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Predicting the End of Faith in America

by Christopher McKnight Nichols and Charles Mathewes

The end of religion in America is near. As Easter approached the cover of Newsweek read, “The Decline and Fall of Christian America.” Jon Meacham, the magazine's editor, set the tone quickly inside: Recent national polls indi

A Tale of Two Crises: 1848-9 and 2008-?

by Mike Rapport

An economic crisis cutting deep, rising food prices, a shortage of credit, spiralling unemployment – and the advent of a new government promising radical

Bipartisanship Works

by Michael H. Ebner

As President Obama encounters substantial challenges in creating a bipartisan approach to governance, largely overlooked are the ways that Franklin Delano Roosevelt successfully made bipartisanship a key instrument in conducting American foreign policy during the Second World War. In the face of escalating international conflicts in Europe and Asia well in advance of Pearl Harbor, FDR had appointed two prominent Republicans to key posts in his cabinet. Henry L. Stimson, acknowledged amon

Blame It All on Unintended Consequences

by Joyce Appleby

Why do economic downturns catch experts unawares? Even more intriguingly, why do they defy analysis after they've happened? Neither economists nor financiers can agree on why the world's economies are in free fall today. More than 70 years later, there's still no agreement on what caused the Great Depression. Not even in hindsight does consensus emerge. The answer to this puzzle lies in the fact that economic activity sets in motion a battery of unintended econ

Guess What? The New Deal Worked!

by Steven Conn

Since the economic crisis we're now in is being compared to the Great Depression, the solutions being offered are being routinely compared to the New Deal. Republicans in particular have been quick to pronounce the New Deal a failure as a way of justifying their opposition to the new stimulus package and any other federal response to our new Great Depression. Congressman Steve Austria (R-Ohio) is so angry at the New Deal that he told an audience recently that Franklin Roosevelt's New

Blogging from the Center as an Historian During a Contested Campaign: Politically Anomalous and Academically Tenuous?

by Gil Troy

Mr. Troy delivered the following remarks at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians on March 26, 2009 at a panel considering "The 2008 Election as History." A video of this talk will be posted in the coming weeks on HNN.

Do the Humanities Matter in Hard Times? A Russian Historian's Answer

by Walter G. Moss

A recent New York Times article was titled "In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth.”  Being primarily a Russian historian, I thought of the toughest Russian times, the German siege of Leningrad, which lasted from September 1941 to January 1944.  It led to the deaths, mainly from starvation, of a million or so Leningraders. Attempting to stay alive, people ate anything including rats, glue, and human body parts. But the “tough times&rdq

On the Decline of Presidential Press Conferences

by Rick Shenkman

The most important image of this presidency is the one you cannot bring to mind. It is George W. Bush standing in front of the Washington press corps taking questions.

The Obamas’ Working Marriage

by Kristin Celello

In a recent issue of People magazine, Michelle Obama does her best to dispel any notions that she and the President have a “

The Businessman from the Past Who Puts Our Rogues Gallery of Thieves to Shame

by Michael J. Makley

Subsidies, bailouts, stimulus packages, and calls for federal takeovers proliferate amid the current economic melee.  Finance managers who concocted crisis-inducing instruments are receiving million dollar retentio

Why Neither Nationalization Nor a New Tarp Can Fix Our Finances

by James Livingston

The banks are neither loaning nor investing.  They’re sitting on idle reserves provided to them by the Treasury’s disbursement of funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or they are waiting for directions from their ostensible supervisors in the federal government.  Why not then just go ahead and nationalize them, thus forcing them to do their job of moving money from savings or deposits to productive investments, of converting idle surpluses to working capi

Is Greed Good? It Depends on the Times

by Robert Brent Toplin

"Greed" is suddenly the operative word for characterizing the bonuses received by AIG executives and other financial titans who amassed riches while pushing their companies and the American economy over the cliff. But will this anger last? Are discussions about greed and calls for government action to curb it likely to extend beyond the present financial crisis? History suggests that outrage over the abuses of fat-cats is often short-lived. Complaints appear frequently durin

The Auto Bailout: a Bad Deal

by John Paul Rossi

With the economy tanking and unemployment skyrocketing you'd think the Obama administration would be doing all it could to save jobs. But if its auto bailout plan is any indicator of its current direction, we're on our way to losing a lot more jobs. Why is that? Because President Obama and his advisers are repeating the central mistake of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal-contradictory programs that undermined economic recovery in his time. While the Obama stimulus package creates job

Remembering Past Hard Times

by by TH McGraw

You don’t have to take a shower every day. Good news? Your great-grandparents might have given a baffled look at any such declaration. Just whom, they might have asked, would want cold water poured on them in winter? Showers, hot showers with clean water were before modern times mostly reserved for royalty. Plenty of servants to draw and heat water, or time away from requisite peasant drudgery were needed. As late as the twentieth century, even in urban America a warm shower was not univer

A 9/11 Reformer's Final Plea for Justice in Washington

by Anthony Toth

Beverly Eckert rose very early on February 6 to catch the 8 a.m. Acela train out of Stamford, CT, but she was eager to make the trip to Washington, DC, this time around. On past journeys, the doors of official Washington would too often slam in her face. But now, she and other 9/11 family members had an appointment to meet with President Obama himself. So Eckert was keen to deliver by hand a letter she had written the day before, which laid out her fervent hope for a resolution of one of the

Irish and Black Americans: Have the Parallel Lines Finally Met?

by Thomas Fleming

On this St. Patrick’s Day, with a black president in the White House, it is interesting – and maybe even somewhat inspiring – to look back on the way the Irish-American and African-American stories have coursed through our history on parallel lines, e

That Chimpanzee Cartoon Was Dangerous

by William Loren Katz

On February 18th Rupert Murdoch's New York Post published a cartoon of two beefy white policemen who have just slain the author of the stimulus package - a chimpanzee who lies in a pool of blood. The paper's defense -- just good-hearted fun, no harm intended to the first African American President who devised and just signed the package. Perhaps this was Murdoch's contribution to African American history month or race relations? Or was it offered to the public as a call for reasoned deba

Why We Need a “Truth Commission” to Investigate Torture

by William J. Astore

The American people’s faith in their government—even with the election of Barack Obama—remains compromised.  One reason is obvious.  Americans see low-level military operatives being imprisoned for mistreatment, even murder, of prisoners.  At the same time, high-level officials go uninvestigated and unpunished.  In their case, we’re told to look forward rather than backward, an empty phrase that can be cynically manipulated both to exonerate law-bre

The Intended and Unintended Consequences of the Financial Crisis

by Richard Bensel

Just after the 2008 election, Newsweek ran a story comparing Barak Obama to Abraham Lincoln, a comparison that Obama in some ways has welcomed. Among other things, the two presidents both hailed from Illinois, shared a passion for rhetoric, recruited a cabinet containing one or more of their most serious opponents, and took the oath of office in the midst of a national crisis.  While Obama, of course, has not inherited a country on the brink of civil war, the new president does c

A Double Standard for Campus Free Speech

by Richard L. Cravatts

In what is yet more evidence that universities have become, as Abigail Thernstrom has described them, “islands of repression in a sea of freedom,” Toronto’s York University witnessed a near riot of some 100 pro-Palestinian Israel-haters, as police had to be called to usher Jewish students to safety after they had been barricaded inside the Hillel@York offices and were “isolated and threatened” by the physically and verbally aggressive demonstrators. York,