The Latest 
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What Comes After the Fall of Pro-Slavery Monuments?
Ana Lucia Araujo
In nearly two decades studying monuments, memorials, and museums memorializing slavery in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, I learned several lessons. When groups decide to erect a monument to remember an event or a person from the past, they are always driven by present-day motivations.
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The Right to Breathe Free: A Showdown Over Race and Nature (Part II)
Douglas C. Sackman
Over time American nature has been retrofitted with an infrastructure of racism, one that gives some people open access to land, clean water, and good air while constricting the access of others to these vital natural resources, or takes them away altogether.
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Centuries of Protest at City Hall Park
Marika Plater
Closed gates around City Hall Park in New York not only restrict access to the park as a site for protest, but ignore the site's history as a theater for political expression.
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75 Years Ago the First "Nuclear Race" Was in Hollywood
Greg Mitchell
Despite Americans' keen interest and considerable fear in the atomic bomb after the end of World War II, the first commercial film to tackle the Manhattan Project was a bomb of a different sort.
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A Letter to America: Why We Need a New History Education
Linda Morse
Let us get busy: history teachers must change the world!
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For Deep and Lasting Reform, We Need to Amend the Constitution
John Davenport
After the upheavals of June, we may now have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to get to the constitutional roots of so many national problems.
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Blog
We’re All Historians Now
Stone Age Brain
Donald Trump may not like the debate we are having about history. I welcome it.
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Re-stabilizing the Middle Class and the Poor: Lessons from the 1930s
David Stebenne
For a long time it seemed as though the 1930s era of high unemployment was a kind of “great exception” in American history, but now it has appeared again, suddenly and unexpectedly, just as it did in the early 1930s.
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Will White Liberals Keep Faith With This Historical Moment?
Elwood Watson
White liberal allies to today's Black protest movements must dig in for the long haul and remember the words of Audre Lorde: "The war against dehumanization is ceaseless."
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Eighty Years On, Chamberlain's Appeasement Policy is Still Debated
Yoav J. Tenembaum
The evidence suggests that Neville Chamberlain was sincere in his desire but profoundly mistaken about his ability to keep Britain out of war with Germany.
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Humanity is an Endangered Species. Can We Do What it Takes to Save Ourselves?
Lawrence Wittner
The dire crises facing humanity--climate change, pandemic disease, widespread pollution, and nuclear weapons, to name a few--demand that we reject a fatalistic sense of impotence and the legacies of nationalism that prevent cooperative solutions.
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Marshall McLuhan: The Man Who Predicted the Internet and Warned Us of its Dangers
Ludovic Rembert
These days, most of Professor McLuhan's "global village" is kept in private and confined spaces: the village plaza is Facebook, a space that is operated for commercial purposes, restricting our discussions and absorbing our private data within our conversations and searches to sell it to advertisers.
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The Roundup Top Ten for July 10, 2020
The top op ed essays by historians and about history from around the web this week.
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"It Has Not Been My Habit to Yield": Charles Sumner and the Fight for Equal Naturalization Rights
Lucy Salyer
Senator Charles Sumner lost his battle on the Fourth of July 1870, with dire consequences for both Asian immigrant communities and the prospects of a more racially egalitarian America.
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Minor Temporary Changes to HNN's Schedule
HNN's editor is taking some time off between July 9 and 14. New op ed essays will be posted as usual on Sunday.
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Blog
A Renaming Everyone Can Get Behind
Jim Loewen
Delaware is the only U.S. state without a name for its highest point. Naming it after Ronald Reagan would probably satisfy fans and critics alike.
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Blog
We’re All Historians Now
Stone Age Brain
Donald Trump may not like the debate we are having about history. I welcome it.
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This Independence Day, We Need a Patriotism Index
Gregory D. Foster
We must now develop a long-overdue Patriotism Index to quantitatively distinguish real Americans from the many poseurs and potential enemies who lurk among us.
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This Independence Day, Celebrate and Carry On America's Past Generosity
William Lambers
As we celebrate America’s birthday on July 4th, let’s remember how our nation’s generosity has aided many hungry and oppressed people around the world.
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Madison’s Sorrow Goes Beyond Pompeo's Dinners
Kevin C. O'Leary
We are stuck with two major parties and when one party abandons the broad liberal-conservative center, the system stops working.
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The Case for a National Liberation Day Holiday on December 6
Robert Hardaway
The anniversary of the ratification of the 13th Amendment, which finally eliminated slavery in the entire United States, should be made a national holiday.
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Abolition Movement Historian Ethan Kytle Discusses Confederate Monuments and Teaching Younger Students about Slavery
James Thornton Harris
"I don’t think it is fair for a scholar like me to tell a community what sort of monuments it should put up. This should be a local decision—and one that takes into account the perspectives of the entire community, which was not the case with Confederate monuments."
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New Novel "The Collaborator" Explores the Moral Ambiguities of a Holocaust Rescuer
Diane Armstrong
Do we have the right to judge the actions of people in life and death situations? Are we honour-bound to keep promises, no matter to whom they were made, and in what situations? Can a man be a hero and a collaborator?
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While Monuments are Being Removed, a Historian Asks Questions
Andrew Joseph Pegoda
People have a right to walk around their neighborhood park without being terrorized by iconography devoted to people who denied their ancestors human rights.
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But Why Is America Exceptional?
Guy Chet
Political separation from Britain allowed old English traits to remain preserved in America, like a bug in amber, even as they were whittled away by change in the old country.
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Annexation Will Be the (Formal) Beginning of Apartheid and the End of Zionism
Andrew Seth Meyer
An American historian and lifelong liberal Zionist concludes that Israel's planned annexation of West Bank territory will force people of conscience to choose between liberal ideals and a form of Zionism harnessed to ethnic nationalism.
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How Britain and Churchill Repelled the Nazi War Machine (1940-1941)
Jeff Roquen
In The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson has not only produced an engaging and timely portrait of the perilous period of when Britain stood alone against Nazi Germany but has also illuminated how tragedy and loss can be turned into a triumph and justice through steadfast determination and solidarity of purpose.
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Of Steamboats and Fireworks: The Great Mississippi River Race of 1870
Eric Simanek
On the 4th of July of 1870, a 1,200 mile race between two steamboats on the Mississippi River was decided. The race attracted global interest. Reporters wrote about it. Gamblers wagered on it. People gathered and cheered for it.
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Will Capitalist Consumer Culture Absorb Another Generation of Protest?
Walter G. Moss
Do recent protests against the symbols of racism--monuments and statues--reflect a political movement that can easily be absorbed by today's multicultural corporations, or will that energy sustain a push to fundamentally reform American capitalism too?
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Blog
The Youngest History-Makers in the U.S. Senate
Ronald L. Feinman
Although he seeks to become the oldest first-term president in US history, Joe Biden began his career in national office at the youngest age allowed for a US Senator.
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Ken Burns: Our Monuments are Representations of Myth, Not Fact
James Baldwin reflects on the complexity of "liberty" in the context of anti-black racism.
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The Roundup Top Ten for July 3, 2020
HNN Staff
The week's top op-eds by historians from around the web.
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The Slow Path to Police Reform in Northern Ireland
Donald M. Beaudette and Laura Weinstein
It took deep reforms and patience to build trust in policing across the sectarian divide of Northern Ireland after the Good Friday Accords. Does that process have lessons for the United States?
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Big Alex McKenzie and the Last Great Fraud of the Gilded Age
Paul Starobin
Alexander McKenzie’s plot to corner Alaska’s gold proved to be the last great swindle of the original gilded age, as this seamy chapter in our national life gave way to what become known as the Progressive Era.
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Liberal Reform Threatens to Expand the Police Power--Just as it did in the Past
Max Felker-Kantor
The history of liberal law-and-order reveals that procedural reforms implemented on top of a structure of policing that has been empowered to protect property and control “disorder” are not only doomed to fail but will produce the conditions for more protest and resistance.
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In the “Bramble” of Central Park, a Showdown Over Nature and Race
Douglas C. Sackman
The viral video of the confrontation between birder Christian Cooper and dog walker Amy Cooper in Central park illuminates how nature and race have been constructed in America, giving privileged access to some while turning others into eternal trespassers.
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Newest Born of Nations: European Nationalism and the Confederate States of America
Ann Tucker
White southerners looked to contemporary European nationalist movements and compared the South to aspiring nations abroad. This allowed them to conceive of the South as a potential nation, distinct from the North and separate from the United States, and to justify secession and the creation of the Confederacy.
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“A Very Different Story”: Marian Sims and Reconstruction
David B. Parker
Marian Sims's 1942 historical novel Beyond Surrender was not nearly as popular as Gone with the Wind. But it reminds us today of a history that might have been--both during Reconstruction and in the popular portrayal of the period.
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Those We Abuse, We Loathe
J. Chester Johnson
Until white Americans reckon with the significance of white supremacy in America, they will deflect a sense of responsibility by laying blame for black suffering on black Americans themselves.
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Pawns of History: The Poetics of Russian Revolutionary Politics
Tim Brinkhof
The repression of political dissent in Czarist Russia led many future revolutionaries to literature as a gateway to political thought; their poetic idealism may have made them both effective and dangerous.
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Will George Floyd’s Murder Be Trump’s Undoing?
James D. Zirin
Donald Trump seems to mistake the temper of the times. Will his instinct to divide the nation be his undoing?
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In This Election Year We Historians Need to Insist on Truth-telling
Walter G. Moss
“Tell the truth” should be as central to our mission, as “First, do no harm” is to doctors and nurses.
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Has Trump’s Popularity Reached a Tipping Point? Joe McCarthy's Fall May Give Clues
Robert Brent Toplin
McCarthy rode a wave of bullying and bluster until it broke back on him. Trump has advantages as president that McCarthy didn't, but faces the same problem: his tactics will work until they don't.
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Vannevar Bush: Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Indispensable Expert
Michael H. Ebner
Vannevar Bush's efforts to bring the expertise of scientists to bear on public policy decisions led to the establishment of the National Science Foundation under Harry Truman's presidency.
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Roundup Top Ten for June 26, 2020
The top ten op-eds by historians or about history from around the web this week.
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