Recently Published

The Perils of Internet Research: The Case of LBJ and Affirmative Action

by Samuel Walker

Affirmative action in employment as official U.S. policy began with President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 Executive Order 11246. Designed to implement Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the order directed federal agencies to maintain “a positive, continuing program” to promote equal employment opportunity, and federal contractors to take “affirmative action” in that regard.E.O. 11246 had a tangled history with regard to women. LBJ deliberately omitted sex discrimination from it, even though Title VII specified “sex” along with the other protected classes. Under pressure from a resurgent women’s rights movement (the National Organization for Women was founded in 1966), he issued Executive Order 11375 in October 1967 revising 11246 to include sex discrimination.

OAH/NCPH Sessions “Chart the Future of Teaching the Past”

by Craig Thurtell

Teaching students to think like historians may be an idea whose time has arrived. The April annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians (OAH/NCPH)/National Council for Public History (NCPH) in Milwaukee certainly offered abundant evidence of its spread. This approach rests on several key premises. First, history is understood not in the popular sense, as everything that has ever occurred in human history, but rather as an interpretation of the relatively meager evidence that has been left to us by the past. Interpretation of this evidence, in fact, constitutes the essence of the discipline. If students do not have the opportunity to grasp and practice this essential activity, they will not grasp history; instead they will misunderstand it as a chronicle of forgettable events. A second premise recognizes that history, as practiced by historians, requires the application of certain understandings and cognitive skills that are unique to the discipline. For example, historians master a conceptual framework that includes causation, chronology, and many other concepts, and, in analyzing primary and secondary sources, they deploy specific cognitive skills like sourcing and inference in order to interpret these documents.

Response to John McAdams: "Fidel Knew that Oswald Intended to Shoot at Kennedy"

by Brian Latell

By daring to write about the Kennedy assassination in Castro’s Secrets: The CIA and Cuba’s Intelligence Machine I feel as if I have joined a fractious fraternity of experts all steeped in the minutiae of competing conspiracy theories. Since I make no claim to be a serious student of the assassination, and in fact it constitutes a relatively small portion of my book, I entered the fray with nagging misgivings.By concluding that Fidel Castro knew in advance that Lee Harvey Oswald would fire at John F. Kennedy that long-ago day in Dallas, I had no illusions about how taunting my findings might seem to some who are immersed in the subject. No one, after all, had ever argued quite the case that I make: not a Cuban murder plot, but a conspiracy of silence.

Someone Used My Research without Acknowledgement

by Richard Labunski

Update:  Regnery issues correction in Labunski disputeOn a Sunday night in January, I turned on “Book TV,” the weekend program on C-SPAN2 where authors talk about their non-fiction books and editors discuss the publishing industry. Chris DeRose, a Phoenix lawyer and political consultant, was explaining how the Bill of Rights became part of the Constitution. Focusing on the political and personal relationship of James Madison and James Monroe, he devoted particular attention to the crucial election between them for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in the First Congress.

Should NATO Be Handling World Security?

by Lawrence S. Wittner

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (better known as NATO) is in the news once again thanks to a NATO summit meeting in Chicago over the weekend of May 19-20 and to large public demonstrations in Chicago against this military pact.NATO’s website defines the alliance’s mission as “Peace and Security,” and shows two children lying in the grass, accompanied by a bird, a flower and the happy twittering of birds. There is no mention of the fact that NATO is the world’s most powerful military pact, or that NATO nations account for 70 percent of the world’s annual $1.74 trillion in military spending.The organizers of the demonstrations, put together by peace and social justice groups, assailed NATO for bogging the world down in endless war and for diverting vast resources to militarism. According to a spokesperson for one of the protest groups, Peace Action: “It’s time to retire NATO and form a new alliance to address unemployment, hunger, and climate change.”

The Baffling Harry White

by David Chambers

I write in response to Benn Steil’s New York Times op-ed “Banker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” Joan White Pinkham's New York Times letter to the editor "A Case from the Cold War," and Bruce Craig's HNN reply "Setting the Record Straight: Harry Dexter White and Soviet Espionage."First, it may be a bit early for Mr. Craig to say, "both Steil and Pinkham loosely played with the facts and twisted the truth." Mr. Steil's book is still to come: only a hint appears in his op-ed. Ms. Pinkham offered only an article by IMF historian James M. Boughton.Second, regarding whether White was involved in espionage, perhaps it is worth revisiting early insight from Whittaker Chambers (my grandfather). Although in Witness he tended to write off White like other New Dealers -- as communist dupes -- Chambers also recounts this story:

Understanding American Myths: Announcing the New Blog "MythicAmerica"

by Ira Chernus

The United States is a very real place, a political state full of very real land, people, things, resources, and much more. America is a mythic place -- the version and the vision of the United States that Americans conjure up in their minds when they imagine what their nation is, what it has been, what it could be; what its role in the world is, has been, and could be; what their own role in the nation is and might be; what it means to be an American.Soon I’ll be launching MythicAmerica, a blog housed on HNN to to explore the mythic expressions that have pervaded, and still pervade, American life -- especially political life, shaping Americans’ responses to national events in more ways than we are likely to suspect, as well as to experiment with new myths that might shape American life in the future. To invite you into the MythicAmerica community, I offer here some preliminary reflections on myth and American life.For a long time I avoided using the word myth because it means so many different things to different people. Academic experts on myth debate heatedly about what a myth is and how it functions in human life. In fact, with so many conflicting meanings and so much debate, some scholars have declared the word meaningless and abandoned it altogether.

2012's Real Victory Won't Be Obama or Romney: It'll Be the National Security State

by William J. Astore

Now that Mitt Romney is the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party, the media is already handicapping the presidential election big time, and the neck-and-neck opinion polls are pouring in.  But whether President Obama gets his second term or Romney enters the Oval Office, there’s a third candidate no one’s paying much attention to, and that candidate is guaranteed to be the one clear winner of election 2012: the U.S. military and our ever-surging national security state.The reasons are easy enough to explain.  Despite his record as a “warrior-president,” despite the breathless “Obama got Osama” campaign boosterism, common inside-the-Beltway wisdom has it that the president has backed himself into a national security corner.  He must continue to appear strong and uncompromising on defense or else he’ll get the usual Democrat-as-war-wimp label tattooed on his arm by the Republicans.

America as a Shining Drone Upon a Hill

by Tom Engelhardt

Here’s the essence of it: you can trust America’s crème de la crème, the most elevated, responsible people, no matter what weapons, what powers, you put in their hands.  No need to constantly look over their shoulders.Placed in the hands of evildoers, those weapons and powers could create a living nightmare; controlled by the best of people, they lead to measured, thoughtful, precise decisions in which bad things are (with rare and understandable exceptions) done only to truly terrible types.  In the process, you simply couldn’t be better protected.And in case you were wondering, there is no question who among us are the best, most lawful, moral, ethical, considerate, and judicious people: the officials of our national security state.  Trust them implicitly.  They will never give you a bum steer.

What Does It Take for a Candidate to be President? Interview with Samuel Popkin

by David Austin Walsh

Samuel K. Popkin has quite an extensive track record of scholarship and political work. He received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969 and began his career as a scholar of modern Vietnam -- his The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam is considered a classic. It wasn't a coincidence that he was subpoenaed by the Pentagon Papers grand jury in 1972 -- he spent a week in jail after he refused to testify on the grounds of academic freedom.

Mother's Day, 2012, and We're Still at War

by Murray Polner

After the carnage of World War II, the members of the now defunct Victory Chapter of American Gold Star Mothers in St. Petersburg, Florida, knew better than most what is was like to lose their sons, daughters and husbands in war. “We’d rather not talk about it,” said Ceil Rindfuss, whose son was killed in that conflict. She told the St. Petersburg Times in 1960, “It’s a terrible scar that never heals. We hope there will never be another war so no other mothers will have to go through this ordeal.” But as a result of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, too many now mourn family members lost to war.

Why Did the "Jewish Daily Forward" Interview a Hamas Spokesman?

by Daniel Mandel

The recent interview accorded to Hamas’s Mousa Abu Marzook by the Jewish Daily Forward underscores an all-too-frequent and serious failure of perception when dealing with totalitarian movements and those who speak for them.The problem is not the totalitarian addiction to falsehood. One need not be a totalitarian thug in order to lie. Rather, the problem is the cluelessness as to the purpose of their utterances, not all of which may even be lies.Totalitarians do not speak simply to mislead the credulous or to defame their enemies. That is a subsidiary goal -- and benefit -- of their words. Their words, which form part of their overall offensive, are designed to bewilder and paralyze their enemies.

Obama "Evolved" on Same-Sex Marriage -- Lincoln "Evolved" on Slavery

by Corey M. Brooks

Like Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, President Obama's declaration that gay and lesbian Americans deserve a right to marry is a historic statement of principle, even though its practical policy implications are limited because the states, not the federal government, hold most of the power to define marriage.Obama's assertion that state-level prohibitions on same-sex marriage are morally objectionable but legally sound rings familiar to this Civil War historian. I can't help but notice a close resemblance to the pre-Civil War views of millions of white Northerners (and perhaps more than a few white Southerners) on slavery. Northerners understood that the Constitution protected slaveholding as a matter left to individual states, and for decades many had found this a comforting justification for their tolerance of an institution they knew should be intolerable. Slavery was a Southern problem, and as long as it could be kept a Southern problem, Northerners' thinking went, they would bear little moral responsibility. It was this North that elected Abraham Lincoln in 1860. 

Was the Economic Miracle of World War II Fact or Fiction?

by Richard Striner

In 1932, the economist John Maynard Keynes made a prophecy: the American depression would last and never end until the nation’s leaders could identify “some object which is admitted even by the deadheads to be a legitimate excuse for largely increasing the expenditure of someone on something!”Only spending on the scale of total war would do the trick.“In the past,” he observed, “we have not infrequently had to wait for a war to terminate a major depression. I hope that in the future ... we shall be ready to spend on the enterprises of peace what the financial maxims of the past would only allow us to spend on the devastations of war.”Many people after World War II would conclude that Keynes had been right.

Roosevelt, Hughes, and the Battle over the New Deal: Interview with James Simon

by Robin Lindley

This spring may see the issuance of one of the most significant U.S. Supreme Court decisions in decades as the Court weighs in on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act of 2010, President Obama’s major legislative achievement. A politically polarized Supreme Court, controlled by conservatives led by Chief Justice John Roberts, will determine the fate of the controversial new law by June. The decision may well go beyond the health care act itself and alter the course of the modern federal administrative state.Seventy-five years ago, the nation witnessed another conflict that pitted the Court against the chief executive. Then Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, a Republican, faced off against a popular Democratic president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who derided the Court for striking down several key New Deal laws including the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act.

Why Did President Nixon Show George Romney the Door as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development?

by Michael H. Ebner

Mitt Romney coyly hints -- premised on his winning the presidential election in November -- that he might very well eliminate the Department of Housing and Urban Development. His father, George Romney, held this cabinet-rank portfolio from 1969 to 1972. It is self evident that Mitt Romney's rationale for excising HUD entails his ardor to cut costs -- and jobs -- in the federal bureaucracy.But largely forgotten is the fact that President Nixon unceremoniously pushed Secretary Romney out of his cabinet. (For the record, Romney was not fired. Understanding that he had lost the confidence of the president, he knew enough to resign. So did John A. Volpe, a another former governor of Massachusetts, who served Nixon as Secretary of Transportation).

No More Victory Days?

by Joseph E. Persico

May 8 marks the sixty-seventh anniversary of VE Day, marking victory over Nazi Germany in World War II. On that day Americans poured into the streets, horns blared, factory whistles shrieked, and churches filled. President Harry S. Truman proclaimed over the radio, “The flags of freedom fly over all Europe.”Since that day, we have known plenty of wars, but no VK Day, VN Day, VI Day, or VA Day marking conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.Why? What changed?For one thing, people grow war-weary. U.S participation in World War II lasted three years and eight months. By contrast, the Iraq War lasted eight years and nine months. Afghanistan has gone on for ten years and seven months and still counting.

How Did TV Remember the '92 L.A. Riots?

by Jill A. Edy

Twenty years ago last week, Americans were transfixed by TV images of Los Angeles burning. It was no Hollywood disaster movie. Four Los Angeles police officers charged with beating an African American motorist were acquitted of wrong-doing. Hours later, the city erupted in riots that left 51 dead and over $700 million in estimated damages. Last weekend, television news remembered, offering its particular brand of popular history.It may seem counterintuitive to think about news as a repository for history; after all, the main point of news is supposed to be to tell us what’s “new.” Yet news, and particularly television news, is a vital resource for developing publicly shared understandings of the recent past. For most Americans, a lot has happened since their last U.S. history class, and to get perspective on what happened and what it meant, many of them will turn to the narratives created by TV journalists. What do these TV histories teach us about the past?

Republicans, Mormons, and Jews: The Unlikely 1940s Alliance That Reshaped U.S. Mideast Policy

by Rafael Medoff

Herbert Hoover, a midwestern Quaker, was the only living ex-president of the United States.Senator Elbert Thomas, Democrat of Utah, was the most influential Mormon in America.Benzion Netanyahu and Hillel Kook were young Jewish activists from Jerusalem.In a span of just six months in 1943-1944, this unlikely interfaith alliance would help change the Roosevelt administration's response to the Holocaust, reshape U.S. policy in the Middle East, and redefined the role of Jews in American politics.* * * * *Netanyahu and Kook, born in Europe and raised in British Mandatory Palestine, traveled to the United States in 1940, hoping to mobilize U.S. support for rescuing Europe's Jews from Hitler and creating a Jewish state. "It was a brand new world for us," Netanyahu told me in one of my interviews with him. "I had never been to America. But I had to learn quickly -- there was no time. The world of European Jewry was going up in flames.

Occupy Activists Resurrect May Day for Americans

by Peter Dreier

Unlike the rest of the world’s democracies, the United States doesn’t use the metric system, doesn’t require employers to provide workers with paid vacations, hasn’t abolished the death penalty, and doesn’t celebrate May Day as an official national holiday.Outside the U.S., May 1 is international workers’ day, observed with speeches, rallies, and demonstrations. Ironically, this celebration of working-class solidarity originated in the U.S. labor movement in the United States and soon spread around the world, but it never earned official recognition in this country. Since 2006, however, American unions and immigrant rights activists have resurrected May 1 as a day of protest. And this year, in the wake of Occupy Wall Street and the rebirth of a national movement for social justice, a wide spectrum of activist groups will be out in the streets to give voice to the growing crusade for democracy and equality.