Recently Published

Gay Rights Movement: Going Forward or Backward?

by Hugo Schwyzer

Much has happened since I last taught my course on gay and lesbian history in the fall semester of 2002.  On the one hand, we've seen sudden, dramatic, exciting progress: the "Massachusetts Miracle" that has resulted in thousands and thousands of legal marriages, the elevation of the openly gay Gene Robinson to be a bishop in the Episcopal Church, and the Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas (particularly considering the breadth of Justice

Interview with James F. Simon About Jefferson and Marshall

by Rick Shenkman

Mr. Simon, Martin Professor of Law and Dean Emeritus at New York Law School, is the author of What Kind of Nation: Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and the Epic Struggle to Create a United States (Simon & Schuster, 2003).

Can Europe Learn from American Constitution-Making?

by James Banner

With the recent failure of the French and Dutch votes on the European constitution, it's going to be harder than ever to see that we are witnessing one of the most extraordinary developments in recorded history.   Only 60 years after the exhaustion and bitterness of World War II, twenty-five nations of Europe have almost fully yoked themselves together under a single encompassing charter. What's more, the boundaries of the nations so close to placing themselves within a single con

Abe Lincoln's Deep Throat

by Ralph E. Shaffer

With Mark Felt's surprise admission ending the decades-long search for "Deep Throat," scholars and pundits can now return to the still unsolved, century-old enigma posed by published revelations of an Abraham Lincoln confidante. Despite application of the latest high tech methods to determine authorship of The Diary of a Pu

Imagine What FDR Would Say about Bush's Social Security "Reforms"

by William C. Kashatus

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt was asked in 1935 to defend payroll contributions to Social Security, he said that he wanted"to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and benefits.""With those taxes in there," he tartly asserted,"no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program."   Seventy years later, President George W. Bush is making a destructive effort to do just that. Insisting that the Social Security system is i

Like Woodrow Wilson (Who Lost Popular Support) President Bush Has Neglected the Home Front While Fighting His War

by Gene Gerard

A frequent criticism of President Bush is that domestic issues have suffered in the last four years. The reasoning behind this assertion is that Bush has been so focused on the war on terrorism that the home front received little attention. In fact, history suggests that this has been the case before. Between 1917 and 1920, President Woodrow Wilson was consumed with winning World War I and negotiating a peace treaty. Between December 1918 and June 1919 Wilson spent onl

Look, Europe Already Has a Working Constitution

by Jeffrey Vanke

French and Dutch voters have solidly rejected the European constitution, also known as the 2004 Treaty of Rome. As a result, a wave of anxiety has swept European governments and media. What's all the fuss about? Europe has had a constitution since 1951, and the 2004 Treaty of Rome contained only marginal changes in it. So the treaty's defeat will make little difference in European affairs, not to mention European history. To call the defeated document a constitution was only sy

Deep Throat Revealed: Historians' Comments

by Bonnie Goodman

This past week it was revealed that W. Mark Felt, the second in command at the F.B.I. during the Nixon Administrstion, admitted in a Vanity Fair magazine interview that he was "Deep Throat," the insider source who relayed top secret information about the Watergate coverup to Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. HNN surveyed major media to see how historians reacted to the news. Text reprinted below was copied straight from news accounts.

The German-Turkish Solution to Darfur

by Diana Muir

Last week week a group of Turkish academics was expected to gather at the Bo gaziçi (Bosphorus) University to hold a conference on "Ottoman Armenians in the Period of the Empire's Collapse." The day before the conference was scheduled to convene, the Turkish Minister of Justice, Cemil Çiçek, rose in Parliament to denounce it, "This is a stab in the back to the Turkish nation... this is irresponsibility… We must put an end to this cycle of tr

South Korea and the United States: Is the Love Affair Over?

by Charles K. Armstrong

September 8, 2005, marks the sixtieth anniversary of the arrival of US soldiers on the Korean peninsula to accept the surrender of Japanese forces. There will likely be little fanfare accompanying this event. At the end of World War II, Koreans viewed the Soviets and the Americans equally as liberators, and neither occupation force was expected to stay long on Korean soil. The special relationship between South Korea and the United States was forged by later events: the formation of the Republic

What History Shows ... Jihad Is a Form of Offensive Warfare

by Daniel Pipes

In his just-released, absorbing, and excellent book, Understanding Jihad (University of California Press), David Cook of Rice University dismisses the low-grade debate that has raged since 9/11 over the nature of jihad – whether it is a form of offensive warfare or (more pleasantly) a type of moral self-improvement.Mr. Cook dismisses as"bathetic and laughable" John Esposito's contention that jihad refers to"the effort t

How Historians Play the Game in Washington D.C.

by Scott McLemee

A member of Congress who says “history” is not necessarily thinking of the same enterprise as a professional historian. This is no Beltway-induced conceptual blockage: For civilians, the important thing about history is story, not methodology. (Even the most devoted viewers of the History Channel have no sense of the century-long debates over the “the objectivity ques

Political Correctness in The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History

by Jeff Lipkes

Ignoring the advice of his academic friends for a second time (he’d already responded to a review by Max Boot), Thomas Woods complained recently on this site that reviewers of his book The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History have dismissed it without bothering to refute its evidence or arguments. He has a point. Critical reviews have been long on indignation and short on substance. Most reviewers have been content to cite h

Does Islam Condone Beheadings?

by Timothy R. Furnish

Lately, losing one’s head for Islam has most appropriately referred to livid, murderous mobs in Afghanistan and Pakistan who, unfortunately, took at face value Newsweek and its false story of American interrogators’ desecration of the Qur’an at Gitmo. Lest we forget, however—since it hasn’t happened for some months—there is a much more literal and horrific sense in which someone can lose his head for Islam, particularly if he is non-Muslim. Between

Maybe Now the Watergate Conspiracy Theories Will Finally Go Away

by David Greenberg

As the historian Stanley I. Kutler noted in Slate a few years ago, Deep Throat's significance has surely been inflated by journalists, who have been entranced by a story that matters more to them than to history. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had scores of sources for their Watergate reporting, and while Deep Throat—or, as we should now say,

Here We Go Again: Deep Throat Revealed?

by Joan Hoff

Now we have another spectacular Deep Throat story that will have the mainstream press buzzing for days–enamored as it is of Woodward and Bernstein as investigative reporters. Even Ben Bradley agrees now that Mark Felt, former number two man at the FBI in the 1970s, was indeed Deep Throat. Before historians jump on the Watergate bandwagon again, please consider the following: 1) Read the Vanity Fair art

Forget Al Haig, David Gergen, L. Patrick Gray, Fred Fielding, Bush 41 ... Deep Throat Was W. Mark Felt

by Rick Shenkman

On Tuesday May 31, 2005 the wires reported that former FBI official W. Mark Felt has admitted that he was Deep Throat, the famous Watergate source for Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. A story about his admission

Richard B. Morris and the Columbia Riots of 1968: The Truth Finally Is Out

by Philip Ranlet

The riots that rocked Columbia University during the memorable year of 1968 remain the most well known of the student rebellions of that tumultuous time. However, the version of the disturbance that historians

Why Congress Has Every Right to Investigate Baseball and Other Sports

by Julian E. Zelizer

The chair of the House Government Reform Committee, Tom Davis, House Democrat Henry Waxman and Senate Republican John McCain have announced that they will propose legislation to impose uniform drug testing standards on the four major U.S. professional sports leagues. The suspicions about superstar athletes such as Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa have caused many legislators to doubt that sports officials can crack down effectively on steroid abuse. Yet, according to many Americans, Congres

The 4 Historical Misunderstandings About Social Security

by Edward Berkowitz

This article was delivered as a talk to members of Congress in mid-May. It was one of a number of talks being sponsored by the American Historical Association as part of the National History Center's Congressional Breakfast Seminar Series.