[John Feffer is co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus.]

The deliberations that took place in Tokyo after World War II, which led to 25 guilty verdicts and the execution of seven Japanese, helped shape the international law around war crimes.

The arguments made in the proceedings against Slobodan Milosevic and the instigators of the Rwanda genocide, as well as the recent indictment of the International Criminal Court against Sudanese leader Omar Hassan al-Bashir, can be traced back to the court discussions and decisions of more than half a century ago.

The Tokyo trial lives on not only through its precedents but also in the continuing controversy over its structure, purposes, and verdicts.

"There has continued to be a lively and often contentious debate in Japan about the trial and its implications," says George Washington University associate professor Mike Mochizuki, who participated in a Mar. 23 seminar in Washington, DC...

[From 1997-2005 Susan Ware served as editor of volume five of the biographical dictionary Notable American Women at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. Her research interests include twentieth-century American history and the history of American women, as well as biography. She has published books on women in the New Deal and the 1930s; biographies of Molly Dewson, Amelia Earhart, and Mary Margaret McBride; and a women's history anthology.]

In 1933 Eleanor Roosevelt’s It’s Up to the Women exhorted American women to help pull the country through its current economic crisis, the gravest it had ever faced: “The women know that life must go on and that the needs of life must be met and it is their courage and determination which, time and again, have pulled us through worse crises than the present one.” While women as a group could not end the depression (mobilization for World War II deserves that credit), the country could never have survived the...

[Nick Taylor is an independent scholar and the author of American Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation to Work (Bantam, 2008).]

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in March 1933, estimates of the number of jobless workers in the United States ranged from thirteen million to as high as fifteen million – a quarter of the working population. Every class of worker was affected: laborers, factory workers, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, secretaries, clerks, salesmen and women, teachers, architects, engineers. No one was immune.

The new president spelled out the problem in his inaugural address. “Our greatest primary task,” he said, “is to put people to work.”

His first steps toward job creation, however, were limited in scope, slow to gear up, or temporary. The Civilian Conservation Corps paid young men to work in national and state parks and forests; their numbers never reached more than 300,000 at any given...

[George White, jr. is an Assistant Professor of History at York College, CUNY. He is the author of the book Holding the Line: Race, Racism, and American Foreign Policy Toward Africa, 1953-1961 and the article “Little Wheel Blues: John Lee Hooker, the Eisenhower Administration and African Decolonization” in the French interdisciplinary journal Cercles.]

These words are difficult to write. Fifty years ago, the people of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo drifted in a purgatory between independence and continued Belgian control. It seems like only yesterday that nationalist leaders like Patrice Lumumba climbed a mountain of severed hands to point their people toward a new future. The Congolese enjoyed a brief moment of unity and democracy until the “Free World” ensnared them. Today, the people of the Congo exist at the bottom-step of the Inferno, unified by exhaustion, trapped by a series of resource wars resembling battles that have raged across the last few...

In the wake of the news that Encarta, Microsoft’s electronic encyclopedia, is to be euthanized, the question of the day seems to be, Is Wikipedia to be blamed or thanked?

This assumes that Wikipedia had anything to do with it, an assumption that many observers and futurepundits are very, very eager to make.

In the comments a fellow named Tom Corddry, who says he ran the Encarta project at the beginning, makes a case for the respectability of his product. It’s mainly an engineer’s case – the core Funk & Wagnalls text, he claims, was superior for the purpose to Britannica’s because it was “more nearly ‘structured data’.” The whiff of sour grapes may or may not be in my imagination, but the memory of Dick Martin pronouncing “Funk & Wagnalls” is certainly not. As a matter of fact, Britannica’s text was very well...