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Iran and the United States in the Cold War

Few outside countries have more at stake in the evolution of Iran’s political situation than the United States, which has been in a state of open enmity with the Islamic Republic for more than three decades. Threats of Iran-backed terrorism, Tehran’s apparent nuclear ambitions, and its evident aim of destabilizing American allies—chiefly Israel—are perpetually high on the list of US concerns in the region. Why is Iran so important to the US? What explains the enduring animosity between the two countries? Answers to these and other questions about the United States’ position in the region today can be found by looking back to the Cold War.

Read more about US Cold War Policy in Iran (4 pages)

The Pueblo Revolt

In 1680 the people known collectively as “Pueblos” rebelled against their Spanish overlords in the American Southwest. Spaniards had dominated them, their lives, their land, and their souls for eight decades. The Spanish had established and maintained their rule with terror, beginning with Juan de Oñate’s invasion in 1598. When the people of Acoma resisted, Oñate ordered that one leg be chopped from every man over fifteen and the rest of the population be enslaved, setting a pattern that lasted four-score years. Now, rising virtually as one, the Pueblos drove out Spanish soldiers and authorities.

Read Edward Countryman’s short essay on the Pueblo Revolt

The League of the Iroqouis

No Native people affected the course of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American history more than the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, of present-day upstate New York. Historians have been attempting to explain how and why ever since, and central to their explanations is the remarkable political and diplomatic structure, the League of the Iroquois. The League has fascinated us for hundreds of years. In the seventeenth century, this Native confederacy united the Five Iroquois Nations—the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas—into something more than an alliance but something less than a single, monolithic polity.

Read this 5 page essay from Matthew Dennis at U of Oregon

Thanks a Lot, Ken Burns!

Among Lundberg’s criticism of Burns’ Civil War series is that, “For all its appeal, however, The Civil War is a deeply misleading and reductive film that often loses historical reality in the mists of Burns’ sentimental vision and the romance of Foote’s anecdotes. Watching the film, you might easily forget that one side was not fighting for, but against the very things that Burns claims the war so gloriously achieved. Confederates, you might need reminding after seeing it, were fighting not for the unification of the nation, but for its dissolution. Moreover, they were fighting for their independence from the United States in the name of slavery and the racial hierarchy that underlay it. Perhaps most disingenuously, the film’s cursory treatment of Reconstruction obscures the fact that the Civil War did not exactly end in April of 1865 with a few handshakes and a mutual appreciation for a war well fought. Instead, the war’s most important outcome—emancipation—produced a terrible and violent reckoning with the legacy of slavery that continued well into the 20th century.”
 

The story behind LBJ's pursuit of the civil rights bill

President Lyndon Johnson, domineering and manipulative, lives on in American memory as the classic power broker. He bullied opponents, sweet-talked skeptics, and chewed out subordinates. He oozed confidence as he passed one piece of landmark social legislation after another, even as his cockiness helped to mire the country in Vietnam. Yet this is not the Johnson who emerges from volumes seven and eight of The Presidential Recordings, a transcription of his phone conversations from June 1 to July 4 of 1964.

More from Slate

Stunning Photographs of Civil War Soldiers

In his marvelous new book, 1861: The Civil War Awakening, Adam Goodheart tries to capture what it felt like to live through secession and the opening months of the Civil War, at a time when it wasn’t clear, or destined, that the war would become the bloodiest and most important event in American history. A historian at Washington College and one of the lead authors of the New York Times’ Disunion blog, Goodheart writes especially vividly about photography, so last week I invited him to tour “The Last Full Measure,” a new Library of Congress exhibition of portrait photographs of Civil War soldiers.

See the slideshow

Mike Huckabee Fixes American History

Don’t worry, American youth: Mike Huckabee has fixed American history. No longer will you suffer under what Huckabee calls “the ‘blame America first’ attitude prevalent in today’s teaching.”

Late Wednesday, Huckabee announced LearnOurHistory.com, a sort of BMG Music Club for what he calls “unbiased” historical lessons for kids. For around $15 each, the company will send you a new animated tale of American history each month, told through the eyes of a gang of time traveling kids.

Putting Wisconsin's Union Battle In Historical Context

Republicans in state legislatures of Wisconsin, Indiana and Ohio are trying to cut collective bargaining rights for workers in the public sector. A recent New York Times article described these bills as “the largest assault on collective bargaining in recent memory, striking at the heart of an American labor movement that is already atrophied.”

On today’s Fresh Air, journalist Philip Dray puts the union protests in the Midwest in a historical context. Dray is the author of There is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America, which follows the labor movement as it grew out of 19th century uprisings in textile mills. The movement rallied workers around common causes before suffering a series of blows after the failed 1981 air traffic controllers’ strike, when more than 12,000 air traffic controllers walked off their jobs. In response, President Reagan said that the striking workers were in violation of the law and would lose their jobs if they did not return to work within 48 hours. When they failed to show up, Reagan fired the workers.

A Physicist Explains Why Parallel Universes May Exist

Our universe might be really, really big — but finite. Or it might be infinitely big.

Both cases, says physicist Brian Greene, are possibilities, but if the latter is true, so is another posit: There are only so many ways matter can arrange itself within that infinite universe. Eventually, matter has to repeat itself and arrange itself in similar ways. So if the universe is infinitely large, it is also home to infinite parallel universes.