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Why TR Lost the Republican Nomination in 1912: What New Research Shows

by Lewis Gould

As the battle between Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama hurtles toward the Democratic National Convention in August, attention among historians

When the Bush Bubble Bursts

by Harlow Giles Unger

By 1694 Britain’s perennial wars had plunged the nation into bankruptcy, but a clever financier named William Paterson came up with a shell game that restored public faith in government credit

Department of Corrections: Barack Obama on Annie Oakley and Hillary Clinton

by Sean Wilentz

In his latest round of ad feminam slurs, Senator Barack Obama has denigrated Senator Hillary Clinton and her position on gun regulation by likening her to Annie Oakley. But once again, Obama has shot himself in the foot. Annie Oakley was one of the first great female superstars in American history. Born in poverty in western Ohio, she began hunting when she was nine years old, and sold hunting game to locals in order to support her siblings and widowed mother. Her sharpshooting abilities

What Underlies Obama's Analysis of "The People"

by Leo P. Ribuffo

The controversy over Senator Barack Obama’s remarks about “bitterness” in small town Pennsylvania will bring back memories to anyone who has studied social and political movements during the past half century. Asked on April 6 why his candidacy had failed to catch fire among voters in such places, Obama responded that the “jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And it’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or r

The Risks and Rewards of the Pope's Visit to the US

by Thomas J. Carty

Pope Benedict XVI’s meeting this week with a U.S. president during an election year demonstrates how Americans increasingly tolerate the conflue

The Follies of Instant History: Another Meaningless Poll of Historians

by Larry DeWitt

Re: Robert S. McElvaine's, "HNN Poll: 61% of Historians Rate the Bush Presidency Worst" (4/1/08)Here we go again. We are engaged in another exercise in instant history, in the form of a poll of opinion in which historians assume the role of soothsayers, predicting the future judgment of the profession on the Bush presidency. This is a follow-up poll to one from 2004 that Robert S. M

Why It's Time to Rethink the 70s

by Bruce Schulman and Julian Zelizer

Why publish a book about one of the most underappreciated decades in contemporary American History? Until very recently, the 1970s seemed like little more than a cruel joke. When they thought about the period at all, historians, pundits, and the great majority of American citizens dismissed the decade as a bizarre interlude between the liberal achievements and eventual crack-up in the 1960s and the conservative revolution of the 1980s. The 1970s meant bad hair, bad mus

The Five Years that Made Lincoln President

by John Waugh

Abraham Lincoln, who hated to condemn a deserting soldier to death, was given to putting the papers of tough cases aside and saying, “they are still in soak.” He might have said the same thing at one time about his political career. It was after his one term in Congress ended in 1849. He was not running for reelection, probably couldn’t have won if he did, because he had opposed the U.S. Mexican War, not a popular position in Illinois. It appeared to him that his p

Letter to My Granddaughter: How to Decide Whom to Vote for

by Vaughn Davis Bornet

Dear Granddaughter Susan:You have asked me in your e-mail letter about Republicans and Democrats. You want to know some differences. Specifically, what kind of person would be likely to feel comfortable after choosing to be a Republican or a Democrat? Answering this flattering inquiry is supposed to be easy for me, since I have written steadily about American politics for some sixty years and more. But all is not quite what it seems in the highly controversial area of American political

Republican, Democrat, or Independent: Which Choice for Me?

by Vaughn Davis Bornet

A historian's letter to his granddaughter.

Reporter's Notebook: Highlights from the 2008 OAH Convention: Day 2

by Rick Shenkman

Related Links Past AHA & OAH Conferences OAH 2008: Day 1 OAH 2008: Day 2 OAH 2008: Day 3 Want to share your reflections on the OAH annual meeting? We've set up a special blog so you can. CLICK HERE

Historians for Obama

HNN Editor: The list of signers was updated 4-21-08. Our country is in serious trouble. The gap between the wealthy elite and the working majority grows ever larger, tens of millions of Americans lack health insurance and others risk bankruptcy when they get seriously ill, and many public schools do a poor job of educating the next generation. Due to the arrogant, inept foreign policy of the current administration, more people abroad mistrust and fear the United States than a

George W. Bush: As He Now Appears in a History Book

by Kathryn Moore

George W. Bush entered office under a cloud of doubt, with Democrats crying “Foul!” following the month-long drama of recounting ballots in Florida and court battles there and in the Supreme Court. But on January 20, 2001, Bush too

Pastor Wright: In Context

by Steve Hochstadt

Racism is still alive in America. Few would claim that racial prejudice against African-Americans, an enduring American shame, has been eliminated. Yet the explosion of criticism, mainly by white commentators, of Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and of Senator Barack Obama for remaining his parishioner and friend, conveniently ignores the world of white racism in which Wright developed his ideas. The focus on Wright and Obama has obscured the larger truth about the sermons he has presented: they r

My Love-Hate Relationship with John Brown

by John Michael Cummings

I never expected John Brown to dominate the title of my first novel.  As a native of Harpers Ferry wh

The Mystery of Oswald's Contacts with the CIA in Mexico

by Jefferson Morley

A small group of senior CIA officers may have been running an authorized counterintelligence operation involving Lee Harvey Oswald six weeks before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. That

Why We Should All Regret Jefferson's Broken Promise to Kościuszko

by Gary B. Nash and Graham Russell Gao Hodges

In March 1798, Tadeuz Kościuszko, a hero of the American and Polish revolutions, and Thomas Jefferson, Vice President of the United States, huddled in a cramped second-story room in Philadelphia to make a pact of ho

Why Guernica Speaks to Us Now More than Ever

by Ian Patterson

Humankind (as T.S. Eliot said) may not be able to bear very much reality, but fantasy has never had it so good — or so powerful. Unfortunately, fantasy is not extricable from reality, and imaginary aims can have real consequences, especially in war. Look at the American tactic of “shock and awe” that was going to have such a rapid and devastating effect on Iraq that it would force Saddam Hussein to capitulate within days, after which peaceful Western-style democracy would sprin

Is the National Archives Preserving or Distorting the Heritage of the New Deal?

by Martin Halpern

In encouraging students to conduct research on important events in history, historians today have access to a wealth of resources on the Internet. I tell my students to view critically all sources but that sites managed by government agencies and university libraries are generally reliable. My experience with calling to the attention of the National Archives an important error on the www.ourdocuments.gov website will lead m

What's Left of Bush's Democracy Agenda?

by Daniel Mandel

The other month in Cairo, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice confirmed at a press conference that the Bush Administration had quietly waived a congressional hold on $100 million in military aid to Egyp