America

Once again, “the people” prepare to elect an American president

By Louis René Beres

Apart from their obvious differences, all of the candidates, both Democrat (President Obama) and Republican, have one overriding chant in common. For each aspirant, every pitch is prefaced by sanctimonious appeals to “the people.” Whether openly, or with a quiet nod to a presumably more subtle strategy, “I want to be the people’s president” is always their conspicuously shared mantra.

This is not hard to understand. To suggest otherwise

The Battle of Midway: a narrated slideshow

There are few moments in American history in which the course of events tipped so suddenly and so dramatically as at the Battle of Midway. At dawn of June 4, 1942, a rampaging Japanese navy ruled the Pacific. By sunset, their vaunted carrier force (the Kido Butai) had been sunk and their grip on the Pacific had been loosened forever.

9/11 and the dysfunctional “aughts”

By Richard Landes
In the years before 2000, as the director of the ephemeral Center for Millennial Studies, I scanned the global horizon for signs of apocalyptic activity, that is, for movements of people who believed that now was the time of a total global transformation. As I did so, I became aware of such currents of belief among Muslims, some specifically linked to the year 2000, all predominantly expressing the most dangerous of all apocalyptic

The linguistic impact of 9/11

By Dennis Baron

The terrorist attacks on 9/11 happened ten years ago, and although everybody remembers what they were doing at that flashbulb moment, and many aspects of our lives were changed by those attacks, from traveling to shopping to going online, one thing stands out: the only significant impact that 9/11 has had on the English language is 9/11 itself.

Because it is gone now

By Claire Potter
As a citizen, it is sometimes a jolt to realize that September 11 is now a decade in the past. As a teacher of modern United States history who ended her twentieth-century survey last fall with the attack on the twin towers, it was even more of a jolt to realize that a first-year college student who had matriculated in September 2010 might recall only the faint outlines of an event that definitively altered the course of our century. A student who entered high school in that same month would likely have been familiar with images of the smoke billowing out of the World Trade Center towers

How 9/11 made “History”

By Mary Dudziak

In classrooms across the country on September 11, 2001, lesson plans were abruptly abandoned. Students and teachers gathered around televisions, sharing the sense that “history” was being made before their eyes. Patricia Latessa, a Cincinnati high school teacher, turned on the cafeteria television “and watched history unfold.” She reflected as she watched about how the scenes of airplanes flying into buildings would impact her students

Taking liberties

By Susan Herman
Post-9/11 surveillance measures have made it far too easy for the government to review our personal and business records, telephone and e-mail conversations, and virtually all aspects of our lives. For example, Under the so-called “library provision” of the

Decennium 9/11: Learning the lessons

By Andrew Staniforth
For Americans, no act of terrorism compares to the attacks and from that moment the history of the United States has been divided into ‘Before 9/11’ and ‘After 9/11’. In lower Manhattan, on a field in Pennsylvania, and along the banks of the Potomac, the United States suffered its largest loss of life from an enemy attack on its own soil. Within just 102 minutes, four commercial jets would be simultaneously hijacked and used as weapons of mass destruction to kill ordinary citizens as part of a coordinated attack that would shape the first decade of a new century.

9/11 and 3/11

Carl R. Weinberg
Editor, Magazine of History
On Tuesday March 11, 2003, I was working in my office at North Georgia College and State University (NGCSU), when I received an email that I will never forget. It was sent to all faculty and staff on the campus listserv from one of my colleagues on the subject of “America’s Defense.” His email noted that some of our

Back to school special
Part 2: Early literacy data

By Sydney Beveridge, Social Explorer

With the new school year approaching, Social Explorer is taking a closer look at education data today and over the years. In this installment, we are looking at some of the earliest reported census data related to education.
The Census Bureau first reported literacy data on reading and writing in 1840. At the time, 91.5 percent of the adult white population (over the age of 20) was literate.

Strikes low, unemployment high

By Joseph McCartin

As Americans celebrate Labor Day 2012, the movement whose struggles led to the creation of this national holiday – the union movement – arguably faces its most profound crisis since Congress declared this national holiday in 1894. Indeed with the labor market weakened by the Great Recession and unemployment stubbornly high according the just released

Care-less America

By John Tirman
The American public is essentially indifferent to the victims of wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The native populations that U.S. troops intervened on behalf of, or who were under the thumb of dictators we were trying to depose, suffered greatly in those wars, with millions dead and additional millions made homeless, impoverished, widowed, injured, or deprived of a normal life. This staggering human toll was and is not America’s responsibility alone, of course. But what is remarkable is how little the American public sympathizes with these victims, how little concern is registered.

The King of Showmen

By Rebecca Alpert

Today, Harlem Globetrotter star Reece “Goose” Tatum will be inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame. But Tatum also deserves consideration for induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. Baseball was Tatum’s first sport and first love.

Tatum was a gifted pantomime artist and comedian.

Coups, corporations, and classified information

By Arindrajit Dube, Ethan Kaplan, and Suresh Naidu

The Central Intelligence Agency was created in 1947 under the National Security Act. The act allowed for “functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security,” in addition to intelligence gathering. Initially, the scope of the CIA was relegated to intelligence, though a substantial and vocal group advocated for a more active role for the agency. This culminated in National Security Council Directive No. 4, which ordered the CIA to undertake covert actions against communism.

1 million dead in Iraq?

By John Tirman
As the U.S. war in Iraq winds down, we are entering a familiar phase, the season of forgetting—forgetting the harsh realities of the war. Mostly we forget the victims of the war, the Iraqi civilians whose lives and society have been devastated by eight years of armed conflict. The act of forgetting is a social and political act, abetted by the American news media. Throughout the war, but especially now, the minimal news we get from Iraq consistently devalues the death toll of Iraqi civilians.