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Are We Kidding Ourselves About Our Great Tradition of the Fair Treatment of The Other?

by Simon Balto

President Obama’s national security speech at the National Archives has, by this point, been both lauded for its oratory and pragmatism, and heavily critiqued for its supposed doctrinal continuations with the Bush administration. Though Obama deserves credit for so forthrightly engaging the issue, with so much at stake (to paraphrase both the President and, ironically, Dick Che

Are Americans Still Stupid?*

by Rick Shenkman

Exactly one year ago this week the hardback of Just How Stupid Are We: Facing the Truth About the American Voter was published by Basic Books. Now there's a paperback edition available. Is the book still relevant? After Barack Obama's election friends emailed me wondering if I still believed the voters are uninformed. Didn't Obama's election m

Is the GOP Washed Up? Hardly.

by David L. Stebenne

As scholars and politicos debate the Republican party’s future, everyone involved ought to keep in mind that history does offer some useful lessons. The closest historical analogy to the GOP’s present dilemma was the party’s experience in the 1930’s and ‘40’s, when the Republicans as a national party also had real trouble appealing to the broad middle of the electorate at a time when moderation was increasing

Lawyers Should Punish the Torture Lawyers

by Harold H. Bruff

Lawyers for the Bush administration gave their clients very bad advice on a wide range of topics, including domestic surveillance, the detention and trial of terror

Thinking of Dick Cheney as Cicero

by David R. Carlin

Everybody agrees that some prisoners held at Guantanamo received a certain amount of rough treatment. Those on the American political left call this treatment "torture." They say it was criminal conduct, and they want somebody held accountable for this wrongdoing. Above all, they'd love to see former Vice President Dick Cheney branded a criminal. Those on the right, by contrast, call the rough treatment at Guantanamo "enhanced interrogation," and they hold that valuabl

Is Economic Growth a Delusion?

by Steven Stoll

Unemployment reached 8.5 percent in March of this year, but add in the once full-time, now part-time laborers, it may be as high as 15 percent. Yet my

Why Obama's Right to Claim that Torturing Prisoners Is Un-American

by Edwin G. Burrows

President Obama has often asserted—most recently in his address at the National Archives—that the harsh interrogation of enemy prison

Tortured Debate: Why the Media Should Stop Referring to the Inquisition

by Liam Brockey

As a troupe of wise men once said, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. Regrettably, that is no longer the case. The recent flood tide of commentary about the so-called Torture Memos has brough

Evangelicalism—the End of an Era?

by Steven P. Miller

Historians love eras—if only because they offer an easy way to critique those other historians who dare think in terms of “the age of . . . . ”  Recent developments might be giving

"Big Bang": Changing the National Approach to the Treatment of Detainees (June 2005)

by Philip Zelikow and Gordon England

HNN Editor: Last week in testimony before a Senate subcommittee Philip Zelikow provided fascinating insights into the grueling bureaucratic infighting that delayed reform of the Bush administration's detainee policies. You can read his testimony here. Zelikow testified that by the summer of 2005 Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was convinced"the raging controversy over 'Abu Ghraib' or 'Guantanam

Tortured Reasoning and Tortured Results

by William Loren Katz

Each day the evidence piles up - highlighted by the unconvincing rants of Dick Cheney. Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell, said,"the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002 -- well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion -- its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa'ida." Journalist Paul Krugman said of the

The Swine Flu and Historic Memory

by Heather Munro Prescott

Last month I attended the annual meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine, an organization "devoted to the study of all aspects of the history of the

American Torture: No Knowledge of History, No Sense of Tragedy

by William J. Astore

Recently in the New York Times, Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti showed that the Bush Administration, the CIA, and the Senate and House Intelligence Committees failed to ask for any historical context before approving so-called “harsh interrogation techniques,” including waterboarding, in 2002.  No one apparently knew, or wanted to know, that the U.S. had defined waterboarding as torture and prose

What Harry Truman Could Teach George W. Bush About Being an “Ex”

by Matthew Algeo

Since settling into his Dallas home last month, George W. Bush has made only a handful of forays out into the real world. He’s popped into a hardware store that (in jest, presumably) offered him a job as a gre

The Decline (and Fall) of the G.O.P.?

by Robert Brent Toplin

It’s hard to believe that less than five years ago George W. Bush won re-election, and the G.O.P. secured control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives. Since that time, the Republican Party has gone through one of the greatest meltdowns in political history. Americans have been leaving the party in droves. And while Democrats have rallied around the impressive stewardship of Barack Obama, Republicans appear leaderless. Their public face has been represented in recent mont

The New Deal Was a Good Idea, We Should Try it

by Linda Gordon

            Two new conservative books have repeated an old criticism of the New Deal: it didn’t end the depression.  Only WWII did.  The conclusion is quite correct, but the authors are completely wrong about the reasons, as any careful student of US legislative history should know.  There were two problems, by no means confined to the New Deal.           

Is There Anything to the Claim that Texas Can Secede?

by Clayton E. Lust

Texas cannot secede from the United States. Rick Perry is wrong. Ron Paul is wrong. All of the teabaggers (hilarious by the way) are wrong. First and foremost, the United States and the Confederate States fought a little war in the 1860s. While the cause of rupture was the protection of slavery, a point of contention from a political standpoint was can you secede simply because you don't like the government duly elected. When Robert E. Lee surrendered on April 9, 1865, that question from a

Punish Torture? Hollywood's Answer.

by Robert Brent Toplin

Ever since the Justice Department released four memos from the time of George W. Bush’s administration that justified waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques, Washington has been abuzz. Some politicians reacted by calling call for prosecution of high-level officials. Others defended the people who crafted these policies because the aim of forceful interrogation was to protect the country from terrorist attacks. Americans who are curious about the stakes in this lively debate

What About Michelle's First Hundred Days?

by Stacy A. Cordery

While the mixed assessments of President Barack Obama’s first hundred days pour in, Michelle Obama has maintained a near-flawless record of behavior and pushed campaign questions about her equanimity into obscurity. In the process, she has managed to accomplish The First Lady Ideal: pleasing most of the people most of the time. She has done this through a media-savvy combination: her actions remain reassuringly conventional while she personifies the Obama message of hope and change. M

Americans' Unceasing Quest for a Moral Economy

by Robert M. Saunders

In this period of economic stress, a big-picture examination of Western economic thoughts and practices can provide insights for the present. Some 2,500 years ago, Aristotle began the quest for a moral economy with a call for the government to establish “just” prices and wages. The Christian church adopted the concept of a “just society” based on the belief that individuals should subordinate their selfish interests for the common good. The Puritans who came to Amer