Richard Drake

Richard Drake Richard Drake received a Ph.D. in history from UCLA in 1976. His teaching career at the University of Montana began in 1982 where in 2017 he became the inaugural holder of the Lucile Speer Research Chair in Politics and History. His published work includes four books on modern Italian history, including The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy (1989; Rev. edn. 2021). He has published two books on American foreign policy: The Education of an Anti-Imperialist: Robert La Follette and U.S. Expansion (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013) and Charles Austin Beard: The Return of the Master Historian of American Imperialism (Cornell University Press, 2018). He currently is working on a book with the working title of “Mark Twain and the Course of the American Empire.”

Israel/ Palestine

The Nuremberg Charter and the War on Gaza

Richard Drake

( Counterpunch ) – “In preparation for the Nazi war crimes trials in 1945, representatives of Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States met to discuss the legal basis of the proceedings. They produced on August 8, 1945, the London Charter of the International Military Tribunal, a document that subsequently became known as […]

African-Americans

Was Charles Austin Beard a Racist Historian?

Richard Drake

( Counterpunch ) – Controversy about Charles Austin Beard began in 1913 when he published An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. He turned thirty-nine that year. Until then, his books had appeared to widespread praise within the profession and to the benign neglect of the general reading public. A highly successful […]

Israel/ Palestine

Some Israeli perspectives on the tragedy of the Middle East

Richard Drake

( Richard Drake) – The sickening events lately occurring in the Middle East have shocked and outraged the conscience of the world. The experts who have tried to pacify the Middle East, whatever their real intentions, obviously have failed to achieve anything but the preservation of a status quo guaranteed to produce one crisis and […]

Pentagon

Empire and Blowback: Remembering Chalmers Johnson’s Critique of American Imperialism

Richard Drake

( Responsible Statecraft) – It has been nearly ten years since Chalmers Johnson died, and twice that long since the publication of “Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire.” That Johnson’s condemnation of American imperialism originated in a conservative political and philosophical tradition makes him a somewhat unusual figure. Such viewpoints more characteristically come […]