Historians/History

Channelling George Washington: The Missing Word in the Declaration of Independence

by Thomas Fleming

“I bet you can’t tell me the important word that Tom Jefferson left out of the Declaration of Independence.”“You’ve got me baffled, Mr. President. What is it?”“Brotherhood.”“A fascinating thought. The French included it in their declaration in 1789. Liberté, egalité, fraternité. Did anyone notice this in your lifetime?”“It occurred to me when I became president, and tried to govern our new country. I didn’t say anything about it. But I did a few things.”“Give us some examples.”

Robert Caro and the Mythical Cuban Missile Crisis

by Sheldon M. Stern

The editor-in-chief of HNN, Rick Shenkman, asked me recently if I would write a critique of the account of the Cuban missile crisis in Robert Caro’s The Passage of Power, Volume 4 of his authoritative biography of Lyndon B. Johnson. Shenkman felt that Caro had utilized “myths that you debunked years ago on HNN” -- and, unfortunately, he was right.

LBJ Thought Nixon Committed Treason to Win the 1968 Election

by Ken Hughes

The president, in a telephone call to Senate Minority Leader said of Nixon's suspected sabotage of Vietnamese peace talks, "This is treason."

Is Independence Day a Radical Holiday?

by Hsuan L. Hsu

Fourth of July on Helena Island, SC, 1939. Credit: NARAAsk people what we celebrate on Independence Day, and they’ll probably name a discrete historical event such as the signing of the Declaration of Independence or the American Revolution. But for over two centuries, diverse groups have continually invoked and contested ideas underlying the Declaration and the Revolutionary War in ways that recall William Faulkner’s observation that “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Since 1776, the meaning of July 4 has become much broader and more complex than literal interpretations of U.S. history would suggest. The Revolution and the Declaration of Independence have taken on a range of meanings for people in the U.S. and throughout the world fighting to realize their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The struggle for independence did not end when Cornwallis surrendered -- it only shifted from open war to political contests over ideas and policy.

The Real Reason the Bible Bans Homosexuality

by Eric Berkowitz

With the exception of requiring husbands to be faithful to their wives -- at least in theory -- the Hebrews treated adultery much as their neighbors did. They struck out on their own, however, in designating a new sexual “abomination” where there had been no precedent: The Bible made anal sex between men a crime of the worst order, for which death by stoning became the only option. “Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable,” commands Leviticus. “Their blood will be on their own heads.” Men had been “lying together” since the beginning of civilization, of course. This was the first time they risked their lives by doing so.

The Forgotten American Pandemic: Historian Dr. Nancy K. Bristow on the Influenza Epidemic of 1918

by Robin Lindley

The epidemic is seldom mentioned, and most Americans have apparently forgotten it. This is not surprising. The human mind always tries to expunge the intolerable from memory, just as it tries to conceal it while current.--H.L. Mencken on the 1918 influenza epidemicThe toll was staggering. From 1918 to 1920, influenza killed more that 50 million people as it spread around the world in the worst pandemic in recorded history.In the United States, the flu infected a quarter of the population and killed 675,000 people -- more than ten times the number of American combat deaths in World War I. And this unusual form of influenza proved especially lethal to healthy young adults. The epidemic shook the confidence of medical professionals who were unable to determine the cause of the outbreak or develop a cure.

America's Moral Reckoning with War

by Raymond Haberski

As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wind down, we might assume that the conversation about them and the future of American war efforts will enter a new stage. With a little space from the heat of these battles, we might even expect a moral accounting of these wars. But what would that sound like?Since 1945, generations of Americans have lived in a constant state of conflict -- not war, necessarily, but something in between peace and the kind of all-consuming engagement of World War II. Thus, Americans have for better or worse slowly come to understand their nation through both the metaphor of war (e.g. the “war on drugs,” “the war on poverty”) as well as through the trials of real conflict. So as some troops come home from overseas, others will remain. As the most intense violence declines, Americans will continue to hear about people dying and killing for their nation. In short, moral questions about war will remain.

This is Not Your Grandfather's Germany

by Kevin Kennedy

Victor Davis Hanson has ambivalent thoughts about the Germans. On the one hand, he admires the characteristically “German” traits of hard work, thrift, and sound financial management, which, according to him, have made Germany the most productive and prosperous economy in the European Union. But he also believes that other E.U. nations, especially those bordering the Mediterranean, resent German success. They don’t appreciate Germany’s demands that they abandon their profligate ways and adopt more Teutonic attitudes to money, work, and efficiency. Irresponsible nations like France (which has just elected a” socialist” president), as well as Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland now threaten to infect the rest of the E.U. with anti-German sentiment. Hanson warns us that this is a dangerous scenario. For as admirable as many German traits may be, there is another one that always appears whenever Germany has been “united and isolated”: bellicosity. Therefore, as Hanson concludes, all members of the E.U. must either adopt German fiscal policies (meaning they must put severe austerity measures into place), or Germany will unleash another blitzkrieg upon them.

Reflecting on Military Service

by Vaughn Davis Bornet

I shall depart here from reflecting on my scholarly life, for this is the time, in between Memorial Day and the anniversary of D-Day, where my thoughts go back to my military service. I was on active duty for the four-and-a-half years of World War II, and spent an additional eighteen-and-a-half years in the Naval Reserve. There's bound to be conjecture in my views, and some readers may hold very different opinions.But military service had its effect on me, that’s for sure.For one thing, I think it knocked a certain self-centeredness out of me. I had to think about the other guy whether I wanted to or not. His actions could affect me, I soon came to realize. He was, so to speak, holding the ladder for me; or, if so inclined, he could be throwing a wild pitch at me from a short distance. To a kid accustomed to living the lonely life of a graduate student, one likely to virtually ignore other solitary, even isolated, classmates, life in the military was a new and somewhat unnerving experience.

Who Invented Memorial Day?

by Jim Downs

"Contrabands at Headquarters of General Lafayette," by Mathew Brady, 1862.As Americans enjoy the holiday weekend, does anyone know how Memorial Day originated?On May 1, 1865, freed slaves gathered in Charleston, South Carolina to commemorate the death of Union soldiers and the end of the American Civil War. Three years later, General John Logan issued a special order that May 30, 1868 be observed as Decoration Day, the first Memorial Day -- a day set aside "for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet church-yard in the land."

It's Time for a National World War I Memorial

by Julian Saltman

Liberty Memorial in Kansas City (Wikipedia)On Monday Americans will gather to celebrate Memorial Day, a holiday on which we honor those who have served, and fallen, in our country's armed forces. Veterans and their descendants will participate in ceremonies and parades across the country, and many will be in Washington, D.C., to visit the national memorials dedicated to the wars in which they fought.But there is one glaring exception: World War I.Despite nearing the centenary of the war's outbreak, the United States still lacks a national memorial to the 4.7 million Americans who served during the conflict. Of those servicemen, nearly 117,000 perished during the war -- 53,402 in combat -- and another 204,000 were wounded. Many believe that the last man to die in the war was an American soldier, 23-year-old Henry Gunther of Baltimore. He was killed one minute before the 11 a.m. armistice of Nov. 11, 1918. In comparison, roughly 34,000 Americans died in combat during the Korean War, and some 47,000 died in combat in Vietnam.

At Last, Honor for Albert Wedemeyer, a Great American Soldier

by Thomas Fleming

Shortly after the Allies established a beachhead in Normandy in June 1944, George C. Marshall, the U.S. Army’s chief of staff, sent a cable to General Albert C. Wedemeyer telling him: “Your plan has worked.” Marshall was referring to the 147-page Victory Program that Wedemeyer and a small staff had written in 1941. It had been expanded and elaborated by Wedemeyer’s War Plans successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower and renamed Overlord. But Marshall still regarded the original plan as the key to the Allied success.This is a sample of the astonishing forgotten story that historian John J. McLaughlin reveals in his new book, Albert A. Wedemeyer, America’s Unsung Strategist in World War II.

Slavery and the Myth of the Alamo

by James W. Russell

Two and a half million people visit the Alamo each year where, according to its website, “men made the ultimate sacrifice for freedom,” making it “hallowed ground and the Shrine of Texas Liberty.”There can be no doubt that the symbolism of the Alamo is at the center of the creation myth of Texas: that the state was forged out of a heroic struggle for freedom against a cruel Mexican dictator, Santa Ana. It represents to the Southwest what the Statue of Liberty represents to the Northeast: a satisfying confirmation of what we are supposedly about as a people.But if Northeasterners can be excused for embracing a somewhat fuzzy notion of abstract liberty, the symbolism of the Alamo has always been built upon historical myth.

The Science (and History) of Disgust: Interview with Psychologist Rachel Herz on Understanding Human Repulsion

by Robin Lindley

Only humans experience disgust, an emotion that evolved initially to help us avoid toxic food and disease and morphed into a manipulable sense that infuses personal choices about cuisine and friends and sex partners as well as cultural decisions on economics, law, moral codes, politics, and allies and enemies.Whether something is disgusting varies from place to place and over history. In the 1600s, for example, New Englanders found lobster so foul that laws were enacted to bar slave owners from serving it to slaves more than three days a week -- yet now most people consider lobster a delicacy.

The Perils of Internet Research: The Case of LBJ and Affirmative Action

by Samuel Walker

Affirmative action in employment as official U.S. policy began with President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 Executive Order 11246. Designed to implement Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the order directed federal agencies to maintain “a positive, continuing program” to promote equal employment opportunity, and federal contractors to take “affirmative action” in that regard.E.O. 11246 had a tangled history with regard to women. LBJ deliberately omitted sex discrimination from it, even though Title VII specified “sex” along with the other protected classes. Under pressure from a resurgent women’s rights movement (the National Organization for Women was founded in 1966), he issued Executive Order 11375 in October 1967 revising 11246 to include sex discrimination.

OAH/NCPH Sessions “Chart the Future of Teaching the Past”

by Craig Thurtell

Teaching students to think like historians may be an idea whose time has arrived. The April annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians (OAH/NCPH)/National Council for Public History (NCPH) in Milwaukee certainly offered abundant evidence of its spread. This approach rests on several key premises. First, history is understood not in the popular sense, as everything that has ever occurred in human history, but rather as an interpretation of the relatively meager evidence that has been left to us by the past. Interpretation of this evidence, in fact, constitutes the essence of the discipline. If students do not have the opportunity to grasp and practice this essential activity, they will not grasp history; instead they will misunderstand it as a chronicle of forgettable events. A second premise recognizes that history, as practiced by historians, requires the application of certain understandings and cognitive skills that are unique to the discipline. For example, historians master a conceptual framework that includes causation, chronology, and many other concepts, and, in analyzing primary and secondary sources, they deploy specific cognitive skills like sourcing and inference in order to interpret these documents.

Response to John McAdams: "Fidel Knew that Oswald Intended to Shoot at Kennedy"

by Brian Latell

By daring to write about the Kennedy assassination in Castro’s Secrets: The CIA and Cuba’s Intelligence Machine I feel as if I have joined a fractious fraternity of experts all steeped in the minutiae of competing conspiracy theories. Since I make no claim to be a serious student of the assassination, and in fact it constitutes a relatively small portion of my book, I entered the fray with nagging misgivings.By concluding that Fidel Castro knew in advance that Lee Harvey Oswald would fire at John F. Kennedy that long-ago day in Dallas, I had no illusions about how taunting my findings might seem to some who are immersed in the subject. No one, after all, had ever argued quite the case that I make: not a Cuban murder plot, but a conspiracy of silence.

Someone Used My Research without Acknowledgement

by Richard Labunski

Update:  Regnery issues correction in Labunski disputeOn a Sunday night in January, I turned on “Book TV,” the weekend program on C-SPAN2 where authors talk about their non-fiction books and editors discuss the publishing industry. Chris DeRose, a Phoenix lawyer and political consultant, was explaining how the Bill of Rights became part of the Constitution. Focusing on the political and personal relationship of James Madison and James Monroe, he devoted particular attention to the crucial election between them for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in the First Congress.

The Baffling Harry White

by David Chambers

I write in response to Benn Steil’s New York Times op-ed “Banker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” Joan White Pinkham's New York Times letter to the editor "A Case from the Cold War," and Bruce Craig's HNN reply "Setting the Record Straight: Harry Dexter White and Soviet Espionage."First, it may be a bit early for Mr. Craig to say, "both Steil and Pinkham loosely played with the facts and twisted the truth." Mr. Steil's book is still to come: only a hint appears in his op-ed. Ms. Pinkham offered only an article by IMF historian James M. Boughton.Second, regarding whether White was involved in espionage, perhaps it is worth revisiting early insight from Whittaker Chambers (my grandfather). Although in Witness he tended to write off White like other New Dealers -- as communist dupes -- Chambers also recounts this story:

Understanding American Myths: Announcing the New Blog "MythicAmerica"

by Ira Chernus

The United States is a very real place, a political state full of very real land, people, things, resources, and much more. America is a mythic place -- the version and the vision of the United States that Americans conjure up in their minds when they imagine what their nation is, what it has been, what it could be; what its role in the world is, has been, and could be; what their own role in the nation is and might be; what it means to be an American.Soon I’ll be launching MythicAmerica, a blog housed on HNN to to explore the mythic expressions that have pervaded, and still pervade, American life -- especially political life, shaping Americans’ responses to national events in more ways than we are likely to suspect, as well as to experiment with new myths that might shape American life in the future. To invite you into the MythicAmerica community, I offer here some preliminary reflections on myth and American life.For a long time I avoided using the word myth because it means so many different things to different people. Academic experts on myth debate heatedly about what a myth is and how it functions in human life. In fact, with so many conflicting meanings and so much debate, some scholars have declared the word meaningless and abandoned it altogether.