On July 27th, 1953, the Armistice Agreement for the Restoration of the South Korean State established an uneasy ceasefire, ending a war that the U.S. had fought, but never formally declared. Sometimes overshadowed in U.S. twentieth-century historiography by the...

This article originally appeared in the May 2019 issue of The American Historian. Recent years have seen a surge in attention to transgender politics. Famously—and controversially—dubbed a “transgender tipping point” by Time magazine, trans justice is now...

by Chris Wimmer The first World’s Fair on American soil ran from May 10 to November 10, 1876. Millions of visitors flocked to Philadelphia to see the show. But two months before it ended, it nearly went up in smoke.… Read the article The post The Centennial Fire...

On March 20, 2005, two years to the day after U.S. forces invaded Iraq, Army Specialist Ashley Pullen drove a Humvee in a routine patrol south of Baghdad. Pullen was a member of the 617th Military Police Company and, like all women in the military at that time,...

by Tom Clavin Douglas “Pete” Peterson was born in Omaha and raised in Nebraska and Iowa. He enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in 1954, attaining flight pilot and instructor status soon after. He would have a 26-year military career, … Read the article The post War and...

This post originally appeared in the 2022 issue of The American Historian. In 1921, dozens of investors celebrated the grand opening of Chin Lee’s Restaurant in New York. Located on the northern edge of the Times Square theatre district, their restaurant nourished...

by Susan Ronald In the following excerpt from Hitler’s Aristocrats, author Susan Ronald discusses the Weimar Republic and the political environment that enabled the rise of Hitler and fascism in post-World War I Germany. Many believe the rise of fascism … Read the...

by Tom Clavin  It was on May 3, 1952, that a plane landed on the North Pole. Specifically, the aircraft was a ski-modified U.S. Air Force C-47. The pilot was 33-year-old William Pershing Benedict, born in Nevada and raised in … Read the article The post Crary of the...

Photo by Transformer18, under Creative Commons 2.0 license. This post originally appeared in the November 2015 issue of The American Historian. In late September 2015 a video began circulating on social media under the hashtag #pizzarat. As of early October, it had...

The attack on Pearl Harbor remains one of the most infamous events in American history. In the aftermath, a popular belief emerged that the reason Japan did not invade the United States was due to the widespread ownership of firearms by American citizens. This notion...

This post originally appeared in the November 2018 issue of The American Historian. Paja Thao’s arrival in the United States in 1984 marked the end of a long and painful journey. In 1975 the war in Laos forced him to flee his village, and for fifteen days he...

by Laura Dail and Matthew Krogh HBO’s new miniseries White House Plumbers imagines the story of how political saboteurs E. Howard Hunt (Woody Harrelson) and G. Gordon Liddy (Justin Theroux) brought about the controversial end to Nixon’s presidency. Laura Dail … Read...

This post originally appeared in the May 2017 issue of The American Historian. “Why does youth consider Big Business ‘immoral’?” the editors of Fortune magazine asked with palpable anxiety in a special report titled “Youth in Turmoil” in 1969. Speaking for...

by Tom Clavin During my recent book tour promoting the release of Follow Me to Hell, I met many book-loving people and participated in fun events. Along the way, I heard some good stories or a name or event … Read the article The post A Long Journey Home appeared...

April 30, 1975 is commonly understood to be the dramatic endpoint of the Vietnam War. For the victorious Vietnamese, what they called the liberation of Saigon marked a “total victory after thirty years of grim and bloody sacrifice.”[1] For those Vietnamese who...

by Alexander Larman When I finished writing The Crown in Crisis, the book that has become the first part of my Windsors trilogy, I was asked two questions more than any other. Was the Duke of Windsor really a Nazi? … Read the article The post The Windsors at War...

by Sandra Dallas Novelist Sandra Dallas joins us to discuss the inspiration behind her latest book, Where Coyotes Howl, a vivid and deeply affecting ode to the early twentieth-century American West. Some years ago, my daughter and I were prowling … Read the article...

by Tom Clavin There were four lawmen who participated in the legendary Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in October 1881—the town marshal, Virgil Earp, and the three men he had deputized, his brothers Wyatt and Morgan, and Doc Holliday. A … Read the article The post Bat...