[David Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers and author of three books of political history, has written the "History Lesson" column since 1998.]

In 1932, the parents of a 4-year-old went to court to change his legal name. Christened Herbert Hoover Jones in 1928, when the commerce secretary and Republican presidential nominee was a national hero, the boy deserved relief, said his parents, from "the chagrin and mortification which he is suffering and will suffer" for sharing a moniker with the now-disgraced chief executive. His new name: Franklin D. Roosevelt Jones.

No president has ever suffered a reversal of political fortune as sudden and complete as the fall from glory to ignominy that was the sum and substance of Herbert Hoover's presidency. Elected in a landslide in 1928 to nurture the prosperity of the buoyant Coolidge era, Hoover proved unable and unwilling to lift America out of the Great Depression. Worse,...

[Peter Kupfer is a former editor on the National / Foreign desk at The San Francisco Chronicle. ]

As the son of an African immigrant prepares to assume the highest office in the land, Tom Buk-Swienty’s portrait of muckraking journalist and reformer Jacob Riis is both instructive and inspiring. Through his ground-breaking articles, lectures, books and — most famously — photographs, Riis exposed the abysmal living conditions suffered by tens of thousands of immigrants in New York in the early 1900s and played a pivotal role in efforts to reform the city’s obsolete housing and health codes.

Riis knew all too well the harsh realities of immigrant life. A native of Denmark, he came to the United States in 1870, at the age of 21, to escape a disastrous love affair and quickly fell upon hard times. At his lowest ebb, he was no better off than the "unwashed poor" he would later write about — a vagabond who slept in alleyways and begged for food at the back...

[Brian Latell is a senior research associate and adjunct professor at the University of Miami. A career Latin America specialist for the CIA and National Intelligence Council, he served as National Intelligence Officer for Latin America from 1990-1994. He is the author of After Fidel.]

Fidel Castro looms large in fewer than a dozen books among the hundreds written about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Two of them are the work of irrepressible conspiracy theorist and researcher Gus Russo. In his 1998 book, Live by the Sword, and now in Brothers in Arms, written with Stephen Molton, Russo labors to implicate Castro in the murder in Dallas.[1]

It is not an unreasonable postulation. No one had more compelling motive to eliminate the president than the Cuban leader who had known of CIA and White House plots against his life since at least 1961. His regime was the target of unrelenting American assaults—sabotage operations, assassination plots, support for...

[Robert Shaffer is associate professor of history at Shippensburg University.]

Students come into our history classes well versed in the mantra that “those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it,” that history is “useful” in teaching lessons for today. Whether they truly believe this idea is a separate question, and many of us devote a lot of energy trying to make our lectures, discussion questions, and reading assignments “relevant” to the present. But the quest for “relevance” has its own pitfalls, in the overly simplistic analogies that students—and policymakers—make between past and present. Indeed, one of the textbooks that I use when I teach “Theory and Practice of History,” a required course for history BA majors at my university, states boldly in its opening chapter: “Many who believe the proposition that history is relevant to an understanding of the present often go too far in their claims. Nothing is easier to abuse than the historical analogy or...

[A N Wilson writes for the Daily Mail.]

Want to know what Britain would be like if ruled by extreme Left-wingers? Then you would only have had to visit Liverpool while Derek Hatton was deputy leader of Liverpool City Council in the early Eighties.

He was expelled from the Labour Party as a member of Militant Tendency, but not before turning Liverpool, once the proud port of the mightiest empire in the world, into a bankrupted, slum-ridden, crimeridden dump.

And Margaret Thatcher? Well, ask any working-class person who, during her premiership, was suddenly able to buy their own council house.

Ask the liberated people of the Falkland Islands. Ask the peoples of Eastern Europe. They would say she was undoubtedly the greatest political leader Britain had after Winston Churchill.

Yet Hatton has delivered a verdict on Margaret Thatcher which reflects his own repulsive character far more than it tells us anything about her....

[Mr. Tosh is the author of: Why History Matters (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). John He is Professor of History at Roehampton University, London. He is the author of The Pursuit of History, a standard introduction to the discipline (4th edn, Longman, 2006). His advocacy of the social relevance of history is reflected not only in Why History Matters, but in his specialist research on the history of masculinities in modern Britain, notably in A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (paperback edn, Yale University Press, 2007). J.Tosh@roehampton.ac.uk ]

... My own practice as a historian has always been informed by an awareness of the social and political purchase of historical knowledge - first as an Africanist naively aspiring to equip a new nation with part of its history, and later as a British gender historian concerned to historicize the essentialist notions of masculinity which were current in...

Last month, far from his old D.C. stomping grounds, a very old W. Mark Felt, Sr., died quietly in Santa Rosa, California. The press, who had known him as the dashing, silver-haired spook dubbed Deep Throat, portrayed this as a major event, the passing of one of the late 20th century's most influential figures. The New York Times remembered him as the man who "helped bring down President Richard M. Nixon by resisting the Watergate cover-up and becoming Deep Throat, the most famous anonymous source in American history." Across the Pond, the Guardian's obituary only heightened the legend. "Long after memories of Linda Lovelace's pornographic film have vanished," it wrote, "Felt will live on in American political history as Deep Throat, the mysterious insider whose leaks to journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein brought well-deserved ruin to the Nixon presidency."

In no small part because of Hal Holbrook's goggle-eyed, cotton-mouthed...

Abraham Lincoln has always provided a lens through which Americans examine themselves. He has been described as a consummate moralist and a shrewd political operator, a lifelong foe of slavery and an inveterate racist. Politicians from conservatives to communists, civil rights activists to segregationists, have claimed him as their own. With the approach of the bicentennial of his birth, the past few years have seen an outpouring of books on Lincoln of every size, shape and description. His psychology, marriage, law career, political practices, racial attitudes and every one of his major speeches have been subjected to minute examination.

Lincoln is important to us not because of his melancholia or how he chose his cabinet but because of his role in the vast human drama of emancipation and what his life tells us about slavery's enduring legacy. The Nation, founded by veterans of the struggle for abolition three months after Lincoln's death, dedicated itself to completing...

Since 2006, visitors to the NeueGalerie, the boutique museum of German and Austrian art in New York City, have had the chance to view one of Gustav Klimt’s most celebrated paintings—his seductive, gold-spangled portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. For the 70 years before that, however, you would have had to go to Vienna’s Austrian Gallery to see Klimt’s masterpiece. That’s because the painting, along with four other Klimts the Bloch-Bauer family owns, was stolen by the Nazis after the Anschluss, and retained by the Republic of Austria after World War II ended. It took another six decades for the Austrian courts to rule that the Klimt had to be returned to Adele Bloch-Bauer’s rightful heir, who was 90 years old when she finally reclaimed her family’s property and sold it to the NeueGalerie. The wheels of justice ground very slowly in that famous case, but in the end—thanks in part to increased public awareness of Nazi looting—justice was done.

At the National Gallery in...