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Basketball's Best Once Were Blackballed from the College Game

by George Beres

College basketball was for many decades almost an all-White sport. Until the 1950s, Blacks playing on campus courts were rare exceptions. Howard (Hobby) Hobson, coach of the first NCAA champions, Oregon's Tall Firs in the first national tourney in 1939, gambled four years earlier by playing the university's first African-American, Charles Taylor. But after the 1936 season, albino became the dominant color again. At Oregon State, the first Black was Charley White in 1966. I remember th

Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal

by Peter N. Kirstein

The Iraq War, as Vietnam was, is morally wrong, strategically a disaster and fueled by the notion of American exceptionalism: that America has the might and the ethnocentric right to shape the international community in its own image. The occupation of Iraq must end with the rapid withdrawal of American military forces. The justification for war was deliberately falsified and demonstrated an incompetence of such magnitude as to warrant criminal prosecution of the national-security elites inc

Political Correctness Is Alive and Well on College Campuses

by Alan Levy

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Alan Levy. I have been a professor in the Pa. State System of Higher Education (SSHE) at Slippery Rock University for 21 years. I have a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. I have also taught at the University of Louisville and at the Phillips Exeter Academy. I teach in the history department at Slippery Rock. I have served, as well, as the Director of the University’s Honors’ Program. I have also written books and articles in

Why the Civil War Still Matters

by Kevin M. Levin

Much has changed within the historical profession and in race relations, but as we approach the Civil War sesquicentennial celebrations beginning in 2011 there is reason to be concerned. While academic and National Park Service historians have worked tirelessly over the past four decades to revise our understanding of the Civil War by emphasizing the importance of slavery, race, and emancipation as central themes of the war, the general public continues to hold onto a sanitized, white-only inter

The Romance of E-Mail: Ground Rules

by Michael H. Ebner

I am no Luddite about electronic communication. Quite the contrary. Exhilarating, intoxicating, and addictive most accurately describe my own romance with e-mail. I find much to agree with in the assertion recently proffered by my fellow historian Edward L. Ayers: e-mail’s ubiquity is another manifestation of humanity’s relentless search for community. But I do harbor some foreboding about my own, easily detectable, romance with e-mail. Hence this cautionary tale, reminis

HNN Doyen: Gordon S. Wood

by Bonnie Goodman

What he is famous for.

It's Not Just the Japanese Government that's Turning a Blind Eye to History ... So Are Japanese Corporations

by William Underwood

Editor's Note: This article was updated on March 30, 2006 on the website of Japan Focus to reflect recent events. Click here to read this updated article. Just as Nazi Germany did in Europe during World War II, Imperial Japan made extensive use of forced labor across the vast area of the Asia Pacific it once occupied. Today, however, Japan’s government and corporations are dealing with the legacy of wartime forced l

Whose Art History is it Anyway?

by S.J. Redman

Some time ago, I was having a conversation with an art historian about the development of cannons. I was interested in talking to him because I had studied how certain archaeological and anthropological objects became rather expected in museums across the western world. Why does every museum need an ancient Egyptian mummy, or a totem pole from the Pacific Northwest, I asked. I had sought out the art historian for a fresh perspective. The clear difference between museums that cover general his

The Founders Never Imagined a Bush Administration

by Joyce Appleby and Gary Hart

George W. Bush and his most trusted advisers, Richard B. Cheney and Donald H. Rumsfeld, entered office determined to restore the authority of the presidency. Five years and many decisions later, they've pushed the expansion of presidential power so far that we now confront a constitutional crisis. Relying on legal opinions from Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and Professor John Yoo, then working at the Justice Department, Bush has insisted that there can be no limits to the power o

Horowitz, Genovese, and the Varieties of Culture War: Comments on the Continuing Unpleasantness in Idaho

by William L. Ramsey

Perhaps the institution of slavery as it existed in the antebellum South was permitted by the Bible, as my Fundamentalist and Neo-Confederate opponents insist. I rather hope not, but I have never challenged them on that point. It strikes me as a nineteenth-century coffin they are welcome to continue nesting in if they like. But it never ends there. They must always go on to recast the South’s “peculiar institution” as a positively “pleasant” and worthwhile experi

Conspiracy Thinking and the John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Assassinations: Part II

by Mel Ayton

Click here to read Part I. JFK, RFK and MLK conspiracy advocates began with the premise that conspirators would organise the assassinations in a certain way. Yet the most basic examination of their ‘assassination scenarios’ can only leave the reader with the conclusion that the purported ‘conspiracy plans’ were altogether ridiculous. For example, why would sophisticated conspirators have allowed a ‘hypnotised Sirhan’ to

About the Historians Who Write History Columns

by Andrew Bernstein

Historical columnists bridge the gap between academic history and journalism. By writing columns professionals in each of those fields aim to influence the course of world events by putting current events in historical perspective while educating lay-people about the past. The individuals who write these columns are driven and very committed to both their scholarship and the mission of historical columns. “I have always seen journalism and history as kindred fields – a lot of the

Interview with Chalmers Johnson: Cold Warrior in a Strange Land

by Tom Engelhardt

As he and his wife Sheila drive me through downtown San Diego in the glare of mid-day, he suddenly exclaims,"Look at that structure!" I glance over and just across the blue expanse of the harbor is an enormous aircraft carrier."It's the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan," he says,"the newest carrier in the fleet. It's a floating Chernobyl and it sits a proverbial six inches off the bottom with two huge atomic reactors. You make a wrong move and there goes the country's seventh largest city."

Remember When . . .

by Robert S. McElvaine

Remember when . . . Remember when conservatives were opponents of big government?Remember when conservatives warned of the threat of too much power being seized by the president and the executive branch?Remember when conservatives thought excessive federal power was a great danger to Americans’ freedom?Remember when conservatives believed in checks and balances?Remember when conservatives placed their freedoms above their fears?Remember when conservat

Why I Decided to Write a Novel

by Larry Schweikart

Few historians can hope to match the tremendous success of the history-trained fiction writer Caleb Carr, whose book, The Alienist (1994) was a chilling look at the world of late 19th-century America through th

The Columnist Who Thinks African-Americans Should Be Grateful Their Ancestors Were Enslaved

by Andrew Bernstein

A Seattle-area columnist has drawn the fire of more than a thousand complaining readers upset with her suggestion that African-Americans should be grateful their ancestors were enslaved and brought to America. The column, by Adele Ferguson, was published in the Kitsap Peninsula Business Journal (KPBJ) on March 13, 2006. In the article Ferguson argued that black Americans should abandon the Democratic Party, claiming it doesn't have their true interests at heart. “It

Algeria and Iraq: Yes, There Are Parallels

by Ted Morgan

In my book, My Battle of Algiers, I tell the story of my military service as a second lieutenant in the French army. After four months in a combat unit south of Algiers, I was assigned to help write and edit an army-run weekly newspaper called RéalitésAl

7/7 and the War in Iraq

by J. R. Kerr-Ritchie

On July 7, 2005, four bombs exploded on London’s public transport system. The final death toll was 56, including three Asian and one Jamaican suicide bombers of the Islamic faith. Stunned but resilient, the British populace including Muslims later partook of a two-minute silence to honor the slain victims of the worst terrorist attack on mainland Britain. Fourteen days after the original attack, Londoners awoke to discover that four more attempted bombings had been thwarted. Several

The High School History Textbook Debate in China

by Charles W. Hayford

Japan is not the only country in which high school text books occasion a debate over history and politics. In China, Li Datong, once an activist in the 1989 democracy movements, was fired as the editor of Freezing Point (Bingdian), a weekly supplement to the newspaper China Youth Daily . The occasion for his firing was the January 11 publication of an article,"Modernization and History Textbooks," by Yuan Weishi, a professor of philosophy at Zhong Shan (Sun Yat-sen) U

Conspiracy Thinking and the John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Assassinations: Part I

by Mel Ayton

A child dies from some unexplained illness; fisherman sail off never to return; random violence takes the life of an innocent bystander. And always behind these tragic events lies the question – Why?