Eighty years ago today, the Casa Loma Orchestra recorded a song that was to become an American standard. What happened in the OKeh recording studio on Union Square in New York on October 29, 1929, however, is not nearly as well remembered as what occurred on that day about two...

Eighty years ago this week, an enormous sound emanated from lower Manhattan and began to spread in waves across the nation and, eventually, the world. The cause of the noise was the collapse of the stock market on "Black Tuesday," October 29, 1929, the worst single day of what was...

Threatening as they are, the fires burning around Los Angeles are not the most dangerous flames being fanned by hot hair in America these days.

"There is a coup going on," Glenn Beck lied to his radio followers on Monday. "There is a stealing of America, and the way it...

It is long past time for the mainstream media to start acting responsibly about what has been going on in the United States over the past few months.

One of the principal reasons why large percentages of Americans have been misled about health insurance reform and President Obama is...

St. John, Virgin Islands.

As I watch people windsurfing at Cinnamon Bay, it comes to me: "That's the image that gave us an extra four years of George W. Bush!" The photo of John Kerry windsurfing was exploited successfully by Karl Rove and company to paint the 2004 Democratic...

As most people on the planet probably know by now, last Friday ex-Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska made a post on Facebook in which she labeled President Barack Obama's health insurance reform plan "downright evil." Palin wrote:

"The America I know and love is not one in which my parents...

If the text of the citation for the honorary degree Notre Dame bill bestow on President Obama that has been leaked today by anti-abortion extremist Randall Terry is accurate, the university is making much the same case as I did...

{Historian Robert S. McElvaine is Elizabeth Chisholm Professor of Arts & Letters at Millsaps College & author of:
The Great Depression: America, 1929-1941 (Random House) and
Down and Out...

President Obama is meeting on Thursday with the CEOs of fourteen top credit card issuers. According to reports, the President will tell them that they have to "make those increases a lot easier to understand" and "make it so it doesn't look like you're taking advantage." Those, at least,...

President Obama seems to be hearing the growing outcry against the big bank pirates' declaration of war on the American people through their outrageous increases in credit card interest rates.

On Thursday in this blog I detailed the organized banksters' unleashing of...

Where is the fury now? The populists with pitchforks who screamed bloody murder at the A.I.G. bonuses are not saying nearly enough, or screaming loudly enough, about an even more outrageous action by the...

Enough! No--Too much!

Amid all the justified outrage we all feel at Bernie Madoff and the AIG bandits, let us save some intense outrage for Pope Benedict XVI.

After insulting Muslims by declaring in 2006 that Muhammad had brought "things only evil...

Today we mark the sixth anniversary of the beginning of the war in Iraq. Recent reports indicate that the situation there has improved considerably. The focus is shifting back to Afghanistan. President Obama has made good on his campaign promise to set a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. The question...

Ever since AIG entered the public consciousness in a very negative way...

A report by ABC's Jake Tapper on Monday that President Obama is reading a selection of letters from the public each day to get a feel for people's thoughts and problems is heartening. In establishing this means of connection with the feelings, hopes, and problems of "ordinary" Americans, Mr....

Washington, DC - 01.20.09 - Those numbers, at last! The date that appears on a T-shirt I've worn many times over the past few years has finally arrived! The unnatural disaster named "Dubya" has finally ended. As I watched him fly over me in a helicopter early this afternoon, I...

Last Christmas, one of my daughters gave me a coffee mug with an image of George W. Bush with devil's horns.

I used it occasionally over the ensuing months and the image faded slightly from a few trips...

Makes no difference what group I'm in . . .
Different strokes for different folks . . .

-- Sylvester Stewart (1968)

The legacy of the 1960s has been a matter of contention, with an uncertain outcome, for the...

Prior to the start of the war in Iraq in 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made a distinction between "Old Europe" that opposed the American war and "New Europe" that supported that war. Other members of the Bush Administration and neo-conservatives picked...

{My son, Brett, who is 20 and just voted in his first presidential election, wrote the following on Facebook on Election Night. I was so proud and moved by what he wrote, that I decided to post it for others to see.}