Recently Published

How Race Relations Touched Me During a Long Lifetime

by Vaughn Davis Bornet

This is a particularly personal essay about American race relations as I witnessed them during my very long lifetime. 

The Hard Years at the Harvard History Department

by Morton Keller and Phyllis Keller

After 1970 as before, History was the most troubled of Harvard’s social science departments. An Old Guard fought with tenacity for decades to fend off threats to the quality of what (with some reason) it regarded as one of Harvard’s great departments. Historical metaphors come readily to hand: Leonidas and his band at Thermopylae; Bourbons who learned nothing and forgot nothing; perhaps most apt, Canute ordering the tide not to come in.

The Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti: Eighty Years After

by Ron Briley

T. S. Elliott once described April as the cruelest month. Perhaps he should have considered August. Recent weeks have witnessed observations marking the sixty-second anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet, the eightieth anniversary of the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti on August 23, 1927 is drawing less attention. Of course, we are talking about the lives of two men as opposed to thousands. But just as with the atomic bomb

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

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.

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

Was the Marshall Plan as Good an Example of Bipartisanship as People Say?

by Greg Behrman

On June 5, 1947, Secretary of State George Catlett Marshall arrived at Harvard University’s 286th Commencement with a bold idea.  World War II had decimated Europe.  Beyond the physical destruction and death, the continent’s economies were in an acute state of commercial and financial dislocation.  National Communist Parties – in France and Italy, in particular – were finding fuel in the want and despair.  To the east, the Soviet Union emerged a contin

Iraqi Insurgents, ‘Werewolves’ and the Uses of History

by Perry Biddiscombe

Nearly a decade ago, I published two books, Werwolf! and The Last Nazis, both of which have since been cited by right-wing pundits and opinion-makers in order to establish a point of comparison for the current war in Iraq.  Both volumes were focused on the Nazi effort – codenamed"Werwolf" – to raise guerrillas against the Allied invaders and occupiers descending upon Germany in 1944/45, and a subsidiary part of this story involves the way in which small frag

Whatever Happened to August First?

by J. R. Kerr-Ritchie

Two weeks ago, hurricane dean swept Jamaica.   One hundred and seventy six years previously, a human hurricane hit the British colony in the form

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

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

Why Bush Never Should Have Been Considered Wilson's Successor

by Erez Manela

Ninety years ago this summer the first American troops under General John J. “Blackjack” Pershing landed on European shores. The United States had been at war with Germany since April. The war, President Woodrow Wilson famously said, was being fought to “make the world safe for democracy.” On the Fourth of July that year, street posters declared, “For Freedom Then, For Freedom Now!”  

The Housing Crisis: Caused by Lax Regulation

by Robert Brent Toplin

After Wall Street went into a tailspin because of problems with sub-prime mortgages, Democratic presidential candidates demanded stronger standards for the mortgage industry. Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama and Christopher Dodd asked Congress to exercise more control over the risky lending practices that have harmed homebuyers and frightened investors. We've heard such sage advice before. But in the past, no one heeded it. Now it's time for leaders in Washington to stop the abuses.

The Housing Crisis: Caused by the Bush Tax Cuts

by James Livingston

I don’t know about you, but watching the markets get crazy has been great fun for me.  Once upon a time I wrote a book on the origins of the Fed, so every time I read about the “moral hazard” involved in bailing out insolvent lenders—or borrowers—I have to laugh.  This hazard lies in thwarting the logic of the market, according to the old-school economists and journalists who preach it. 

Getting Out of Iraq: The Return of Tricky Dick?

by William Marina

Today, Henry Kissinger must be smiling! In a lead article in The Sunday New York Times (Aug. 12, ’07) assessing the positions of the Democratic candidates for president, the newspaper suggested that all of the various Democrats’ plans for leaving Iraq “may take years.”This is “withdrawal?” It appears to be “déjà vu, all over again,” to quo

Why Vincent Bugliosi Is So Sure Oswald Alone Killed JFK (Interview)

by Robin Lindley

Dallas, Texas. Friday. November 22, 1963. President John F. Kennedy died after a sniper attack on his motorcade. For many, the assassination remains a mystery. A 2003 Gallup Poll revealed th

Interview with Elliot Jaspin: Racial Cleansing in America

by Rick Shenkman

Elliot Jaspin, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize (1979), is the author of the just-published book, Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hiden History of Racial Cleansing in America (Basic Books), the March HNN Book of the Month. He is the System Editor for Cox Newspapers, where he specializes in computer-assisted reporting. In 2006 he wrote a series for the Cox chain about a number of campaigns to force blacks out of largely white comm

Did We Miss the Lesson of Nagasaki?

by William D. Hartung

It has been 62 years since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the moral and strategic lessons of those devastating acts have still not been fully learned. Despite the efforts of scientists like Leo Szilard and diplomats like John McCloy to promote alternative means for ending the war, the bombings went forward. There are still debates among historians and the public at large about the primary rationale for the use of the weapons. Some interpretations accept the offi

How Paranoid Was Nixon?

by Kenneth J. Hughes, Jr.

It wasn’t the crime, but it wasn’t the cover-up, either. Something more basic took down a president 33 years ago. Long before prosecutors identified him as an unindicted coconspirator, Richard Nixon was a conspiracy theorist. In the last 10 years, the government has systematically declassified hundreds of hours of White House tapes recorded on a voice-activated system that President Nixon had the Secret Service install in the oval office. They reveal a textbook example of w

It's Time to Face the Whole Truth About the Atlantic Slave Trade

by Sheldon M. Stern

"Readers must understand that this terrible traffic in millions of human beings had been ... a joint venture."