History News Network (HNN) at George Washington University is a platform for historians writing about current events.
History News Network (HNN) is a non-profit corporation registered in Washington DC. HNN was founded by Richard Shenkman, the author of Legends, Lies & Cherished Myths of World History. Shenkman served as editor until his retirement in 2019. Historian Kyla Sommers is the current editor-in-chief. HNN sponsors several history-oriented blogs including Liberty and Power (coordinated by David T. Beito), and Jim Loewen. [1] [2] [3]
HNN, originally hosted by George Mason University, moved to George Washington University in 2017. [4]
Murray Polner was the long-time book editor for HNN. [5] [6]
In 2012, HNN celebrated the Fourth of July by holding a contest to select the worst books about American history every published. Nominees David Barton’s The Jefferson Lies, Michael Bellesiles’s Arming America , Gavin Menzies’s 1421 : The Year China Discovered America, Richard G. Williams’s 2006 book Stonewall Jackson: The Black Man’s Friend and A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn. [2] Over 1000 HNN readers gave the nod to Barton and Zinn. [7]
George Mason University (GMU) is a public research university in Fairfax County, Virginia, in Northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C. The university is named in honor of George Mason, a Founding Father of the United States.
Howard Zinn was an American historian, playwright, philosopher, socialist intellectual and World War II veteran. He was chair of the history and social sciences department at Spelman College, and a political science professor at Boston University. Zinn wrote more than 20 books, including his best-selling and influential A People's History of the United States in 1980. In 2007, he published a version of it for younger readers, A Young People's History of the United States.
Eric Alterman is an American historian and journalist. He is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English and Journalism at Brooklyn College and the author of twelve books.
Jonah Jacob Goldberg is an American conservative syndicated columnist, author, political analyst, and commentator. The founding editor of National Review Online, from 1998 until 2019, he was an editor at National Review. Goldberg writes a weekly column about politics and culture for the Los Angeles Times. In October 2019, Goldberg became the founding editor of the online opinion and news publication The Dispatch. Goldberg has authored the No. 1 New York Times bestsellerLiberal Fascism, released in January 2008; The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas, released in 2012; and Suicide of the West, which was published in April 2018 and also became a New York Times bestseller, reaching No. 5 on the list the following month.
Gil Troy is an American presidential historian and a popular commentator on politics and other issues. He is a professor of history at McGill University. Troy is the author of nine books, and the editor of two. He writes a column for The Daily Beast on forgotten history, putting current events in historical perspective and is a columnist for The Jerusalem Post.
In political studies, surveys have been conducted in order to construct historical rankings of the success of the presidents of the United States. Ranking systems are usually based on surveys of academic historians and political scientists or popular opinion. The scholarly rankings focus on presidential achievements, leadership qualities, failures, and faults. Popular-opinion polls typically focus on recent or well-known presidents.
David Barton is an American evangelical author and political activist for Christian nationalist causes. He is the founder of WallBuilders, LLC, a Texas-based organization that promotes pseudohistory about the religious basis of the United States.
James William Loewen was an American sociologist, historian, and author. He was best known for his 1995 book, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. A 2005 book, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, galvanized a national effort to develop a list of sundown towns.
Jon Ellis Meacham is an American writer, reviewer, historian and presidential biographer who is serving as the Canon Historian of the Washington National Cathedral since November 7, 2021. A former executive editor and executive vice president at Random House, he is a contributing writer to The New York Times Book Review, a contributing editor to Time magazine, and a former editor-in-chief of Newsweek. He is the author of several books. He won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House. He holds the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Endowed Chair in American Presidency at Vanderbilt University.
No Gun Ri: A Military History of the Korean War Incident is a 2002 book by United States military officer Robert Bateman about the events that took place at No Gun Ri in 1950 and the controversy that followed. Bateman contested the veracity of a Pulitzer prize-winning account published earlier. The book was awarded the 2004 Colby Award for military history.
Frances Fox Piven is an American professor of political science and sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she has taught since 1982.
Randall J. Stephens is an editor and historian of American religion.
Jews Against Zionism: The American Council for Judaism, 1942-1948 is a 1990 book by Thomas A. Kolsky, a professor of history and political science at Montgomery County Community College, based on his doctoral dissertation at The George Washington University.
Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning is a book by Jonah Goldberg, who was then a syndicated columnist and the editor-at-large of National Review Online. In contrast to the mainstream view among historians and political scientists that fascism is a far-right ideology, Goldberg argues in the book that fascist movements were and are left-wing. Published in January 2008, it reached number one on The New York Times Best Seller list of hardcover non-fiction in its seventh week on the list.
Wolf Isaac Blitzer is an American journalist, television news anchor, and author who has been a CNN reporter since 1990, and who currently serves as one of the principal anchors at the network. He is the host of The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer since 2005; previously he served as the network's lead political anchor until 2021.
A People's History of the United States is a 1980 nonfiction book by American historian and political scientist Howard Zinn. In the book, Zinn presented what he considered to be a different side of history from the more traditional "fundamental nationalist glorification of country". Zinn portrays a side of American history that can largely be seen as the exploitation and manipulation of the majority by rigged systems that hugely favor a small aggregate of elite rulers from across the orthodox political parties.
John Willingham is an American writer and editor known for his collections of reviews about honors programs at public universities in the United States, for his essays about history, literature, politics, and religion, and for The Edge of Freedom: A Fact-Based Novel of the Texas Revolution. The Revolution was his subject once more in his paper "Should We Forget the Alamo?: Myths, Slavery, and the Texas Revolution (2023). In 2011, he founded and became editor of Public University Honors, a website that evaluates more than 50 college honors programs and provides information about honors programs in general.
Murray Polner was an American editor and author. He was the founding editor of Present Tense, a liberal current affairs magazine published by the American Jewish Committee, a job he held for the entire two decades that the magazine was published. He was an anti-Vietnam War activist and a committed pacifist.
Present Tense was a magazine of Jewish affairs published by the American Jewish Committee (AJCommittee) from 1973 - 1990. Murray Polner was the editor from the time of the magazine's creation until its final issue. The magazine covered social and political issues in the United States, Israel and Jewish communities worldwide.
Julian Emanuel Zelizer is a professor of political history and an author in the United States at Princeton University. Zelizer has authored or co-authored several books about American political history; his focuses of study are the second half of the 20th century and the 21st century.
Journalist-historian Rick Shenkman has found a new home for the History News Network, namely George Washington University, meaning 'its future is now assured' after departing George Mason University.