Historians/History

Jamestown at 400: Caught Between a Rock and a Slippery Slope

by Fred Fausz

Readers seldom take the pain to gather together all that hath been written on any subject but usually content themselves with one or two books and some former treatises, whereby they gain but a lame and partial knowledge, and so prejudice the Truth. -- Edward Waterhouse, Virginia Company Secretary, 1622The Commonwealth of Virginia is hosting an ambitious 400th birthday bash on May 11-13 to commemorate Jamestown as England's first permanent colony in North America. That festive

Americans are Tourists of History

by Marita Sturken

Over the past few weeks we have seen another round of fact-finding assertions and denials about the fact that the United States engages in and sanctions torture.   The debate is revealing not only in its déjà vu quality, but also in the stunning fashion in which it indicates an inability to reconcile such practices with our national identity as a country of moral superiority.  One way to begin to understand the broad capacity to deny not only the current practic

Is the History of the U.S. Supreme Court Essential?

by Peter Hoffer

Every October brings us the World Series and a spate of new books on the U.S. Supreme Court. This year is no exception. Like the color commentators' tips on who is up and who is ailing before, during, and after the games, the majority of the new books on the Court offer glimpses inside the chambers, with anecdotes of how the justices play their game. It is not by chance that both baseball broadcasters and High Court chroniclers are most often journalists.

The Willed Amnesia of the Residents of Eastern Galicia

by Omer Bartov

In recent years I have visited Buczacz, my mother’s hometown in the former Eastern Galicia, several times. Located now in Western Ukraine, it is one of many Galician towns that were once heavily populated by Jews and Poles, and are now almost exclusively inhabited by Ukrainians. Having experienced devastating violence in the past, t

Genocide Deniers

by Scott Jaschik

Note: Comments on this article may be posted either here on HNN or at the website of Inside Higher Ed, where this article was first published. -- EditorsIn the buildup to the vote by a House of Representatives committee officially calling for U.S. foreign policy to recognize that a genocide of Armenians took place during World War I, at the behest of the “Young Turk” government of the

Archeology and the Propaganda War Against Israel

by Richard L. Cravatts

In one of those ironies of questionable scholarship, just as a battle over a Barnard scholar’s book about Israeli archeology had inflamed her application for tenure, heavy equipment was tearing away at the ancient crown of Jerusalem’s 36-acre Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site. Nadia Abu El-Haj's book, Facts on the Ground: Archeolo

The Armenian Resolution: Pure Grandstanding

by Timothy R. Furnish

House Resolution 106, first proposed when the Democrats took over control of Congress back in January 2007, was just voted out of the Foreign Affairs Committee last week and, according to Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD), will pass before Congress adjourns next month.  H.R. 106 puts the government of the United States on record as affirming that the Ottoman Empire pepetrated “genocide” on its Armenian subjects, killing at least 1.5 million of them between 1915 and 1923; f

Did Hyperinflation Doom the Weimar Republic?

by Eric D. Weitz

Everyone loves to throw around the Weimar metaphor.  Google some variant of "Weimar" and one quickly enters the nether-world of crazy conspiracy theorists and scary neo-Nazis.  "Weimar America" is where Jews rule the media and control everyone's thoughts.  Or it's a land that went off the gold standard (anyone remember that?) so hyperinflation and fascist police are just around the corner.  It's a place that has abandoned Christianity, or it's a country whose inept president is just marking time for the dictator in the wings.  It's the prelude to the "Neo-con Reich," the Apocalypse and Second Coming, or the Nazification of America. Refine the search a bit -- add, say "Condoleezza Rice" to "Weimar" and "America" -- and things get a bit saner, but not by much.  Newsweek columnist Michael Hirsch says that Iraq is "the most powerful example of democracy's drawbacks since the Weimar Republic."  Pat Buchanan thunders against an "affluent Weimar America" that celebrates sex and destroys Christian values. A Janet Jackson dance routine (no, not the wardrobe malfunction one) that evokes goose-stepping Storm Troopers becomes a metaphor for the decline of America.  And the Secretary of State conjures up Weimar not for America, but for a Russia in dangerous disarray.

The Most Important Moment in American History

by Thomas Fleming

At noon on  December 23, 1783, General George Washington walked to the state house in Annapolis, Md, where the Continental Congress was meeting. Congress had fled from  Philadelphia earlier in the year when a

Reporter's Notebook: Highlights from the 2004 Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association

by Rick Shenkman

Related LinksReporter's Notebook: The 2003 Annual Meeting of the AHA2003 OAH Annual Meeting: What Historians Against the War Want

Reporter's Notebook: Highlights from the 2006 Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association (Philadelphia)

by Rick Shenkman

IndexNews News About the Convention in the Mainstream Media and BlogsHNN Daily Reports Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Podcasts HNN Audio Interviews with HistoriansArticles Articles About the Convention and Papers Presented at the Convention

Discrediting the Politicization of History

by Keith Windschuttle

 The University of Colorado’s dismissal of Ward Churchill for academic fraud was not only a welcome decision in support of scholarly standards, it will also go some way towards discrediting one of the most depressing tendencies of our era, the politicization of history. In Australia, Churchill has long been frequently cited by historians of Aboriginal affairs. In their introduction to a special “genocide” edition of the academic journal Aboriginal Histo

Ike's Wise Restrained Response to Sputnik

by Yanek Mieczkowski

A half-century ago, on October 4, 1957, the Space Age began.  The Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite, signaling a new era.  The event still resonates.  In September 2007, Russia announced plans to send men to the moon by 2025, prompting media chatter about a renewed "space race." Sputnik initiated the first "space race"—and prompted harsh criticism of President Dwight Eisenhower.  As in today's war on terror,

Nixon vs. the Imaginary “Jewish Cabal”

by Kenneth J. Hughes, Jr.

On Monday September 24, 2007 the Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center publishes a collection of transcripts that illustrate the evolution of Nixon’s conspiracy theories about Jews, intellectuals and the Ivy League in the aftermath of the publication of the Pentagon Papers. The Federal Reserve is catnip to conspiracy theor

What is Wrong with Quotas? Equality, Democracy, Bias, and Balance in American Society

by Jules R. Benjamin

I was thinking the other day about the issue of academic freedom.  Conservative scholars have discovered the secret control of liberal arts departments by, of all people, liberals.  The remedy suggested is balance, achieved by ending the liberal bias of current hiring and tenure decisions.  Who can oppose balance or support bias?  It seems true that if the controlling liberals say, in a department of English or of Sociology, would eliminate the bias that h

When's a Palace an Emblem of Democratic Aspirations?

by Ron Briley

A recent visit to Hawaii during the annual meeting of the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association offered an opportunity to observe the impact of historical narratives well beyond the narrow confines of the history conference papers and sessions. Visits to the Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor and the ‘Iolani Palace, the royal residence constructed by King Kalakaua in 1882, offer contrasting historical narratives regarding the American presence in Hawaii. The Pe

They Don't Have Anything Like Our Presidential Libraries, but Brits Now Do Have the Churchill and Thatcher Archives and that's Something

by Jeff Shear

“If you want to learn about Stalin, study Henry VIII. If you want to learn about Mrs. Thatcher, study Henry VIII,” Alan Bennett’s Tony Award winning “The History Boys” tells us. While the playwright makes an interesting point, the history boys who run the Churchill Archives at Churchill College Cambridge hurry to add that if you really want to learn about Baroness Thatcher make an appointment. The Churchill

The Manhattan Project: A Great Work of Human Collaboration

by Richard Rhodes

No other story resonates quite like the story of the Manhattan Project. When I wrote my history The Making of the Atomic Bomb, I thought of it as the tragic epic of the twentieth century: Humankind invents the means of its own destruction. But the discovery of how to release the enormous energies latent in the nuclei of atoms has led to a world where world-scale war is no longer possible. Is that tragedy, or cause for celebration? Nuclear power came out of the Manhattan Pro

Was Grant a Drunk?

by Edward G. Longacre

Credit: Wiki Commons/HNN staff.

The Saudi Billionaire vs. Cambridge University Press

by Robert O. Collins

On April 3, 2007 Kevin Taylor, Intellectual Property Manager for the Cambridge University Press (CUP), contacted Millard Burr and myself that the solicitors for Shaykh Khalid bin Mahfouz, Kendall Freeman, had informed CUP of eleven “allegations of defamation” in our book Alms for Jihad: Charities and Terrorism in the Islamic World and requested a response. On April 20 CUP received our seventeen page “robust defence,” but it soon became apparent that CUP had de