History Department News and Research

“I think [Trump] is losing even some of his [Catholic] supporters, or they are moderating their support,” says Margaret Susan Thompson, professor of history and political science. She notes that Trump's comments have been so harsh and controversial that even conservative-leaning Catholics are speaking out against the president and defending Leo.

The Remembrance Scholars plan the Remembrance activities held at the University each year, and the cohort will be recognized during a convocation in the fall.

“The book is a story about what happened to the common citizen, and the common soldier. It is a splendid example of how to do a fully rounded work on a people at total war, of how to use a vast mix of sources, and to keep the story going,” writes reviewer Paul Kennedy, Dilworth Professor of History at Yale University.

“Having been attacked twice in less than a year by the United States and Israel, including the assassinations of a significant number of political, military and religious leaders, Iran is determined to reestablish deterrence,” says Osamah Khali, professor of history.

Omar Garcia Harfuch, Mexico's security chief helped lead the operation that killed the drug lord known as “El Mencho,” comes from a long line of Mexican top brass. “Garcia Harfuch was sort of destined to follow in his father and grandfather’s footsteps,” says Gladys McCormick, Jay and Debe Moskowitz Endowed Chair in Mexico-U.S. Relations.

“The Iranians have indicated...that they are willing to have a deal. What they want are their rights to enrich uranium that are guaranteed under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), that any country who signed on the the NPT has. But the Trump administration is insisting that there be no enrichment at all,” says Osamah Khalil, professor of history.

The death of El Mencho may trigger a much wider onslaught of violence, says Gladys McCormick, Jay and Debe Moskowitz Endowed Chair in Mexico-U.S. Relations. “He was a key leader of one of the most violent criminal groups in Mexico. As with the captures or killings of other drug cartel kingpins, we are likely to see violence in response to the sudden power vacuum.”

The U.S. is placing tariffs on other countries for making successful products—not because they’re acting unfairly toward the U.S., says Andrew Wender Cohen, professor of history. “Imagine there's a country that's producing something very inexpensively that people make a lot of use out of. You're basically saying, ‘Well, we want to punish you for that.’”

The Howard F. Cline Book Prize in Mexican History recognizes outstanding scholarship and will be presented in Paris this spring. 

“Allport is a fluid writer, a conjurer with the rare ability to sustain a gripping narrative without resorting to Vaseline-lensed sentimentality. He overturns one piece of conventional wisdom after another—quarrelsome, occasionally, to a fault,” says New York Times reviewer Kevin Peraino.

Faculty experts will delve into a variety of topics from democracy and women’s voices to immigration in a series of weekly lectures offered in the Spring 2026 semester. 

“We're still not very close to phase two coming into place. Hamas is unlikely to disarm willingly and Israel is not going to be able to disarm them,” says Osamah Khalil, chair of the International Relations Undergraduate Program.

“Contrary to a lot of modern assumptions, it [the Maginot Line] was never expected to defeat a German attack by itself. The point of the Maginot Line was not to stop the boche in their tracks, but to channel any future westward offensive away from the French industrial heartland and toward the Low Countries, particularly Belgium,” writes Alan Allport, professor of history.

The article, co-authored by Associate Professor of History Robert Terrell and William Henry Johnson ’25 B.A. (Hist), was published in Central European History.