Historians in the News

Garry Wills says people are being taken in by the Buckley myth

Despite his famous fight with Gore Vidal, he was no homophobe.

UMass professor, Christian Appy looks at the tangled legacy of the Vietnam War in his new book

Appy, a professor of modern U.S. history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, argues in his most recent book, "American Reckoning," that the nation has never fully addressed the implications of the Vietnam War.

What it's like to be a young Greek historian in today's economic climate

Michael Iliakis earned a PhD in ancient history 4 years ago. This is what his life is like.

Ralph Luker, pioneer history blogger, has passed away at age 75

by Kevin Levin

An ordained minister, "Ralph's courageous involvement in the civil rights movement in the early 1960's was the pivotal experience that shaped his professional work." (From his obit.)

Historian Tom Engelhardt remembers how he came to the anti-war movement in the sixties

by Tom Engelhardt

He asks the question: What It Means When You Kill People On the Other Side of the Planet and No One Notices

President of the OAH says the revised AP standards are ok

AHA executive director James Grossman agrees.

NYT History Book Reviews: Who Got Noticed this Week?

by Erik Moshe

This week it's books about Nagasaki, the richest man who ever lived, Philip II, and the birth of modern Europe.

Antisemitic Regimes Should be Taken at Their Word, says Jeffrey Herf, Historian of Holocaust and Islamic Radicalism

The professor notes that “the problem of underestimating the role of ideology in politics remains very much with us.” It’s a problem evidenced in Adolf Hitler’s rise and simultaneous inability of “intellectuals and policymakers” to take the German dictator’s Jew-hatred seriously.

California high school creates gay history class

“This is history. This is an experience that happened.”

A Year of Racial Tumult Brings Potent Lessons — and Risks — to the Classroom

Each new event has forced scholars to make pedagogical choices.

Robert Conquest: The Historian as Moral Hero

by Joseph Bottum

His distinguishing characteristic was his unexpected seriousness—the moral cast of his mind that both kept him a precise historian and directed him to oppose communism.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Leap Into the Racially Charged 1960s

by Scott Porch

He was a lifelong Democrat but tough to pigeonhole as either a conservative or liberal, and he had worked in both Johnson and Nixon administrations.

What it would look like if the Hiroshima bomb hit your city

Alex Wellerstein, a nuclear historian at the Stevens Institute of Technology, created a NukeMap that allows you to visualize what the Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions would look like in your hometown.

The day after 9/11, Kagan father-son duo said ‘take the war’ to Palestine

A video has emerged with a montage of clips from an interview recorded the day after 9/11 featuring Donald and Frederick Kagan, two members of a leading neoconservative family.

South Korea considers state control over school history textbooks

“History should be taught in one way to avoid division of the people. At the moment, since there are various history textbooks, there can be confusion.”

Historian Mark Perry discovered a secret about an Alabama governor's past that helped him understand the delusions about the Old South

by Mark Perry

It was buried in a book on page 160.

Historian Kevin M. Schultz pens book about Buckley and Mailer

Schultz's interest in the turbulent times led him to write his new book "Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship that Shaped the Sixties."

Robert Conquest, Historian Who Documented Soviet Horrors, Dies at 98

Mr. Conquest chronicled the Stalinist purges and the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s with original findings and gripping narratives.

Richard Rothstein says government policy created ghettos

In an interview he says the WPA mandated racist policies.

The Islamic historian who can explain why some states fail and others succeed

Ibn Khaldun charted the story of the world from creation, which began with ‘the minerals and progressed, in an ingenious, gradual manner, to plants and animals’ and onto human history. He anticipated Darwin.