Jenny Thompson, PhD, Historian & Author

What is it about war that causes nostalgia? Are the pre-bellum days viewed simply, with the hazy softened focus of longing, as days of peace? The harsh and horrific time of war necessarily evokes a sense of the past as a time when things were better, were “before”…

Certainly,  Read More 

The 1981 film Gallipoli remains one of the best movies about war ever made. I refrain from calling it a "war movie," since it is far more than that. It is a captivating, wrenching movie about the ideals of war, the experience of war, and the utter horror of war.

William Wyler's 1946 film about men returning home from World War II and the difficulty of life on the American homefront post-conflict is an amazing study of war's effects.

Wyler's 1942 classic, Mrs. Miniver, documented British life on the homefront during the war, and chronicled the sacrifices of one family during the Blitz. The film's moving  Read More 

I was saddened to hear of the passing of the last known U.S. veteran of World War One, Frank Buckles.

He was 110 years old. It's hard to imagine the changes in the world that Mr. Buckles witnessed in his long life.

I had the great honor to meet Mr. Buckles at a ceremony  Read More 

It’s hard to watch the news of the world—the uprisings in Tunis and Cairo—the rumblings of protest in Jordan and Yemen--and not feel that the winds of change are blowing.

“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” Bob Dylan famously sang half a century ago  Read More 

As Halloween approaches, the scary sounds of the holiday fill the air; ghosts and goblins decorate doorways, and the chill of the approaching winter is in the air.

But the truly frightening part of this holiday are the eerie, creepy voices that clutter our airwaves, trying to scare us, trying to capitalize on our  Read More 

As the current economic crisis unfolds, the “stimulus” funding idea has been set forth as a means by which the U.S. economy might recover. Based on an interpretation of the economic model attributed to John Maynard Keynes, this promise of recovery, some argue, was last proven to work during the U.S. involvement in  Read More 

On July 25, 2010, the “Afghan War Diary,” comprised of more than 91,000 reports related to the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010, was released ---just two days before the US House was scheduled to vote on further funding for the war.

One hundred and fourteen congress members would vote “no” on allocating the 59 billion dollar sum for  Read More 

During the build up to the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the Bush administration insisted that an American-led war to “remove” Iraq from Kuwait was not inevitable. This, despite the obvious events constituting an unmistakable prelude to war—troops, equipment shipped across the world, cabinet officials traveling overseas to meet with various world  Read More 

Recently, the stories of two men who strongly sounded their opposition to the Vietnam War at great personal expense have re-emerged in the public forum: the stories of Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Dr. Daniel Ellsberg.

Two separate documentaries profiling each man have premiered within the last year, "MLK: A Call to  Read More