Recently Published

225 Years After Yorktown and We're Still Not Honoring the Virginia Black Soldiers Who Fought There?

by Anita L. Wills

October 16, 2005, will mark the kickoff of the 225th anniversary of the Siege of Yorktown, one of the deciding battles of the Revolutionary War. The Yorktown Battle was fought after a defeat at the Battle of Camden South Ca

Our Global Cinderella

by Lawrence S. Wittner

The announcement that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2005 has been awarded to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and to its chief, Mohamed ElBaradei, should remind us of the crucial activities performed by the United Nations. The IAEA, of course, is the U.N. agency that has worked, with considerable effectiveness, to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Hundreds of nuclear facilities are monitored by the IAEA in over 70 countries. Among its other activities, it led the sear

Being Fearful Hasn't Made Us Safer ... Maybe We Should Try Being Hopeful

by Ira Chernus

Who can deny it? It's an almost physical pleasure to watch George W. Bush's fall from grace. And it's so easy. All you have to do is say, "Bush has botched the war on terrorism. Bush is not keeping us safe from terrorists -- or from the terrors of nature." You've already got over half the country with you, and more are jumping on board the anti-Bush train every day. But before we settle in to ride that train to political glory, we ought to consider whether it can really take us to a be

How Just Was WW II? (And What Does that Have to Do with Our War in Iraq?)

by Dagmar Barnouw

On the morning of March 19, 2003, the preemptive invasion of Iraq seemed imminent and our local NPR station had brought together a small panel to discuss different countries’ different opinions about it. Trying to explain Ger

The Organization that Fights for Human Rights for Historians

by Antoon De Baets

This article is being published on the 10th anniversary of the Network of Concerned Historians. On 13 October 1995, the Network of Concerned Historians (NCH) was established at the History Department of the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Its purpose was and still is to provide a bridge between international human-rights organizations campaigning for censored or persecuted historians and others concerned with the past on th

Patrolling Borders: Bacon's Rebellion and Modern “Minutemen”

by Heather Norby

In light of recent border politics and the post September 11, 2001 focus on real and imagined foreign threats, I have found myself thinking of Bacon’s Rebellion. After the showdown in April between California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger praising private border patrols and President Bush condemning them as vigilantes many of us on the left were asking ourselves if this was some good-cop, bad-cop stunt. It occurred to me that the questions raised by these modern self titled &ld

The Struggle to Be Heard

by David Horowitz

Maurice Isserman, a leftwing professor at Hamilton College, which invited first a convicted terrorist to join its faculty and then Ward Churchill to be a faculty sponsored speaker, has written an attack on me in Academe, which is the publication of the American Association of University Professors. The purpose of this piece, portentously called "David Horowitz and the Truth" is to discredit first me and through me the academic freedom movement, on which the AAUP has declared u

Interview with Howard Zinn

by Tom Engelhardt

Tomdispatch: You and Anthony Arnove just came out with a new book, Voices of a People's History of the United States, featuring American voices of resistance from our earliest moments to late last night. Now, we have a striking new voice of resistance, Cindy Sheehan. I was wondering what you made of her? Howard Zinn: Often a protest movement that's already underway -- and the present antiwar

Why I Am Running for the U.S. Senate from Maryland

by Allan Lichtman

Conservative big government is making government costlier and less fair. It is stifling individual freedom and democratic decision-making.--Allan Lichtman, Newsday.com August 7, 2005After analyzing American politics for many years I am running as a Democrat for the United States Senate seat in Maryland being vacated by Paul Sarbanes. This election matters to everyone nationwide, since Bush has targeted our state as a top priority for picking up a seat in 2006 and holding his S

Huck, Katrina, Gerhard, and Us

by Martin Halpern

At age 80 Hal Holbrook performed his “Mark Twain Tonight” again on Broadway in June and I was lucky enough to be able to attend. "The world I live in irritates me enormously," Holbrook told the St. Petersburg Times in his fiftieth year of appearing as Twain: "Doing the Twain show has become a way for me to express my feelings. It gives me the opportunity to take a look at what

Is the Solution to the Korean Crisis in Antarctica?

by William Lambers

Isn't it ironic that while South Korea is locked in a dispute with North Korea over its nuclear weapons program, the two rivals are at the same time members of a peace treaty that prohibits all military activity? The unlikely source of common ground lies in the Antarctic Treaty of 1959. This treaty may appear obscure, but in reality it's a model for achieving peace and disarmament on the Korean peninsula.   In 1958 President Eisenhower invited 11 nations who had conducted scientif

Reporter's Notebook: The State of Cultural History: A Conference in Honor of Lawrence Levine

by Victor Greene

The organizers of this meeting, which was held at George Mason University in September, stated that its purposes were indicated succinctly in the title. It was to have dual goals, to review the field of cultural history and at the same time recognize Prof. Levine for his distinguished teaching and scholarship in that area.Without question these two goals according to this reporter as well as those attending and participating were well achieved. One proof was the surprisingly large audi

The McCloy Memo: A New Look at Japanese American Internment

by Greg Robinson

The removal and confinement of some 120,000 American citizens and permanent residents of Japanese ancestry from the Pacific Coast during 1942, popularly (if inaccurately) known as the Japanese American internment, remains a powerful event in the nation’s consciousness. In the decades since the war, historians have exhaustively documented the primary role of anti-Japanese prejudice and war hysteria by West Coast Army officers and civilians in bringing about the issuing of Executive Orde

Now Bush Needs to Apply the Lessons of Katrina to the War In Iraq

by Judith Apter Klinghoffer

As hurricane Rita bore down on Texas, Presient Bush cleared his schedule and headed to the Northern Command where the response to Rita is coordinated and he is planning to visit the affected region ASAP. This time the folks would not be able to tell him all is well when it is not, nor that they are taking care of business the best way possible when they are not. This time they know he will be watching and there will be consequences to failure. Behaving as a bureaucracy during an em

When Hemingway Took the Government to Task for a Hurricane Disaster that Cost Hundreds of Lives

by Melissah J. Pawlikowski

On September 2, 1935 what became known as the Great Labor Day Hurricane ravaged the Florida Keys with winds of 160 miles per hour and gusts up to 200 miles per hour. Soon after the clouds had cleared, leaving a crystal blue horizon, the dead were counted. Between 400 and 600 people perished. What made this storm all the more tragic was that among the dead were 265 World War I veterans. At the height of the Great Depression these veterans had been sent to build a road on the low lying

Interview with Stephen Kinzer: 1953+1979=2001 (Well, There's a Link)

by Rick Shenkman

Mr. Kinzer is the author of All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror (John Wiley & Sons, 2004). He is a correspondent with the New York Times.Let's start with history. In 1953 the Eisenhower administration backed a

Is Sociology Stuck in the 60s?

by Kenneth Wagner

Attempting to treat its numerous self inflicted wounds, the academic field of sociology continues to use the curious remedy of shooting itself in the foot. I refer to a collection of articles on the current state of the field by prominent sociologists in a recent edition of the Chronicle Review (August 12, 2005).The discipline of sociology has good reason for introspection. Since the 1970’s sociology has seen a decline in student interest and relative research funding, t

Why We Need Our Own Iliad

by Thomas G. Palaima

Three and a half years ago, when U.S. soldiers were only fighting in Afghanistan, I wondered in an opinion column when we would finally have an American "Iliad," a work that would reveal the costs, necessities and realities of war. Natural disaster in New Orleans and Mississippi has pushed the wars our troops are still fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan off the front pages, except when suicide bombers rack up large numbers. And we focus now on the dodge or half-accept-the-blame

Series: What America Needs to Do to Achieve Its Foreign Policy Goals ... Dealing with the West Bank (7)

by William R. Polk

Click here to read the other articles in this series. In many ways, the Palestine problem is the most pervasive, complex and dangerous problem in American foreign policy. It is also the most difficult to address because it is so deeply embedded in guilt, emotion and fear as to be almost beyond rational thought. Americans, both government officials and private citizens, feel far freer to criticize America, Britain or F

Why Historians Have a Stake in the Debate Over Evolution

by Kevin C Armitage

As any newspaper reader knows, the American public has little regard for the theory of evolution. Despite its nearly universal acceptance among scientists worldwide, both the president of the United States and the Senate majority leader—an MD—favor the teaching of a competing, unscientific (indeed, antiscientific) theory known as “Intelligent Design” as a counterpoint to evolution in the public schools. Even before such powerful politicians openly supported “int