As the debate continues this week concerning the vice presidential nominees, please consider President James Madison and his election 200 years ago in 1808.

• The 1804 election was the first time electors had to name specifically a president and a vice-president (12th amendment). Prior to 1804, the two top vote-getters determined the president and the vice president.

• Madison's supporters in the Congress moved the caucus from February to January, thus helping Madison secure the nomination. James Monroe was considered a possible contender for the nomination. As a result not only did Monroe's supporters boycott the caucus, so did the New York delegation who supported their own George Clinton.

• Clinton, who had served as Jefferson's vice president, was nominated to be Madison's running mate . . . however, he never openly accepted the nomination. He, too, was critical of the early Caucus stating that he was not properly notified nor consulted...

[Humberto Fontova is the author of: Exposing the Real Che Guevara. visit http://www.hfontova.com .]

"How the Mob Owned Cuba, and Lost it to the Revolution," is the bestselling book's title. T.J. English is the author.

Several facts get in the way of the books title and thesis. To wit: Cuba's Gross Domestic product in 1957 was $2.7 billion. Cuba's foreign receipts in 1957 were about $750 million--of which tourism made up only $60 million. Gambling was a small fraction of this $60 million. How could the beneficiaries of that tiny fraction of Cuba's income "own" the entire country, and "infiltrate its levers of power from top to bottom," as the book asserts? Well, we have it on the good authority of Castro regime officials, primary sources for this book, which neglects to mention how "the Revolution" has made multiple times that few million in cahoots with Colombia's cocaine cowboys....

On the invaluable History News Network, Lawrence Wittner, a SUNY historian, writes of an organisation that "did have the satisfaction of turning British public opinion against the nuclear arms race, thereby pushing Britain and other nuclear-armed nations toward nuclear arms control and disarmament measures and helping to prevent nuclear war".

Readers in the UK will be surprised to learn that Professor Wittner is talking about the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). His article is a retrospective on CND's 50th anniversary. My estimate of CND's political influence is different from his. The principal influence the organisation had on British public opinion was to ensure repeated electoral defeats for Labour when the party adopted CND's policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament. CND's influence on the arms control policies of successive governments, meanwhile, was exactly zero.

I argued this point in a...

Gerald R. Ford’s FBI files, released under the Freedom of Information Act this month, will not force an instant reappraisal of America’s 38th president some 20 months after his death.[1]
Unlike John F. Kennedy’s bureau file, which documented JFK’s trysts in the 1960s with Judith Campbell (a Mafia moll) and Ellen Rometsch (a suspected East German spy), the FBI files on Ford hold no information about any dangerous liaisons.

The files do contain information, though, on a curious liaison. Ford secretly arranged to share information with the FBI while serving on the Warren Commission, the panel charged with investigating President Kennedy’s 1963 assassination. This would surely have been an explosive revelation but for one fact: Ford’s covert dealings with the bureau in 1963-1964 have been public knowledge since 1978, when 58,000 pages from the FBI’s files on the assassination were first released.[2]

Notwithstanding the passage of 30 years, there...

[Daniel Walker Howe is Rhodes Professor of American History Emeritus at Oxford University and Professor of History Emeritus at UCLA. His books include What Hath God Wrought (2008 Pulitzer Prize winner) and Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. This essay is based on his presentation at the FPRI Wachman Center’s May 17-18, 2008 history institute on America in the Civil War Era, held at and co-sponsored by Carthage College, Wisconsin.]

When I signed on to do my volume in the Oxford History of the United States, several volumes had already appeared, so I knew what was expected. I also knew that I wanted to address not just fellow academic specialists and our captive audiences in the courses we teach but also the general curious public. I also wanted to combine the traditional kind of history—political, military, diplomatic—with the newer kinds of history: social, cultural, and economic. Both kinds of history are essential for a full understanding of...

[Mikyoung Kim is Assistant Professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute – Hiroshima City University. Before assuming her current position in 2005, she taught at Portland State University as Fulbright Visiting Professor. She previously served with the U.S. State Department from 2000 to 2004, specializing in U.S.-ROK-DPRK relations. Her forthcoming book, Securitization of Human Rights: North Korean Refugees in East Asia, will be published by Praeger in 2009.]

... Post-Cold War Japanese history education emphasizes two main goals: 1) understanding national history in the context of the global historical trajectory; and 2) educating citizens as members of the international community.[8] The empirical realities have not been in sync with the educational goals: history education, instead, has been the target of domestic ideological contention and international criticisms.

Political bifurcation over history textbooks is nothing new in Japan. The ideological pendulum...

[Helen Womack has written articles published in The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Times and The Sunday Telegraph. Kate Connolly is the Guardian and Observer's Berlin correspondent, also covering central and eastern Europe and Scandinavia.]

When the refrigerator mechanic and young conscript soldier Anatoly Babi was given the chance in the autumn of 1968 by his military superiors to 'see the world', he leapt at the opportunity. The son of peasant parents born in the Soviet republic of Kirghizia, set off in an army lorry to Hungary, where he joined a large force of his fellow Soviet soldiers.

What Babi did not realise then was that he was part of a 100,000-strong force of troops from the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact that, exactly 40 years ago this week, were to roll into Czechoslovakia and crush the 'Prague Spring', the liberalisation movement led by the country's Communist party First Secretary, Alexander Dubcek. His attempt to introduce democratic reforms into...

We live longer than anytime in history. Our long lives are due in large part to good nutrition, sanitation, and vaccines.

There have been numerous posts here and elsewhere about the vaccine deniers, primarily focused around the modern myth that vaccines cause autism.

That is not the topic of this post. Instead, I am going to take a brief tour of the childhood vaccines and review the morbidity and mortality caused by vaccine preventable diseases and the efficacy of the vaccines in preventing these diseases. With the brouhaha surrounding vaccines it is beneficial to step back and contemplate the death and misery that the vaccine preventable disease have caused and continue to cause.

In the interests of full disclosure, I am an Infectious Disease doctor. I make a living from treating diagnosing and treating infections. I don’t make dime one if people do not get infected, so I am against any and all vaccines as they cut into my bottom line (2).
...

[Timothy Snyder is Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies in European and Russian Studies at Yale University.His most recent book, The Red Prince: The secret lives of a Habsburg Archduke, was published earlier this year.]

Can a nationalist found an empire? The United States of George W. Bush invaded Iraq in the name of democracy, though any representative Iraqi government would have to oppose a foreign occupation. Russia under Vladimir Putin tries to impose its will on Ukraine in the name of national self-determination, denying that Ukrainians are a separate people. The Chinese regime modernizes Tibet while expressing its own sense of national superiority. All of these are imperial policies by essentially nationalist regimes, and all of them spread nationalism around the world. Ukrainian national identity is ever more distinct. Tibetan protests spread from towns to the countryside. The American occupation will build the Iraqi nation, as the inevitable...