Новости за 05.09.2018

In an era of congressional gridlock and political stands determined by opinion surveys, historians are re-evaluating our 28th President, Woodrow Wilson. Born in 1856 in Virginia to a minister, Wilson was pre-occupied with creating a high-minded vision for the United States, a nation he believed possessed a unique moral force in a corrupt world.

In your American history textbook and mine, no matter where or when you encountered it, Roger Williams and the story of Rhode Island came right after the story of William Bradford’s Plymouth colony and John Winthrop’s Massachusetts Bay.  In the hurried trip through the mid-seventeenth century, Williams flees Massachusetts in 1636, founds Rhode Island as a haven for religious dissenters, voices some important ideas about the need to separate church and state, and then pretty much disappears from the narrative. Читать дальше...

A unit of the Bulgarian International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, 1937

Historians know a great deal about CIA history. The US government has acknowledged some 50 Cold War covert actions, from fiddling with Italian elections in the late 1940s to undermining Marxist influence in Yemen in the 1980s. Spy chiefs, practitioners, journalists, and academics have written enough books on the CIA to fill several libraries. Although debate still rages about the good or ill of the CIA, we know the major contours of its history.

“There was not a manual, and there was not anything other than let’s try this, and with the overriding principle that these young people should not have to pay too big a price both in terms of their academic learning, in terms of their safety, by going through this process, because they didn’t volunteer for it either. And we’re all in it, in that sense. And that was the beauty of it, I mean, there were so many beautiful moments, but a lot of ugly stuff.”– Shelton Boyles, a former English teacher... Читать дальше...

When the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences announced the nominees for the 70th edition of the Emmy Awards last month, it wandered, perhaps unwittingly, into the latest season of America’s history wars. 

At a time when the American population is radicalizing, when popular movements are coalescing around “radical” demands—Medicare for All, the abolition of ICE, tuition-free college, in general the demand to make society livable for everyone—it can be useful to draw collective inspiration from the past. Irruptions of the popular will have on innumerable occasions reshaped history, remade the terrain of class struggle such that the ruling class was, at least for a moment, thrown on the defensive and forced to retreat. Читать дальше...

1968: the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the Tet offensive and My Lai massacre in Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson’s abdication and Richard Nixon’s election, the Chicago Democratic convention. It’s not surprising in 2018 that we’ve been inundated with TV specials, films, and articles to commemorate episodes of the single most tumultuous year of the past century. 

Related Link Every article we've published on Trump  

When Donald Trump was a presidential candidate, he promised to “drain the swamp.” Evidently, that promise has not been kept. Washington’s “swamp” appears to be overflowing, evidenced by a recent news report that Republican Congressman Chris Collins, the first member of the U.S. House to back Trump for President, has been indicted on charges of insider trading. Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi responded to the news by claiming there is a “culture of corruption” in Washington. Pelosi and... Читать дальше...

  There are few plays whose creation was an historical adventure and that is the tale of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit, getting another revival at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey at Drew University, Madison, N.J. England’s Noel Coward wrote the play in 1941, at the start of World War II. He was forced to flee London, under heavy bombing by the Germans, when his office was destroyed in a nighttime raid. He went to Wales with a friend to write something about the war and wound up producing a comedy play. Читать дальше...

John Dean's Testimony Before the Watergate Committee (1973)

In a recent tweet, President Trump attacked John Dean, Nixon’s White House Counsel, as a “RAT.” He wrote: "The failing @nytimes wrote a Fake piece today implying that because White House Councel (sic) Don McGahn was giving hours of testimony to the Special Councel (sic), he must be a John Dean type 'RAT.' But I allowed him and all others to testify. . . .” 

Related Links

●   Supreme Court Nominations:  HNN's General Coverage

●   HNN Hot Topic:  Filibusters

How many people have been appointed to the Supreme Court?

125 people have been appointed to the Court. According to the US Senate website seven declined to serve.

Why was President Obama denied a chance to make a third appointment to the Court?

President Barack Obama is a Democrat.  The US Senate was controlled by the Republicans when Antonin Scalia died and a seat opened up on the Court. Читать дальше...

Rudy Giuliani (Courtesy of Gage Skidmore)

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky co-founded the Pro-Truth Pledge (at ProTruthPledge.org), a project joined by anyone who cares about creating a united constituency of all who care about truth and facts. He authored a number of a number of books, most notably the national bestseller The Truth Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide, and is regularly featured in venues like CBS News, Time, Scientific American, Psychology Today, Newsweek, The Conversation, CNBC, and elsewhere. Читать дальше...

Attack against Fort Sumter

A new arena in our burgeoning political circus has opened in the form of short-take political commentary: American Civil War, 2.0. Not restricted to 4chan, alt-left or alt-right, it grows instead from the fever swamps of what was once called the respectable middle. Examples of these predictions can be found here, here and here.  And one knows it’s “a thing” when Twitter features a parody hash tag, #SecondCivilWar.

Few of these forecasters see a repeat of our last civil war. Читать дальше...

Labor Day pamphlet, 1942, produced by the Office for Emergency Management.

Professor Jay Winter

Imagining war is the curse of our violent world; we have no choice but to face that task with as much intelligence, compassion, and courage as we can.

Professor Jay Winter is a renowned expert on the cultural history of modern war and its disastrous consequences for all caught in the industrialized horror, soldiers and civilians alike, from around the globe. He is also acclaimed for his knowledge of the imagery that emerges from conflict and forms of remembrance. Читать дальше...

Across the country, the number of university students majoring in history continues to decline. Students think history is boring, just a bunch of uninteresting dead people and too many dates that need to be memorized.

From Friday, August 3, 2018 at 6:00 p.m. until Sunday, August 5, 2018 at midnight, reported Chicago police, gunfire claimed sixty-six victims on the predominantly African American South and West Sides of the city. Twelve residents, ranging from the ages of eleven to sixty-two, died from the gunshot wounds during the weekend. The sudden outburst of gunplay underscored the fact that, although some metrics had indicated a recent decline in the city’s astronomical homicide rate, Chicago was still struggling to curb gun-related violence. Читать дальше...

As summer break comes to an end, teachers across the country will flock to stores purchasing school supplies with their own money, turn their undecorated classrooms into places of excitement and learning, and prepare themselves for another year of testing, low pay, and underfunding. However, following a year that witnessed numerous teachers’ strikes across the country for the first time in decades, teachers and school districts may also be preparing themselves for another wave of militancy. 

Since the advent of the Trump administration, large numbers of Americans have been aghast at its narrow nationalist approach to world affairs. But many of them are also uneasy about the alternative championed by the foreign policy Establishment. 

The possibility now exists that up to seven Democrats who are younger than our youngest President, Theodore Roosevelt, and our youngest elected President, John F. Kennedy, may compete for the 2020 Democratic Presidential nomination. If any one of these seven were to be the nominee, such an individual would join three other past Presidential nominees in American history, who would have taken the oath of office at an age younger than TR and JFK.