The 43-minute documentary My Native Air: Charles Evans Hughes and the Adirondacks is now available for viewing free of charge on YouTube. [Read more…] about Charles Evans Hughes Documentary Now Available Online
Foreign Policy
King Hancock: Drinking with John Hancock during the American Revolution
Americans are surprisingly more familiar with John Hancock‘s famous signature than with the man himself. In a spirited account of Hancock’s life, Brooke Barbier’s King Hancock: The Radical Influence of a Moderate Founding Father (Harvard University Press, 2023) depicts a patriot of fascinating contradictions ― a child of enormous privilege who would nevertheless become a voice of the common folk; a pillar of society uncomfortable with radicalism who yet was crucial to independence.
About two-fifths of the American population held neutral or ambivalent views about the Revolution, and Hancock spoke for them and to them, bringing them along. [Read more…] about King Hancock: Drinking with John Hancock during the American Revolution
Anna Rosenberg: A Key Aide to FDR and Truman
This week on the Historians Podcast, author Christopher C. Gorham discusses his biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman aide Anna Rosenberg, The Confidante: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Helped Win WW II and Shape Modern America (Citadel Press, 2023).
Anna Rosenberg was dubbed by Life magazine as “far and away the most important woman in the American government.” From New York City, Rosenberg devised a plan that helped diversify the ranks of factory workers during the Second World War. She also served as deputy defense secretary during the Korean War. [Read more…] about Anna Rosenberg: A Key Aide to FDR and Truman
V is for Victory: Roosevelt’s Revolution & World War II
V Is For Victory: Franklin Roosevelt’s American Revolution and the Triumph of World War II (Scribner, 2023) by Craig Nelson takes a look at how FDR confronted an American public disinterested in going to war in Europe, skillfully won their support, and pushed government and American industry to build the greatest war machine in history, “the arsenal of democracy” that won the Second World War. [Read more…] about V is for Victory: Roosevelt’s Revolution & World War II
Jane Addams, Alice Hamilton & The Hague Women’s Congress
Berlin, May 1915. Three feminists on an historical mission — Jane Addams and New York native Alice Hamilton from the United States, and Aletta Jacobs from the Netherlands — meet Wilbur H. Durborough. The American photographer and filmmaker had traveled to Berlin with his cameraman, Irving G. Ries, to shoot footage for his war documentary On the Firing Line with the Germans (1915). [Read more…] about Jane Addams, Alice Hamilton & The Hague Women’s Congress
Furnishing Foreign Relations: Benjamin Joy’s Sea Chest
The most recent episode of the Massachusetts Historical Society’s (MHS) Object of History podcast “Furnishing Foreign Relations: Benjamin Joy’s Sea Chest,” examines an object from the first diplomatic mission between the United States and India. [Read more…] about Furnishing Foreign Relations: Benjamin Joy’s Sea Chest
The Marquis de Lafayette: A Short Biography
2024 will mark the 200th anniversary of the return of the Marquis de Lafayette (Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de La Fayette) to America. In 1824, almost 50 years after the start of the American Revolution, the 68-year-old Lafayette was invited by President James Monroe, an old Revolutionary War comrade and lifelong friend, to tour the United States.
Lafayette’s visit was one the major events of the early 19th century. It had the effect of unifying a country sometime fractured by electoral discord and reminding Americans of their hard won democracy. [Read more…] about The Marquis de Lafayette: A Short Biography
The Great Power of Small Native Nations
In this episode of the Ben Franklin’s World podcast, Elizabeth Ellis, an Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University and a citizen of the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, joins to investigate the uncovered and recovered histories of the more than 40 distinct and small Native nations who called the Gulf South region home during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Ellis is the author of The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South (Penn Press, 2022) [Read more…] about The Great Power of Small Native Nations
The 60th Anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis
At the height of the Cold War, for two weeks in October 1962, the world teetered on the edge of thermonuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Earlier that fall, the Soviet Union, under orders from Premier Nikita Khrushchev, began to secretly deploy a nuclear strike force in Cuba, just 90 miles from the United States.
President John F. Kennedy said the missiles would not be tolerated and insisted on their removal. Khrushchev refused. [Read more…] about The 60th Anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis
Sol Bloom: A Manhattan Leader In American WWII Foreign Policy
Sol Bloom (March 9, 1870 – March 7, 1949) was a song-writer and Congressman from New York who began his career as a sheet music publisher in Chicago. He served fourteen terms in the House of Representatives from the West Side of Manhattan, from 1923 until his death in 1949.
Bloom was the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee from 1939 to 1947 and again in 1949, an important period in the history of American foreign policy. [Read more…] about Sol Bloom: A Manhattan Leader In American WWII Foreign Policy