[Daniel Bruno Sanz is a journalist and author of Why the Democrats Will Win in 2008: The Road to an Obama White House.]

A spectre is haunting the United States: the spectre of nuclear attack without nuclear war. Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and Iran, Pakistan and North Korea, capable state and shadowy non-state actors contemplate flattening an American city with a device smuggled into the United States at one hundred possible ports of entry. It would have no return address. The scenarios of holocaust are many and multiply with the advance of technology and the information age. What will this lead to?

1938-39 were exciting years in both physics and science fiction. Uranium fission was discovered, fantastic novels and broadcasts by H.G.Wells and Orson Welles were popular and academic journals, newspapers and magazines openly discussed atomic energy. However, most American physicists were skeptical that atomic energy could actually be harnessed and there was no atomic...

[After teaching at Wakayama University, Jane Braxton Little earned a Harvard M.A. in Japanese cultural history.]

...I might not have noticed the woman with the cropped hair and ill-fitting gray silk dress if a cameraman hadn't zoomed in on her. She was stooped, seated in a cobblestone courtyard on folded legs before a black-and-white family photograph flanked by vases of golden chrysanthemums. In my eyes she looked old but she could have been middle-aged, a young mother on Aug. 6, 1945....

In the shadow of the bombed-out hulk of the six-story Atomic Dome — one block from the Peace Museum entombing the outlines of children's bodies radiated into the sidewalks where they happened to be captured at 8:15 a.m. on their way to school — there in the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Park, I became this woman's token American aggressor.

It was my government, my president who unleashed the horror of the atom bomb on Japan. It was my country, my people who turned her...

[Greg Mitchell writes the popular Media Fix blog at The Nation, where this first appeared this week. He is co-author with Robert Jay Lifton of "Hiroshima in America."]

Sixty-five years after the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the bomb is still very much with us, and controversy continues to swirl over the decision to obliterate the two Japanese cities -- sparked this time by President Obama's decision to send a U.S. envoy to Hiroshima, for the first time, for the official ceremony today.

Already some on the right are charging that this amounts to an "apology" for using the bomb against Japan. Warren Kozak, in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, has attacked the Obama move, equating it with President Reagan going to Bitburg and laying a wreath at graves belonging to SS members. In contrast, the overwhelming majority of the 130,000 killed in Hiroshima were civilians, mainly women and children.

Secretary of State...

[Stan Katz directs the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School.]

My historian friend Morty Horwitz of the Harvard Law School faculty is fond of saying that those who abuse history by using it selectively to prove a point, are "looking for their friends in history." This sort of instrumental use of history is common, especially when it is by nations to falsify their pasts. This is why so many countries try to control the interpretation of history in school textbooks in an attempt to keep school children from learning about the misdeeds of earlier generations. An even more egregious state abuse of history occurs when nations manipulate history texts and teaching in order to promote desired values, ordinarily by portraying as heroes those who stand for the desired national values.

I was trained professionally as an historian, and although I have not formally taught history for a number of years, I...

Editor's Note: The Chronicle, in response to questions raised in the blogosphere, launched an investigation of this article and determined that the student had"fabricated several details in the story" and that"Mr. Bellesiles said he was saddened that his student had altered the details of a personal tragedy and that he regretted that he had unknowingly passed on a story that was not accurate."

[Michael A. Bellesiles is a historian and adjunct lecturer in history at Central Connecticut State University. His most recent book, 1877: America's Year of Living Violently, is forthcoming next month from the New Press.]

Teaching military history when there are veterans in the classroom requires a greater sensitivity to the impact of language than may be the case with other students. I learned long ago to never insert words like "just" or "only" before giving casualty figures, for few veterans who have been in combat consider...

[Chris Hedges, whose column is published Mondays on Truthdig, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.]

On Monday I will teach my final American history class of the semester to prison inmates. We have spent five weeks reading Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.” The class is taught in a small room in the basement of the prison. I pass through a metal detector, am patted down by a guard and walk through three pairs of iron gates to get to my students. We have covered Spain’s genocide of the native inhabitants in the Caribbean and the Americas, the war for independence in the United States and the disgraceful slaughter of Native Americans. We have examined slavery,...

[Bruce Fein is a constitutional lawyer and international consultant with Bruce Fein & Associates and The Lichfield Group. This essay is adapted from American Empire: Before the Fall, published by Campaign for Liberty.]

From the late 1940s to the end of the Cold War, U.S. presidents interceded everywhere in the world in an effort to contain or to defeat the USSR. No country was too small for the United States to believe its alignment with the Soviet Union would be pivotal to American safety, freedom, or prosperity. For the first time, America began to devise a foreign policy for every nation on earth, be it Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Nepal, or Fiji. And this attitude prevailed when no one would have dared an offensive war against the United States—at the height of its power, the Soviet Union flinched in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Two unassailable orthodoxies drove this hyper-interventionism. First was the belief that the national security of the United States...

[Marc Lacey, who joined The Times in 1999, opened the newspaper's first-ever Phoenix Bureau in the summer of 2010. As Phoenix bureau chief, Marc covers the immigration debate, border issues and other events in Arizona and the Southwest United States.]

...The modern story [of the Mexican border] begins with Prohibition, when Mexico became the place for thirsty Americans to go for a cheap, legal drink. Over the years, the lure of cheap booze gave way to quickie divorces, dog races, strip shows, slot machines and brothels where fathers sometimes brought their sons when they hit 16. Through it all, there were plenty of drugs — medicinal (cut rates with no prescriptions) as well as illegal (marijuana, cocaine, heroin).

“The spice of danger adds a zest to the pleasure of thousands who visit them from this side of the frontier,” The Times wrote of the towns of Tijuana and Agua Caliente, in a feature article describing the raging drinking and gambling scene there. The...