History News Network

Nov 22, 2024 | historynewsnetwork.org | Jefferson Morley

A small group of senior CIA officers may have been running an authorized counterintelligence operation involving Lee Harvey Oswald six weeks before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. That’s the controversial but conditional conclusion I reached while writing the biography of CIA spymaster Winston Scott, the agency’s top man in Mexico for more than a decade. Our Man in Mexico, argues that if there was an Oswald operation, Scott, a brash and brilliant spy, was not a participant.

Oct 23, 2024 | historynewsnetwork.org | Aaron Leonard

Geoffrey Roberts is the author of Stalin’s Wars and Victory at Stalingrad. He is professor and head of the School of History at University College Cork, Ireland. Roberts is a frequent contributor to British, Irish, and American newspapers and to popular-history journals and has been a consultant for TV and radio documentaries. His latest book is Stalin's General: The Life of Georgy Zhukov, based on new research in the Russian archives.

Oct 22, 2024 | historynewsnetwork.org | Richard John

The U.S. Justice Department recently hauled Google into court for violating an 1890 federal law designed to forestall the unjust consolidation of economic power. Known today as the Sherman Act, this law was proposed by Ohio lawmaker John Sherman to prevent sprawling financial combines like Standard Oil from using their formidable command over the production, distribution, and sale of a good or service to bankrupt their rivals and block new entrants from the market.

Sep 24, 2024 | historynewsnetwork.org | Ronnie Grinberg

Irving Howe and many other New York intellectuals believed that New Leftists, their leaders and theoreticians included, tended to lack intellectual sophistication. Specifically, most of them failed to engage robustly in an exchange of ideas. They relied too often on style rather than substance. They were immature, that is they had not won their intellectual spurs through long, hard preparation, and the rigors of verbal combat. They were, to Howe’s generation, crude adolescent boys.

Sep 18, 2024 | historynewsnetwork.org | Timothy Messer-Kruse

It’s been five years since the New York Times published the 1619 Project, which among other thingsbrought mainstream attention to the protracted debate over the meaning of the American Revolution. Many fans of the 1619 Project have accepted its characterization of the nation’s founders as defenders of slavery. Conservatives, with the support of several well-respected liberal historians, have fired back that patriot leaders hated slavery and did their best to set it on a path to extinction.