Over on Civil Warriors I've begun a couple of posts on Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck, aka"Old Brains" -- probably the least martial nickname in American military history. Nowadays Halleck is an obscure figure. I doubt that anyone who is not a U.S.

Louis Menand,"Lives of Others,

There is no dearth of teaching materials available on the web. Although this site is primarily a teaching resource, it is atypical; rather than providing lesson plans, its emphasis is on helping students understand the nature of historical evidence and the work of creating historical interpretation.

To do so, this well-designed site asks students to solve a historical whodunit. William Robinson, an African American, was murdered in the British colony of Salt Spring Island (British Colum

Up Front

History Buzz Bonnie Goodman

News at Home

What Murdoch Won't Want to Change at the Wall Street Journal Robert Brent Toplin

Will We Ever Get National Health Insurance? Jill Quadagno

The Scary Origins of Chief Justice Roberts's Decision Opposing the Use of R

Harvey Mansfield,"Athei

Brandon Watson's"Political Discourse and Quotation," Siris, 3 August, continues a discussion begun by Nonpartisan's"Obama, Originality,

One interesting minor theme of my recent museum visits here in London has been, I suppose, the popular origins of wargames (as opposed to the intellectual origins): I've been coming across a number of games, produced in the first half of the twentieth century and aimed presumably at children, which represent war in some way. War games,

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The phrase that has been irritating me lately is “the elephant in the room.” It’s been around a while. I remember it coming up in therapy discussions of family dynamics and denial in the mid-1980s. That is long before

Environmental historians are no strangers to controversy. In the last twenty-five years numerous scholars have studied the history of environmental protection in Nazi Germany, a provocative topic if there ever was one. Braving criticism for seeming to draw parallels between modern"green" parties and one of the most brutal regimes in history, historians have explored such things as the protection of natural area