HNN Rundowns
News at Home
 The Curious Creation (and Unintended Consequences) of the Electoral College The Framers would be aghast at our electoral politics today. |
 Presidential “Czars”: A Constitutional Aberration Obama has appointed more executive branch czars than any other president. |
 Barack D. Eisenhower Why Obama is like Ike. |
 Hetch Hetchy Redux: An Effort to Turn Back the Environmental Clock Inside the efforts to drain the San Francisco reservoir. |
News Abroad
 Face/Off: The Last 2012 Presidential Debate On foreign policy, the candidates are practically identical. |
 Big Maps, Big Dreams, and the Failure of the Obama Doctrine Don't count on the Pentagon ever changing its first principles. |
 Why the Only Solution is the Two-State Solution A one-state solution means the end of a Jewish Israel. |
Historians & History
 The Importance of Doing Recent History Navigating a bewildering world of new sources, new media, and information overload. |
 The Inevitability of the Cold War Six months in 1945 determined the course of the next half-century. |
Blogs
High Speed Amtrak: Part II Amtrak's Quik-Trip from Chicago to St. Louis. |
With Apologies to Browning... The GOP's rape problem. |
Books
 Review of Emily Bernard's Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance |
 Review of Paul S. Boyer's American History: A Very Short Introduction A solid, workmanlike, and inexpensive approach to U.S. history for students. |
The Cuban Missile Crisis at Fifty
 Noam Chomsky and the Cuban Missile Crisis He gets Kennedy and the ExComm tapes very, very wrong. |
 Washington Looks Back at the Cuban Missile Crisis Part 1 of an ongoing blog series on D.C.-area Cuban Missile Crisis events |
 The Week the World Stood Still The Cuban Missile Crisis and the ownership of the world. |
 The Cuban Missile Crisis ExComm Meetings: Getting it Right After 50 Years RFK was far from a dove during the Crisis -- he consistently advocated for invading Cuba. |
 What If Nixon Had Been President During the Crisis? Kaboom. |
 The Cuban Missile Crisis: The View from Okinawa Six months earlier, the U.S. secretly brought near-identical missiles to the ones on Cuba to another small island -- Okinawa. |
 HNN Hot Topics: The Cuban Missile Crisis The best of commentary from historians, political scientists, journalists, diplomats, and politicians from around the web. |
Historian's Take: The Second Presidential Debate
 Obama Did More than Simply Win the Debate He came across as a powerful president who is genuinely with expanding the middle class. |
 Nothing Has Changed Except for the Media Narrative This was a classic pseudo-event, a media-generated moment that fit into the narrative many reporters were looking to right. |
 Obama and Romney Have Fundamentally Different Visions |
 My Fantasy Questions for Obama and Romney Town-hall questions are general short-sighted and ill-informed -- here's what should have been asked of the candidates. |
 "Was It a Good Show?" Above all, the debates are TV entertainment, and on that basis, both candidates won. |
 Romney's Lost Libya Opportunity The president's vulnerable on the Libya attacks, but Romney found a way to make it a negative for himself. |
 Obama Was Hurt on Libya And that matters more than who "won" the debate. |
Blogs
 Fact-Checking the Candidates: A Sacred Ritual in the Theater State Even the wonky fact-checkers emphasize performance over substance. |
 Individuals and Collectives Paul Ryan's Randian nightmare. |
 The New “New Normal”: Saving Ourselves From the Cliff When did government leaders decide to completely abdicate responsibility for our common interest? |
News at Home
 How History Shaped Barack Obama’s View of National Identity Historian Ian Reifowitz on the president's concept of "one American family." |
 Mormons and African Americans Have Criss-Crossed Political Identities |
 Return of the Paranoid Style The spirit of Joe McCarthy is alive and well in Jack Welch's job numbers paranoia. |
_0.jpg) Obama Wasn't the First President Who Hoped to be a Uniter George Washington faced an intense partisan divide. |
News Abroad
 The Vietnam War as You've Never Seen It ... From Hanoi Lien-Hang Nguyen discusses her new book, Hanoi's War: An International History of the War in Vietnam |
Historians & History
 A Historian Taught by History Eugene D. Genovese, R.I.P. |
Culture Watch
 The Irish Troubles Still Troubling Thirty Years Later Brian Friel's Freedom of the City gets the revival treatment at the Irish Repertory Theater. |
 The N-YHS Takes a Look at the Big Apple in World War II The city that never sleeps slept little during that particular dust-up. |
Books
 Review of Louis P. Masur's Lincoln Hundred Days Louis Masur successfully makes the story of the Emancipation Proclamation the story of the Civil War itself. |
 Review of Shawn Francis Peters's The Catonsville Nine The Catonsville Nine, a group of anti-war Catholic priests, turned the protests against Vietnam from radical to mainstream. |
Historian's Take: The Vice-Presidential Debate
Joe Biden: Barack Obama's Hatchet Man He put the "vice" in vice president last night -- an undignified performance from a man holding the second-highest office in the land. |
Three Reactions to Last Night's Debate The Mideast dominated foreign policy, Biden came off as a jerk, and neither candidates talked much about principles. |
 Biden Nailed It |
Did Either Ryan or Biden Manage to Rally Women Voters? Women are the key to the election, but neither candidate made effective appeals. |
Your Take
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Blogs
 Obama's Other Debate Failure: No Narrative At least Teddy could string together a story about the middle class in America. |
 How the Democrats Can Win on Taxes The math on Mitt's tax plan just doesn't add up. |
News at Home
 Why Obama Lost the First Debate And how he can win the next one, with acting tips courtesy of the Gipper. |
 Barack's Lost Idealism He's stopped speaking the truth because what he has seen of America since 2009 has broken his heart |
 Hey Mitt, When Are You Going to Apologize to My Parents? They were part of the "47 percent," but they were the hardest-working people I've ever known. |
 Affirmative Action's Unlikely Allies How corporations and the military stopped Reagan from abolishing affirmative action. |
 Historian's Take: The First Debate Contributions from Ira Chernus, Lewis Gould, K.C. Johnson, Leo Ribuffo, Ruth Rosen, Gil Troy, and Bernard Weisberger. |
News Abroad
Overwrought Empire U.S. military power is more ubiquitous than ever ... and don't expect the next administration to change things. |
 Post-Mortem on the Muhammad Protests The video really did matter. |
 A Policy Lesson from Reagan for Obama and Romney |
Historians & History
 Eric Hobsbawn's Brilliance ... And His Blindspot Unlike Eugene Genovese, Hobsbawm remained an unrepentant Marxist to the very end. |
 Why Aren't We More Worried About Pandemics? New breakthroughs in neuroscience illustrate why humans remain optimistic in the face of potential catastrophe. |
Google Questions
 Did Lincoln Own Slaves? No, of course not, but a surprising number of Google searches are about this. |
 Is Elvis Alive? No, he's not. Drugs and peanut butter and bacon sandwiches killed him. |
 Did Hitler Escape from Berlin? Even though the Soviets found his charred body, this ridiculous conspiracy theory just won't go away. |
Culture Watch
 The Innocence Project Hits the Stage The Exonerated is a relentless, scalding indictment of the U.S. justice system. |
Books
 Review of Julie Levinson's The American Success Myth on Film |
 Review of Steve Hochstadt's Exodus to Shanghai: Stories of Escape from the Third Reich |
Historian's Take: The First Debate
Who Cares Most About Ordinary Americans? Neither Obama or Romney seems to remember that women are half the population. |
The Debate Worked The candidates offered substantive exchanges that focus much more on issues, statistics, and philosophy than passing gaffes. |
 Ninety Minutes of Talking Points The intellectually inert performance of two mediocre American politicians. |
Was It 1992 Redux? George H.W. Bush was not a precedent that President Obama wished to revive. |
Obama's Bad Night Was he channeling his inner Michael Dukakis? Or maybe his inner Tom Dewey? |
Romney Takes Round One But we ought to be skeptical about the whole notion of debate "winners" and "losers." |
Another Act in the "Theater-State" The pomp and pageantry of the American presidency are at least a clear echo of the great royal courts of the pre-democracy era. |
Your Take
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In Memoriam
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A giant of history -- and an unrepentant Communist -- passes away. Presenting the best of the web commentary on Hobsbawm's legacy, including thoughts by Stephen Kotkin, Eric Foner, and Niall Ferguson. |
 Eugene D. Genovese, R.I.P. Remembering a gentleman, a scholar, and a friend. |
He leaves behind a legacy of achievement and of principle. |
Remembering one of the most influential American historians of the last sixty years. |
Features
Robert Merry, editor of the National Interest, takes a serious yet playful approach to presidential rankings. |
Blogs
 Eric Hobsbawm, Social Bandit In recognition of his passing, Josh Brown presents a vintage 1983 drawing of Eric Hobsbawm from "Visions of History: Interviews with Radical Historians") |
 The 1980 Debates as Inspiration -- and Warning Happy October, which every four years becomes debate month in American presidential politics. |
 “Hope and Change”: The “Comeback Kid” of Political Narratives? Is Obama's "Forward" slogan a throwback to Bill Clinton-style political optimism? |
 Running Out of Energy But with the right federal policy, the U.S. could be a net exporter of energy and technology within ten years. |
News at Home
Once unique to the U.S., TV debates have truly gone global. |
What would the radical Charles Sumner have to say about today's Republican Party? |
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Mitt's stepped in it again, and this time it may stick to his shoe ... or his face. |
News Abroad
The three-star general turned right-wing Christian crusader is back, and now he's gunning for Obama. |
Why they go berserk: Muslims see insults to Muhammad as a broader attack on their dignity. |
It's not just the bomb -- Netanyahu's entire case against Iran is something out of Looney Tunes. |
It takes some serious gall for the president of Iran to criticize America's democratic process. |
Historians & History
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Education
 Back to $chool It's now cheaper to go to Harvard than Cal State. |
Culture Watch
The Boss is but the latest in a long line of the rock star historian/troubador. |
Teatime never was so much fun as when it's with two kooky lesbian lovers in 1901 New York. |
The story of a whistleblower in the 1880s resonates deeply today. |
A slow-moving play builds to an unforgettable, gut-wrenching conclusion. |
Books
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