Recently Published

David Barton’s Jefferson

by Martin E. Marty

Our premier historian of late colonial and early republican America, Gordon Wood, while reviewing a book on Roger Williams warms up readers with references to Thomas Jefferson. “It’s easy to believe in the separation of church and state when one has nothing but scorn for all organized religion. That was the position of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson’s hatred of the clergy and established churches knew no bounds. He thought that members of the ‘priestcraft’ were always in alliance with despots against liberty. For him the divine Trinity “was nothing but ‘Abracadabra’ and ‘hocus-pocus’... Ridicule, he said, was the only weapon to be used against it.”If you wanted to promote the idea of “a Christian America,” one which would privilege one religion, a version of Christianity, and de-privilege all others, and if you want to get back to roots and origins, the last of the “founding fathers” on whom you’d concentrate would be Jefferson. Yet the most ardent public and pop advocate of privilege and virtual establishment, David Barton, cites Jefferson for Bartonian positions which are directly opposite of Jefferson’s. Never heard of David Barton? Most of the historians you would ever meet never heard of him, and if you told them about him and his positions, they would yawn or rage about listing him among those who deal honestly with Jefferson.

How Mormon History has Shaped Mitt Romney

by Daniel J. Herman

In 1886, Miles Park Romney, great-grandfather to Mitt Romney, found himself giving three cheers to the Mexican flag and delivering a patriotic oration on Benito Juarez, hero of Mexico during its struggle against French occupation. Romney—who had spent several years in Britain as an LDS missionary, had helped Brigham Young colonize southern Utah, then helped colonize Arizona in the early 1880s—had been uprooted yet again. Having fled Arizona to escape prosecution for illegal cohabitation, he now sought to establish Mexican refuges for his fellow polygamists.Miles Romney’s flight—in fact his several flights—is old history. It is unlikely—despite the fears of Senator Orrin Hatch—that Democrats will use the “outlandish” deeds of long-dead Mormons to strike blows at Mitt in the presidential election. Yet the story of Miles Romney is far from irrelevant; it tells us much about modern Mormons and about Mitt Romney in particular.From Isolation to Acceptance

May Day: From the Haymarket Massacre to the Occupy Movement

by Lawrence S. Wittner

Many people might be surprised to learn that the May Day celebrations that occurred around the world yesterday were born more than a century ago out of a struggle by American workers for the eight-hour day.The late nineteenth century was a particularly hard and brutal time for working people in the United States. The rise of giant corporations fostered accelerated exploitation of workers in the interests of profit by the wealthy few. In the new, giant factories, it was common for workers to labor from 60 to 80 hours a week. Many workers had a six-day workweek, but a seven-day workweek was the standard for steel mills, oil refineries, paper mills, and other highly mechanized plants. The industrial accident and death rate soared to new heights -- not only thanks to new, dangerous machines and the use of child labor, but because of worker exhaustion. In 1881 alone, an estimated 30,000 American railway workers were killed or injured on the job.

I Did It My Way—By Accident: Lessons from an Unconventional Career

by Ray Smock

This talk will be, in part, a reflection on the history profession in the past half century, but what it is mostly about is stories from my career. I hope what I say has some bearing on the larger aspects of the profession. Historians can look at the big overarching themes when they tell their stories, but they can also try to see the universe in a grain of sand. What this talk is about is just one historian’s tale, one grain in the story of our profession.Just a few months ago reports from the American Historical Association (AHA) convention indicate that newly minted PhDs in history find the job market a frustrating experience. There are more people looking for traditional academic jobs than there are jobs available. A large part of this frustration can be laid at the door of too many history departments that continue to train history students the way they have been trained for the past 100 years. Pick a field of history, study under an expert in that field, read the literature of the field, pass a comprehensive exam, and then write a dissertation of your own based on original research. Next, get it published if at all possible. Find an academic job. Teach students, research, write books, and train another crop of students to follow the same path.

Protests Over Housing Inequality Have a Long History in Israel

by Yfaat Weiss

The summer of 2011 in Israel was marked by social protest that drew hundreds of thousands of Israelis onto the streets and squares. They were protesting against the government’s ongoing policy of ignoring economic and social hardship, against the deterioration of public state services in the areas of education and health, and in particular against the severe shortage of affordable housing experienced by Israel’s middle and lower classes.

On Islam, Romney Doesn't Have the Slightest Idea What He's Talking About

by Juan Cole

Mitt Romney said Monday that of course he would have taken out Osama bin Laden and that "even Jimmy Carter would have made that call."Since Jimmy Carter ordered a brave and risky but failed military mission into Iran, that was a cheap shot on the part of someone who has never had anything to do with the military. Moreover, Jimmy Carter made peace between Egypt and Israel and played a major role in reducing the number of Africans stricken by the Guinea worm from 3.5 million to 1,100. So Romney, who has mainly been sending our jobs overseas, isn’t good enough to shine Carter’s shoes.

The Real War on Muslim Women

by Daniel Martin Varisco

One of the most revered journals on the political front has taken a cue from Sports Illustrated: Foreign Policy now has a sex issue, indeed what is billed as “the sex issue.” Someone forgot to tell the editors that there is such a thing as “gender,” since there is very little bedroom-variety “sex” revealed in the articles. If a review of “Women in Politics” is about “sex,” then the journal misses out on the real sex going on, like politician John Edwards cavorting while running for President and several secret servicemen strip clubbing the night away in Columbia. And if what is going on from India to Iran is “the new politics of sex,” it looks a lot like the old. The reader might even accuse the journal of false advertising, since the seductive pose of a model clad in hijab black on the cover suggests more politically incorrect eye candy inside.

Fantasies of Male Chivalry Ignore the History of Women in Wartime

by Heather Marie Stur

No American institution subscribes more to heroic notions of masculinity than the armed forces.  The starkest example of this in the last decade was the Jessica Lynch saga. The Army and the media overlooked the fact that another (black) woman was taken prisoner with Lynch, while a third woman was killed outright during the ambush where they were captured. What was important to the Army, the media, and the American public was that U.S. special forces, exclusively comprised of male troops, rescued a young, white, American woman who was held captive by enemy Iraqis.

Mitt Romney Must Decide What Kind of America He Believes In

by Ian Reifowitz

We now finally know who the presidential nominees of our two major political parties will be this fall. Republicans and Democrats stand opposed to one another on a range of policy issues. As a historian who studies national identity in multiethnic societies like ours, I am especially concerned by the growing divide between the two camps. Increasingly, some very conservative political figures describe Americanness in starkly different terms than do moderates and liberals.The question of our national identity is not determined by specific legislation, although laws play a role in drawing the boundaries of who wins wide acceptance as a member of the American community. How we define Americanness is much more a matter of consensus, of broadly embraced terms, of offering inclusion, and seeing that offer reciprocated as mutual bonds turn a population into a people.The 2010 census documented demographic trends that have been noticeable for a long time. In the future our country’s population will consist of ever-greater numbers of Asian and Hispanic Americans. But this itself is nothing new. At the turn of the last century some feared the huge influx of non-Anglo-Saxon European immigrants, people, some said, who could never be truly American. Such fear of “outsiders” and “unassimilable” immigrants or racial minorities has long haunted our politics.

Civilian Casualties: Tactical Regrets and Strategic Hypocrisy

by Steven I. Levine and Michael H. Hunt

The recent publication by the Los Angeles Times of photographs from 2010 showing grinning American soldiers in Afghanistan posing with the severed limbs of Taliban suicide bombers has provoked more expressions of regret and condemnation by top Washington officials. Just one month ago the cold-blooded murder of sixteen Afghan civilians near Kandahar by an apparently deranged U.S. Army staff sergeant triggered a similar outpouring of shock, regrets, and apologies by top U.S. officials. President Barack Obama declared, “The killing of civilians is outrageous and it’s unacceptable. It’s not who we are as a country, and it does not represent our military.” It would be comforting to be able to believe this, but current military practice and historical facts deny us such moral balm.

Setting the Record Straight: Harry Dexter White and Soviet Espionage

by R. Bruce Craig

With the recent publication of Benn Steil’s New York Times opinion piece, “Banker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” considerable interest has once again focused on whether Harry Dexter White – an assistant secretary of the Treasury and that department’s key figure in the founding of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – was a Soviet spy.  White’s daughter, Joan Pinkham responded to Steil’s assertions by claiming that the evidence the author cited did not establish her father’s guilt. In fact, both Steil and Pinkham loosely played with the facts and twisted the truth about Harry Dexter White’s role with both the founding of the Bretton Woods institutions and the Soviet underground.

The Pineapple that Ate Global History

by Alan Singer

When I was a teenager, Dr. West's Medicine Show and Junk Band recorded one of my all-time favorite tunes, "The Eggplant That Ate Chicago." The band played a blend of Appalachian jug music and banjo combined with sixties psychedelic hippie. The song's lyrics told the story of an alien invasion of planet Earth by space fruits and vegetables. It warned listeners, "You better watch out for the eggplant that ate Chicago, if he's still hungry, your whole country's doomed."It seems the eggplant is back again, this time disguised as a pineapple named "Common Core." It is still voraciously hungry, but instead of attacking cities it is attacking global history, content knowledge in the curriculum, and the education of American children, and if it's still hungry, our "whole country's doomed."

Peter Beinart and the Specter Haunting American Jewry

by Jack Ross

Since even before its release last month, Peter Beinart’s The Crisis of Zionism has been extravagantly denounced and praised.  To his everlasting credit, Beinart has described in vivid and uncompromising terms the corrupting and corrosive impact of the American Jewish Establishment he so courageously exposed in the New York Review of Books:

North Carolina's Pursuit of a Master Race

by Edwin Black

Of the more than thirty American states that violated one of the most basic rights of their citizens — the right to procreate — few were as pernicious as North Carolina. Yet the nature of North Carolina's history also illustrates the challenge of obtaining modern-day justice, even when the most energetic efforts are undertaken.Most importantly, the crimes committed by the state in conjunction with the leading academic, scientific, judicial, legal, and medical authorities were never about just improving perceived conditions in North Carolina. Rather, it was always about the state doing its fair share to achieve international race purification. This meant close coordination, cooperation, and synchrony with the most virulent eugenic leaders around the world, from California to Connecticut to Nazi Germany.What North Carolina did was never a local transgression; it was part of a global aggression in pursuit of a master race.

Tim Weiner's "Enemies": The Final Say

by Susan Rosenfeld

First, I agree that Mr. Weiner did NOT “neglect” (my word) the bombings by the Weather Underground and other nefarious acts by more extreme members of the so-called “New Left.” Second, I noted that Mr. Weiner, unlike some FBI critics, demonstrates that presidents influenced the Bureau to conduct the kinds of investigations that skirted or broke the First and Fourth Amendments.

The Forgotten History of Milwaukee's Civil Rights Struggle

by Patrick D. Jones

The annual Organization of American Historians meeting has been taking place this weekend in Milwaukee, a city most often associated with beers and brats; Harleys and heavy industry; white ethnics, labor unions and “sewer socialists”; Lavern & Shirley. What is less well-known is the important place Milwaukee occupies in the history of the modern black freedom movement.Between 1958 and 1970, a distinctive movement for racial justice emerged from unique circumstances in Milwaukee. A series of local leaders inspired growing numbers of people to challenge employment and housing discrimination, segregated public schools, the membership of public officials in exclusionary organizations, welfare cuts, and police brutality.

The True Story Behind the "War on Moms"

by Mary C. Brennan

The Republican Party has a complicated history with mothers and motherhood. Although the modern party has associated motherhood with the American Way of Life, family values, and all that is right with America, individual politicians have tended to focus on the aspects of maternalism that fit their message of the moment while overlooking the reality of the women who occupy those roles. Ann Romney is certainly not the first Republican (or for that matter Democratic) wife whose commitment to her husband and children has been used to increase her husband’s credibility, moral standing, and/or humanity. From Mamie Eisenhower to Pat Nixon to Laura Bush, presidential candidates have touted their wives’ domestic skills as evidence of their own understanding of American virtues. Richard Nixon even held up the American housewife and mother as the perfect example of the superiority of capitalism when he argued with Nikita Khrushchev in 1959 during the famous Kitchen Debate.

The Shame of Nations: A New Record is Set for Spending on War

by Lawrence S. Wittner

On April 17, 2012, as millions of Americans were filing their income tax returns, the highly-respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) released its latest study of world military spending. In case Americans were wondering where most of their tax money -- and the tax money of other nations -- went in the previous year, the answer from SIPRI was clear: to war and preparations for war.World military spending reached a record $1,738 billion in 2011 -- an increase of $138 billion over the previous year.  The United States accounted for 41 percent of that, or $711 billion.Some news reports have emphasized that, from the standpoint of reducing reliance on armed might, this actually represents progress.  After all, the increase in “real” global military spending -- that is, expenditures after corrections for inflation and exchange rates -- was only 0.3 percent. And this contrasts with substantially larger increases in the preceding thirteen years. 

Updated OAH/NCPH 2012 Sessions List (Now with Room Numbers!)

by HNN Staff

The 2012 Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians starts in earnest this Thursday in Milwaukee. As always, HNN will be posting updates from the convention floor.Below is a list of interesting sessions at this year's OAH -- if you'll be attending one of this sessions, let us know how it goes on Twitter by tagging @myHNN.Full OAH Program

Channelling George Washington: Obamacare -- The Monster Law

by Thomas Fleming

“It’s the law. The monster law!  Why doesn’t someone make this the main issue about Obamacare?”By now I had become expert at detecting when President Washington was upset. It so happened that I was upset about the same thing. I answered him, perhaps too enthusiastically. “I’ve been having similar thoughts. What can we do about it?”“More to the point, why haven’t you done something about it already?”“It’s the usual historian’s excuse, Mr. President. I’m trying to finish a book. I sense you’ve  gotten some ideas about confronting the problem?”“First of all the problem should be identified. It’s time somebody made more Americans aware of the excesses of the Imperial Congress. Since President Nixon was driven from office -- deservedly, I should add -- Congress has seized vastly more power than the Constitution ever intended it to have. This is a prime example!”“You think it’s unconstitutional?”