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Bombing Civilians: An American Tradition

by Marilyn B. Young

Airpower embodies American technology at its most dashing. 

Truthiness v. Scholarship: Ward Churchill’s Day in Court

by Thomas Brown

"Well, anybody who knows me knows I'm no fan of dictionaries or reference books - they're elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn't true or what did or didn't happen. Who's Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I want to say it was happened in 1941, that's my right."-- Stephen Colbert Postmodernist epistemology battled empiricism in a Denver courtroom over the past month, and both came away bloodied. The University of Colorado fired Ward Churchill in

Ward Churchill: He’s Baaack!

by Larry DeWitt

Well, that embarrassment for the liberal academy—Ward Churchill—is back in the news again. This time he is triumphant.  A jury in Colorado has just ruled that his firing in 2007 was improper, and they upheld Churchill’s central contention: that he was fired because of his politically-incorrect comments on the victims of 9/11. This turn in the saga has allowed Churchill to proclaim his vindication, and has moved his attorney to crow that: “There are few defining mo

Blame It All on Unintended Consequences

by Joyce Appleby

Why do economic downturns catch experts unawares? Even more intriguingly, why do they defy analysis after they've happened? Neither economists nor financiers can agree on why the world's economies are in free fall today. More than 70 years later, there's still no agreement on what caused the Great Depression. Not even in hindsight does consensus emerge. The answer to this puzzle lies in the fact that economic activity sets in motion a battery of unintended econ

A European Future for NATO?

by Carolyne V. Davidson

If ever there was a time for the United States to lead NATO in a new direction, this is it. But it could be France, not the United States, that guides NATO into the future. President Obama discussed transatlantic relations on his trip to Europe. It was the first statement of U.S. policy toward NATO heard from this administration. Yet behind the rhetoric extolling multilateralism the reality is that while France is rejoining military NATO, the United States is becoming more distant. T

A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats: Has the Right Been Misusing JFK's Quote?

by Donald Lazere

President Reagan’s guru Arthur Laffer, a former economics professor at the University of Chicago, continues to preach the gospel of supply-side economics.

The Historian Who's No Longer Angry

by Megan Stephenson

In the 1980s, when Jacki Rand worked at the Smithsonian, her boss decided to put Rand, who is half Choctaw, on a committee of white men to plan an Indian museum. She was glad to serve but not particularly pleased about being the only Indian. Besides, she figured, those Washington suits probably didn’t know a thing about Native Americans. “I’m not like, the representative of the whole native American thing in the United States. You guys have to go out and meet some Indian

Bipartisanship Works

by Michael H. Ebner

As President Obama encounters substantial challenges in creating a bipartisan approach to governance, largely overlooked are the ways that Franklin Delano Roosevelt successfully made bipartisanship a key instrument in conducting American foreign policy during the Second World War. In the face of escalating international conflicts in Europe and Asia well in advance of Pearl Harbor, FDR had appointed two prominent Republicans to key posts in his cabinet. Henry L. Stimson, acknowledged amon

What's to Be Done with North Korea?

by Walter L. Hixson

Despite inept diplomacy by virtually all concerned, it appears the world may survive the latest fiasco emanating from the Korean peninsula, at least for now. At some point, however, unless determined diplomacy

Guess What? The New Deal Worked!

by Steven Conn

Since the economic crisis we're now in is being compared to the Great Depression, the solutions being offered are being routinely compared to the New Deal. Republicans in particular have been quick to pronounce the New Deal a failure as a way of justifying their opposition to the new stimulus package and any other federal response to our new Great Depression. Congressman Steve Austria (R-Ohio) is so angry at the New Deal that he told an audience recently that Franklin Roosevelt's New

History Doyen: John Hope Franklin, 1915-2009

by Bonnie Goodman

John Hope Franklin died at March 25, 2009 at the age of 94, Franklin was the doyen of African American history.

Blogging from the Center as an Historian During a Contested Campaign: Politically Anomalous and Academically Tenuous?

by Gil Troy

Mr. Troy delivered the following remarks at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians on March 26, 2009 at a panel considering "The 2008 Election as History." A video of this talk will be posted in the coming weeks on HNN.

A Flawed Basis for Middle East Peace

by Jonathan Goldstein

No one should think that all peace agreements lead to an end to violence. They don't. As the recent killings in Northern Ireland demonstrate, the 1998 Good Friday peace accord, engineered by former Maine Senator George Mitchell to lessen Protestant/Catholic tensions in the Ulster counties, is now under threat. So what can we expect, with Mitchell once again thrust into the middle as President Obama's negotiator in the tension-fraught Middle East, from any peace agreement he might work

Can You Do Business with Al Qaeda Terrorists?

by James Livingston

The terrorists of the very late-20th century were quite different from their predecessors among, say, the Irgun, the Zionist group led by Menachim Begin in the 1940s, or its mirror image, the Palestine Liberation Organization, led by Yasir Arafat from the 1960s until his death in 2004.  Both of these groups targeted civilians in the hope of removing them and their armed representatives from territory they claimed as their ancestral homeland.  Even so, neither would have considered,

Do the Humanities Matter in Hard Times? A Russian Historian's Answer

by Walter G. Moss

A recent New York Times article was titled "In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth.”  Being primarily a Russian historian, I thought of the toughest Russian times, the German siege of Leningrad, which lasted from September 1941 to January 1944.  It led to the deaths, mainly from starvation, of a million or so Leningraders. Attempting to stay alive, people ate anything including rats, glue, and human body parts. But the “tough times&rdq

The Journalist as Historian: A Case Study

by David Grann

As a reporter, I nearly always write about the living: people I can talk to, spend time with, accompany on their adventures. Even when a subject refuses to speak with me, or has recently passed away, there are people

Women’s History Month: Comparing Presidential Proclamations

by Daniel Sauerwein

Women’s History Month has its roots in Women’s History Week, which was created by congressional resolution co-sponsored by Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) in 1981.  In 1987, the National Women’s History Project petitioned Congress for expansion of Women’s History Week to include the entire month of March.  They were successful and every year Congress passes a bipartisan resolution supporting National Women’s History Month. In addition

Nuclear Weapons, The Great Lakes and Lake Champlain?

by William Lambers

Imagine living along Lake Ontario in the British colony of Canada. The year is 1813 and Great Britain and the United States are at war. It is a cool April morning. You peer out across the Lake to watch the sunrise. The waters are calm, the surrounding countryside quiet. You gaze up and down the Lake for American warships. There are none in sight…..but where are they? Little do you know that a fleet of American warships is readying for battle. At Sackets Harbor in the easte

Why Neither Nationalization Nor a New Tarp Can Fix Our Finances

by James Livingston

The banks are neither loaning nor investing.  They’re sitting on idle reserves provided to them by the Treasury’s disbursement of funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or they are waiting for directions from their ostensible supervisors in the federal government.  Why not then just go ahead and nationalize them, thus forcing them to do their job of moving money from savings or deposits to productive investments, of converting idle surpluses to working capi

Is Greed Good? It Depends on the Times

by Robert Brent Toplin

"Greed" is suddenly the operative word for characterizing the bonuses received by AIG executives and other financial titans who amassed riches while pushing their companies and the American economy over the cliff. But will this anger last? Are discussions about greed and calls for government action to curb it likely to extend beyond the present financial crisis? History suggests that outrage over the abuses of fat-cats is often short-lived. Complaints appear frequently durin