The past is never dead. It's not even past
Malaparte’s description of Axis Europe during World War II is not the most accurate, but it may be the most telling. His extravagant writing style and excellent use of symbolism provide several haunting and powerful images that sum up the horrors of the war like few accounts have.
After World War II, American Jewish history emerged as a significant field of study. Historian Hasia Diner has argued that the subfield actually began to emerge as early 1892, but if we consider pioneering texts about Jews composed by American writers during the nineteenth century, the work of Hannah Adams suggests that it began far earlier.
I wrote about Ulysses Grant for two reasons: necessity and curiosity.
In October 2011, I was invited to the White House Forum on American Latino Heritage, a gathering of historians, and labor and political leaders in our nation’s capital. The day-long forum featured a roster of distinguished speakers, including President Barack Obama, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis and Medal of Honor recipient Sergeant First Class Leroy Petry.
Acclaimed British historian Antony Beevor’s recently published The Second World War is a masterful account of the worst conflict in human history, when truly the entire world became engulfed in the flames of war. Having written previously on various aspects of the era, Beevor’s work attempts to synthesize his prior research into a detailed narrative of World War II.
Historian Jules Tygiel presents not only an account of Jackie Robinson’s heroic struggle to integrate Major League Baseball, but a larger history of links between African American history, baseball, and the modern civil rights movement. Baseball’s Great Experiment further raises questions about race and sports in our current day.
Universities received large amounts of government funding for scientific research during World War II and the early Cold War. Such assistance allowed the University of Texas’s McDonald Observatory to pursue an ambitious research agenda in the field of astronomy
The Iranian Revolution of 1979 affected the lives of all Iranian citizens, especially women. Claudia Espinoza illustrates how Ayatollah Khomeini’s new theocratic government implemented segregationist policies that drastically changed the dress code, legal rights, and professional opportunities available to Iranian women.
Rosie the Riveter, with her red handkerchief and sculpted biceps, has become an easily recognizable national cultural icon. But what about the message behind the poster? From where did this image of a strong, confident, working woman originate?
Knowing one’s exact location was among the greatest challenges of the human push into the air, as it is in the exploration of any new frontier, before there were such things as aeronautical charts, that is, maps for aerial navigation. It is easy for a generation with pocket sized access to Google Maps to underestimate how different our world looks from above if you have only seen it from ground level.