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How the Other Half Live: What Tom Friedman Is Missing

by Jonathan Rees

In the May 2005 issue of Harper’s Magazine, Gordon Bigelow analyzes the evangelical Christian roots of free-market economics in nineteenth century Great Britain (and eventually the United States): Looking back two centuries at these early debates, it is clear that a pure free-market ideology can be logically sustained only if it is based in a fiery religious conviction. The c

John Roberts, Historian

by Rebecca Bernstein

Judge John G. Roberts, the nominee picked by President Bush for the Supreme Court to take the place of retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Conner, has earned many honors in life, starting with several awards for papers concerned with history, which he earned while an undergraduate at Harvard University in the early 1970s. Judge Roberts graduated from Harvard in 1976 and then continued on to Harvard Law School. However, law was not always the career path he intended to take. “Jo

Did the FBI Try to Blackmail Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas

by Marc Stein

A controversial FBI file that reportedly contains allegations of homosexual conduct by Abe Fortas, an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court in the 1960s, is missing, according to the FBI. Never proven, the allegations may have been made as a way for the FBI to threaten Fortas with exposure, encourage his resignation, or prevent his appointment as Chief Justice. Fortas has been in the news recently because of inaccurate Republican claims about the

Why the Right to Privacy May Be Taken Away by a New Supreme Court

by Ellen Chesler

The resignation of Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and the still possible retirement of ailing Chief Justice William Rehnquist may threaten long-established judicial protections of personal privacy and undermine the foundations on which women’s reproductive freedoms rest. Forty years ago, the Supreme Court ruled decisively that married women have the right to use contraceptives. That historic case, Griswold v. Connecticut, led to dramatic changes in Americ

Venona Ten Years Later: Lessons for Today

by Steven T. Usdin

Ten years ago, on July 11, 1995, the U.S. intelligence community held an extraordinary press conference at CIA headquarters to break the seal on one of the most closely held secrets of the Cold War. The world learned that, starting in 1946, American cryptologists had cracked Soviet codes and read portions of thousands of messages Soviet intelligence operatives sent each other during World War II. Most of the cables decrypted in a program that came to be known as Venona, one of numerous codenames

9-11: How Far Can the President Legally Go?

by John Dean

Untold thousands of Americans have been killed by unidentified terrorists on American soil. A veiled enemy has declared war on our nation and our way of life. Understandably, the American people look to one person for answers and action: The President of the United States. What can he do? What should he do?These are not hypothetical questions. This is real life. How they are answered will affect every American.The Object Of Terrorism Is Fear

Why Ronald Reagan Picked Sandra Day O'Connor--And Why George W. Bush Might Want to Follow His Example

by Gil Troy

It is not surprising that Sandra Day O’Connor emerged as the crucial swing vote in the modern Supreme Court, or that her retirement presents President George W. Bush with a most unwelcome headache. Justice O’Connor’s appointment in 1

With Our History, Spinning America's Image Isn't Enough

by Thomas Palaima

The historian Tacitus explained the secret of the peace that prevailed in the early Roman Empire. Romans used their military might to create a desert, then called it peace.The Bush administration is now seeking a Pax Americana through nearly unilateral use of military power based on a similar principle: Make a desert and call for a public relations campaign.Admittedly, this is several stages better than what we did with bombs, artillery, napalm and Agent Oran

The Fundamentalist Attack on Separation of Church and State Defames America and Its Founders

by Harvey Wasserman

The right-wing's multi-front war on American democracy now aims at our core belief in separation of church and state. It includes an attempt to say the founding fathers endorsed the idea that this is a "Christian nation," with an official religion.But the founders---and a vast majority of Americans---repeatedly, vehemently and with stunning clarity denounced, rejected and despised such beliefs.Nowhere in the Constitution they wrote does the word "C

Japanese Internment: Why Daniel Pipes Is Wrong

by Irfan Khawaja

What lessons of relevance to the current war on terrorism should we learn from our treatment of Japanese-Americans during World War II? The orthodox civil libertarian position regards the internment of Japanese-Americans as wrong, identifies “ethnic profiling” as its essential feature, and condemns all further attempts at profiling, including that focused on Muslim-Americans today. Michelle

What Mississippi Teaches Us (Again) About Escaping from the Past

by Fran Shor

William Faulkner, the legendary Mississippi-bred writer who wrestled in his novels with the tortured legacies of the South, noted that “the past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past.” Through a number of recent high-profile trials and investigations we have been reminded that the past cannot be so easily buried, especially when justice languishes. With the FBI opening an investigation of the 1955 brutal murder of the black teenager, Emmett Till, and a Mississippi jury finding E

Sports: My or No Way

by Murray Polner

At New York Yankee home games during the seventh inning stretch, a sonorous voice on the P.A. system asks the crowd to stand – how many brave souls would dare refuse? – for the playing of Irving Berlin’s "God Bless America."Nothing much was said publicly about standing for the song until first baseman-slugger Carlos Delgado, then of the Toronto Blue Jays, refused last year to rise from his dugout bench, declaring he wasn't thrilled how th

Morality, Politics and Liberalism

by Daniel Burnstein

The public controversy concerning the Terri Schiavo case illustrated how important it is for progressives to emphasize that issues affecting economic well-being are the most crucial moral issues that we face as a national community. When news outlets focus excessively on socio-cultural issues, as in the Schiavo case, attention is deflected from socio-economic issues that more gravely threaten Americans’ well-being. It is astounding, for example, that the media bec

Why the Founding Fathers Would Be Appalled at Tom DeLay's Call to Impeach Judges

by David E. Kyvig

Update 6-18-05: The office of Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) says that he has not called for the impeachment of judges for unpopular rulings as Mr. Kyvig stated in this piece.I blame Congress over the last fifty to a hundred years for not standing up and taking its responsibility given to it by the Constitution. The reason the judiciary has been able to impose a separation of church and state that’s nowhere in the Constitution is that Congress

The Framers Vs. Senator Frist

by David E. Kyvig

Conservatives portray the men who framed the Constitution as repositories of democratic wisdom. If that's what they believe, they ought at least be faithful to one of the Framers' core principles. But they aren't doing so. Instead, ignoring that principle, they're rushing headlong to impose a radical reform on the United States Senate. Senate Republicans, lusting to install a few judges who can only be confirmed by slender partisan majorities, are ignoring a principle in which Jam

Gay Rights Movement: Going Forward or Backward?

by Hugo Schwyzer

Much has happened since I last taught my course on gay and lesbian history in the fall semester of 2002.  On the one hand, we've seen sudden, dramatic, exciting progress: the "Massachusetts Miracle" that has resulted in thousands and thousands of legal marriages, the elevation of the openly gay Gene Robinson to be a bishop in the Episcopal Church, and the Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas (particularly considering the breadth of Justice

Imagine What FDR Would Say about Bush's Social Security "Reforms"

by William C. Kashatus

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt was asked in 1935 to defend payroll contributions to Social Security, he said that he wanted"to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and benefits.""With those taxes in there," he tartly asserted,"no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program."   Seventy years later, President George W. Bush is making a destructive effort to do just that. Insisting that the Social Security system is i

Like Woodrow Wilson (Who Lost Popular Support) President Bush Has Neglected the Home Front While Fighting His War

by Gene Gerard

A frequent criticism of President Bush is that domestic issues have suffered in the last four years. The reasoning behind this assertion is that Bush has been so focused on the war on terrorism that the home front received little attention. In fact, history suggests that this has been the case before. Between 1917 and 1920, President Woodrow Wilson was consumed with winning World War I and negotiating a peace treaty. Between December 1918 and June 1919 Wilson spent onl

Why Congress Has Every Right to Investigate Baseball and Other Sports

by Julian E. Zelizer

The chair of the House Government Reform Committee, Tom Davis, House Democrat Henry Waxman and Senate Republican John McCain have announced that they will propose legislation to impose uniform drug testing standards on the four major U.S. professional sports leagues. The suspicions about superstar athletes such as Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa have caused many legislators to doubt that sports officials can crack down effectively on steroid abuse. Yet, according to many Americans, Congres

The 4 Historical Misunderstandings About Social Security

by Edward Berkowitz

This article was delivered as a talk to members of Congress in mid-May. It was one of a number of talks being sponsored by the American Historical Association as part of the National History Center's Congressional Breakfast Seminar Series.