How Do You Fire a Special Prosecutor? Ask Harry Truman.
By Andrew Coan
The Latest 
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What Historians are Saying: In Response to Max Boot's Op Ed on Historians
Max Boot published an article saying historians are not engaged enough with the public. Here's how historians reacted.
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Why Aren't Americans More Enraged About Russian Interference? World War 2 History Helps Explain
William K. Klingaman
Even after Pearl Harbor, "the Greatest Generation" was often complacent about foriegn threats.
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The Polar Bear Expedition: When America Intervened in Russian Affairs
James Carl Nelson
As allegations and investigations swirl around the questions of Russian intervention in our 2016 elections, it’s worth a look back one hundred years to our own intervention in Russia.
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Roundup Top 10!
This week's broad sampling of opinion pieces found on the Internet, as selected by the editors of HNN.
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We Need to Acknowledge the Power of the Israel Lobby
Walter L. Hixson
Israel and its American supporters have assembled the most powerful lobby pursuing the interests of a foreign country in all American history.
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“National Security Crisis” or “Power Grab”?
M. Andrew Holowchak
It’s not the Constitutionality of Trump’s Wall, but Its Morality that Matters
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Proof that Bombs Can Stop Genocide
Rafael Medoff
If President Roosevelt had heeded the pleas that were made in 1944 to use force against the machinery of genocide, many lives could have been saved.
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How the Shortest Presidency Spurred a Brief Constitutional Crisis
Suzy Evans
William Henry Harrision only served as president for 31 days but he still sparked a constituional debate.
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What Dinesh D’Souza's "Death of a Nation" Gets Wrong About Martin Van Buren
Mark Cheathem
D’Souza’s inability, or unwillingness, to ground his case in actual evidence calls into question his motivation and suggests that he wants to use history as partisan propaganda, not as a way to illuminate the past.
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Whose Country is This? Trump, Coolidge, and Immigration
Bruce W. Dearstyne
It was a central question a century ago, and still is today. President Coolidge and President Trump might have similar answers.
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What To Know About the History of Impeachment
Peter Charles Hoffer
A primer on the constitutional basis of impeachment, when it's been used before, and what that means for our current political moment.
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Sacrificing Greatness For Personal Ambition
Alon Ben-Meir
An Open Letter to Turksih President Erdogan
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Do We Make Writing on Jefferson Harder than It Really Is?
M. Andrew Holowchak
Jeffersonian scholarship is not a fool’s errand, but it is extremely arduous.
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Barack Obama, Politics, and Presidential Rankings
Ronald L. Feinman
How can political circumstances alter how scholars rank past presidents?
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America Needs a Moral Leader in 2020
Donald J. Fraser
And we can look to Abraham Lincoln as an example.
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What I’m Reading: An Interview With Historian Nikki Taylor
Erik Moshe
"We must be able to see and write about the humanity in both our heroes and villains."
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UPDATED: What Historians Are Saying About Trump's National Emergency and Press Conference
A curated collection of Tweets and articles from across the web.
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Is the Green New Deal Impossible?
James Brewer Stewart
The Green New Dealers, the Abolitionists and the “Right Side of History”
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What a Japanese-American soldier’s thirty-year secret can teach us about race, war, and loyalty
Sandra Vea
Interpreters with the Military Intelligence Service (MIS) during WW2 were credited for shortening the war in the South Pacific by two years. Yet, they had to keep their service secret for 30 years.
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Blog
The Worldwide Problem of Holocaust Ignorance – and The Barriers to Solving It
Steve Hochstadt
Because encouraging diversity and fighting prejudice are politically controversial, Holocaust education is a partisan political act, and always has been.
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Roundup Top 10!
This week's broad sampling of opinion pieces found on the Internet, as selected by the editors of HNN.
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Blog
Congress and the Trump Administration Are Using and Abusing History At Least Six Times a Day
Checkered History
A new interactive tool helps us understand how politicians use history--and how historians can respond.
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Alexander the Great and "The Republic of Northern Macedonia"
Robert Garland
How Alexander the Great helped created a naming controversy 2,500 years later that was just resolved.
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Old Concepts for New Concerns: the Railroad, the Internet, and Government Regulation
Tom Wheeler
"The principles underpinning the industrial era rules remain valid today, they simply need updating to reflect the capabilities of the new technology." writes the former FCC Chairman.
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The American Tourist in Paris: A Retrospective
Lauren Jannette
Although no longer breaking furniture, running out on checks, and throwing racist fits about the evening’s entertainment, Americans remain an integral part of Paris’s continued debates over the benefits and detriments of being one of the world’s largest tourists destinations.
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Combatting Crimes against History
Antoon De Baets
Those who died while exercising their right to history are testimony to the fact that the historian’s craft is vulnerable, that its integrity needs constant vigilance and protection, that the defence of its basic principles is a duty for all, always, and everywhere.
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The British, with Guitars and Drums, Invade America in 1963
Bruce Chadwick
As the song goes, rock and roll is here to stay.
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Why the Congress of Racial Equality Has Been Forgotten – And Why It Still Matters Today
L.E.J. Rachell
We need to go back to CORE to have a better understanding of the ongoing antiracist movement.
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We Need to Re-think Our Characterization of Trump’s Trade War, and “Mercantilism” Just Doesn’t Cut It
Randal Grant Kleiser
Characterizing Trump as a “mercantilist” misleads the public into thinking he follows a stable, precedented, and predictable ideology on trade.
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Why Our World Seems Out of Control
Walter G. Moss
What the world needs more than ever are wise political leaders who can redirect technology to serve the common good.
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What I'm Reading: An Interview with Urban Historian Carl Abbott
Tiffany April Griffin
"We understand our lives and world by the stories we tell about how we—and things in general—got to be as they are."
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Book Review: Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny (2018)
Jeff Roquen
Although more than one thousand books have been written on his life, the recently-published Churchill: Walking with Destiny (2018) by Andrew Roberts merits consideration as the newly definitive one-volume biography of its subject.
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Revisiting the Wright Brothers and the History of Human Flight
Ken Lawrence
What William Hazelgrove's Wright Brothers, Wrong Story gets wrong about the Wright brothers.
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Don’t Expect Rulers of Nuclear-Armed Nations to Accept Nuclear Disarmament―Unless They’re Pushed to Do So
Lawrence Wittner
Although the rulers of nuclear-armed nations are usually eager to foster nuclear buildups, substantial public pressure can secure their acceptance of nuclear disarmament.
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What Historians Are Saying: State of the Union 2019
What historians are saying on Twitter about Pelosi, Trump, and the postponed State of the Union address.
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State of the Union: How Can We Assess Donald Trump’s First Two Years in Office?
Michael Nelson
For all his decline in effectiveness, Trump has not become less influential.
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Roundup Top 10!
This week's broad sampling of opinion pieces found on the Internet, as selected by the editors of HNN.
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Don’t Invade Venezuela
Alan McPherson
Contrary to what most believe, a military intervention in South America would be unprecedented
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What Historians Are Saying: Ralph Northam, Blackface, and the KKK
Historians contextualized the Virginia governor's yearbook photos--and had a lot to say.
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Feisty Singer Nina Simone Is Back in New Play
Bruce Chadwick
Little Girl Blue drew an engrossing portrait of entertainment history in that era and showed the discrimination African Americans faced.
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Blog
Happy Belated Birthday, Jackie Robinson!
Steve Hochstadt
A personal reflection on baseball, family, and one sports legend.
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Why Elliott Abrams is the Right Man for the Job in Venezuela
Teresa Meade
His career stretches back through some of the most sordid instances of US intervention and brutality.
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Sleeping Giant: When Public Workers Awake
Leon Fink
What W.E.B. Du Bois and American labor history can teach us about the government shutdown's end.
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What Popular Histories Often Get Wrong About the Underground Railroad
Roy E. Finkenbine
Underground Railroad activists and fugitive slaves had to improvise in response to ever-shifting circumstances.
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Why Do Few People Know the History of Northern Slavery?
Marc Howard Ross
How and why was the enslavement of tens of thousands of people in the region forgotten, and how and why has it recently been partially recovered?
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What I’m Reading: An Interview With Cultural Historian Surekha Davies
Erik Moshe
Understanding the past involves mental stamina and breadth
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The Inspiring Campaign We All Need to Remember at this Horrible Time in Politics
Joel K. Goldstein
It was the campaign run by Vice Presidential candidate Ed Muskie in 1968.
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To Free or Not to Free
M. Andrew Holowchak
A Theoretical Botheration with Jefferson’s View of Slavery
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Six Times the Failure of a Political Nomination Changed American History
Ronald L. Feinman
Including slavery, gay marriage, abortion rights, and desegregation.
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Updated: Black History Month – What Historians Are Saying
Historians' tweets and retweets on Black History this Black History Month.
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Marie Colvin: an Amazing Woman Whose Life Was Cut Short Trying to Present Us with the Truth
James Thornton Harris
In Extremis, Lindsey Hilsum's new biography of the journalist, shows that underlying the glamor of celebrity and the adrenaline-rush of dodging gunfire was a committed humanitarian.
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Blog
What History Can Teach Us About Capitalism, Socialism, and Inequality
Steve Hochstadt
Growing inequality is not only an American problem, but a global problem that keeps getting worse.
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Bold Experimenter FDR Was Born 137 Years Ago
Joseph A. Esposito
Unquestionably, Roosevelt is the most consequential American president since Abraham Lincoln.
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Roundup Top 10!
This week's broad sampling of opinion pieces found on the Internet, as selected by the editors of HNN.
News
- Timothy Thomas Fortune: A Great, Forgotten Black Radical
- Black History Trail Makes 200 Stops Across Massachusetts
- Emmett Till's Murder and How America Remembers Its Darkest Moments
- ‘Slavery is not a game’: Virginia school apologizes over Black History Month exercise
- How the Republican Response to the Mueller Investigation Breaks With History
- Every Sunday, These Historians Go to the Movies — All in the Name of Digital Community
- History has a massive gender bias. We’ll settle for fixing Wikipedia.
- Historians fight back as TV raids their research treasures for its shows
- "The North Star" Launches with Keisha N. Blain as Editor-in-Chief
- New Interactive Tool Maps the American War on Terror
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