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This Week's Op Eds Original essays for the History News Network.  by Rachel Ida Buff Now, on the streets of U.S. cities, federal agents join militarized police in waging war on Americans who are exercising their lawful rights of freedom of speech and assembly. There is no doubt that the results endanger us all. |
 by David T.Z. Mindich Lynching helped to raise the odious flag in 1894. But in 2020, hundreds of thousands of marchers protesting the lynching of George Floyd brought the flag down. |
 by Paul Ham Many people, including historians, believe that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused Japan's unconditional surrender, saved a million American lives, and was the least morally repellent way to end World War II. Paul Ham contends that none of this is true. |
 by William L. Barney The United States is at a crossroads. The path chosen will determine whether contemporary America resumes its role as a beacon of hope and progress to the rest of the world or joins the Confederate slaveholders of the past among history's losers. |
 by Campbell F. Scribner Left critics of the recent "Harper's Magazine" open letter on free speech and open debate make some claims that are narrowly meritorious. But they don't address the value of speech as a way of building the collective citizenship necessary for democracy. In this respect, the signers are correct. |
 by Stephen Kiernan Creating the bomb was both a milestone achievement, and a profound expansion of the limits of warfare. This complexity deserves a permanent public memorial. |
 by Moritz Föllmer Although Nazi aesthetics are generally associated with the monumental architecture of Albert Speer and the propaganda films of Leni Riefenstahl, Germans generally encountered conventionality in art, music and cinema. This helped to normalize the acts of the Third Reich and to allow ordinary Germans to dissociate themselves from Nazism after 1945. |
 by Marc Wortman Pleasure-seekers and shoreline business owners on the east coast of the United States rejected voluntary calls to dim their lights in 1942. German U-Boat crews devastated shipping and commerce until compulsory blackouts were enforced. |
 by Guy Laron It was clear from the outset that this was a desperate gamble that put Iraq on a collision course with Washington. But Saddam believed he had no other choice but to stop Kuwait from dumping oil into a slack market. |
 by Andrew Feffer Two documentaries on the notorious lawyer and fixer portray Roy Cohn as a figure of evil, but don't examine the social and political context of power in New York City. |
 by Billy J. Stratton Silas Soule and Joseph Cramer, two Civil War-era heroes who rebelled and refused to join a brutal attack against Native peoples represent the moral courage we would do well to honor. |
 by Tony Platt Alfred Kroeber built the University of California's anthropology department into a world leader literally with the bones of the Native peoples of California. It's time to honor them. |
 by Alan J. Singer Just reading the Constitutional text, without context, does not help us understand what Antonin Scalia called "the fairly understood meaning of those words." |
 by Mark Holan Authors, academics, musicians, and others bothered by their work being "cancelled" might consider the original boycott for some needed perspective. |
 by Richard Lim While we cannot ignore Washingon's participation in slavery, we shouldn't discount his remarkable transformation into someone who wished for its abolition and took steps personally to make things right, becoming the only major founder to free his slaves. |
 by Steve Hochstadt The political conspiracy theories of the right assume that Democratic voters actively support evil. The conspiracy theories of the "Never Biden" element of the left assume that we are just dumb. |
 by Ronald L. Feinman Age, health, and political calculations about securing an ideologically sympathetic replacement could prompt as many as six Supreme Court Justices to leave the court in the next four-year presidential term. Who names their replacements will shape the court for a generation. |
 by Joshua Brown AG to the rescue |
Don't Miss!  by Patrick L. Hamilton and Allan W. Austin The Hate-Monger, a supervillain introduced by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1963, called attention to the destructive power of bigotry, but today readers should resist the idea that defeating any one person, no matter who or how powerful they might be, can eliminate racism. |
 by Jenny Woodley Thinking of the Mary McLeod Bethune memorial in Washington's Lincoln Park in tandem with the controversial Emancipation memorial suggests ways in which commemorative spaces can operate as places of dialogue. |
 by Pete Daniel Change is on the front foot, and this is no time to allow wealth and ignorance to gain ground. Achiever exhibits and sculpture gardens seem pathetic sideshows to the powerful history of the country. |
 by G.W. Gibson We can take heart that our country and our discipline have come a long way from the nadir and Frederick Jackson Turner. Somewhere between Teddy Roosevelt and Colin Kaepernick, we have managed to pick up a few yards as Americans and as American Historians. |
 by Martin Halpern Activists in today's struggles against institutionalized racism and for black lives can benefit from studying a local victory of fifty years ago. In the spring of 1970, the Black Action Movement (BAM) at the University of Michigan led a thirteen-day strike that won a commitment to change by the university administration. | Roundup Top 10
 The top op eds by historians from around the web last week. | |
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