"The War May Have Been Fought on Battlefields, but It Was Won in Libraries"

"Hitler also reviled what he called Tintenritter, or 'ink knights': academics, writers, librarians. What could they offer to the mighty Wehrmacht? As it turns out, the seemingly pointless and definitely un-martial labor of OSS's scholar-spies and the Chairborne Division gave the U.S. essential intelligence about German infrastructure—the kind of intelligence that Graham writes the Nazis never bothered to develop about Britain, and that would have made its bombing raids even more devastating."

Greg Barnhisel at The New Republic reviews Elyse Graham's Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II.

"Well-Written and Superb History"

"There is a role to play in the United States for a serious political left to challenge the assumptions of the center-left and center-right and raise issues the mainstream parties and movements would otherwise ignore. But, as Maurice Isserman's book reveals, the Communist Party USA could never have served that purpose—because a healthy left, unlike the CPUSA, would be a loyal opposition, acting in the best spirit of the American experiment rather than supporting its enemies."

Ronald Radosh at The Bulwark reviews Maurice Isserman's Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism.

"Transports You Back to an Era Much Different Than the Divided and Cacophonous Times We're Living in Now"

"Of course, real life is never like a Norman Rockwell painting. But it is good to be reminded of a time when more of our great country's energy and time were focused on moving together towards higher ideals than sniping at one another on social media or paralyzing government with our divisions--or stroking one narcissist's enormous ego."

Brian Katulis at The Liberal Patriot praises Franklin D. Roosevelt's, and Norman Rockwell's, Four Freedoms.

"The Army's First Centralized School for Intelligence and Psychological Warfare"

"I was proud to be in the American army and we were able to do what we had to do.  I don't think we're heroes.  But the opportunity to help fight and win the war was a wonderful way.  I can look anybody straight in their eye and say I think I've earned the right to be an American.  And that's what–that's what it did for me."

Jon Wertheim at 60 Minutes interviews some of the last surviving Ritchie Boys from World War II.

"For the Nation"

"Amery's point on September 2, 1939, in the wake of Hitler's invasion of Poland, was that there are times when the Loyal Opposition needs to speak not just for the opposition, but for the country. There are times when country comes first, when a government of one's own party has utterly failed and needs to be called to account on behalf of the nation as a whole.
"This is such a time in America, in 2020."

At The Bullwark, William Kristol calls on Joe Biden to "speak for America."

"The Only Decision Truman Made Was Not to Alter the Plan"

"On the first two questions, declassified archival documents are pretty clear: There never was a decision to drop either bomb. Instead, there was a decision to build an atom bomb. Once it was ready, it was used; once the second bomb was ready, it too was used. From the outset, this was the plan—an automatic sequence from building the bomb to testing it to dropping it on the enemy."

Fred Kaplan at Slate argues that "decision to bomb Hiroshima wasn't a decision at all."

And a 2016 Atomic Heritage Foundation article recalls the debate over the Smithsonian's 1995 exhibit.

Imperialist or Nationalist?

"To make empire the dominant story in British history is to misunderstand the nature of Britain, its elite and its exploitative power, and its persistent racism. The racism of Oswald Mosley and Enoch Powell, for all its roots in the past, was a self-consciously post-imperial nationalist one. Imperialism reluctantly granted British Caribbean people UK citizenship. These rights were stripped away by nationalists, right down to Theresa May–this was the essence of the Windrush scandal. People voted for Brexit not because they were imperialists, but because they were nostalgic for a national Britain. They were certainly not voting for the return to free immigration from the old imperial territories. The history that seems to matter most to Brexiteers is a particular account of the second world war, one that is decidedly nationalist."

David Edgerton at The Guardian writes that the British "should not admit the framing of the debate about history as a question of a dark imperial history sullying a bright national story."

Proto-Cointelpro

"Yet, in all its activities, the government offered the rationale of 'national security,' claiming that internal dangers were sufficient to discard constitutional guarantees. In responding to criticism over the prosecution of the Christian Front, Hoover had retorted: 'It took only 23 men to overthrow Russia.' Administration reasoning in World War II set a precedent for far more massive government spying during the Cold War, particularly against civil rights organizations and opponents of the Vietnam conflict. The very Smith Act used in 1944 against domestic fascists was used with far more severity against Communists during the Cold War, the law's scope only being limited by the Supreme Court in 1957."

In a 2017 Daily Beast article, Justus D. Doenecke looks at civil liberties under Franklin Roosevelt.

"It Concerns Us All"

"The main exhibition took eight years to put together. The American historian Timothy Snyder called the project a 'civilisational achievement' and 'perhaps the most ambitious museum devoted to the second world war in any country'.
"But the populists who had come to power in Poland's elections two years earlier found this unbearable, preferring to promote a version of events that would airbrush real history and glorify the nation instead."

Estera Flieger at The Guardian criticizes changes at Poland's Gdańsk Museum of the Second World War.

Ours to Fight For

"When Rockwell mentioned his idea to Saturday Evening Post editors, they readily approved the project—Rockwell was their star cover artist. Only after the magazine published the pictures did the Washington propagandists catch on. The Office of War Information, by now being infiltrated by image-savvy, 'Mad Men'-style advertising executives, arranged a 1943-'44 national tour for the paintings, which raised almost $133 million in war bonds. Millions of reprints appeared everywhere—inside taxicabs, on milk bottles and stuffed inside Americans' monthly bank statements, for starters. When the traveling paintings reached a new city, parades shook the streets."

Abigail Tucker at Smithsonian looks back to Norman Rockwell's "Four Freedoms" paintings.

"Almost an Entire Generation of Whites Received the Most Significant Government Handout in American History"

"The New Deal was an unprecedented government investment in social welfare. It created unemployment benefits and Social Security and gave military veterans resources to attend college, find work, and buy homes, to name some of its banner accomplishments. It was also deeply racist—usually in intent, but almost always in practice. To get it through Congress, northern Democrats ceded significant ground to their southern counterparts, the nation's staunchest segregationists. Southern Democrats felt that improving the lives of black people would upend the racial order in their region. We will never know if they were right. They decided not to risk it."

In light of a recent lawsuit, Zak Cheney-Rice at New York discusses "When Affirmative Action Was White."

"Echoes Some of the Broader, More Malign Attempts at Historical Falsification Abroad at Present"

"So if the Nazis were so obviously anti-socialist, and believed so ardently in the virtues of private property and entrepreneurship, and if socialists were among the earliest and hardest hit victims of the Nazi party prior to the Second World War, why is Hitler being proclaimed by some as a socialist?"

Matthew Fitzpatrick and A. Dirk Moses at Australia's ABC explain the conundrum.

"Provides Copious Evidence That the United States Sought Russian Entry Up To and Even After the Bombs Were Dropped"

"In the first edition of his path breaking volume, Giangreco demolished the revisionist myth that Truman's depiction of an invasion as a looming catastrophe was a gross exaggeration, a 'postwar creation' designed to cover up the real reasons for using the bombs.  Citing a variety of hitherto untapped sources (including documentation on the production of 500,000 Purple Heart medals for the invasion's dead and wounded), Giangreco showed that Truman's vision was amply borne out by the projected casualty figures military and civilian planners routinely used.  
Now, in the expanded edition of Hell to Pay, his research again involves areas that have received little or no attention."

Robert James Maddox at History News Network reviews D. M. Giangreco's Hell to Pay: Operation Downfall and the Invasion of Japan, 1945-1947.

"Unlikely Business Owners"

"In Birmingham in the 1930s, a young musician by the name of Herman Blount—later known as Sun Ra, the incomparable jazz bandleader—regularly visited the party's Ella Speed Bookstore, where he enjoyed public lectures and conversations on culture and politics with employees and customers. Decades later in Baltimore, the Black Arts poet Sam Cornish frequented the Free State's successor, the New Era Bookstore, which published one of Cornish’s earliest poetry collections under its in-house Sacco Publishers imprint (named for Sacco and Vanzetti)."

Joshua Clark Davis at Jacobin looks at the history of Communist Party bookstores.

"It's Really the White Middle-Class Boomers Who Exemplify All the Awful Characteristics and Behaviors That Have Defined This Generation"

"I'll give you something abstract and something concrete. On an abstract level, I think the worst thing they've done is destroy a sense of social solidarity, a sense of commitment to fellow citizens. That ethos is gone and it's been replaced by a cult of individualism. It's hard to overstate how damaging this is.
"On a concrete level, their policies of under-investment and debt accumulation have made it very hard to deal with our most serious challenges going forward. Because we failed to confront things like infrastructure decay and climate change early on, they've only grown into bigger and more expensive problems. When something breaks, it's a lot more expensive to fix than it would have been to just maintain it all along."

Sean Illing at Vox interviews Bruce Gibney, author of A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America.

"Federal Programs Reinforced Segregation"

"Suburban expansion financed by the Federal Housing Administration, another New Deal agency, was also discriminatory. In the Los Angeles area, Panorama City, developed by Henry J. Kaiser in the late 1940s, and Lakewood, developed by Mark Taper and his partners, were FHA-supported on explicit condition that African Americans be barred. FHA rules stated that 'incompatible racial elements' would disqualify builders from essential federally backed loans. The FHA also frequently required that property deeds prohibit resale to African Americans."

Richard Rothstein in the Los Angeles Times writes that "government's unconstitutional and systematic insistence on segregated housing in the mid-20th century" created "patterns that persist to this day."

Katie Nodjimbadem at Smithsonian Magazine interviews Rothstein.

And Steve Hochstadt at History News Network discusses Rothstein's The Color of Law.

"They Said in Effect: Political Violence Is a Line We Won't Cross"

"After Olympia, Rothermere and the Daily Mail also withdrew open support and the rest of the British press effectively boycotted Mosley, reporting only the continued violence that broke out at subsequent rallies but not details of his speeches. Newspapers that had previously been sympathetic—often catering to a public taste for appeasement of Hitler—changed their tune. British Blackshirts were branded as thugs.
"That also made attending Mosley’s meetings much less comfortable for MPs and government ministers. It was only after this shift in the way fascists were treated in the press and in political discourse that the realities of the Nazi threat finally penetrated the British public, helping them to coalesce behind the war when it broke out in 1939."

Katherine Pickering Antonova at The Washington Post explains "[h]ow the British defeated homegrown fascism."

Finis Germaniae?

"After World War II, the Allied occupiers, as Mr. Sieferle sees it, saddled Germans with a false idea of their own history—the idea that there was something premodern about Germany, a fundamental difference between it and the West. That may describe Russia, but not Germany, and Germany's modernity is painful for Westerners to face. 'If Germany belonged to the most progressive, civilized, cultivated countries,' he writes, 'then ‘Auschwitz’ means that, at any moment, the human "progress" of modernity can go into reverse.'"

Christopher Caldwell at The New York Times discusses German historian Rolf Peter Sieferle.

The Proto-Alt Right

"In the years before the outbreak of World War II, people of German ancestry living abroad were encouraged to form citizens groups to both extol 'German virtues,' around the world, and to lobby for causes helpful to Nazi Party goals."

Alan Taylor at The Atlantic provides photos of the German American Bund of the 1930s.

"That Humility Has Been Lost"

"It's hard to recapture the horror that earlier generations of Americans felt about preventive war when it was still something that other countries did to the United States and not merely something Americans contemplate doing to others. They viewed it the way some Americans still view torture: as liberation from the moral restraints that human beings require. One of the things that frightened them most about the Nazis was that Hitler had dispensed with the concept of original sin. He had aimed to create a new class of infallible, god-like, humans who need not be encumbered by the fetters that bound lesser races. Totalitarianism, argued Arthur Schlesinger in The Vital Center, aimed 'to liquidate the tragic insights which gave man a sense of its limitations.' For Schlesinger, Reinhold Niebuhr, Walter Lippmann and other intellectuals who shaped America’s foreign policy debate in the early Cold War, acknowledging these limitations was part of what made America different. Because Americans recognized that they were fallible, fallen creatures, they did not grant themselves the illegitimate, corrupting power of preventive war."

Peter Beinart at The Atlantic looks at the American embrace of preventive war.