News at Home

The Kids These Days: A Bright Future for Economic Literacy?

by Bryan Caplan

The Nation's Report Card, a national test of high school achievement, came back last month. One of its most trumpeted results is that American high school students are doing pretty well in economics. 37% of high school seniors perfor

The Scary Consequences of Our Mindless Indifference to the History of the Constitution

by Eric Lane and Michael Oreskes

America’s greatest strength and greatest weakness are the same thing. We are not burdened by a sense of history, our own or anyone else’s. Our detachment from history has liberated us to focus forward. We look to the future in a way that many other societies envy.

It's Time for an Independent Investigation of America's Intelligence Strategy: The Church Committee Shows How.

by Frederick A.O. Schwarz, Jr., and Aziz Huq

Six years after the 9/11 attacks, there is a good case to be made that the national security strategy of the United States is in shambles.  We are mired in a war in Iraq that hinged on false premises supplied

Is America a Christian Nation? What Both Left and Right Get Wrong

by John Fea

How do they demonstrate that America was founded as a Christian nation? By selectively choosing texts from the writings of the Founders.

The First Mother Who Fought the Military to Find Out How Her Son Died

by Robin R. Cutler

One hundred years ago, across a creek from the Naval Academy in Annapolis Maryland, a 22-year-old marine died during a fight with his fellow student officers. A handful of these young men immediately claimed Lieutenant James N. Sutton committed suicide; within 36 hours a swift and efficient investigation confirmed their story. Newspapers on both coasts proclaimed that Sutton shot a bullet through his brain, though a few reports hinted that mysterious circumstances surrounded his death. B

Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy

by David Weaver-Zercher

One year ago, on October 2, the words Nickel Mines became part of the nation’s vocabulary. It was near that Lancaster County village,

Is Our Problem Disaccumulation? Dis-a-what? Read on.

by James Livingston

 The big question in the financial press last week—before the Fed’s bold moves—was 25 or 50 basis points, that is, should the central

Was Dick Cheney's Self-Serving Claim to be Part of Congress Really Laughable?

by Edward J. Larson

Commentators and comedians have ridiculed Vice President Dick Cheney for invoking executive privilege to deny one set of documents to the Senate Judiciary Committee while, at the same time, asserting that his office is not part of the executive branch so as to deny another set to the Information Security Oversight Office of the National Archives.  As a historian, though, I admire the Vice President’s chutzpah.   Rather than being laughably ridiculous, his seemingly conflicti

The Long Road From Little Rock: 50 Years Later

by Jason Sokol

Fifty years ago this month, America met the schoolhouse mob. Thousands of whites encircled Little Rock Central High School on September 4, 1957, as a group of African American students attempted to enter. National Guard troops, mobilized by Governor Orval Faubus, blocked the students’ path. Newspapers across the world splashed on their front pages the horrible results: after the troops rebuffed 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford, outraged whites closed in on her, raining epithets and spittl

I Love Reading Economists When They Write Like Journalists

by James Livingston

I love reading economists when they write as journalists: the numbers recede, and stories get told.  I also love reading White House staffers when th

When a Good Public Education Becomes a Constitutional Right

by Joyce Appleby

California has something to offer the nation as it comes to terms with the recent Supreme Court ruling invalidating school desegregation programs in Louisville and Seattle. In their five-to-four decision, the justices said that public school systems cannot recognize a student's race in devising plans to achieve or maintain segregation. But the problem of equality of education, which Brown v. Board of Education addressed 47 years ago, remains.

Reflections on 9-11

by Gil Troy

The passage of time, and the frustrations from Iraq have blurred memories of September 11, six years ago when the World Trade Center crumpled in an apocalyptic cloud of dust, ash, and fire. Many assumed “our world would never be the same.” Yet, Osama Bin Laden’s Islamicist terrorists failed to derail Western society. Life for most of us in the West continued with little interruption.

2007: The HIV/AIDS Crisis

by Seth Abrahams

It is 10 years since the Press Release of the Center for Infectious Diseases of the University of North Carolina about their research in Malawi which proved that STD’s enhance HIV transmission and that by treating STD’s one would reduce the spread of HIV. Within 5 months of the publication of the article in a Medical Journal during June 1998, Public Health of Seattle and Kings County had this information on th

Let's Do Something Constitutional on Constitution Day

by Joyce Appleby

On September 17, Constitution Day, in 2002, scholars presented a petition, signed by 1,200 American historians, urging members of Congress to assume their constitutional responsibility to determine whether or not to declare war on Iraq. Reminding them that Congress had ignored this provision since its 1941 declarations of war on Japan, Germany and Italy, the petition explained why the Founding Fathers gave this power to them and to no other body.

Sen. Larry Craig's Arrest

Commentary Jonathan Zimmerman: Purging Larry Craig Aaron Belkin: A Sting He Didn't Deserve Seth Randal & Alan Virta: Idaho’s Original Same-Sex Scandal Gary Leupp: Sen. Larry Craig in the Toilet

The 600 Year Tradition Behind Same-Sex Unions

by Allan Tulchin

John Boswell, in Same Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe (1994), published rites of adelphopoesis (brother-making) from liturgical manuscripts of the Eastern churches. The book received tremendous publicity, including a week of cartoons in Doonesbury. But as James Davidson has commented in the London Review of Books (June 2, 2005), “Reviewers (including myself) generally gave it a fairly hard time, and its central claim—that these same-sex unions sanctioned by the Churc

What Does Weird Weather Really Tell Us?

by Philip Ranlet

By any standard, the weather experienced by the East Coast since December has been, well, weird. What can you say when the weather is so odd that Easter was colder than Christmas. Surely, some terrible climate change – global warming – must be happening to cause such bizarre conditions. On May 6 a famous New York City newspaper publisher wrote: “Tho’ we have had a very mild Winter, we have had the coldest and most backward Spring I think that ever I knew. There

Does Psychology Explain Why Some Voters Continue to Back Bush?

by Robert Brent Toplin

We are faced with an intriguing mystery: President George W. Bush’s administration has been pursuing a disastrous intervention in Iraq, yet some Americans remain generally supportive of the president. This allegiance to a failed policy gives a substantial number of Republican Congressmen the will to resist Democratic appeals for a withdrawal from Iraq.

Why All of Us Have to Keep Spending Like Crazy--Or Else!

by James Livingston

Herewith an update on the credit crunch, which many well-placed financial analysts see as a potential crisis.  I doubt it will degenerate to that ext

Latest Flash from the NSA News Wire

by Jules R. Benjamin

Intercept of walkie-talkie conversation between Ben Laidon and several assorted evildoers.Ben – Bush’s inconsistencies are driving me crazy.  If we tell our terrorists to go back to