Recently Published

Is the US Going to Attack Iran?

by Nasir Khan

Is the United States going to attack Iran?  This question is being asked around the world.The big American military build-up in the Persian Gulf has gone on for some time, and there is every reason to believe that Washington is setting the stage for a major offensive against Iran.  In fact, the Bush administration has followed a carefully orchestrated strategy with a view to paving the way for a major conflict with Iran. The clearest signal comes from US Vice President Dick C

Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan

by Larry Berman

Why did one of the great spies of our century allow me to be his American biographer?  During the Vietnam War, Pham Xuan An was a highly respected Time Magazine reporter who turned out to be a spy for the North Vietnamese. He was a trusted source for the era’s best known reporters; his circle extended well beyond journalism to include the CIA’s Lou Conein, Edward Lansdale and William Colby. He was friends with the most notable South Vietnamese politicians and

Hiss and History

by Victor Navasky

Click here to read an exchange between Mr. Navasky and Mark Kramer written in response to this article. In 1951 Leslie Fiedler, the literary critic, wrote "it is time, many of us feel, to forget the whole business...[t]he prison doors have closed [on Alger Hiss ]; let us consider the question also closed." Twenty-seven years later another literary critic, the distinguished and thoughtful cultural and political obs

Imus and History

by Rick Shenkman

Imus is already last week's news, though his face adorns the cover of Newsweek. But there remain a few angles that unfortunately have not been addressed. First, is the curious attitude of his apologists to history. In their rush to defend Imus from attacks that he's a racist they frequently omit his pattern of racism. Though they concede that he frequently "came up to the line" and perhaps on occasion "crossed it"--for some reason the vocabulary of the Old We

The Storm Facing Tulane's History Department (And We Don't Mean Katrina)

by Rick Shenkman

"I was floored and devastated." This statement by Tulane historian Susan Schroeder is not a reference to Katrina. It is a comment about charges involving racism, harassment and slander that have riven Tulane's department of history, led to the filing of a lawsuit by one member against another, and made a mockery of the image of school collegiality created in the wake of the 2005 storm when students and teachers

Jessica Lynch, the Media, and History

by Richard S. Lowry

The American public only sees short bites of history on the evening news and receives precious little detail in their morning newspapers. Seldom are stories revisited for in-depth analyses. In the case of the invasion of Iraq, reporters were embedded with specific units and were required to stay with units as they advanced toward Baghdad, leaving no time for in-depth reporting.

Gunnar Myrdal’s a lot More Complicated than You Think

by Clare L. Spark

Recently, History News Network published an excerpt from a widely- and well-reviewed book The Race Beat: The Press, The Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation, written by journalists Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff and published by Knopf in 2006 for a general educated readership. Leaving aside the perhaps unconscious link to The Birth of a Nation in the subtitle, I was astonished by the excerpted first chapter, w

Why Giuliani Had to Backpedal About His Wife's Role as First Lady

by Scott Kaufman

When Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani told Barbara Walters on the show “20/20” on March 29 that he would be open to his wife, Judith, attending cabinet meetings, it was an expression of how he viewed his relationship with her. “If she wanted to sit in on cabinet meetings,” stated Giuliani, “that would be something I would be very, very comfortable with.” To many Americans, however, the presence of the first lady – an unelected, unappoi

Hiss Was Guilty

by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr

For nearly sixty years, Alger Hiss's defenders have mounted one campaign after another to discredit the mountain of evidence that proves he spied for the Soviet Union.

A “New World” to Claim - The Arctic

by Robert J. Miller

Recent news reports state that global warming and the shrinking Arctic icecaps are opening new sea lanes and making barren islands suddenly very valuable.  In fact, the international community might experience a new race of exploration, conquest and acquisition for this “new world” - these newly available lands and sea routes.  Conflicts could arise over shipping lanes, islands, fish stocks, minerals and oil that are now becoming accessible and commercially exploitable.&

Reporter's Notebook: Highlights from the 2007 OAH Convention: Day 4

by Rick Shenkman

Related Links OAH 2007: Day 1 OAH 2007: Day 2 OAH 2007: Day 3 OAH 2007: Day 4 Index: OAH 2007 HNN Videos & Podcasts Past OAH & AHA Conven

Reporter's Notebook: Highlights from the 2007 OAH Convention: Day 3

by Rick Shenkman

Related Links OAH 2007: Day 1 OAH 2007: Day 2 OAH 2007: Day 3 OAH 2007: Day 4 Index: OAH 2007 HNN Videos & Podcasts Past OAH & AHA Conven

Reporter's Notebook: Highlights from the 2007 OAH Convention: Day 2

by Rick Shenkman

Related Links OAH 2007: Day 1 OAH 2007: Day 2 OAH 2007: Day 3 OAH 2007: Day 4 Index: OAH 2007 HNN Videos & Podcasts Past OAH & AHA Conven

Reporter's Notebook: Highlights from the 2007 OAH Convention: Day 1

by Rick Shenkman

Related Links OAH 2007: Day 1 OAH 2007: Day 2 OAH 2007: Day 3 OAH 2007: Day 4 Index: OAH 2007 HNN Videos & Podcasts Past OAH & AHA Conven

Yushchenko’s Gamble

by Andreas Umland

Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko’s recent decision to dissolve the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian Parliament, is so risky a step that it may threaten the integrity of his political legacy. Contrary to the tenor of current heated discussions about the legal quality of Yushchenko’s decree, the main question about his decision is not a juridicial, but a political one: Yushchenko can, arguably, not win the fight into which, oddly, he got himself. Not only might the Constitutional

Congress Acts after Survivors Challenge Jewish Leadership on Holocaust Insurance and Bad Arolsen Revelations

by Edwin Black

Reaction to recent revelations in the Jewish media regarding evidence of corporate complicity, unrevealed insurance company involvement and pervasive IBM punch cards among the papers in the secret Bad Arolsen repository has re-ignited a grass-roots survivor campaign to recover their rightful Nazi-era insurance claims against such companies as the giant Italian insurer Generali. Following the series of revelations that began last year, grass roots survivor and second generation groups in

American Museums in Crisis: A New Thing?

by Samuel J. Redman

A recent Washington Postarticle written by Robert Sullivan, a former associate director for public programs of the Smithsonian's Natural History Museum and the current vice president of Chora, a museum consulting firm in Washington accused the Smithsonian Institution of failing on many fronts over the course of the past decade.  Terms used by Sullivan in the Washington Post to

The Return of the Domino Theory

by Christopher McKnight Nichols

Dominoes are back. The old, scuffed political theory of one domino falling and knocking down others turned up recently in President Bush's call for support from Congress for a surge in U.S. troops in Iraq.On March 19, Bush said: "If American forces were to step back from Baghdad before it is more secure, a contagion of violence could spill out across the entire country. In time, this violence could engulf the region. For the safety of the American people, we cannot allow this to h

There It Goes Again: The Bush Administration's Latest Plan to Build New Nuclear Weapons

by Lawrence S. Wittner

The Bush administration's stubborn determination to prevail, whatever the costs, is evident not only in its reckless military venture in Iraq, but in its single-minded pursuit of new nuclear weapons.The U.S. government, of course, is supposed to be divesting itself of its nuclear weapons under the provisions of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which it signed in 1968.  As recently as the NPT review conference of 2000, the U.S. government joined other signers of the NPT

The Man Who Championed Lobotomies: Separating Man from Monster

by Jack El-Hai

Walter Freeman, the American neurologist and psychiatrist who devoted his career to championing lobotomy as a treatment for psychiatric disorders, died thirty-five years ago. His reputation was then at a low ebb, and it has not since risen appreciably. It is tempting to write off Freeman as a fringe figure in American medicine — an aberrant doctor who somehow managed to get his hands on 3,400 psychiatric patients so that he could treat them with his infamous ice pick and leave them much