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Why Obama's the Real Deal

by James Livingston

The Hitman is at it again. Paul Krugman’s New York Times column on Friday, February 1st, praised John Edwards for moving the Democrats to the left—by laying out concrete proposals on health care and climate change, by forcing Clinton and Obama to follow suit. This praise works as setup for the punch line: “Personal appeal won’t do the job” against the Republicans. Only repeated reference to “substantive differences” will allow the new “pa

Mukasey Still Doesn't Know Water Boarding Is Torture?

by William Loren Katz

Attorney General Michael Mukasey, this country's chief legal officer, discussed the torture known as water boarding Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. 

Obama’s New Math

by Robert S. McElvaine

There is nothing new about insurgent presidential candidates. The Democratic party seems to have one every four years. But it has become clear that there is something very new about this year’s insurgent, Sen. Barack Obama. The difference can best be seen in mathematical terms: the Obama campaign is making a serious attempt to change the type of math by which American politics has been calculated for the last 40 years. The Republican era that began with the election of Richard Nixon

Obamarama: The Absurd Arguments Being Used Against Him

by James Livingston

This time I waited until the returns were in. Barack beat Billary badly in South Carolina Saturday, much to my surprise. I thought it would be closer. The most promising figures to come out of the contest indicate that Obama’s appeal to young white voters is not something that shows up only in opinion polls—it reaches into the voting booth as well. He got 40% of white voters under 40 and 50% of white voters under 30. Pretty amazing.But I’m still cranky because the pol

Because Americans Know Little History, Washington DC's Building Visitor Centers. Really.

by Steven Knipp

It is a statistical fact that we Americans remain in school longer than any other society in history, entering kindergarten at five and often only get catapulted out of academia a full quarter of a century later. Despite that impressive educational marker, whenever I hear young people open their months when visiting Washington, more often than not, they come across sounding like ignoramuses.

Was the Civil War a Terrible Mistake?

by Jim Powell

During Dr. Ron Paul’s recent appearance on FACE THE NATION, he suggested that the Civil War was a mistake, and he has been criticized for saying that. The topic was a minor part of the interview, and he didn’t have time to present much of a case, but fascinating questions were raised. How else would American slaves have gained their freedom if the Civil War hadn’t forced the issue? How could important social reforms of any kind be achieved against stubborn opposition?

Don't Get Tough, Barack

by James Grossman

Don’t do it, Barack. The pundits have weighed in, and they’ve reached a consensus: it is time to take off the gloves. “Time to get mean,” as one Chicago columnist puts it. “Democratic War!” screams the headline in New York. The media have concluded that the Clintons have gotten serious, and it’s time to show how tough you are. Time to demonstrate that you aren’t as “soft” as you have seemed. Well, this is not the National Basketb

Can Washington DC Legally Stop Residents from Owning a Handgun? (Supreme Court Brief)

by Jack N. Rakove, Saul Cornell, David T. Konig, William J. Novak, Lois G. Schwoerer, Fred Anderson, Carol Berkin, Paul Finkelman, R. Don Higginbotham, Stanley N. Katz, Pauline R. Maier, Peter S. Onuf, Robert E. Shalhope, John Shy, and Alan Taylor

INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY OF ARGUMENT The central question is whether the Second Amendment protects a private right to keep handguns and other firearms, independent of an individual’s membership in a state-regulated militia. As a problem for constitutional historians, the question can be elaborated and restated in this way: Did the framers and ratifiers of the Amendment believe they were constitutionally entrenching an individual right to keep arms for personal protection? Or did t

Who Owns the Noose?

by Jim Downs

It happened, again. Beginning in Jena, Louisiana in 2006 and then followed by incidents at the University of Maryland, the Coast Guard Academy, and Columbia University, the noose, which powerfully symbolizes the rampant lynching that occurred throughout the U.S. South in late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has been discovered hung now in a police station in South Florida.  Leaving aside the nature of this “hate crime,” this is certainly not the first time that the tar

The Surprisingly Democratic Roots of Evangelicalism

by Thomas S. Kidd

In early 1742, during a major revival of religion in Ipswich, Massachusetts, a new convert named Mrs. Whipple found her public voice for the first time. Only days before, she had been wondering whether she could

The Two Albu[r]querques

by David Holtby and Tobías Durán

Albuquerque closed its Tricentennial celebration last October. While the attempt to entertain by lighting the Sandia Mountains met with mixed reviews, the final event shouldn’t diminish appreciation of an eighteenth-month long festival that saw many reminders of Spain’s pivotal role 300 years ago. But it’s not simply by looking back to 1706 that we glean meaning from the Tricentennial. Contemporary Spain should be part of what we know about, too. Doing so gives us perspec

South Korea's Leader Tries to Turn His Back on History

by Alexis Dudden

South Korean president-elect Lee Myung-bak has wasted no time stirring things up in Seoul. True to his Hyundai Construction CEO stripes, the businessman-politician for the people wants to act quickly on his campaign pledge to increase peoples’ incomes. One way to do this, he believes, is by rapidly destroying government bureaucracies that he says waste time and money. He promises to be president of the bottom line. Of course many are eager to have more cash in their pockets. Lee&

Putin’s New Man at Brussels

by Andreas Umland

On 10th January 2008, the Russian President named Dmitry Rogozin (b. 1963) as his government’s new ambassador at NATO’s headquarters in Brussels. Vladimir Putin’s appointment should raise attention in the West as it is a move that, in many ways, exemplifies what is currently going on in Moscow and where Russia is heading. Rogozin’s promotion is characteristic of a number of recent trends in both domestic and foreign policies of the Kremlin.

Can Today's Candidates Revive Martin Luther King's "Shattered Dreams"?

by Thomas F. Jackson

Democratic candidates have recently been cherry-picking lessons from the civil rights and voting rights campaigns of the mid-1960s. President Lyndon Johnson's achievement in building a bipartisan congressional coalition to secure passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act was indeed monumental. But Martin Luther King Jr. was no mere dreamer. As the civil rights revolution's most famous strategist and self-proclaimed "symbol," King stood at the forefront of a mass political movement

We Could Take Humanitarian Lessons from Herbert Hoover

by William Lambers

On May 17, 1946, former President Herbert Hoover spoke to America about a world threat "more destructive than armies," a force so powerful as to bring &qu

Remembering Roy Rosenzweig

by Gary Gerstle

Roy was a friend for thirty one years. He was a fourth year graduate student at Harvard when I arrived as a rookie in the fall of 1976. We were drawn together initially by our common interest in American labor history. We were both working with Stephan Thernstrom; we both wrote labor and social histories of small New England cities whose names began with the letter W—Worcester, MA, and Woonsocket, RI. Each of us has been asked many times: why those cities? Well the truth can now be told

A Lesson from Recent U.S. History: We Need a Program for Good Jobs

by Frank Stricker

In the business press the question of the day is whether we are entering a recession. But even if we do not slip into recession, there is an old problem that we ought to address, and that is the shortage of good jobs. Only one of the presidentia

These articles, taken from HNN's archives, help put Ronald Reagan's life and presidency in proper perspective. Click here for a roundup of articles about Reagan that appeared the week he passed away. If you would like to post a comment on Reagan, please do so below.Legacy "Final Take on Ronald Reagan ?" Edmu

In Memory of Roy Rosenzweig (1950-2007)

by Bonnie Goodman

IndexReminiscencesSteve BrierJoshua BrownJack Censer Daniel Cohen Marion Deshmukh Gary Gerstle Mack Holt Mills Kelly Meredith Lair Elena Raz

A Nuclear-Free World? Policymaking Elites and the Public Agree

by Lawrence S. Wittner

On January 15, 2008, in an Op-Ed column entitled "Toward a Nuclear-Free World," four concerned American citizens called upon U.S. government and other governments to set "the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons" and to take substantial action toward this goal.  No, these Americans weren't leaders of Peace Action, the Friends Committee on National Legislation, Physicians for Social Responsibility