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"This second edition of Howard Zinn on War is a collection of 26 short writings chosen by the author to represent his thinking on a subject that concerned and fascinated him throughout his career. He reflects on the wars against Iraq, the war in Kosovo, the Vietnam War, World War II, and on the meaning of war generally in a world of nations that can't seem to stop destroying each other. "

MOSCOW - Fifty years ago Saturday, U.S. pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down while flying a U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union, a dramatic episode of the Cold War that pushed the rival superpowers closer to confrontation. "In order to understand the world today, you must understand how we got here, and we got here through the Cold War," the pilot's 44-year-old son, Francis Gary Powers Jr., said Friday. "And then we have to understand how this period of time developed and expanded and how close we came to nuclear war.

This series of entries will last from June 19 until October 30, 2011, running every Sunday morning for 20 weeks. In these photo essays, I hope to explore the events of the war, the people involved at the front and back home, and the effects the war had on everyday lives. The entries will follow a roughly chronological sequence, with some broader themes (such as "The Home Front") interspersed throughout. These images will give us glimpses into the real-life experiences of our parents, grandparents and great grandparents, moments that shaped the world as it is today

"World War II transformed New York City. A new exhibit presented by the New-York Historical Society, "WWII & NYC: Photography and Propaganda," tells that story. Drawn from a vast collection of historical images, including many from U.S. Navy archives, the exhibit shows how the war touched every aspect of life."

"For 20 years now we have seen this pattern: Something terrible happens somewhere -- and what is happening in Syria is not just terrible but atrocious in the literal meaning of that term. Americans naturally feel we must "do something." The easiest something to do involves bombers, drones, and cruise missiles, all of which are promised to be precise and to keep our forces and people at a safe remove from the battle zone. In the absence of a draft, with no threat that taxes will go up to cover war costs, and with the reality that modern presidents are hamstrung in domestic policy but have enormous latitude in national security, the normal democratic checks on waging war don't work. We "do something," with bombs and drones, and then deal with blowback and consequences "no one could have foreseen.""

"In 1968, Milton Glaser and Lee Savage made a very short, totally silent, anti-war film called "Mickey Mouse in Vietnam." "It was for a thing called the Angry Arts Festival," Glaser told Brian Galindo of BuzzFeed this week, "which was a kind of protest event, inviting artists to produce something to represent their concerns about the war in Vietnam and a desire to end it." The film, which has long been so hard to find that rumors circulated about its demise, was uploaded to YouTube earlier this yea"

CIVIL WAR TO CIVIL RIGHTS A NATIONAL DIGITAL HISTORY PROJECT FOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS  The coming year, 2011, marks the 150th anniversary of president-elect Abraham Lincoln's inaugural train trip from Springfield, Illinois to Washington, DC and the presidency of a nation on the eve of civil war. Inspired by that anniversary, the National Park Service invites high schools classes to join in a national digital project on the broader theme of inaugurations - new beginnings.

Between 1935 and 1943, top-caliber photographers such as Marjory Collins, Gordon Parks, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Jack Delano, working under the direction of Roy Stryker produced the well-known photographic survey of America during the Depression for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), which became the Office of War Information (OWI). During WWII the OWI recorded homefront activities that supported the war effort. In this image, photographer Collins documented workers trying to keep up with orders at the Annin Flag Company in Verona, New Jersey. And like many of the photographs produced under government auspices, Collins's series at the Annin Flag Company promoted the story of nation-wide mobilization.

In an effort to prevent abuse of powers by the United States government, the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution. Over time, various exceptions have been made to these rights with the belief that such exceptions were in the public interest. During times of war especially, the nation has struggled to maintain a reasonable balance between civil liberties and national security.

"Four decades ago, Ho Van Thanh fled the fighting in his native Vietnam, disappearing into the jungle with his infant son, Ho Van Lang. This week, father and son emerged for the first time - an enfeebled Thanh carried in a stretcher, and Lang wearing only a loincloth made of tree bark. According to the Vietnamese newspaper Dan Tri, Ho Van Thanh, now 82, was last seen in 1973 running into the jungle, after his wife and two other children were killed by a bomb or land mine near his home."

A critique of narratives that try to illustrate the impact of the Iraq War on families at home.

"Ten years ago, writer Richard Rubin set out to talk to every living American veteran of World War I he could find. It wasn't easy, but he tracked down dozens of centenarian vets, ages 101 to 113, collected their stories and put them in a new book called The Last of the Doughboys. He tells NPR's Melissa Block about the veterans he talked to, and the stories they shared."

"In the 1950s and 1960s, ethnic writers moved onto the bestseller lists and achieved recognition in literary circles. Ralph Ellison, Philip Roth, and N. Scott Momaday showed how Americans once at the margins were now closer to the country's cultural center. In doing so, all three writers expanded the boundaries of American literature and opened up the definition of what it is to be American. The video provides the backdrop for this era, as a post-World War II America began to enjoy a prosperity that led it toward conformity and mass consumption. However, the postwar economic boom and "white flight" to the suburbs increased the physical and class distance between the white middle class and ethnic minorities who remained in older neighborhoods closer to the city centers. Ellison, Roth, and Momaday helped to resist the imaginative segregation that accompanied these changes in the urban and suburban landscape. Ellison's adaptations from jazz and blues, Roth's ethnic comedic rifts, and Momaday's ingenious use of Native American narrative traditions all helped to make storytelling richer and expanded readers' awareness of where narrative art comes from and who is capable of creating it. The video also emphasizes the risk these authors took in their innovative approaches as representatives of their own communities, often facing fierce criticism and misunderstanding of their fiction and its intentions. "

"73 years ago, President Roosevelt was mulling a third term, and Charles Lindbergh was praising German air strength. A new book looks at the dramatic months leading up to the election of 1940."

"The bad versus good guys narrative reflects certain aspects of the U.S. government's approach to counterterrorism that are both counterproductive and deeply troubling. First, the term is symptomatic of the attitude that Americans should not ask, or seek to understand, the motivations of those who wish to attack us. To be sure, some politicians throw out facile statements positing reasons for terrorists' actions. In 2001, former president George W. Bush famously proclaimed, "they hate our freedoms." Earlier this year, during a radio talk show, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee suggested that Islam is inherently violent. Such two-dimensional explanations, however, do not count as serious efforts to understand the enemy. They are simply another way of saying "bad guys.""

If only the powers that be at msnbc.com understood that Adolph Hitler actually was a man of peace, they wouldn't have acted so rashly in removing their site's link to a Pat Buchanan column essentially blaming England for World War II.

It was just such an exciting time across the board, so much change going on -the end of World War I, women getting the right to vote, Prohibition being enacted, of course, which is where the series begins. It was just a great time of upheaval. And when I had read about the character Steve plays, Nucky Thompson, this was just such a perfect guy to set a series around.

Commentator and broadcast news veteran Robert Trout was on the air from London on this day 58 years ago when the Japanese bombed the American Naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. He tells us what it was like being part of the newscast that first told Americans they had entered the Second World War.

In 1999, the National Park Service announced its intention to move the painting and tear down the building - which sits in the middle of the battle line where Union troops defended Cemetery Ridge - to restore the landscape to its 1863 appearance. The decision touched off a battle between Civil War purists and modern-architecture preservationists that may have reached its conclusion this week in federal court in Washington.

In the third chapter from her series "Chaplain Turner's War," Moni Basu takes on tough challenges of narrative journalism: reporting events after the fact and portraying both the grave and the mundane aspects of military conflict.