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History News Network

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Roundup Top 10!


How Not to Be the Next Brian Williams

by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons

Ten ways to avoid false memories.


Black Men Were Burned Alive in the Bible Belt

by Bill Moyers

Jesse Washington was just one black man to die horribly at the hands of white death squads.


Don’t blame Sykes-Picot

by James L. Gelvin

Sykes and Georges-Picot have become the obligatory villains in narratives that give pride of place to the imperialist perfidy that has frustrated Arab or Islamic unity and is responsible for the multiple failures of the contemporary Middle Eastern state.


To the terrorists, Obama is ‘Crusader in chief’

by Marc A. Thiessen

Islamic radicals have long invoked the Crusades to justify violence against the West, including the 9/11 attacks.


Is Pope Francis a "Radical Leftist"?

by John Fea

Popes actually haver a history of engaging in politics.


America Needs a More Focused and Restrained National Security Strategy

by Ivan Eland

If Obama wants a lasting legacy in foreign policy, he should be the first president in the post-Cold War era to create a coherent and sustainable national security strategy that deals with the current limited real threats to U.S. security and hedges against the future rising of China.


Black History Month doesn’t name white supremacy and unwittingly facilitates it

by Steven W Thrasher

Learning tales of black exceptionalism, and contrasting them to the stereotypes of lazy slaves and indebted sharecroppers, underscores ongoing racial divides


Why are we obsessed with the Nazis?

by Richard J Evans

How has thinking about the Third Reich changed over the decades? And does it exert such a grip because it represents racism in its most extreme form?


Vietnam’s Quiet Anniversary

by Jeff Shesol

On this fiftieth anniversary, we owe the soldiers and ourselves an honest reckoning with the causes and costs of this war.


Is it too early to start writing biographies of George W. Bush?

by David Greenberg

In a new biography James Mann largely exempts Bush’s anti-regulatory stance from culpability for the debacle of 2008, placing most of the blame on decisions made under Bill Clinton.