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Summary of the Emory Report on Michael Bellesiles

by HNN Staff

Michael Bellesiles Chronology: Latest DevelopmentsBellesiles's Response to the ReportOther

Is the Alleged Sniper's Muslim Religion Worth Noting?

by Daniel Pipes

It came as no surprise to learn that the lead suspect as the Washington, D.C.,-area sniper is John Allen Muhammad, an African-American who converted to Islam about 17 years ago. Nor that seven years ago he provided security for Louis Farrakhan's "Million Man March." Even less does it amaze that he reportedly sympathized with the 9/11 attacks carried out by militant Islamic elements. All this was near-predictable because it fits into a well-established tradition of A

Was Bellesiles Really Threatened?

by John G. Fought

In June 2001, on the initiative of some members of the council of the Omohundro Institute, the American Historical Association council adopted a remarkable statement, considering "personal attacks upon or harassment of an author, as we have seen directed at Michael A. Bellesiles following publication of Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, to be inappropriate and damaging to a tradition of free exchange of ideas and the advancement of our k

Mr. Bellesiles’s Emails

by James Lindgren

Editor's Note: Last week HNN published a detailed article by Jerome Sternstein about the Bellesiles book, Arming America. The article included numerous references to emails Mr. Bellesiles wrote to Professor James Lindgren when the Bellesiles book first appeared. In response, Mr. Bellesiles disavowed the emails, implying he hadn't written them."I do not recognize those words as mine," Mr. Bellesiles told us

Are Michael Bellesiles’s Critics Afraid to Say What They Really Think?

by Jerome Sternstein

Click here to read Mr. Bellesiles's Response to Mr. Sternstein. Click here to read Mr. Sternstein's Response to Mr. Bellesiles. Has the time come to ask if Michael Bellesiles's Arming America is an example of scholarly deceit? Some defenders of Bellesiles's work have insisted in various forums that Bellesiles's

Regime Change? We've Been Here Before (And It Wasn't Pretty)

by Henry Butterfield Ryan

Regime change is a trendy new term for an old and special kind of intervention, the kind President Bush has in mind for Iraq and its unsavory leader, Saddam Hussein. Don't confuse it with preventing takeovers, restoring ousted leaders, removing ethnic-cleansing marauders or overthrowing governments that help terrorists attack us. We have done all of those things since World War II, but regime change consists exclusively of toppling an existing regime that displeases or

The Lesson the Palestinians Learned from Israelis (To the Israelis' Everlasting Regret)

by Caleb Carr

This is an excerpt from Mr. Carr's recent book. Following the Second World War, the campaign of Jewish terror reached its peak on July 22, 1946, when the Irgun--commanded by future Israeli prime minister Menahem Begin--blew up an entire wing of the famously beautiful King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Ninety people died: and once again, the vic- tims were Arabs, Britons, and Jews alike. Given such behavior, and given that they had long planned to leave anyway, the British in

Why Jimmy Deserved the Nobel Peace Prize

by Itai Sneh

On Oct. 11, the Norwegians awarded the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize to former President Jimmy Carter. By giving him this honor at this time, the Nobel Committee seized the opportunity to express its concern over the long-term global consequences of the aggressive, unilateral policy that the United States has initiated toward Iraq. Both the timing and the citation accompanying the prize hinted at more than Carter's undisputed courage in promoting peace and human rights. A one-term

Column: How Can We Go After Iraq and Not North Korea?

by P.M. Carpenter

"Q: How Many Ws Can Stand on the Head of a Pin?" If Fidel Castro has been reading the news about North Korea and is half the dictator he's made out to be, he would announce posthaste not that he's just thinking about arming his little regime with nuclear firepower, or that he's in the process of arming his little regime with nuclear firepower, but that he has, in fact, already armed himself with the radioactive buggers. At least then the White House would get of

With Us or Against Us: Why We Now Have to Put the Matter So Starkly

by Judith Apter Klinghoffer

With Us or Against Us in Word and Deed The United States is drawing lines in the sand, and its European and Middle Eastern allies do not like it. Analysts have pointed out the benefits France accrued from Arab anti-Americanism especially in the aftermath of its 1966 exit from the military command of NATO. Since 9/11, analysts have finally been drawing attention to the manner in which American Middle Eastern allies Egypt and Saudi Arabia have used anti-American propaganda

Why Those Election Results in Pakistan Are Frightening

by Juan Cole

The results of the elections held in Pakistan on October 10 have cast a shadow over the Bush administration's foreign policy. That policy has been driven by contradictory impulses -- curbing Islamic extremism, promoting democracy, beating the drums of war, and supporting dictatorial regimes friendly to the United States. The Pakistani electorate has pointed out the inconsistencies. When we hear that Iraqis will "dance in the streets" on being liberated

IBM and Auschwitz: New Evidence

by Edwin Black

This article is drawn from Mr. Black's just released and updated German paperback edition. The new edition includes the discovery of hard evidence linking IBM to Auschwitz. The evidence, detailed here, will be appended to his English language editions at the next reprinting in the new future.  

Pax Americana?

by Ira Chernus

For the Bush administration, the road of public policy leads to Rome. That's nothing new in U.S. history. Americans of the 19th century often pointed to the Roman republic as the model for our own rights and freedoms. But President Bush would have us emulate the Roman empire, creating world order by giving orders around the world. The fall of the twin towers in New York gave a tremendous boost to the advocates of empire within the administration. They sealed their victory in th

Column: Does President Bush Really Want an Independent Investigation of 9-11?

by P.M. Carpenter

Oh my. At the eleventh hour Iraqi diplomats threw a wrench into United Nations negotiations over the wording of inspection terms while insisting they're in "100 percent accordance" with that global body's determination to find out what in hell is going on in Baghdad. Every Earthling of passable intelligence knew this would happen, of course, and it just goes to show you, said a U.S. spokesman, "once again the Iraqis want to delay and deceive." Tr

Korean Delusions

by Daniel Pipes

What is it about democracies that at critical moments they delude themselves into thinking that they can contain their totalitarian enemies through a policy of niceness? In the 1930s, the British and French leaderships believed that appeasement - accepting Adolf Hitler's annexation of Czechoslovakia - would satiate the German dictator's aggressiveness. In the 1970s, three American presidents thought that détente with Leonid Brezhnev would make it possible to build a U.S.-So

Presidency: Brent Scowcroft on Jimmy Carter

This past week Jimmy Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize. Last May HNN published an excerpt about President Carter from A World Transformed (1998), the memoir written jointly by President George Herbert Walker Bush and General Brent Scowcroft, his national security advisor. General Scowcroft is credited in the book as the author of the excerpt, which concerns events leading up to the passage of UN resolution 678 on November 29, 1990. The resolution gave Iraq an ultimatum: get out of Ku

Column: Pseudo-Americanism

by P.M. Carpenter

In their seemingly hysterical rush to militarily confront an enemy who poses no imminent threat to U.S. national security, ultraconservatives once again are demonstrating that the real war in which they see themselves engaged is a domestic-not foreign-one. The old bugaboo of liberalism, born in the 1930s and nurtured publicly until the mid-1970s, may only draw a shallow breath every now and then, but the Right wants it dead, dead … definitely dead. Nothing less wi

HNN Series: My Life as a Historian ... THOMAS FLEMING

Some pundit once remarked that for most Americans, history was what happened to other people. I don't agree with that contention for both personal and philosophical reasons. In fact, it would not be much of an exaggeration to say I have devoted my writing life to exploding the idea.To a surprising degree, encounters with history have shaped my life. My first encounter took place in a parking lot outside Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City, when I was seven years old. My father steered me

Bellesiles: Do the People Who Favorably Reviewed the Bellesiles Book Owe Readers an Apology?

by Glenn Harlan Reynolds

The brave minuteman armed with his trusty rifle, Bellesiles told us, was mostly a myth — Americans at the time of the Revolution, and for many decades afterward, seldom owned guns, but instead relied on the government for protection. Bellesiles received glowing reviews in the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, the Atlantic Monthly, and many other publications, from reviewers who were often visibly ple

The Price of Historical Amnesia

by Ron Briley

As schools begin to reopen all over the country, teachers, especially those in history, will express disappointment over how much their students have forgotten during the summer. But perhaps we are too quick to chide our young people for not maintaining intellectual engagement. It may well be that their forgetfulness simply reflects the historical and cultural amnesia which seems to characterize modern memory in the United States. As we bemoan low test scores and the short at