Recently Published

Gunnar Myrdal's Insight

by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff

The winter of 1940 was a cruel one for Gunnar Myrdal, and spring was shaping up even worse. He was in the United States, finishing the research on the most comprehensive study yet of race relations and the condition of Negroes in America. But he was having trouble reaching conclusions, and he struggled to outline and conceptualize the writing. "The whole plan is now in danger of breaking down," he wrote the Carnegie Foundation, which was underwriting his project.

Time to Ask and Tell!

by Steve Estes

"To you who answered the call of your country and served in its Armed Forces," Pres. Truman wrote to Lt. Robert Ricks in 1945, "I extend the heartfelt thanks of a grateful nation." Ricks, a young Army Air Force navigator who had survived several months in Dachau as a prisoner of war, had certainly earned the nation's gratitude. The note from Truman was mailed to millions of American GIs at the end of World War II. Hundreds of thousands of them, like Ricks, were gay.

Bush and the Case of Executive Privilege

by Mark J. Rozell

President Bush and Congress appear headed toward a clash over whether White House aides can be forced to testify before a legislative committee. If pushed hard by the Democrats, it appears that Bush will claim executive privilege and revive a national debate over a constitutional principle most commonly associated with Watergate and the Lewinsky scandal. Why would the president want to do that?

Why Reconstruction Explains Our Politics Today

by Heather Cox Richardson

A week after the 2004 presidential election, a friend sent me a map of America with the red and blue states superimposed over the Confederate and Union states of the Civil War years. The Republican red states fit almost perfectly over the southern states that supported the Confederacy and the western plains that were territories during the 1860s, and the Democratic blue states fit closely over the states that had supported the Union. 

Did Jefferson Abuse His Authority to Count Himself into the Presidency?

by Bruce Ackerman

As sitting Vice-President, Thomas Jefferson was President of the Senate in 1801, and the Constitution assigned him the job of presiding over the final stages of the bitter presidential election of 1800. When the electoral votes came in from the states, it was up to him to open the envelopes and announce the results. There was only one problem – Jefferson himself was running for president against John Adams, and his rulings from the chair could determine whether he or Adams would be pres

The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination: The Acoustics Evidence

by Steve Barber

Some years following the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel on the night of June 4/5 1968 critics of the official version of the assassination said there were audio recordings of more than 8 shots fired when RFK was shot.

James Loewen's Fight to Get Heard

by Lauren Zanolli

In 1908 a muckracking reporter by the name of Ray Stannard Baker published Following the Color Line, in which he exposed what would later be called “sundown towns”: communities that forcibly kept out African-Americans.  Discussion of the practices of these communities remained virtually non-existent for almost one hundred years, until Sociology Professor James Loewen published Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism in 2005.  

A Peace Plan That May Be Worse Than War

by Jonathan Goldstein

In preparation for hosting an upcoming summit of Arab heads of state, Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Abdullah has recirculated his five-year-old Middle East peace plan. The Prince first floated this proposal to President George W. Bush in April 2002. Theoretically, it has never been taken off the table. The proposal is commendable for its novelty. For the first time, the Saudis have persuaded 21 other Arab states to agree to conditions under which all would recognize the State of Israel.

School Lunches for Kids Around the World: Hey, Why Not?

by William Lambers

In his first major foreign policy address in 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower called for "a declared total war.. upon the brute forces of poverty and need." Eisenhower stated, "The peace we seek…can be fortified, not by weapons of war but by wheat and by cotton, by milk and by wool, by meat and by timber and by rice." Today, the idea of an all-out war on global poverty needs to be an integral part of U.S. policy in our effort to seek peace in the 21st century.

The Right to Bear Bazookas: A New Take on the Second Amendment

by Saul Cornell

The Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia has decided to strike down a gun control law as a violation of the Second Amendment. The decision, known as Parker, casts aside more than 70 years of established jurisprudence. The Appeals Court’s revisionist reading of U.S. v. Miller, (1939) the controlling Supreme Court precedent, is highly problematic. According to the majority opinion in Parker, Miller was only concerned with the type of weapons pro

The Forgotten Alliance of African Nationalists and Western Pacifists

by Lawrence S. Wittner

This year, the West African nation of Ghana is celebrating fifty years of independence, based on the termination of British rule of the Gold Coast (as Ghana was called in the colonial era) in 1957.The independence ceremonies of March 6, 1957 had great symbolic significance.  Ghana was the first country to throw off colonial rule in Black Africa.  In addition, its first prime minister, Kwame Nkrumah, was a fiery African nationalist who had led a daring and unremitting campaign

Why Roosevelt Was Right About Stalin

by Geoffrey Roberts

Roosevelt was right about Stalin. The Soviet dictator was a man you could do business with. That is one of the main findings of my new book, Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939-1953 (Yale University Press 2007).  “Had I been born and brought up in America,” Stalin told the head of the American Chamber of Commerce in June 1944, I would probably have been a businessman.” Even as the Cold War broke out Stalin tried to persuade the Republican poli

It's Gay Rights, Not Gay Genes, That Matter

by Nancy C. Unger

The "gay sheep" research on rams from the U.S. Sheep Experiment Station in Idaho set off a firestorm of controversy. In an effort to understand what causes homosexuality in rams (which inhibits breeding), scientists sought to produce artificially same-sex preference behavior in male sheep. If they could figure out how to make sheep gay, perhaps they could figure out how to make them straight. Their efforts failed, but the strong suggestion that sexual preference is biolog

When is a Farmer not a Farmer? When He’s Chinese: Then He’s A Peasant

by Charles W. Hayford

After Mao Zedong died in 1976, they put his body on display in one of those see-through coffins which Lenin made popular. Shortly after, the NBC evening news commentator, David Brinkley, termed this “peasant under glass” – a racist flippancy which would not have been accepted (or probably even thought of) for the dead leader of a Western state.Now the thing is that Mao wasn’t even a peasant: He never made his living with a hoe (if an

Working Hard to Misconstrue the 2nd Amendment

by Robert J. Spitzer

In a startling case that may single-handedly revive interest in the Second Amendment’s “right to bear arms,” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled 2-1 Friday that a D.C. law barring residents from keeping handguns in their homes violated citizens’ Second Amendment right to have guns, aside and apart from service in a militia. In carving out an “individual” right, the case of Parker v. District of Columbia proves that bad

Jacques Pluss Now Says He Is a Nazi--And Proud of It

by Troy Vettese

In March 2005, Fairleigh Dickinson University fired Jacques Pluss, a popular and outwardly tolerant professor who holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in medieval history. It was reported that Pluss was a neo-Nazi. But to avoid controversy, FDU cited Pluss’s alleged numerous absences for his dismissal, not his beliefs. HNN has closely followed this story since then and kept in contact with Pluss. Pluss has even posted on HNN forums, and wrote an article to defend himsel

The Cherokee: Saying No to Blacks

by William Loren Katz

As President Bill Clinton and others arrived in Selma, Alabama for the 42nd anniversary of the "bloody Sunday" march that prodded Congress to pass the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the Cherokee Nation chose a lower road. It voted overwhelmingly for an amendment to their constitution that revokes citizenship rights for 2,800 members because their ancestors included people of African descent.

Arthur Schlesinger’s Missing Vital Center

by Clare L. Spark

In his Commentary essay, reprinted in HNN, Norman Podhoretz regrets that Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. had, in his unrelenting negative depiction of the Republican party, abandoned the liberalism he espoused in his famous book The Vital Center. The obituary in the Guardian also references the “vital centre,” defining this conception as “a vital centre of accepted societal values” that, combined

Exercising Congress’s Constitutional Power to End a War

by Louis Fisher

Testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, 1/30/07.Mr. Chairman, thank you for inviting me to offer my views on the constitutional authority of Congress to restrict, redirect, or terminate military operations. In recent years, some commentators have argued that Congress cannot, in time of war, interfere with the President’s power as Commander in Chief. Others claim that if Congress decides to exercise the power of the purse it must terminate all funding rather than a

Oh, No, the Dreaded Question: Is My Book Relevant?

by James Oakes

I should have known better.  My book is a few weeks old and already I’ve been asked to “apply” its lessons here, there and everywhere.  I should have predicted that reporters would inevitably ask me to compare Abraham Lincoln to George Bush.  What I did not expect was the reaction of some good friends in the profession, who find my book helpful in the