 1962, the Pentagon dispatched a chemical weapons platoon to Okinawa under the auspices of its infamous Project 112. Described by the U.S. Department of Defense as "biological and chemical warfare vulnerability tests," the highly classified program subjected thousands of unwitting American service members around the globe to substances including sarin and VX nerve gases.