History News Network

historiography

Originally published 12/24/2014
What’s Wrong with the Way We Think About Presidents: An Interview with Julian E. Zelizer

Our inflated idea of presidential power, what’s happening with the book industry, and other topics.

Originally published 12/13/2013
The Black Hole of Apartheid History

Why historians should study the regime, not just its opponents.

Originally published 11/27/2013
Diminishing Returns of the Global Turn

Global history has met the law of diminishing returns in its insights.

Originally published 11/25/2013
Documenting Historians' Revolutionary Demographic Change

In 1962, the president of the American Historical Association warned about young historians of "lower middle-class or foreign origins." How times have (thankfully) changed.

Originally published 10/28/2013
This Is What Happens When Historians Overuse the Idea of the Network

Historians have been applying the network -- the controlling metaphor of the digital age -- to everything, even the distant past. Maybe that's not such a great idea.

Originally published 10/09/2013
New Age Travellers adapting traditional horse-drawn caravans

Modern nomadic groups draw from traditional historical culture while still using technology.

Originally published 09/24/2013
British historian says we should ‘look beyond Europe and America’

Lecturer says profession should widen its global outlook.

Originally published 09/09/2013
Review of James Goodman's "But Where Is the Lamb? Imagining the Story of Abraham and Isaac"

An ambitious work of cultural history that resonates far beyond its biblical subject

Originally published 08/20/2013
In Defense of the Late, Great Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn will be read for decades; his critics, not so much.

Originally published 08/08/2013
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: Towards a Radical New Theory of Anglo-American Slavery, and Vindication of Free Markets

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is International Business Editor of The Daily Telegraph. He has covered world politics and economics for 30 years, based in Europe, the US, and Latin America. He joined the Telegraph in 1991, serving as Washington correspondent and later Europe correspondent in Brussels.With luck it will help to vindicate the fathers of liberal government and the free market in the 17th and 18th Centuries, falsely accused until now of abetting - or promoting - the great crime of race-based African slavery.For academic orthodoxy holds that John Locke and the great Whig thinkers of the Glorious Revolution (1688) helped to design and foster the economic system of hereditary slavery that shaped Atlantic capitalism for a century and a half.From that it is but a step to dismiss the moral claims of liberalism as so much humbug, to write off all the talk of justice, natural rights, inviolable contracts and government by consent as the self-interested catechism of oppressors. As Samuel Johnson said acidly: "How is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?"

Originally published 04/15/2013
Towards a New History of the Civil Rights Movement

LBJ signs the Voting Rights Act while Martin Luther King, Jr. looks on.Hilary Rodham Clinton awoke on the morning of January 3, 2008, exhausted and depressed. The New York Senator had started her quest for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination believing in its inevitability, only to be surprisingly blindsided by Barack Obama, a forty-six year old first term Senator. Only a few hours earlier, Obama had crushed Clinton in the Iowa caucus and now her advisors feared defeat in the upcoming New Hampshire primary. She was stunned while her husband, former President Bill Clinton, was furious. “[Obama’s] a phony,” Clinton insisted, “…he has no experience…What has he really done?”

Originally published 02/25/2013
Jim Cullen: Review of James M. Banner Jr.'s "Being a Historian: An Introduction to the Professional World of History" (Cambridge, 2012)

Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. His new book, Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions, was published last month by Oxford University Press. Cullen blogs at American History Now.

Originally published 01/16/2013
What are the 10 Most Important Documents in American History?

Announcing the winners in the reader poll "What are the 10 Most Important Documents in American History?" Nearly 800 readers voted -- the most important document in American history is the Marshall Plan!*Note: The Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and Bill of Rights were specifically EXCLUDED from the poll, since they'd be in the top three practically by default. We wanted to give other documents a chance!

Originally published 12/07/2014
How Two Historians Responded to Racism in Mississippi

One wrote a textbook passing along the racist myths of Reconstruction. The other wrote a textbook challenging them.

Originally published 06/27/2014
Surowiecki on Intellectual Piracy

James Surowiecki had an excellent articlein the June 9 issue of the New Yorker about countries committing intellectual piracy. It includes a nice summary of how "stealing" patented ideas played a major role in the early economic development of the United States. In the process, it surveys some of the considerable historical evidence debunking the widespread myth that intellectual property is necessary for, or even makes a contribution to, economic growth.