Historians/History

Unions and Strikes Through the Camera Lens

by Robin Lindley

Chicago police fire on striking steelworkers in the Memorial Day Massacre of 1937. Credit: NARA."The viewfinder is a political instrument." --Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American ImagesThe American labor movement and photojournalism in the U.S. evolved in tandem in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As workers struggled for security through unions, Americans interpreted the labor movement through a burgeoning onslaught of photographs in the popular press.

Lessons from the Dust Bowl

by Walter G. Moss

 Machinery buried in dust near Dallas, North Dakota, in 1935. Credit: USDA.Early in the twentieth century American philosopher George Santayana wrote that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Another quote, sometimes attributed to Mark Twain, offers this correction: "History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme." These two quotes came to mind as I watched Ken Burns’s The Dust Bowl last week -- this four-hour PBS documentary by America’s most famous film documentarian remains available on some PBS stations or for viewing online until at least December 4. The destruction, personal suffering, and tragedies caused by our recent Hurricane Sandy were not a repeat of the 1930s’ Dust Bowl, but they were close enough to remind us that we have ignored at our peril a basic historical lesson: Screw up the environment badly enough and it’ll come back to blow you away with a vengeance.

Remember: Those Notorious Anti-Semitic "Protocols" are Fiction!

by Vaughn Davis Bornet

.

Channelling the Spirit of 1800 This Post-Election Season

by Michael Austin

Credit: Wiki Commons/HNN staff.As Americans, we love to pretend that things were different back then, back when gods and giants roamed the earth. What would the likes of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson need with 30-second attack ads? Would Alexander Hamilton stoop to voter suppression schemes? Would Benjamin Franklin care about the Meat Loaf vote? Now that the Founders have transformed into myth, we must consider them above such partisan nonsense. And we must at least suspect that, if they could only see us now, they would be so disappointed at the way we have abandoned their clear instructions on such issues as taxation, the national debt, federal power, states’ rights, military readiness, and the role of religion in the public square.

"Recasting Presidential History": A Trans-Disciplinary Approach to the Office and the Presidents

by David Austin Walsh

Credit: Grace Elizabeth Hale presenting her paper, "Outsider in Chief: Presidents and the Politics of Authenticity and Emotion" at the "Recasting Presidential History" conference. Credit: Miller Center. It will come as a surprise to many readers that presidential history has fallen out of fashion within academic circles. After all, the president is a figure of near-mythological proportions, which makes both the office and the men who have held it intrinsically worthy of study. The president -- and other politicians, in the executive branch and out of it -- routinely lead in the news cycle.

The Ultimate What-If of the Cuban Missile Crisis: What If There Had Been a Nuclear War?

by Eric G. Swedin

Five decades ago, at the height of the Cold War, the world survived the most dangerous moment in human history. During the course of thirteen days, the Soviets and Americans confronted each other, but sanity won out and a deal was negotiated to end the crisis.

The Bretton Woods Transcripts, Hiding in Plain Sight

by Kurt Schuler

Credit: World Bank.Sometimes important historical material is listed for all the world to see, has been read and cited by scholars -- yet still goes unremarked. Such was the case with the transcripts of the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, which I found in 2010 and which have recently been published as a book.The Bretton Woods conference, held in the New Hampshire town of the same name, approved agreements for the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, two institutions that are still active and important. It also marked a break with the economic policies that had existed in the 1930s. The related disasters of world depression and world war convinced the governments represented at the conference that they had to act in a spirit of cooperation. Despite many tests in the years since, the spirit of international economic cooperation has generally persisted and deepened.

Jacques Barzun: A Legacy of Passion

by Kelsey McKernie

Jacques Barzun in an undated photograph. Credit: Columbia University.History has lost yet another of its most extraordinary and distinguished scholars, with the death on October 25 of cultural historian Jacques Barzun, at the age of 104. Insatiably curious, energetic and open-minded, Barzun’s interests ranged from subjects as high-brow as classical music and Romantic philosophy, to those as common as mystery novels and baseball. French-born but thoroughly Americanized (he obtained citizenship in 1933), he paired Old World refinement with New World sincerity and wrote more than forty books over the course of seven decades.

Remembering the Code Talkers

by Jeffrey S. Reznick

Navajo code talkers at Camp Pendleton, California. Credit: Northern Arizona University.The passing of Navajo code talker George Smith last month gives us pause this Veterans Day to honor the men from two dozen Native American nations who served the United States military during both world wars. Those of World War II have captured the American conscience, and they do all the more as America’s “greatest generation” rapidly disappears.Mr. Smith was one of the last surviving Native American code talkers who helped the U.S. military win victory during World War II, particularly in the Pacific, by sending messages in their native languages.Mr. Smith and his contemporaries – from the Navajo nation, and others, like the Choctaw and Cherokee nations – operated on the front lines, relaying by radio and telegraph vital tactical information faster and more securely than any conventional military code. No message sent by a code talker was ever successfully decoded by enemy forces.

A Salute to the U.S. Army

by D.M. Giangreco

American doughboys on the Italian Front in World War I. Credit: U.S. Army.Freedom doesn't come easy. Ask the sergeant helping train an Iraqi infantry battalion who, four tours and ten long years ago, was a young private conducting weapons searches in Baghdad's slums. Perhaps a soldier struggling to keep the HMMWV trucks in his unit's motor pool running in spite of the choking dust of southern Afghanistan might have some thoughts on this, or a 2nd Infantry Division trooper forward deployed near the Demilitarized Zone separating a vibrant South Korea from the misery that is North Korea. Ask a veteran of Vietnam, Korea, or World War II -- whose numbers grow ever smaller.

A Spirit, "Unbroken"

by Kinue Tokudome

The B-24 Liberator bomber Green Hornet, on which Louis Zamperini served as bombardier. Credit: National Archives.“Culmination of my seven-year journey into ‘forgiveness’”, that is how Ms. Laura Hillenbrand describes her book, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption (soon to made into a major motion picture) This is a book about the experience of B-24 bombardier Louis Zamperini who became a POW of the Japanese. As a track runner, he had competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

1965: When the "Sixties" Really Started

by James T. Patterson

Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson during the Christmas season, 1965. Credit: LBJ Library/White House.On December 18, 1964, Lyndon Johnson turned on the lights of the National Christmas Tree and proclaimed, “These are the most hopeful times in all the years since Christ was born in Bethlehem.” He added, “Today -- as never before -- man has in his possession the capacities to end war and preserve peace, to eradicate poverty and share abundance, to overcome the diseases that have afflicted the human race and permit all mankind to enjoy their promise in life on this earth.”

Jacques Barzun, 1907-2012

With Light from a New Dawn, a profile painting of Jacques Barzun in 1959, by Eric Morse, 2005.In MemoriamJoseph Epstein: Jacques Barzun: An Appreciation (10-26-12)I first met Jacques Barzun in the autumn of 1974. I had just been named editor of The American Scholar, the quarterly magazine published by Phi Beta Kappa, and he had long been on its editorial board and was among its leading contributors. He seemed to embody the best of the magazine in its intellectual aspirations and cultural standard. He had earlier told me, by letter, that he was planning to leave the editorial board, and the prospect so alarmed me that I made a special trip from Chicago to New York to try to dissuade him from doing so.

The Inevitability of the Cold War

by Michael Dobbs

Credit: Wikimedia Commons/HNN staff.As a historian and a journalist, I am interested in hinge moments in history. I witnessed one such moment as a reporter for the Washington Post in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe at the end of the Cold War. My new book, Six Months in 1945: FDR, Stalin, Churchill, and Truman -- from World War to Cold War, focuses on another, equally momentous, historical transition from one era to another.Historians pretty much agree that the Cold War ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. But when, why, and how it began has been the subject of much debate. Traditionalist historians emphasize the Sovietization of Eastern Europe, culminating in the Communist-led coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948 orchestrated by Josef Stalin. Revisionists accuse President Truman of setting the stage for the Cold War with the bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945 and his embrace of “atomic diplomacy” against the Soviet Union.

The Importance of Doing Recent History

by Renee Romano and Claire Potter

Credit: Wikimedia CommonsJournalists, it has been said, provide the “first rough draft of history.” Presumably historians come to the scene some time later and draw on a variety of sources -- including those first journalistic accounts of events -- to revise that “rough draft” into something more finished and considered. But while historians do not cover events as they unfold like journalists do, in fact some historian has to be the one to write that first draft of history.

The Curious Creation (and Unintended Consequences) of the Electoral College

by Ray Raphael

Congress Hall in Philadelphia in 2007. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.What were the framers of the Constitution even thinking? Why did they bequeath to us the Electoral College, which grants the people of Ohio the power to choose the nation’s president and which has produced four winners who actually lost the popular vote?The short answer: the men who wrote the Constitution believed they were producing a system not only different from but antithetical to the one that soon emerged.

The History Lesson in an Offensive Fashion Design

by Damon B. Akins

A week ago, fashion designer and Greensboro native Mark McNairy found himself at the center of a social media firestorm. His new clothing line for The Gap drew sharp criticism for a solid black T-shirt with the words “Manifest Destiny” on the front. As a historian of the American West, this is a core part of my teaching, and while my students would find this obvious, it is nonetheless worth a few words on why Manifest Destiny is a fundamentally offensive fashion statement.Manifest Destiny was a phrase coined by John O’Sullivan in the lead-up to the Mexican War (1846-1848). He touted westward expansion as a critical part of the United States’ inevitable fulfillment of “our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”

Farewell, Columbus Day -- Hello, Exploration Day

by Tom Diehl

Map of the United States, 1823. Credit: University of Nevada, Reno.Exploration is in our DNA. Without that innate curiosity, our world would be so different; yet, our schools shortchange students through what has traditionally been a sanitized, Euro-centric recollection of America’s past. No Child Left Behind has further eroded history education by placing the emphasis on math and language arts.As a former school board president of a district of 10,000 students, I witnessed much of this first hand. Because of my experiences, when recently approached by another former board member to have Columbus Day rededicated to Neil Armstrong Day, I was fascinated. I countered with Exploration Day, which would honor all explorers, and we began a modest journey of our own.In the process of honing our message, I came across the account of Moncacht-apé, a Native American explorer who lived in the late 1600s and early 1700s. Antoine Simon Le Page Du Pratz, details his travels in “Histoire de la Louisiane,” originally published in Paris in 1758.

JFK's War Against Leaks

by David G. Coleman

CIA director John McCone (foreground left) with President Kennedy on November 29, 1961. Credit: JFK LibraryPresidents don't like it when classified information appears on the front page of the New York Times. Unless, of course, they're the ones doing the leaking.Mr. Obama is the latest to confront the problem. His administration has prosecuted more cases of leaks of national security information than all other presidents combined. The FBI has assigned agents to hunt down leakers. The Justice Department has investigations underway. New rules have been put in place restricting who can talk to reporters. And legislation designed to introduce new levels of accountability for government officials talking to reporters is winding its way through Congress.

David Maraniss on the Unlikely Odyssey of Barack Obama

by Robin Lindley

Senator Barack Obama in Fayetteville, North Carolina in 2008. Credit: Flickr/Wondermonkey2k.I believe that life is chaotic, a jumble of accidents, ambitions, misconceptions, bold intentions, lazy happenstances, and unintended consequences, yet I also believe that there are connections that illuminate our world, revealing its endless mystery and wonder. I find these connections in story, in history, threading together individual lives as well as disparate societies—and they were everywhere I looked in the story of Barack Obama.--David Maraniss, “Introduction”, Barack Obama: The Story (2012)