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Roundup: Talking About History

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This is where we excerpt articles about history that appear in the media. Among the subjects included on this page are: anniversaries of historical events, legacies of presidents, cutting-edge research, and historical disputes.

Thomas Meaney: On Pankaj Mishra

SOURCE: The Nation (5-15-13)

Thomas Meaney is a doctoral candidate in history at Columbia University and an editor of The Utopian.

In the fun-house mirror of the present, the contours of the twentieth century have assumed a strange symmetry. It begins and ends with imperialism. The century opens with the West plundering the Rest, until one Asian nation, Japan, joins the action and becomes an empire itself. In the century’s last decade, the pattern repeats: the forces of liberal capitalism are again as dominant as ever, only this time China is the apt pupil of Western rapacity. The way historians speak of the present in terms of “imperialism,” ”anti-imperialism” and “the rise of Asia” makes the burst of decolonization after World War II seem like an interlude in a perpetual age of empire. The temptation to see Western colonials still lording it over hapless subalterns continues to guide our understanding of the relations between the “North” and “South” since the end of formal imperialism in the 1960s. But this perspective passes over the major structural changes in the history of the postwar decades, when the United States reconceived its mission in the world and new nations were no longer willing to support it on the same terms. Without grasping how this new configuration of forces reshaped the world order, we will continue to misidentify ways to change it.

It does not help that the best-known attempt in the twentieth century to forge a more equitable international arrangement without the blessing of the West remains mired in nostalgia. In 1955, a group of Asian and African leaders met in the city of Bandung in West Java, with the aim of strengthening economic and cultural cooperation. Though many of the participating states were aligned with the United States or the Soviet Union, their leaders made a show of rejecting the polarities of the Cold War and ending colonialism and racism. They declared their right to have their voices heard in the UN Security Council and to pursue collective defense.

But there was another agenda at Bandung, less publicized and less savory. Anti-colonial lions like Jawaharlal Nehru, Achmed Sukarno, Zhou Enlai and Gamal Abdel Nasser were also intent on licensing each other’s expansionary initiatives within and around their rapidly modernizing states. Nehru was determined to crush the peoples of highland Southeast Asia and absorb them into India; Nasser sought to extend the influence of Egypt into Syria and Yemen; Zhou Enlai wanted all parties to accept that Tibet, conquered six years before Bandung, was Chinese; and everyone agreed that West Papua belonged to Sukarno, who later declared that Greater Indonesia would “gobble Malaysia raw.” But the third world’s designs for internal harmony faltered quickly. Less than a decade after Bandung, China was fighting India in the Himalayas, while Nasser had Egypt on an uneasy footing with Algeria and Ghana. In retrospect, Bandung was not the birth of the Non-Aligned Movement founded in Belgrade six years later, but rather, as the anthropologist John Kelly has argued, the point where the third world accelerated its long march into the US-designed global system predicated on the consolidated nation-state. What remains of the Non-Aligned Movement’s public ideals is today in tatters. Last year, Egypt’s President Mohamed Morsi embarrassed Iran by using his speech at the Non-Aligned Movement conference in Tehran to point to Syria’s growing isolation. In March, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad upset his own clerics by embracing Hugo Chávez’s grieving mother in public, as if it needed to be underscored that Venezuela and Iran do not make good partners....
Columbia University, imperialism, Pankaj Mishra, The Nation, Thomas Meaney
Comments

Amy Reading: How a Texas Paper Brought Down Billie Sol Estes

SOURCE: Bloomberg Echoes (5-16-13)

Amy Reading is the author of “The Mark Inside: A Perfect Swindle, a Cunning Revenge and a Small History of the Big Con,” recently published in paperback by Vintage.

Billie Sol Estes, the Texan con man whose exploits rattled the administrations of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, died in his sleep May 14. From a penniless background, Estes built up a $40 million West Texas empire of cotton, grain, real estate and fertilizers, and then lost it all when a series of newspaper articles in 1962 revealed that many of his dealings were fraudulent.

Estes once wrote that “Everything I touched made money.” The truth was that everything he touched was tainted. His downfall toppled five federal officials, was linked to seven mysterious deaths and was rumored to have almost cost Johnson his spot on the 1964 presidential ticket (though you won’t read a word about Estes in Robert A. Caro’s four-volume biography, “The Years of Lyndon Johnson”). As it turns out, even the story behind the story that brought down Estes has a shady element.

On Feb. 12, 1962, the Pecos Independent published the first of four unsigned articles that referred to Estes only as a “Pecosite.” They detailed a huge swindle in 11 West Texas counties. The paper’s editor, Oscar Griffin, wrote that farmers had been approached by a businessman who offered to pay a 10 percent commission if they would take out a mortgage to buy anhydrous ammonia tanks, used to store fertilizer for growing cotton on the alkalized Texas soil. The tanks would then be leased back to the businessman for the exact amount of the monthly mortgage payments....
Amy Reading, Billie Sol Estes, Bloomberg Echoes, con men, Texas
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Penny Lewis: Hard Hats, Hippies, and the Real Antiwar Movement

SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Ed. (5-13-13)

Penny Lewis is an assistant professor of labor studies at the Joseph P. Murphy Institute for Work Education and Labor Studies in the School of Professional Studies at the City University of New York. This essay is adapted from her new book Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory, published by Cornell University Press.

Decades after its conclusion, the U.S. war in Vietnam remains an unsettled part of our collective memory. Members of the military, veterans, scholars, journalists, and artists continue to revisit and reinterpret the war, assessing its historical significance while seeking meaning for wars fought today. Despite the efforts of our political elites to put the ghosts of Vietnam to rest, the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have prolonged these discussions. Books and articles with titles like "Is Afghanistan Another Vietnam?" abound. The economic and political imperatives that drive U.S. foreign policy, the appropriate use of force, the domestic costs of war, the treatment and trauma of veterans, whether today's wars are "winnable" or "worth it"—appropriate or not, those are some of the many points of comparison and concern.

Yet to some observers, the antiwar movement that quickly emerged (and faded) after 9/11 was a different beast from that of the Vietnam era. "The first thing you notice about the antiwar movement is that it isn't your father's," quipped New York magazine in 2005. "It's no longer the good workers of America against the crazy liberal elitists."

To the extent that our memory of Vietnam remains ambiguous, it underscores the nagging uncertainty that the United States was left with after that war. But amid this incomplete accounting, some dominant myths emerged that continue to hold sway. An important one is a narrative about the antiwar movement, which informs our contemporary understandings of class politics as well as of the social sources of support for protest against war in the United States....
antiwar movement, Chronicle of Higher Ed., hippies, Penny Lewis, Vietnam War
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Philip Jenkins: Joe McCarthy Was No Witch Hunter

SOURCE: RealClearReligion (5-10-13)

Philip Jenkins is a Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University and a columnist for RealClearReligion. His latest book is Laying Down the Sword.

Language speaks us. Much as I hate quoting that post-modern cliché, it captures the truth that certain words and phrases become so deeply inlaid in our everyday conversation that we are scarcely able to realize their ideological slant.

As a prime example, I offer the wave of investigations that the United States and other countries undertook into Communist subversion and espionage in the Cold War years. Well, that description is a little wordy, so let's just use the convenient short-hand that has become so standard: the McCarthy witch hunts....

Real witches, by definition, did not exist....

In the Communist case, though, the "witches" really did exist, and genuinely posed a threat. For some thirty years now, we have had excellent historical studies by such scholars as Ronald Radosh, Allen Weinstein, John Earl Haynes and Hervey Klehr, and they demonstrate a picture of American Communism absolutely at variance with the myth. At its height in the 1930s, the US Communist Party had at least 75,000 open members, including many well placed in key strategic industries. There was also a penumbra of clandestine members, of unknown scale....
Joseph McCarthy, Philip Jenkins, RealClearReligion, Red Scare
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Clive Doucet: Canadian History is Not Just About Wars and Battles

SOURCE: Toronto Star (5-13-13)

Clive Doucet is a writer and former Ottawa city councillor. His book Notes From Exile was chosen by McClelland and Stewart to be among their top 100 to celebrate their 100th anniversary of Canadian publishing.

Parliament’s http://www.parl.gc.ca/committeebusiness/CommitteeHome.aspx?Cmte=CHPC&Language=E&Mode=1&Parl=41&Ses=1 has voted to undertake a “comprehensive review of significant aspects of Canadian history. That history would include, but not be limited to, pre-Confederation, Confederation, suffrage, WWI, with an emphasis on battles such as Vimy Ridge, WWII, including the liberation of Holland, the Battle of Ortona. The Battle of the Atlantic, the Korean conflict, peacekeeping missions, constitutional development, the Afghanistan conflict, early 20th century Canada, post-war Canada and the late 20th century.”

I am Canadian. My father fought in the RCAF in the Second World War; my father-in-law, an infantryman, was awarded the Military Cross. In the earlier war, my wife’s grandfather was one of the original Canadian members of the Royal Flying Corps. Both my father-in-law and his father-in-law were shot and lived with the physical and emotional scars of that experience for the rest of their lives. Their history — Canada’s history — lives on through their, and my, extended families.

But had you suggested to them that wars were the defining events of Canadian history, they would have been nonplussed. They fought so that they and others would be free from tyranny — and so that no one else, ever again, would have to fight a war. And when they came home they repatriated their courage, their principles and their ideals and applied these to their civilian lives.
Canada, Canadian history, Toronto Star, Vimy Ridge, World War II
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Tristram Hunt: History is Where the Great Battles of Public Life are Now Being Fought

SOURCE: Guardian (UK) (5-12-13)

Tristram Hunt is Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central. He is the author of The English Civil War: At First Hand and the critically acclaimed Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City. A regular history broadcaster, he has authored numerous radio and television series for the BBC and Channel 4. He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a trustee of the Heritage Lottery Fund.

The bullish Harvard historian Niall Ferguson cut an unfamiliar, almost meek figure last week. As reports of his ugly suggestion that John Maynard Keynes's homosexuality had made the great economist indifferent to the prospects of future generations surged across the blogosphere, Ferguson wisely went for a mea culpa.

So, in a cringeing piece for Harvard University's student magazine, the professor, who usually so enjoys confronting political correctness, denied he was homophobic or, indeed, racist and antisemitic for good measure.

Of course, Ferguson is none of those things. He is a brilliant financial historian, albeit with a debilitating weakness for the bon mot. But Ferguson is also part of a worryingly conservative consensus when it comes to framing our national past.

For whether it is David Starkey on Question Time, in a frenzy of misogyny and self-righteousness, denouncing Harriet Harman and Shirley Williams for being well-connected, metropolitan members of the Labour movement, or the reactionary Dominic Sandbrook using the Daily Mail to condemn with Orwellian menace any critical interpretation of Mrs Thatcher's legacy, the historical right has Britain in its grip....

 
Guardian (UK), history, Niall Ferguson, Tristram Hunt
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Pankaj Mishra: Sun At Last Setting on Britain's Imperial Myth

SOURCE: Guardian (UK) (5-8-13)

Pankaj Mishra is an Indian author and writer of literary and political essays. His books include Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond. His new work, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia, is published in 2012.

Scuttling away from India in 1947, after plunging the jewel in the crown into a catastrophic partition, "the British", the novelist Paul Scott famously wrote, "came to the end of themselves as they were". The legacy of British rule, and the manner of their departures – civil wars and impoverished nation states locked expensively into antagonism, whether in the Middle East, Africa or the Malay Peninsula – was clearer by the time Scott completed his Raj Quartet in the early 1970s. No more, he believed, could the British allow themselves any soothing illusions about the basis and consequences of their power.

Scott had clearly not anticipated the collective need to forget crimes and disasters. The Guardian reports that the British government is paying compensation to the nearly 10,000 Kenyans detained and tortured during the Mau Mau insurgency in the 1950s. In what has been described by the historian Caroline Elkins as Britain's own "Gulag", Africans resisting white settlers were roasted alive in addition to being hanged to death. Barack Obama's own grandfather had pins pushed into his fingers and his testicles squeezed between metal rods....

Fantasies of moral superiority and exceptionalism are not only a sign of intellectual vapidity and moral torpor, they are politically, economically and diplomatically damaging. Japan's insistence on glossing over its brutal invasions and occupations in the first half of the 20th century has isolated it within Asia and kept toxic nationalisms on the boil all around it. In contrast, Germany's clear-eyed reckoning and decisive break with its history of violence has helped it become Europe's pre-eminent country.

Britain's extended imperial hangover can only elicit cold indifference from the US, which is undergoing epochal demographic shifts, isolation within Europe, and derision from its former Asian and African subjects. The revelations of atrocities in Kenya are just the tip of an emerging global history of violence, dispossession and resistance. They provide a new opportunity for the British ruling class and intelligentsia to break with threadbare imperial myths – to come to the end of themselves as they were, and remake Britain for the modern world....
British Empire, colonialism, Guardian (UK), imperialism, Kenya, Pankaj Mishra
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Manuel Barcia: Niall Ferguson Does a Romney

SOURCE: Al Jazeera (5-9-13)

Dr. Manuel Barcia is Deputy Director at the Institute for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Leeds.

Over the past few years as gays, lesbians and transsexuals made social gains across the world, they have found themselves at the end of all sorts of accusations from those who see these advances as a threat to their precious status quo. They have been blamed for earthquakes, hurricanes and terrorist attacks. Now, in a very subtle way, the responsibility for the current economic crisis has been blamed on one of them, the famous and well-respected 20th century economist John Maynard Keynes. 

This time, however, the gay bashing did not come from some religious extremist in the American Midwest or Indonesia, but from Professor Niall Ferguson, a well-known British historian who plies his trade at Harvard University. 

For the sake of disclosure, I have to admit that since I first read Ferguson's work back in the 1990s when I was doing my BA in history at the University of Havana, I have rarely agreed with any of his theses. I have disagreed profoundly with his apologetic studies of emergent imperialisms and, even more, with his opinions about the reasons leading to the crisis we have been plunged into since 2007. Nonetheless, I had respected him as a fellow historian. Now I don't any more. 

I cannot respect his "off-the-cuff" remarks blaming Keynes and his sexual orientation for the current economic crisis. I cannot respect either his spurious attempt to backtracking, which seems more of a damage limitation PR exercise than a truly felt explanation. I am not saying that he is not sorry for what he said; only that he has failed to convince many, including me, that he really is....
47 percent, Al Jazeera, economics, financial meltdown, Mitt Romney, Niall Ferguson
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Lee Donaghy: Writing Like a Historian -- Developing Students' Writing Skills

SOURCE: Guardian (UK) (5-6-13)

Lee Donaghy is an assistant principal at a secondary school in Birmingham in the United Kingdom.

"Why are we doing English in history, sir?" came the question as I asked my year 9 history class what kind of word disarmament was. Having anticipated this kind of reaction I had an answer prepared: "Do we only use language in English lessons?"

The question was anticipated because I have heard it from other classes, and indeed other teachers, since I began to include an explicit focus on language development in my history lessons 18 months ago. And the question goes to the heart of what I believe is a fundamental reason for the attainment gap between children eligible for free school meals and their non-free school meal counterparts in Britain; the misalignment of these pupils' language use with that which is needed for academic success and the need for teachers to explicitly address this misalignment in their teaching.

My year 9 class are typical of many classes I've taught over the nine years of my teaching career; enthusiastic, bright, of limitless academic potential. But when it came to marking their written work I would be left tearing my hair out at their inability to express their understanding clearly. I wanted my pupils to be able to read, speak and write like historians; to be able to express their knowledge and understanding of history in language. After all, we would cover the material in class, I would check their understanding through various exercises and careful questioning and then I would give them frameworks for writing answers, using sentence starters and model answers. Yet, this had always been something of an elephant in the room for me as a history teacher, an issue whose cause and therefore solution I could never quite unpick: why can't I teach my students to write properly?...
Guardian (UK), historians, Lee Donaghy, pedagogy, United Kingdom
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David Milne: Editing an Encyclopedia

SOURCE: OUPblog (4-23-13)

Dr. David Milne is a Senior Lecturer in American Political History at the University of East Anglia. A historian and analyst of US foreign policy, he is a senior editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History. View the Melbourne launch of the Encyclopedia, or attend the American Military and Diplomatic History conference at Oregon State University on 7 May 2013.

When I was invited to review the second volume of Odd Arne Westad’s and Melvyn Leffler’s The Cambridge History of the Cold War in 2010, I compared the enterprise to Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie -- which I intended both as a compliment and as a criticism.

Sweeping in its coverage, the Encyclopédie aimed to capture the main currents of Enlightenment thinking. Diderot’s intention in editing the volume was “to change the way people think,” yet it didn’t achieve that grand aim. The collection contains an important introduction by D’Alembert, and carries essays by Rousseau, Voltaire, and Montesquieu. But contemporary scholars don’t spend much time poring over its volumes. Rather, they focus on the seminal single-authored books: Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. These books are alive, but the Encyclopédie is locked in a particular place in time. Over the past three years I have served as an editor on the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History. Before accepting the commission, I queried its purpose on similar lines.

Of course, today’s editors face a challenge that did not confront Diderot: how to retain scholarly authority in a Wikified world, to paraphrase the title of William Cronon’s thought-provoking essay in Perspectives published in 2012. Cronon compares the supple and constantly evolving Wikipedia to the ossified Encyclopedia Brittanica, registering a strong conclusion: “I don’t believe there’s much doubt that Wikipedia is the largest, most comprehensive, copiously detailed, stunningly useful encyclopedia in all of human history.”

Perhaps Britannica’s board of directors read Perspectives for they closed the print edition of the Encyclopedia the following month. The Los Angeles Times described it as perhaps the “single most powerful symbol to date of our rapidly changing media world, a world in which hard copies of books could become a quaint thing of the past.” Print aficionados of a conservative disposition, like Jonathan Franzen, were stunned. On this lamentable trend toward digitization, Franzen wrote “Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around.”

In light of the foregoing, then, is there any benefit in having a named, credentialed scholar write an entry for a hardcopy Encyclopedia -- that most old fashioned of enterprises? I’d say yes, and I have a few examples to justify my optimism. Some of the most interesting articles that I commissioned were written by major scholars, forced to condense a huge body of work into two or three thousand words. So to give just a few examples, Thomas Schwartz wrote on LBJ, Richard Immerman on Eisenhower, Jussi Hanhimaki on Kissinger, Geoffrey Stone on Civil Liberties, Andrew Preston on Religion, and Paul Boyer on “War and Peace in Popular Culture.”

What these scholars chose to omit and include was utterly fascinating. Thomas Schwartz’s monograph, Lyndon Johnson and Europe, is a wonderful study. But upon finishing that book, part of me yearned for more reflection on how LBJ’s success in managing relations with Europe slotted into a broader assessment of his foreign policy record. This is exactly what Tom’s succinct and perceptive entry provides.

To refer back to the Enlightenment, if Adam Smith wrote three thousand words on the taproots of economic growth -- combining insight from the entirety of his career -- the emphasis might be rather different to that presented in The Wealth of Nations. And it is certain that such a hypothetical essay would be read and studied closely today. Brevity can sometimes deepen the profundity of a particular conclusion. Each contributor has been remarkably successful in distilling the essence of their chosen subjects. It is for this reason, and others, that the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History will stay close to my desk.
Cold War, David Milne, encyclopedias, military history, OUPblog
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Timothy J. Lynch: Is Diplomatic History Dying?

SOURCE: Oxford University Press (5-7-13)

Timothy J. Lynch is an Associate Professor, Director of the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, and Associate Dean for Research at the University of Melbourne. He is the editor-in-chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History. View the Melbourne launch of the Encyclopedia, or attend the American Military and Diplomatic History conference at Oregon State University on 7 May 2013.

Despite lying at the intersection of both history and international relations — two of the most popular disciplines in the contemporary arts academy — diplomatic history is seen as old-fashioned. New, trendier, and leftier approaches have risen. Consider that of the 45 historians at the University of Wisconsin in 2009, 13 (or 29%) specialized in gender, race, and ethnicity; only 1 (or 2%) studied diplomatic history or US foreign policy. Between 1972-2009, the Journal of American History published 36 articles that expressed some sympathy for American communism and not a single one which was critical.

The bestselling history textbook remains Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980). Zinn was unabashedly liberal-leftist in his approach. His book is currently the 860th bestselling book in America. Paul Johnson’s A History of the American People, a conservative interpretation, is 19,331st. This is not to argue over the academic merits of both books but to observe that Zinn’s leftism has necessarily affected how many students and their teachers understand US history. Despite over 40% of Americans describing themselves as conservative, less than 16% of academics identify that way. The American academy, no less American historiography, is a liberal hegemony.

Why this imbalance? After all, diplomatic history has hardly been the preserve of conservative scholars. Perhaps the most important 20th century work of diplomatic history was William Appleman Williams’ Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959) — the inspiration for a wave of left-leaning revisionist histories of US foreign policy. Christopher McKnight Nichols and David Milne, my two associate editors for the Oxford Encyclopedia, would comfortably locate themselves on the progressive wing of modern politics. Liberal historiography is a very broad church.

One possible answers lies in the necessary focus on the ‘great man’ thesis of history — either implicitly or explicitly — in the work of many diplomatic historians. Men, and it largely is men, have been the key foreign policy makers until comparatively recently. They have lead nations, fought wars, and dictated the terms of peace. All the great commanders-in-chief in US history have been men because all 42 presidents have been men.

As a way around this, university students are increasingly presented with impersonal forces and told these are responsible for injustice or are, conversely, the locomotives of progress. Racism, economic deprivation, and gender inequality color the research agendas of a substantial number of historians. Ameliorate these forces and we can enter the sunny uplands of progress and equality. It is not individuals that move history but forces, pressures, classes, sexes, races, even climate. Nations, led by individual leaders, are made to matter less than the United Nations, led by supposedly progressive impulses.

The diplomatic historian, of course, may be in sympathy with some of this. But he or she must also acknowledge the elite nature of much of what he or she studies: the president and his foreign policy principals, ambassadors and military commanders. And that elite, until the era of Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama, was overwhelmingly white and male.

This modern bias against elitism and ‘great men’ and in favor of the explanatory power of impersonal forces is inherent in much contemporary historiography. Diplomatic historians find themselves having to bridge the divide. If only there were more of them — liberal and conservative — doing it.
diplomatic history, great men theory, Oxford University Press, Timothy J. Lynch
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Rosa Brooks: Would Machiavelli Have Drawn a Red Line?

SOURCE: Foreign Policy (5-2-13)

Rosa Brooks is a law professor at Georgetown University and a Schwartz senior fellow at the New America Foundation. She served as a counselor to the U.S. defense undersecretary for policy from 2009 to 2011 and previously served as a senior advisor at the U.S. State Department. Her weekly column runs every Wednesday and is accompanied by a blog, By Other Means.

In days of yore, diplomats were diplomatic. Or so, at least, I am led to believe by fiction and film: Fictional diplomats are erudite, conniving, and suave, treating allies and enemies alike with the same elegant courtesy, even while arranging the most sophisticated betrayals.

Consider the urbane Chauvelin in The Scarlet Pimpernel, a manipulative flatterer who "strove to read the very souls of those with whom he came in contact." Or take the character of Mr. Dryden in Lawrence of Arabia, who defends diplomatic duplicity by asserting, "A man who tells lies, like me, merely hides the truth. But a man who tells half-lies has forgotten where he's put it." Above all, consider that most infamous of real-life diplomats, Niccolò Machiavelli. Dishonest? Certainly. Amoral? Possibly. But rude and obnoxious? Never.

Somewhere along the line, this seems to have changed. Today, many of our senior-most diplomats (and I include the president in that general category) seem to substitute shrillness for suavity, hectoring intransigence for erudition, and prissy pomposity for persuasion.

The examples are too numerous to cite, but take that peculiarly popular word "unacceptable" (as in, "That is unacceptable to the United States"). The number of things the United States finds "unacceptable" is equaled only by the number of things it "will not tolerate." And that is to say nothing of the multitude of "red lines" and "lines in the sand" that U.S. officials draw on a regular basis....
foreign policy, Georgetown University, New America Foundation, Rosa Brooks
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Frank Snepp: The Vietnam Syndrome

SOURCE: LA Times (5-5-13)

Frank Snepp is a Peabody-award winning investigative journalist and the author of two CIA memoirs.

Thirty-eight years ago last week, I was among the last CIA officers to be choppered off the U.S. Embassy roof in Saigon as the North Vietnamese took the country. Just two years before that chaotic rush for the exits, the Nixon administration had withdrawn the last American troops from the war zone and had declared indigenous forces strong enough, and the government reliable enough, to withstand whatever the enemy might throw into the fray after U.S. forces were gone.

That's the same story we told ourselves in Iraq when we pulled out of that country in 2011. And today, as American troops are being drawn down in Afghanistan, we're hearing variations on the same claims once again. Yet security remains so fragile in both Iraq and Afghanistan, it is impossible not to worry that we are deluding ourselves and that we failed to learn the most important lessons of Vietnam.

One major ingredient of both the Afghanistan and Iraqi experiments was the use of American dollars to buy off insurgents, wean them from their Al Qaeda or Taliban suitors and win the indulgence, however grudging, of the leadership in Kabul or Baghdad. Such payments may help ensure a lull in the violence to allow U.S. forces to withdraw. But the enduring fallacy of such tactics was made clear in Vietnam....
Afghanistan, Iraq, LA Times, Vietnam, Vietnam War
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Steve Yoder: It’s Time for Democrats to Ditch Andrew Jackson

SOURCE: Salon (5-3-13)

Steve Yoder is a frequent contributor to The Crime Report. He writes about criminal justice, immigration, small business and real estate. His work has appeared in The American Prospect, Good, The Fiscal Times and elsewhere.

Spring means that appeals for money are bursting forth from both major political parties. It also means Democratic officials in states and counties around the country are busy getting people out to their major fundraiser, the Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner. And they’re bringing in the big guns: Vice President Joe Biden will keynote the South Carolina Democrats’ dinner tonight.

But after an election in which Democrats rode a wave of minority support to keep the White House and Senate, party activists should wonder about one of the founders for whom that event is named. If branding matters, then the tradition of honoring perhaps the most systematic violator of human rights for America’s nonwhites should finally run its course.

Renowned journalist T.D. Allman’s gripping “Finding Florida: The True History of the Sunshine State” argues that brutality was a habit of mind for party icon Andrew Jackson long before he laid the groundwork, as president, for the Trail of Tears, the thousand-mile death march that killed 4,000 Cherokees in 1838−39.

Allman takes us back to July 1816 at a place called the Negro Fort in Florida’s Panhandle, the site of modern-day Fort Gadsden. Florida then belonged to Spain, and the area around the fort was home to Spanish-speaking black and Choctaw Indian farmers who had settled along the Apalachicola River with permission from the Spanish. Unfortunately for them, then-U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Andrew Jackson hated the idea of a free colored community across the border that might serve as a magnet for runaway slaves....
Andrew Jackson, Democrats, presidents, Salon, Trail of Tears
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James Horn: Consuming Colonists

SOURCE: NYT (5-4-13)

James Horn is the vice president for research and historical interpretation at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and one of the scholars involved in the recent discovery of Jane’s remains. He is the author of “A Land as God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America.”

IN the bitterly cold winter of 1607, Capt. John Smith was captured by a large war party of Pamunkey Indians on the banks of the Chickahominy River, in what is now Virginia. Smith was led by his captors to a nearby hunting village, where he was taken to a long house and given enough venison and bread to feed 20 men. The food he did not eat was placed in baskets and tied on a pole over his head. About midnight they set the food before him once more and then in the morning brought as much food again, which made the fearful captain, later describing his capture in the third person, “think they would fat him to eat him.”

That Smith wondered whether the Indians were cannibals is unsurprising — it was part of the received wisdom among colonists that Indians they encountered might be ferocious wild men, marked above all by their predilection for human flesh. And while that received wisdom was utterly wrong, popular history has long portrayed the early colonial era as a meeting of civilized Europeans and savage, if noble, Indians.

The discovery, announced this week, of the cannibalized remains of a young settler at Jamestown greatly complicates that story. It reminds us that the first European settlements were no Eden, and that the initial contact of peoples in the New World — native people, Europeans and then, very soon, Africans — was fraught from the first....
cannibalism, Colonial Williamsburg, James Horn, Jamestown, NYT
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Lincoln Mullen: A First Look at the Digital Public Library of America

SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Ed. (4-23-13)

Lincoln Mullen is a PhD candidate at Brandeis University and a historian of religion in early America and the nineteenth century.

Last Thursday at noon the Digital Public Library of America launched its website. The opening festivities, which had been booked solid with a long wait list for weeks, were canceled, since the venue at the main branch of the Boston Public Library was adjacent to the site of the bombing in Boston earlier that week. But the DPLA, which is a website and not a location, went ahead with the launch of the public service anyway....

Here’s to the hardworking DPLA staff–Dan Cohen, Emily Gore, Amy Rudersdorf, Kenny Whitebloom, and probably others–board of directors, committees, partner institutions, and funders. The DPLA is already a useful tool with some amazing functionality, and as more partners join the effort, the DPLA will only become more important to scholars and to the nation.
Boston, Digital Public Library of America, digitization
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Washington Post Editorial: Shinzo Abe’s Inability to Face History

SOURCE: WaPo (4-26-13)

FROM THE MOMENT last fall when Shinzo Abe reclaimed the office of Japanese prime minister that he had bungled away five years earlier, one question has stood out: Would he restrain his nationalist impulses — and especially his historical revisionism — to make progress for Japan?

Until this week, the answer to that question was looking positive. Mr. Abe has taken brave steps toward reforming Japan’s moribund economy. He defied powerful interest groups within his party, such as rice farmers, to join free-trade talks with the United States and other Pacific nations that have the potential to spur growth in Japan. He spoke in measured terms of his justifiable desire to increase defense spending.

This week he seemed willing to put all the progress at risk. Asked in parliament whether he would reconsider an official apology that Japan issued in 1995 for its colonization of Korea in the past century, Mr. Abe replied: “The definition of what constitutes aggression has yet to be established in academia or in the international community. Things that happened between nations will look differently depending on which side you view them from.”...
Japan, Shinzo Abe, Washington Post, World War II
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Stephen F. Knott: George W. Bush is Victim of a Rush to Judgment

SOURCE: WaPo (4-19-13)

Stephen F. Knott is a professor at the U.S. Naval War College and the author of “Rush to Judgment: George W. Bush, the War on Terror, and His Critics.”

The George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum will be dedicated Thursday at Southern Methodist University, an event that will draw all of the nation’s living presidents to Dallas. Despite the coming fanfare, many Americans consider Bush’s presidency a failure. There is little evidence that scholars, including the influential historians who pronounce the success or failure of an administration, are having second thoughts about their assessment of Bush as a failed chief executive. Unfortunately, far too many scholars revealed partisan bias and abandoned any pretense of objectivity in their rush to condemn the Bush presidency.

Many academics branded Bush a failure long before his presidency ended — and not just fringe elements of the academy, such as Ward Churchill or Howard Zinn, but also scholars from the nation’s most prestigious universities. In April 2006, Princeton history professor Sean Wilentz published an essay in Rolling Stone titled “The Worst President in History?” Wilentz argued that “George W. Bush’s presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace” in part because he had “demonized the Democrats,” hurting the nation’s ability to wage war. No other U.S. president “failed to embrace the opposing political party” in wartime, Wilentz claimed, despite numerous examples to the contrary, such as when Franklin D. Roosevelt compared his Republican opponents to fascists in 1944.

Not to be outdone, in December of that year Columbia history professor Eric Foner proclaimed Bush “the worst president in U.S. history” and argued that Bush sought to “strip people accused of crimes of rights that date as far back as the Magna Carta.” According to Foner, Warren Harding of Teapot Dome fame was something of a paragon of virtue next to Bush, whose administration was characterized by “even worse cronyism, corruption, and pro-business bias.”...
George W. Bush, presidential legacies, presidential rankings, Stephen F. Knott, Washington Post
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Alexander Nazaryan: Blood and Tragedy -- The Caucasus in the Literary Imagination

SOURCE: New Yorker (4-20-13)

Alexander Nazaryan is on the editorial board of the New York Daily News, where he edits the Page Views book blog.

At the beginning of “The Cossacks,” Leo Tolstoy’s early novel about imperial Russia’s military campaign in the Caucasus, the protagonist Olenin muses about the battles to come: “All his dreams about the future were connected with… Circassian maids, mountains, precipices, fearsome torrents and dangers.” He imagines, with predictable vigor, “killing and subduing a countless number of mountaineers.” Much less predictably, he identifies himself with the Central Asian people he is being sent to subjugate: “He was himself one of the mountaineers, helping them to defend their independence against the Russians.”

That subjugation of the Caucasus would continue for another two centuries, culminating in the two successive wars waged by Yeltsin and Putin. From somewhere within that region—it is not clear where, exactly—emerged the Tsarnaev family, immigrating (apparently) to the Boston area about a decade ago. On Monday, the two Tsarnaev brothers—Dzhokhar and Tamerlan—allegedly committed the first act of terror on American soil since 9/11.

Whether the two accused bombers had specific grievances about the plight of their native Chechnya is unclear. But as the details of their lives emerge, people will inevitably be searching for links between the two young men and the conflict-riven place they come from. It’s a conflict that started with the Cossack encroachments of the eighteenth century and continued with imperial invasions under Catherine the Great, mass deportations by Stalin, and the post-Soviet cruelties of the contemporary Kremlin....
Alexander Nazaryan, Caucasus, Chechnya, Leo Tolstoy, New Yorker
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Jon Meachem: Ronnie's Friend Maggie

SOURCE: Time Magazine (4-22-13)

Jon Meachem is the author of "Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship."

The phrase, inevitably, is Winston Churchill's. Long an advocate of Anglo-American alliance, the wartime British Prime Minister often spoke of what he called the "ties of blood and history" between the two nations. For Churchill, a "special relationship" with the U.S. had been a matter not of choice or convenience but of life and death. Faced with Nazi Germany's blitzkrieg across Western Europe in 1940, the new Prime Minister had no doubt about which way salvation lay. No lover, Churchill later remarked, had ever studied the whims of his mistress as he did those of Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was "the New World, with all its power and might," Churchill declared in the wake of Dunkirk in 1940, that one day would come "to the rescue and the liberation of the Old."

The special relationship returned to mind in the wake of the death of Margaret Thatcher at 87. Among the British, reaction was mixed; they are often much more frank about the vices of the dead than Americans tend to be in the hours after the passing of a public figure. Obituary writers attacked Thatcher for being too tough on, and wrong about, the Irish, miners, the poor, Nelson Mandela's African National Congress, and Argentina, which she fought in the Falklands war in the early 1980s. The Daily Mirror called her "the woman who divided a nation."

For many others, though, her death recalled epic days, not so far distant, when both economic stagnation and the Soviet bloc were overwhelming facts of life. Journalist and biographer Nicholas Wapshott, writing in the New York Times, recalled sharing Champagne with Thatcher on a flight home from Japan. "It was Mrs. Thatcher's charisma that those who thought of her as merely a hectoring bossy-boots did not grasp," wrote Wapshott. "And it was that sense of subdued danger and not-quite-erotic excitement that inspired the most important Anglo-American alliance since that of Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt."...


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FDR, Jon Meachem, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, special relationship, Time Magazine, Winston Churchill
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