Recently Published

Why Vice Presidential Nominees Matter

by Leo P. Ribuffo

Despite the Sarah Palin phenomenon, whatever it may ultimately yield, commentators continue to declare that vice presidential nominees rarely affect the outcome of presidential elections.  The truth of this axiom depends on the meaning of the word rarely.  Good choices, bad choices, and  missed choices--usually in combination--have influenced as many as five of the presidential elections since 1960.  And "rarely" might be changed to "frequently" if we r

Old Andy Jackson Would Understand John McCain. Do You?

by Robert Elder

Honor is making a comeback in our national political discourse.  A recent Time article proposed honor as the best way to understand what makes John McCain tick, while the Obama campaign criticized a recent McCain television ad in language that produced the eye-catching headline, “Obama aide questions McCain’s honor.”

Is It Really Wise to Expand the FBI's Investigative Techniques?

by Douglas Charles

According to recent reporting by the Washington Post, in October 2008 FBI officials plan to expand their arsenal of investigative tools in the fields of crime detection, intelligence collect

Can Historians Be Helpful in Addressing the Climate Crisis?

by Steven A. Leibo

So there I was, sometime around January 2005 finishing up one of the very frequent public talks I often give on international issues when an audience member walked up to me. It had been a good discussion of critical challenges from Iraq and China to Globalization and Global Warming and I was feeling pretty positive when the guy ever so politely said “I much appreciated your talk but your explanation that some of the rising ocean levels we have seen of late comes from heated waters taking

The Parallel with 1929 We Ignore at Our Peril

by Robert Brent Toplin

With markets teetering at the abyss, the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, and the federal government's rescue of faltering behemoths like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and AIG, some Americans are looking at the history of the 1930s in search of clues to the causes of the Great Depression. They want to know what went wrong in the past so they can make more educated judgments about what needs to be done to improve conditions in the present. Unfortunately, answers cannot be identified wi

Sarah Palin and the Politics of the Irrational

by Joseph Palermo

In The Age of American Unreason, Susan Jacoby writes: "If Bush's election was not a measure of conscious anti-intellectualism on the part of voters, it was certainly a measure of the public's indifference to demonstrable mental acuity and knowledge as standards for the presidency." (p. 285) In recent years, presidential races have become highly personalized media events. They focus voters' short attention spans on the individuals who are running, rather than on the pol

A New Cold War in the Caribbean?

by Nikolas Kozloff

When Venezuela's Hugo Chávez throws one of his rhetorical bombs, we learn something about the failure of U.S. foreign policy. Recently, "Go ahead and squeal," he taunted us. The cause of his outburst? Likely American protests in the future over his moves to hold joint exercises in the Caribbean with the Russian navy. No one likes Chávez's loopy Cold-War language, but he's onto something with his nutty words: the way the Bush administration has compromised Amer

Before Palin, Before Ferrarro, There Was Charlotta Spears Bass

by Cynthia King

Though partisans continue to debate the merits and demerits of Sarah Palin’s candidacy, the fact is that she is the first female vice presidential nominee for the Republican Party. This is also true of Geraldine Ferrarro for the Democratic Party in 1984. But even Ferrarro cannot lay claim to being the first female vice presidential nominee on the national ballot. That honor goes to Charlotta Spears Bass who ran for Vice President of the United States on the Progressive Party ticket i

Just How Secretive Was the Bush Administration?

by James P. Pfiffner

The Bush administration, in addition to its over-classification of documents, has undertaken more policies in secret than any administration in recent memo

A Biographer Explains Why He Thinks Another Biography of Jefferson Was in Order

by Kevin J. Hayes

As my recent biography, The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson (Oxford University Press, 2008), neared completion,

Why Public Housing Is Viable

by Nicholas Dagen Bloom

The mere mention of public housing to most Americans summons a host of negative images: welfare mothers, gun violence, drugs, and forlorn buildings. Among

Who Was Uncle Sam? And Why Did He Want "You"?

by Christopher Capozzola

Sitting in his Manhattan studio on a summer day in 1916, James Montgomery Flagg took off his glasses, looked in the mirror, and saw there the image of

Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity

by Gary Cross

The old always seem to blame the young for the downfall of civilization.

Leopold and Loeb: Why It Was Time for a New Book About the Case

by Simon Baatz

Few crimes in American history have achieved a notoriety comparable to the murder of a young boy by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb in Chicago in 1924.  Leopold, a nineteen-year-old student at the University of

Sarah Palin Distorts the Founders' Religious Views

by Howard P. Segal

Before the selection of Alaska's governor, Sarah Palin, as the Republican vice presidential nominee, the 2008 campaign had been notable for the apparently declining influence of evangelical Christians on American politics. Notwithstanding the evangelicals' strong support for his candidacy, Mike Huckabee failed to get the GOP presidential nomination. And for all the distortion of Barack Obama's religion as supposedly Islamic rather than Christian, the controversy still offered hope that Amer

David Gelernter’s Facts and The Weekly Standard’s Standards

by Donald Lazere

Last spring a student in an argumentative writing class I was teaching at the University of Tennessee used as a source for a research paper on public education David Gelernter’s article “A World Without Public Schools” in The Weekly Standard (TWS) of June 4, 2007.  She brought to my attention two quotations that Gelernter cites from The Official SAT Study Guide that struck me as being of questionable contextual accuracy. Since the article did not provide

Remembering an American Hero

by Thomas Fleming

In my 2003 book,

How History and Psychiatry Are Alike

by Daniel Costa

Looking at various vocations and the similarities between them can be enlightening. Here, I will bring to your attention historians and psychiatrists. Historians study complex facts and narratives that not infrequently confli

The Attempt to Hijack History at the 9/11 ServiceNation Forum

by Justin Jackson

In front of Columbia University’s Low Library last Thursday night, thousands of us watched Senators McCain and Obama as they attempted to answer or evade often difficult questions about the past, present and future of national service. Unsurprisingly, like most politicians throughout the annals of history, during the ServiceNation forum both senators selectively appropriated commonly accepted representations of the past th

What I Saw the Day the Pentagon Came Under Attack

by Liz Crowe

Last night, Monday, September 10, 2001, I toiled over tables of authorities and contents at the law firm of Mintz Levin where I am a legal secretary. My attorneys needed to file a brief by midnight and my fingers couldn't seem to type fast enough. Upon leaving the office, a finished product with copies in their hands, they reassured me that I could take my time coming in today. My morning commute consists of a bus ride to the Pentagon Metro station and a train ride to the Archives/Navy Me