The Latest 
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Unconditional Surrender: The Domestic Politics of Victory in the Pacific
Marc Gallicchio
The terms on which the United States pressed Japan for surrender were shaped by American domestic politics; New Deal Democrats and their liberal allies succeeded in convincing Harry Truman that it was necessary to dramatically rebuild Japan's society along more social-democratic lines.
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The 1976 Election: Why We Can't Predict Vice Presidential Selections in Advance
Daniel K. Williams
The 1976 campaign highlights a paradox: while the person a presidential nominee chooses as their running mate might be surprising, that individual is selected using criteria that are predictable.
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Hiroshima (1953, Hideo Sekigawa)
View a segment from, and read about, Hideo Sekigawa's 1953 film "Hiroshima."
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Blog
The Apocalypse Factory: Steve Olson Discusses the Path of Plutonium From Hanford Nuclear Reservation to Nagasaki
Robin Lindley
Author Steve Olson makes sense of the complexities of the nuclear age by telling the story of plutonium processing in Hanford, Washington, arguably the key site in the history of nuclear weapons.
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Let's Return Historical Attention to the Crowd
Peter N. Stearns
Historians have much to add to the social science theory on crowds and can help advance understanding past simplistic and mechanistic understandings of today's public unrest.
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History, Memory and Reconciliation with the (Whole) Past
Ralph Young
When we reflect on the monuments we need to ask: does the statue memorialize a person or event that was a force for creating a more perfect union or a force that sought to demolish the United States?
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75 Years Later, Purple Hearts Made for an Invasion of Japan are Still Being Awarded
D.M. Giangreco
There has been much debate about how close the United States was to victory in the Pacific before the atomic bombs were dropped 75 years ago this week. But in 1945, the military ordered so many Purple Heart medals in anticipation of an invasion of Japan that medals from that supply are still being awarded today.
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Honor a Hiroshima Survivor's Legacy: Ban Nuclear Testing and Move to Disarmament
William Lambers
Miyoko Matsubara survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and became an advocate for abolishing nuclear weapons. The United States Senate can honor her and all victims and survivors of nuclear war by ratifying the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
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Five Strictly Professional Reasons Why Historians Dislike Donald Trump
Walter G. Moss
Historians may dislike Trump for many reasons that apply equally to our fellow Americans. But we also dislike him because he violates so many of the values important to us as historians.
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Reflections from "That Further Shore": A Constitutional Lawyer's Immigrant Family History
John Feerick
John Feerick's work in constitutional law helped create the 25th Amendment, and an unadopted amendment to abolish the Electoral College. His recent family history and memoir shows how his immigrant parents laid a foundation for this success.
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Blog
Tumultuous Transitions in the American Presidency
Ronald L. Feinman
Presidential transitions can be bumpy. Whether the next one is in 2021 or 2025 it may prove to be the bumpiest yet.
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Federal Agents, “Insurrection,” and the Long, Bloody History of U.S. Counterinsurgency
Rachel Ida Buff
Now, on the streets of U.S. cities, federal agents join militarized police in waging war on Americans who are exercising their lawful rights of freedom of speech and assembly. There is no doubt that the results endanger us all.
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The 1976 Election: Why We Can't Predict Vice Presidential Selections in Advance
Daniel K. Williams
The 1976 campaign highlights a paradox: while the person a presidential nominee chooses as their running mate might be surprising, that individual is selected using criteria that are predictable.
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The Mississippi Flag and the Shadow of Lynching
David T.Z. Mindich
Lynching helped to raise the odious flag in 1894. But in 2020, hundreds of thousands of marchers protesting the lynching of George Floyd brought the flag down.
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Did the Atomic Bomb End the Pacific War? – Part I
Paul Ham
Many people, including historians, believe that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused Japan's unconditional surrender, saved a million American lives, and was the least morally repellent way to end World War II. Paul Ham contends that none of this is true.
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Learning from Lincoln: Meeting Crisis with Action
William L. Barney
The United States is at a crossroads. The path chosen will determine whether contemporary America resumes its role as a beacon of hope and progress to the rest of the world or joins the Confederate slaveholders of the past among history’s losers.
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Free Speech and Civic Virtue between "Fake News" and "Wokeness"
Campbell F. Scribner
Left critics of the recent "Harper's Magazine" open letter on free speech and open debate make some claims that are narrowly meritorious. But they don't address the value of speech as a way of building the collective citizenship necessary for democracy. In this respect, the signers are correct.
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Better Than Silence: The Need for Memorials to the Manhattan Project
Stephen Kiernan
Creating the bomb was both a milestone achievement, and a profound expansion of the limits of warfare. This complexity deserves a permanent public memorial.
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Conventional Culture in the Third Reich
Moritz Föllmer
Although Nazi aesthetics are generally associated with the monumental architecture of Albert Speer and the propaganda films of Leni Riefenstahl, Germans generally encountered conventionality in art, music and cinema. This helped to normalize the acts of the Third Reich and to allow ordinary Germans to dissociate themselves from Nazism after 1945.
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The Battle of The Atlantic has Lessons for Fighting COVID-19
Marc Wortman
Pleasure-seekers and shoreline business owners on the east coast of the United States rejected voluntary calls to dim their lights in 1942. German U-Boat crews devastated shipping and commerce until compulsory blackouts were enforced.
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30 Years Later: Saddam Hussein's Fateful Decision to Invade Kuwait
Guy Laron
It was clear from the outset that this was a desperate gamble that put Iraq on a collision course with Washington. But Saddam believed he had no other choice but to stop Kuwait from dumping oil into a slack market.
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Who’s Our Roy Cohn?
Andrew Feffer
Two documentaries on the notorious lawyer and fixer portray Roy Cohn as a figure of evil, but don't examine the social and political context of power in New York City.
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From Historical Injustice to Contemporary Police Brutality, and Costs of Monuments to the Unworthy
Billy J. Stratton
Silas Soule and Joseph Cramer, two Civil War-era heroes who rebelled and refused to join a brutal attack against Native peoples represent the moral courage we would do well to honor.
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What's in an Un-Naming? Berkeley's Kroeber Hall
Tony Platt
Alfred Kroeber built the University of California's anthropology department into a world leader literally with the bones of the Native peoples of California. It's time to honor them.
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Constitutional Textualism, Slavery and Undocumented Immigrants
Alan J. Singer
Just reading the Constitutional text, without context, does not help us understand what Antonin Scalia called “the fairly understood meaning of those words.”
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The History of the Boycott Shows a Real Cancel Culture
Mark Holan
Authors, academics, musicians, and others bothered by their work being “cancelled” might consider the original boycott for some needed perspective.
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Yes, Even George Washington Can Be Redeemed
Richard Lim
While we cannot ignore Washingon's participation in slavery, we shouldn’t discount his remarkable transformation into someone who wished for its abolition and took steps personally to make things right, becoming the only major founder to free his slaves.
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Blog
What Does it Mean to be Progressive in 2020?
Steve Hochstadt
The political conspiracy theories of the right assume that Democratic voters actively support evil. The conspiracy theories of the “Never Biden” element of the left assume that we are j...
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Blog
Prepare for Massive Turnover on the Supreme Court in the Next Four Years
Ronald L. Feinman
Age, health, and political calculations about securing an ideologically sympathetic replacement could prompt as many as six Supreme Court Justices to leave the court in the next four-year president...
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The Roundup Top Ten for July 31, 2020
The top op-eds by historians or about history from around the web this week.
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Let Us Now Remove Famous Men
Calvin Schermerhorn
Should the statues remain up, doing the quiet work of reinforcing white supremacy while we get to work dismantling the interlocking components of structural racism? Or are the statues part of a 400-year history of violence against African-descended people that needs urgent attention and rectification?
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What's in a Name?: Decolonizing Sports Mascots
Paul C. Rosier
Decolonizing sports history requires a deeper analysis of how false historical narratives that ‘blamed the victim’ became embedded in public venues in everyday life that shaped generations of Americans’ perceptions of Native people.
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Lincoln, Cass, and Daniel Chester French: Homely Politicians Divided by Politics, United through Art
Harold Holzer
In the age before the glare of television and instantaneous photography were relentlessly aimed at our leaders, politicians could succeed even if they looked like Lewis Cass. Or Abraham Lincoln.
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One of the Chicago 7 Reflects on Dissident Politics Then and Now
Lee Weiner
A veteran of dissident politics in the 1960s warns that while today's broad coalition of activists for a more just and democratic America are on the right track, they must learn from the mistakes of an older generation and find ways to keep united despite difference.
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Mankato’s Hanging Monument Excluded Indigenous Perspectives when it was Erected and when it was Removed
John Legg
Both while it stood and when its presence became inconvenient, the Hanging Monument shows how memorials control historical narratives and elevate particular interpretations of the past.
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What the Faithless Electors Decision Says about SCOTUS and Originalism
Ray Raphael
The outcome of the "faithless electors" case shows that judicial "originalists" use that principle pragmatically and selectively.
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Two Contagions, One Opportunity to Reboot our Approach
Steve Pyne
Outbursts of megafires resemble emerging diseases because they are typically the outcome of broken biotas – a ruinous interaction between people and nature that unhinges the old checks and balances.
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"You Sold Me to Your Mother-in-Law...": An Ongoing Quest to Reconnect a Family
Ken Lawrence
David Jackson had been forcibly separated from members of his family with no word of their subsequent fates for more than two decades, yet he had not given up hope of finding them. Can today’s historians shed light on his quest?
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Will the Crisis Year of 2020 Turn Out Like 1968?
James Thornton Harris
Trump’s attempt to use Nixon’s outdated playbook will fail. Our nation is younger, more diverse and better educated now. We know better.
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Who Opened the Door to Trumpism? David Frum's "Trumpocalypse" Reviewed
David O'Connor
Through his long analysis of Trump’s follies, Frum never develops his contention that twenty-first-century conservatism helped open the door for Trump. Without a full accounting, his political mea culpa is hollow and fails to offer guidance on how to avoid mistakes in the future.
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Weighing the Evidence when a President is Accused of Antisemitism
Rafael Medoff
In weighing the evidence that has so far been produced concerning Trump, one must consider the standards that historians have applied with regard to the other three presidents who have been accused of antisemitism—Richard Nixon, Harry Truman, and Franklin Roosevelt.
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Can Martin Luther King’s Spiritual Vision Kindle a New Progressivism?
Walter G. Moss
Advocates for a broader social democratic political agenda should consider the spiritual roots of Martin Luther King's activism, which have historically engaged a broad range of political views to reform movements.
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Blog
Don’t Tear Down the Wrong Monuments; Don’t Attack Every Holiday
Jim Loewen
When COVID concerns allow, visit the Gettysburg and Vicksburg battlefields, and come to your own conclusion about how the National Park S...
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Roundup Top Ten for July 24, 2020
HNN's weekly roundup of the best op-eds by historians and about history from around the web.
News
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