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The Florida Flood that Accounted for the Most Deaths of Black People in a Single Day (Until Katrina)

by Eliot Kleinberg

A hurricane catc

Interview with Willie Drye: Katrina and the Great Labor Day Hurricane of 1935

by Rick Shenkman

Willie Drye is the author of Storm of the Century: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, published by National Geographic Books.In your book you tell the story of the Great Labor Day Hurricane of 1935. It was deadly and killed some 400 people (most of them World War I veterans who were sent to the Florida Keys to work on a New Deal construction project). But hardly anybody remembers it. Why is that? For starters, the storm struck a part of the country that was literally the ends of the earth in 1935. Outside of Key West, maybe 1,000 people lived on the Florida Keys at that time. William Johns, who was a reporter for the Miami Daily News at the time of the hurricane, noted that no one paid any attention to the Keys before the World War I vets were sent there in November 1934. So the Keys were part of the world that just didn't matter.

One History Professor's Experience with the Katrina Relief Effort

by Karen Kossie-Chernyshev

It is Saturday night, September 3, approximately 8:40 PM.  My husband and I have just arrived at the George R. Brown Convention Center, the second public facility designated for Katrina evacuees.  My goal is to pick up a schedule to plan my volunteer activities and to help my Texas Southern University students do the same.  I want all of us not only to participate in this unprecede

In New Orleans, Once Again, the Irony of Southern History

by Christopher Morris

Once again the entire country is confronted with the legacy of Reconstruction. It is too simple to chalk the tragedy that continues to unfold in New Orleans to the force of nature, or to an unfathomable God. Hurricanes, like earthquakes, tornadoes, eruptions, and tsunamis, do come, but who or what sends them is only half the story. Such disasters whatever their origin smash into worlds of our making. What they do when they make landfall, what they meet when they reach the coast, is lar

American Heritage Enters the 21st Century (At Last)

by Luke Hammock

Welcoming in the age of chips, bits and the World Wide Web, American Heritage magazine plans to debut a new website on September 6 which features articles, photographs and blogs. A beta version of the website, available here, features a comprehensive timeline of World War II, an article examining the influences and impact of the Baby Boomer generation, among others. The print version of the magazine of course has always featured intere

The Horrible History of the "Comfort Women" and the Fight to Suppress Their Story

by Yoshiko Nozaki

[A] conference of historians, psychoanalysts, and artists, gathered to reflect on the relation of education to the Holocaust, watched the videotaped testimony of the woman in an attempt to better understand the era. A lively debate ensued. The testimony was not accurate, historians claimed. The number of chimneys was misrepresented. Historically, only one chimney was blown up, not all four. Since the memory of the testifying woman turned out to be

Tulane: Caught in the Middle of a Disaster

by Bonnie Goodman

This past week hurricane Katrina ripped through Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama with New Orleans suffering some of the worst devastation as water levels rose throughout the city, leading to an unprecedented peace-time order to evacuate the entire area.. Students at Tulane University were set to start classes this week. At first the university was hopeful that it would be possible to resume classes on September 1. Soon that date was pushed back to September 7, but with 80 percent of the city f

How FDR Handled the Fallout from the Great Labor Day Hurricane of 1935

by Willie Drye

As the sun climbed above the hills of the Hudson River Valley on Sunday, Sept. 1, 1935, a special train carrying President Franklin D. Roosevelt rolled to a stop at the station at Highland. Congress had recently ended its longest session in more than a decade and the president had finally escaped the stifling summer heat of Washington, D.C. He was looking forward to spending Labor Day at Springwood, his home overlooking the Hudson River in Hyde Park. FDR planned to combine pleasure and business during an extended stay. The president was unusually skilled at handling the press, and a softball game pitting administration officials against White House correspondents was planned on the lawn of his home on Wednesday, Sept. 4. Roosevelt also would be busy with politics, however. An election year was only a few months away, and the president intended to work on a series of speeches that would lay the groundwork for his announcement that he would run for a second term in 1936.

Caught between Loyalty and Sedition: Patriotic Politicians Who Have Dissented During Wartime

by Ed Pompeian

Many critics of the Iraq War are struggling to oppose the war while continuing to sound patriotic. How have leading figures in the past balanced criticism and loyalty during wartime? In this article we take a look at the responses of Edmund Burke, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and J. William Fulbright .Edmund Burke Edmund Burke is best known for his conservative critique of the French, who he believed irresponsibly abandoned

The Political Rehabilitation of Joseph Rotblat

by Lawrence S. Wittner

By the time of his death, which occurred on August 31, 2005, Joseph Roblat was a revered figure. A top nuclear physicist, Rotblat received—among many other honors and awards--a British knighthood and, together with the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs (an organization that he had helped to found), the Nobel Peace Prize (1995). As the president of the Pugwash conferences recalled: “Joseph Rotblat was a towering figure in the search for peace in the world, who dedica

Series: What America Needs to Do to Achieve Its Foreign Policy Goals ... Concerning Public Ignorance (6)

by William R. Polk

Click here to read the other articles in this series. The United States is upheld and given its character by a tripod: one leg is the popular participation in government; the second leg is an informed public; and the third is the economy. I will touch on these only briefly as they are generally familiar. Popular participation is not only embedded in the Constitution but is practiced in our neighborhoods and towns.

A Tale of Two Constitutional Conventions: Iraq's and Ours

by Paul Douglas Newman

Next week I will begin teaching a college seminar entitled, “The Early American Republic,” and the first subject we will tackle over the month of September is the framing of the constitution of the United States and the struggle for ratification. By October we will study the challenges to the power of the newly created nation by a political opposition party and by the people themselves. At about the same time, Iraqi citizens will be going to the polls to vote on a proposed federal

If We Cannot Trust You With Our Dead, How Can We Trust You With Our Living?

by Judith Apter Klinghoffer

It's time to stop beating around the bush: A growing pundit chorus is breaching the proposition that the creation of a Jewish state called Israel was a mistake and the “root cause” of Islamic terror. Hence, rectifying that mistake by dismantling the state of Israel will go a long way towards pacifying Jihadists like Zarqaui and securing the British (and other Western) homeland from terrorist attacks, argues Geoffrey Wheatcroft in a recent Financial Times column entitled,

"A Corrective to the Pipes Worldview"?

by Daniel Pipes

Bediuzzaman Said Nursi (1877-1960), perhaps the most influential Islamic figure of modern Turkey, is the subject of a new book, edited by Ian Markham and Ibrahim Ozdemir, Globalization, Ethics and Islam: The Case of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi ( Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2005). The title puzzled me but Nursi being someone I know little about, I picked up the volume with interest and delved in. I did not get very far. The introduction (which Ashgate

The Mess on the Mall

by Andrew Ferguson

IF YOU WANT A VISION of hell, look here: the national mall in Washington, D.C., at noon on a summer's day. Mom and Dad and Buddy and Sis stand on the treeless expanse, baked by the pitiless sun, looking lost. Dad wears a muscle-beach T-shirt stretched over a Cheesecake Factory body, his hair matted in shiny ringlets round the crown of his head. Sweat begins to show at the waistband of Mom's stretch pants. The air is hung with scrims of haze. To one side the Capitol building shimmers in ghostly o

Casualties in the Heartland, 1968/2005

by Christian Appy

"You bet your goddamn dollar I'm bitter. It's people like us who give up our sons for the country," said a firefighter whose son was killed in action."Let's face it: if you have a lot of money, or if you have the right connections, you don't end up on a firing line over there. I think we ought to win that war or pull out. What the hell else should we do -- sit and bleed ourselves to death, year after year?" His wife jumps in to add,"My husband and I can't help but thinking that our son g

Ann Lane's Dissertation

by Nathan Williams

Click here for Ann Lane's response to this article.EDITOR'S NOTEAfter the Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose stories broke earlier this year, HNN received an email

History and Memory: They’re Different

by Thomas Fleming

Every time I walked through the vestibule of my family home in Jersey City in the 1940s, I saw Franklin D. Roosevelt's face on the wall, where many devout Irish-Catholic families hung a portrait of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. FDR was the hero of my youth, the almost mythical figure on whom the political fortunes of my father, leader of the gritty working class Sixth Ward, a vital cog in the city's powerful political machine, depended. The name Roosevelt had a magical aura, inducing total admi

Is Organized Labor Fighting Mad?

by James Ottavio Castagnera

The Norris-LaGuardia Anti-Injunction Act and the National Labor Relations Act were passed as a part of the New Deal of the 1930s. Prior to their passage, most private-sector labor organizations relied on their muscle to move employers to the negotiation table. During the late 1860s and 1870s, the Molly Maguires burned breakers, blew bridges and beat up mine bosses in the anthracite coal patches of eastern Pennsylvania, until more than 20 of them were tried and hanged at the county seats of Potts

What Lies Behind the Multicultural Approach to History

by Clare Spark

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