The Latest 
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Filmmaking, Reality and Fact: How Documentaries Shape Americans' Ideas of Truth
Jon Wilkman
A sizable percentage of Americans get their sense of history through television documentaries. The history of nonfiction filmmaking offers crucial insight on how we got to, and how we might escape, a "post-truth" world.
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"Rogue" Manufacturing in China: Past and Present
Eugenia Lean
As China’s economic power grows, global intellectual property might end up looking more and more like the Chinese tradition of shanzhai in the future.
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DC Comics and the American Dilemma of Race
Patrick L. Hamilton and Allan W. Austin
Superhero popular culture has always been embedded within American racial attitudes, reflecting and even contributing to them in ways that reveal goodwill is not sufficient, in and of itself, to fix our problems.
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An Interview with "Most Wanted" Author Sarah Jane Marsh
Chelsea Connolly
"Although I use individuals such as Adams, Hancock, and Paine as a vehicle for the story, I want readers to understand the American Revolution was ultimately a mass movement of the people."
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A Word to My Fellow Progressives: Lessons of the 2020 Democratic Primary
Andrew Meyer
This year feels to many progressives like a lost opportunity. With Joseph Biden seemingly certain to win the Democratic nomiatuion, what can progressives learn and apply to the future from the experience of 2020?
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Blog
The Ruthless Litigant in Chief: James Zirin Paints a Portrait of Trump Through 3,500 Lawsuits
Robin Lindley
American presidents before Donald Trump had some record of public achievement in politics, government or the military before they were elected. Donald Trump brought his astounding history of involv...
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Roundup Top Ten for March 27, 2020
The top ten op eds by historians published around the web.
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A New Lease on Life for the "Jewish Nose" Lie
Moshe Phillips
Anti-Semitic humor helps bigotry infiltrate mainstream culture and discourse.
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Can We Build On Yesterday, Salvage Today—And Save Tomorrow?
Vaughn Davis Bornet
A historian and veteran in his 102nd year reflects on the current crisis. It's like nothing else, but we can learn from the past.
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HNN Introduces Classroom Activity Kits
Chelsea Connolly and Kyla Sommers
Combining the fields of journalism and history, these activity kits provide educators with complete downloadable lesson plans.
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Our Stories Will Carry Us to the Future. Can They Save Us Now?
David Farrier
To avert a climate disaster, science is essential, but we also need stories. We know ourselves first and foremost in the tales we tell.
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Why Holocaust Fiction?
Bernice Lerner
Had they had a choice, I believe Hitler’s victims would have wanted nothing about the mortal crimes against them falsified.
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Plots Against America?: Jim Crow was Homegrown Fascism
Guy Lancaster
HBO’s prestige adaptation of Philip Roth’s 2004 novel The Plot Against America makes it worthwhile to examine whether fascism is really so alien to the United States as many wish to believe.
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The Three Daring Women Who Traversed the Himalayas
Kayte Nunn
Antonia Deacock, Anne Davies, Eve Sims set off overland from England to Tibet in 1958, a 16,000 mile journey to aim climb one of the Himalayas’ unexplored high peaks.
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As We Zoom into Online Learning….
Norman J.W. Goda
To learn effectively, we all need to be, once again, in the same room. Let’s hope it is soon.
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Use What You Know: Online Teaching Tools
Kevin Gannon
Many historians have already been doing this kind of teaching online, so there might not be the need for you to re-discover fire.
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The Cultural Constants of Contagion
Ed Simon
Plague is, in some ways, a type of cultural absolute zero, a shared experience of extremity that does seem to offer certain perennial themes that approach universality.
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Bancroft Prize Goes to Books on Emancipation and Urban Renewal
The scholars Joseph P. Reidy and Lizabeth Cohen have won the prize, one of the most prestigious honors in the field of American history.
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Updated 4/3: What Historians Are Saying About COVID-19 and Trump's Response
HNN Staff
Their tweets, retweets, and comments on social media.
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Updated 4/3: Historians Discuss the Media's Coverage of COVID-19
Journalism is the first draft of history. Historians wield the red pen.
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Blog
An Interview with Mary V. Thompson on the Lives of the Enslaved Residents of Mount Vernon
Robin Lindley
Mary V. Thompson brings to life a complicated history of enslaved people and their legendary owner.
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When the Western Wall Was A Battleground For Jewish Rights
Moshe Phillips
The book explains how Segal and the others who followed in his footsteps transformed the Western Wall from a site of wailing to one of national pride.
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The Cost of Loyalty: A Crisis of Ethics in the Military
Timothy Bakken
Military leadership has inculcated a self-serving culture of loyalty that prevents a long-overdue reckoning with its failures.
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"Faster" Author Neal Bascomb on the Jewish Auto Racer who Defied Hitler
Neal Bascomb
Rene Dreyfus, a former top driver on the international racecar circuit, had been banned from the best European teams—and fastest cars—by the mid-1930s because of his Jewish heritage.
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Golda Meir and Women's Wartime Leadership
Jonathan W. Jordan and Emily Anne Jordan
Are women seeking the presidency held back by Americans' mistrust of female military leadership? The example of Golda Meir suggests they shouldn't be.
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I Taught my Students to Create Hoaxes in Public. Here’s Why
Keith A. Erekson
The discipline of history has much to offer our present age of misinformation in terms of subject matter and analytical methods.
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Trump's Budget Proposal Reveals His Values
Lawrence Wittner
It is often said that government budgets are “an expression of values.” Those values are clear in the Trump administration’s $4.8 trillion budget proposal for 2021, unveiled early this February.
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Churchill, Stalin and the Legacy of the Grand Alliance: An Interview with Professor Geoffrey Roberts
Aaron J. Leonard
Geoffrey Roberts assesses the history and legacy of the wartime alliance and political relationship between Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin.
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The Life and Times of Flamboyant Rock Music Impresario Bill Graham
Bruce Chadwick
The New York Historical Society presents the rock & roll world of Bill Graham (1931–1991), one of the most influential concert promoters of all time, through August 23.
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Does Lincoln or Trump Represent the Conscience of the Republican Party?
Richard Striner
The comparison between Lincoln’s Republican Party and today’s Republican Party is especially troubling.
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Do We Want the Progressive Sanders or the Pragmatist Biden?
Walter G. Moss
Because his pragmatic style matches more the American tradition, Biden has a better chance of unifying our nation and delivering positive long-range results.
News
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- The Prep-School Nazi
- Army Warned in Early February That Coronavirus Could Kill 150,000 Americans
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