Polls

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Publish: Homophobia in Lincoln Studies?

by Philip Nobile

Ever since talk about Lincoln's possible bisexuality crept into the mainstream circa 1995--it was déjà vu for gay historians--Lincoln scholars have been unanimously skeptical and sometimes even hostile to the idea. Perhaps the best word to describe their reaction is homophobic, that is, fear of a lavender Lincoln. While there is plenty of material on Lincoln's sex life and his bonding with men more than women, biographers have never written ab

Pearl Harbor Hype

by Thomas Fleming

Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox visited Franklin D. Roosevelt in the afternoon of Dec. 7, just after the president had learned about our devastating losses at Pearl Harbor. Knox later told his naval aide,"FDR was as white as a sheet. He expected to get hit but not hurt." Several months later, Admiral Thomas Hart, commander of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet, returned to Washington D.C. and visited Roosevelt in the White House. By this time, Hart's small fleet was at the bottom of the Java Sea

Reparations Might Do Some Good

by Elazar Barkan

A group of African-Americans is demanding in federal court in New York that the United States acknowledge its culpability in the practice of slavery. The class-action suit filed last month against three American corporations that benefited from slavery faces major obstacles, not least of which is the lack of legal precedent or clear historical analogy. Although the litigation arouses great fear among critics, past cases of reparations elsewhere indicate that the slavery lawsuit could