Recently Published

After Maine: Can Houston Provide a Much-Needed Victory for the Gay Rights Movement?

by Blake A. Ellis

“Our founding fathers did not intend for people’s constitutional rights to be determined in a political campaign.” That’s how gay activist Chad Griffin responded to news that Maine voters had overturned the state’s gay marriage law in November. As Griffin noted, more than 70 percent of Americans disapproved of interracial marriages when Loving vs. Virginia ruled that states must allow them in 1967. Although support for gay marriage has increased significant

Obama and Health Care: Confronted by Critics, Haunted by History

by Gil Troy

In pushing health care reform, President Barack Obama is confronted by contemporary critics and haunted by history. Americans are ambivalent about big government, not just since Ronald Reagan but since the American Revolution. A review of American attitudes toward government since the Revolution demonstrates this tension between Americans’ desire for government help and their fear of government intrusiveness. Obama also must learn from Bill Clinton’s health care reform failures.

In Praise of “Happy Holidays”

by Edward T. O'Donnell

Here we go again. If it’s December then it must be time for that annual Christmas tradition established a few years ago—the outrage mongering by conservatives over an alleged “War on Christmas” being waged by a cadre of secularists who employ the phrase, “Happy Holidays.” Particularly galling to these self-appointed defenders of tradition are retailers that avoid the word Christmas in their advertising and in-store decorations. In recent years groups like

Thinking Outside the Box: What Obama Could Have Said

by Lawrence S. Wittner

Much of the American public is skeptical about the value of Obama's plan, announced in his address of December 1, to send another 30,000 U.S. troops to fight an apparently endless war in Afghanistan, and with good reason.  If, after eight years of sending U.S. and NATO soldiers to wage this war, al Qaeda maintains its foothold

Post-Islamophobia: How Cultural Integration Can Prevent Terrorism and Build Peace

by Antony Adolf

The Swiss are usually characterized as among the most hospitable people in the world, especially when it comes to keeping foreign coff

Fred Hampton, Barack Obama, and the American Urban Poor

by Simon Balto

 I remember moving to Chicago in the summer of 2007, a city and moment charged by the excitement of the presidential candidacy of one of its own—a young, intelligent, and handsome African-American man committed to organizing for the improvement of the social conditions facing the Black community.  For reasons that many of us within the progressive community may recall, it was an invigorating time and atmosphere.  While living in the city, and in what now strikes me as a fort

How the Vice President Can Serve as the President's Most Unbiased Adviser

by Joel K. Goldstein

There's a common perception that Vice President Joe Biden lost the administration's debate over Afghanistan policy because President Obama did not adopt the course Biden favored. Nothing could be farther from the truth. On the contrary, Biden played the distinctive vice-presidential role that Walter Mondale proposed 33 years ago. In so doing, Biden helped shape Obama's policy toward Afghanistan and offered a model for a constructive role vice presidents can play in presidential decision-

The Obama Non-Doctrine

by Emily S. Rosenberg

In September, 2002, George W. Bush addressed cadets at West Point and advanced his “Bush Doctrine.” Elaborated over the next year, it had two critical features:  The United States would wage preventative war tied to future imagined attacks. The United States was engaged in nothing less than global transformation. Many commentators, noting President Bush’s lofty rhetoric about using military force to end war and to spread American-style democracy globally, labeled hi

Obama’s Contributions to a Dying Empire

by Francis Shor

Old habits die hard, especially imperialist ones. Imperial imperatives, whether economic, geopolitical, or ideological, persist because the ruling elites are dependent on them. In order to conceal imperialist objectives, presidents and other leaders of the US political

“He Knew How to Die”: John Brown on the Gallows, December 2, 1859

by David W. Blight

One hundred fifty years ago this week, John Brown, the radical abolitionist, walked out of the Charlestown, Virginia jail to a wagon containing his simple wood

Darfur: Time To Let The People Speak

by Linda Bishai

Located in the heart of a poverty-stricken region of Africa, with no history of tourism or known exports, Darfur has nonetheless become a familiar name in American and European households.  Numerous rallies, c

Were Early Islamic Historians the First to Embrace Post-Modernism?

by Lesley Hazleton

    I love early Islamic historians. They're much more fun to read than modern ones.  Long before the self-congratulatory concept of mode

What's Modern About the Early Modern Period?

by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

Names are rarely convincingly descriptive. Ugly women are called Bella or Linda, and ugly men Beau.  I know a Nigel who is tall and fair, a

What We Can Learn from a New History of Early Christianity

by Charles Freeman

When reading the mainstream church histories, I often come across the argument that an event, say the physical resurrection of Christ, certainly happened beca

When Was Taft President? Reflections on a One-Term Presidency

by Lewis Gould

     “When exactly did Taft serve as president?” asked a friend who had heard that I had done a book on the twenty-seventh chief executive. After previ

What After All Do Americans Mean When They Say They Love "Liberty"?

by David Reynolds

“Liberty” is stitched into the fabric of U.S. history, from Patrick Henry’s cry “Give me liberty or give me death” to George W. Bush’s assertion that liberty is “t

Will the GOP Find a New Reagan?

by Derek Catsam

If Republicans don't want to consign themselves to irrelevance, they'd serve themselves well to look back to that most maligned of decades, the 1970s. In the years of Jimmy Carter the Republicans were similarly divided, but they recovered and even flourished.By 1977, after the triple blows to the American psyche of Vietnam, Watergate and an economic crisis that lingered into the 1980s, the Republicans appeared hopelessly divided. Internecine warfare threatened to tear the party apart.

Our Turkish-American Thanksgiving Bird

by Larry E. Tise

Just a year ago—on the occasion of our last great American Turkey Day—I sent forth a brief essay arguing that we call our Thanksgiving bird a turkey precisely because it came from Turkey.  That big-breasted creature we all ponder and pray over every November is not a descendant of wild turkeys encountered by the first English settlers in North America.  It is rather the well-fed and intentionally bosomed up offspring of famili

What's Grand About the Grand Concourse in the Bronx

by Constance Rosenblum

Several years ago, when I was waiting in the lobby of the Bronx Museum of the Arts on the Grand Concourse to attend a meeting about the boulevard’

How to Get Out of Afghanistan

by William Polk

In its war in Afghanistan, the United States has come to a crossroads.  President Obama will be forced to choose one of four ways ahead.  The choices are expensive and dangerous for our country; so we must be sure that he chooses the least painful, least expensive and safest of the possible choices. The first possible choice is to keep on doing what we are now doing.  That is, fighting the insurgency with about 60,000 American troops and 68,197 mercenaries at a