Harriet Baskas, National Public Radio (May 21, 2004):

After a brief attempt at selling itself as a family vacation land, Las Vegas is restaking its claim as America's most decadent destination.

Unidentified Man: Yeah, hi. I was wondering, could I get a wake-up call tomorrow morning please? Could I get that to go to my cell phone instead of my room? Well, here's the thing. I--I'm not quite sure if I'm going to be in my room tomorrow so...

BASKAS: A new national ad campaign sports the tag line 'What happens here stays here.' The ads are paid for by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. And while gambling and a bit of hanky-panky seem to be acceptable, the authority's Terry Jicinsky says illegal mob activity isn't an image the city wants to promote.

Mr. TERRY JICINSKY (Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority): It's part of our history. It was acknowledged as part of our history. It isn't really what Las Vegas is about today.

BASKAS: Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman doesn't entirely agree. In fact, the mob museum was his idea.

Mayor OSCAR GOODMAN (Las Vegas): If you had mobsters during a certain period of time that contributed to what we became today, that's all part of it, and I think it's as cool as it gets.

BASKAS: From his celebrity photo-lined office overlooking downtown Las Vegas, Goodman acknowledges his first-hand knowledge of the mob. Before becoming mayor in 1999, he was a noted criminal lawyer.

Mayor GOODMAN: And I represented a lot of mobsters around here, and my practice was about 5 percent mobsters. I'm not afraid to say I was a mob lawyer.

BASKAS: For better or worse, according to historian Hal Rothman, organized crime transformed Las Vegas from a bedraggled collection of desert gambling halls into an oasis of luxury hotels, fancy casinos, leggy showgirls and big-name entertainment.

Mr. HAL ROTHMAN (Historian): Anybody in their right mind knows that from sometime in the 1940s till sometime in the 1970s, the city was mobbed up. The sources of capital and power in the city were closely tied to organized crime.

BASKAS: Rothman is the author of"Neon Metropolis: How Las Vegas Began the 21st Century." He says the mob and its money first made a mark on Las Vegas when New York gangster Meyer Lanski sent Benjamin"Bugsy" Siegel to town to oversee the mob's investment in the Flamingo Hotel.

Mr. ROTHMAN: The original face--you know, when Bugsy Siegel built the Flamingo and all the way up through the Stardust, the money came really from shoe boxes. Mobsters went around to each other and said, 'I'm building a hotel in Las Vegas. I'll sell you share for $50,000, and they'd get the shoe box out from under the bed and they'd give them the cash.

BASKAS: A downtown museum exploring this history strikes Mayor Goodman as a great tourist attraction. But when he first floated the idea round town, the local Italian American community voiced concern.

Mr. ROTHMAN: When I said 'the mob,' I was not thinking of Italian Americans. I really was thinking of the mob as I knew it here, where you had fellows who had reputations like Mo Dalitz, Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lanski, who was one of my clients. It was a Jewish mob that I was thinking of.

BASKAS: No one in the business community has actually come out publicly against the mayor's idea, even if privately they may be concerned about drawing attention to the seamy underbelly of Sin City.

Mr. DAVID MILLMAN (Nevada State Museum): I can understand not wanting to dredge out these so-called bad aspects of one's past, but I think to fully understand where we are today, you've got to understand where we've been.

Scott Galupo, in the Wash Times (May 21, 2004):

... The World War II Memorial, sober and sunk low in a long frame of elms, rests between the two structures that anchor the Mall.The monument to America's first great warrior, George Washington, towers over it on one side. The statue of America's great uniter, Abraham Lincoln, looks on from the other.

In such company, the location and initial look of the new memorial to those who fought in World War II had its doubters. It would trample on ground consecrated by the civil rights movement, some said. Its design smacked of imperialist architecture, others said.

The controversy, settled in granite and bronze, came down to this: Was World War II — the lives lost, the victories gained — a hinge event of American history, on par with the founding and the Civil War? Or not?

Historians say it was: The war transformed America, and, in turn, America transformed the world.

"World War II was the seminal event of the 20th century," says Victor Davis Hanson, military historian and classicist at the University of California in Fresno and author of "Carnage and Culture," a study of the military pre-eminence of Western civilization. "Quite literally, Western civilization as we know it hung by a thread — and was saved by the efforts of Americans."

"The totality of it is what made it unique for the American experience," says Edward J. Drea, a historian of World War II who lives in Fairfax. "It affected everyone, of every class."

From December 7, 1941, to Aug. 6, 1945, America spent 400,000 lives beating back German dictator Adolf Hitler's march across Europe and Japanese Emperor Hirohito's advance in the South Pacific.

Sixteen million Americans served during the war, fully 10 percent of the population at the time. The movement of so many young men and so much materiel radically reshaped our society.

The country literally was in flux, its industrial capacity energized like never before, its agrarian roots fading further from view. The population migrated northward and, drawn by a humming new industry centered on construction of aircraft, to California.

Global war demanded a rapid acceleration in the technology of weaponry and medicine. Mr. Drea, who focuses on the South Pacific theater in books such as "MacArthur's Ultra: Codebreaking and the War Against Japan," notes that the war led to wider use of malaria suppressants such as quinine and the insecticide DDT, which helped stop typhus epidemics.

The United States devoted all its energies to the war, rationing meat, sugar and metals on the home front.

A shortage of shellac, used to manufacture phonograph records, stunted the recording of new music. Short supplies of rubber and gasoline — and trains filled with soldiers — knocked touring musicians off the road. Popular bandleader Glenn Miller sent his own musicians packing to form the Army Air Force Band and died in 1944 when a military flight disappeared over the English Channel.

Yankee legend Joe DiMaggio and movie star Jimmy Stewart joined the war effort at the height of their careers by serving in the Army and Army Air Corps, respectively, and Mr. Stewart became a decorated pilot.

Up to 40 percent of the movies Hollywood cranked out between 1941 and 1945 propagandized for the war. Hum-phrey Bogart squared off against the Nazis in 1943's "Action in the North Atlantic"; Cary Grant captained a submarine in "Destination Tokyo" the same year; and future president Ronald Reagan teamed with Errol Flynn in 1942's "Desperate Journey."

Women flocked to jobs in the men's absence. Teenagers too young to fight also took jobs, setting in motion a new youth culture that would flourish as veterans and their wives created waves of new children for the next 20 years.

After vanquishing European fascism and Japanese militarism, the postwar nation assumed the leading role in defending the world against the other great poison of the 20th century, the menace of Stalin and expansionist Soviet communism.

"The self-destruction of Europe created the conditions for the ascendancy of the U.S. in world affairs," Mr. Hanson says, "and, tragically but necessarily, demanded a new responsibility to expend blood and treasure — immediately after our greatest sacrifice — to prevent the Soviet Union from capitalizing on the ruin of Europe."

...

Tina Brown, in the Wash Post (May 20, 2004):

History is hot. And not just because of Brad Pitt's flying thighs.

There's such an outpouring of books from historians at the moment, you can't throw a canape in Manhattan after 6 p.m. without hitting a tweedy scholar wearing the dazed expression that comes with a sudden release from the past.

The city has been crawling with superstar academics peddling their tomes at tonier-than-usual launch events and overstuffed gigs at the Council on Foreign Relations. Everybody's looking for lessons to support wherever they stand on the meltdown in Iraq, and they're drawing them from books as disparate as Ron Chernow's "Alexander Hamilton," Niall Ferguson's "Colossus," Simon Sebag Montefiore's "Stalin," David Fromkin's "Europe's Last Summer" and James Chace's "1912" -- to name just a few.

The history men have surfaced in the nick of time. As the Iraq crisis deepens, the pundits are either wringing their hands or theatrically recanting. First, the inside dopesters of the spring (Paul O'Neill, Richard Clarke and Bob Woodward) cranked up our anxiety, then the 9/11 commission hit the road to torment New York with a thousand might-have-beens. In an era blinded by news-crawl, only history's depth can give solace to a nation hungry for perspective.

British historians are particularly in demand for the international back story. Floppy-haired Scottish pinup Ferguson has had rapturous receptions for "Colossus." Audiences coast to coast are alternately gratified and rattled by his thesis that America has become an imperial power and had better come out of the closet and deal with it. America, he says genially, has attention-deficit disorder and will fail miserably as an effective liberal empire unless it soon adjusts its culture and its institutions to responsibilities it cannot escape. "People in America are fascinated by the ideas in my book as if by a particularly venomous snake," Ferguson told me from his sanctuary in Oxford, where he has now returned. "They've been thinking about rebuilding Iraq in two years. So when I talk about how the British arrived in Iraq in 1917 and left in 1955, it's bound to make their flesh creep."...

All the historians are eager to redirect Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz on their night table reading. James Chace's regret about 1912 is that Woodrow Wilson won the presidential election that year and kick-started democratic evangelism. Ron Chernow prescribes a dose of Federalist Papers realism: "Hamilton had a darker, more pessimistic view of human nature and foreign policy than Jefferson. While he felt the world had an enormous amount to learn from the U.S., he also felt the U.S. had a lot to learn from the world."

Ferguson sees the Bushies trapped in a tunnel of American self-reference. "It is a very confining thing to understand your own history only in its own terms," he says. It's what Columbia's polymath historian Simon Schama calls "the fallacy of reading history for self-confirmation -- America as God's plan for providence."

Schama has assigned some summer reading for Rummy once he's through with Grant: Thucydides' "History of the Peloponnesian War," Edward Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," Steven Runciman's "A History of the Crusades" and, for a case of imperial nerves, The "Meditations" of Marcus Aurelius. Also, E.M. Forster's "A Passage to India" and Lytton Strachey's essay in "Eminent Victorians" on the loony Maj. Gen. Charles Gordon of Khartoum.

"We have had a triumph of political theory over history," Schama told me. He faults the administration for viewing history as self-emasculating thoughtfulness as against the virile approach of pure principle. "What was needed," Schama says, "was principle chastened by the lessons of the past."

Cass Sunstein, in the LAT (May 17, 2004):

When the Supreme Court decided Brown vs. Board of Education on this day in 1954, it overruled Plessy vs. Ferguson, one of the most infamous decisions in the history of the court.

In that case, which dated back to 1896, the court ruled that the Constitution allowed the prosecution of a 30-year-old African American shoemaker named Homer Plessy for refusing to sit in the "colored" car on the train.

The Plessy decision enshrined the idea of "separate but equal" for more than half a century. Justice Henry Brown's opinion for the majority concluded that although the 14th Amendment was clearly meant to "enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law," it couldn't possibly have been meant to abolish "distinctions based upon physical differences," or to enforce "social equality," or to require "a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either."

Brown vs. Board of Education changed all that, with all nine justices agreeing that enforced separation was, in fact, "inherently unequal." In the years that followed, the court, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, struck down segregation everywhere. It insisted on compulsory desegregation -- requiring busing, if necessary, to do so. It struck down poll taxes and called for a rule of one person, one vote, knowing this would help equalize the political power of African Americans.

But since then, things have radically changed again. Under the leadership of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, the court has abandoned the minority-protecting role assumed by the Warren court. What happened?

A clue comes from a provocative and uncannily prescient memorandum written by a young law clerk for Justice Robert H. Jackson in 1952, during early deliberations that led to the Brown decision, well before Jackson had made up his mind about segregation. The memo was called "A Random Thought on the Segregation Cases." It was initialed at the bottom, "whr," signaling that it had been written by none other than William H. Rehnquist, still less than 30 years old and two decades away from being appointed to the court.

Rehnquist's memo unambiguously stated that "Plessy vs. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed." It acknowledged that this "is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position for which I have been excoriated by 'liberal' colleagues." But in its key passage, it insisted that "one hundred and fifty years of attempts on the part of this court to protect minority rights of any kind -- whether those of business, slaveholders, or Jehovah's Witnesses -- have all met the same fate. One by one the cases establishing such rights have been sloughed off, and crept silently to rest. If the present court is unable to profit by this example, it must be prepared to see its work fade in time, too, as embodying only the sentiments of a transient majority of nine men."

Rehnquist went on: "To the argument ... that a majority may not deprive a minority of its constitutional right, the answer must be made that while this is sound in theory, in the long run it is the majority who will determine what the constitutional rights of the minority are."

Rehnquist's memo concluded that the court should uphold segregation and refuse to protect "special claims" merely "because its members individually are 'liberals' and dislike segregation."

There is no doubt that Rehnquist wrote this memo. But was he speaking for himself?

Testifying before the Senate in 1971, the year he was nominated to the court, Rehnquist said the memo "was prepared by me at Justice Jackson's request; it was intended as a rough draft of a statement of his views ... rather than as a statement of my views."

Many historians, however, have concluded that Rehnquist's memory was inaccurate and that his memo contained his own thoughts, not a record of Jackson's. Consider the words, "it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by 'liberal' colleagues." This sounds like Rehnquist, not Jackson -- a conclusion strengthened by a 1957 Rehnquist essay complaining of "the 'liberal' point of view which commanded the sympathy of a majority of the clerks I knew."

Either way, Rehnquist's memo captures much of the thinking of the court today.

Rehnquist has argued long and hard against efforts to extend Brown or to use the Constitution to protect politically weak groups -- African Americans, women, handicapped people, gays and lesbians. Often he has objected to "attempts on the part of this court to protect minority rights."

Half a century after Brown, those concerned with racial equality now find that they do best when they resort to political, rather than judicial, channels. Of course Brown remains the law; segregation is unconstitutional. But the 1952 memo has turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy: Under Rehnquist's leadership, the role assumed by the Warren court, and signaled above all by Brown, did indeed "fade in time."

Eric Foner and Randall Kennedy, in the Nation (May 4, 2004):

Prior to the landmark Supreme Court rulings in Brown v. Board of Education and Bolling v. Sharpe, the US government and the states were permitted to segregate students racially in primary and secondary public schools. The official rationale for this arrangement was that students--black as well as white--would all fare better in their own, racially distinct schools. Schooling would be separate...but equal, and thus fair. The"separate but equal" formula was coined in Massachusetts in 1850 but elevated to national influence in 1896 when, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of a Louisiana statute that required racial segregation on trains.

Dissenting in Plessy, Justice John Marshall Harlan stated forthrightly what everyone actually knew: that racial segregation arose not from any mutual, reciprocal, respectful desire for social distance and group autonomy but rather as an expression of white supremacist subordination of people of color. Noting that segregation proceeds"on the ground that colored citizens are so inferior and degraded" that they cannot be allowed to share public space with whites, Harlan predicted that segregation would"stimulate aggressions...upon the admitted rights of colored citizens,""arouse race hate" and"perpetuate a feeling of distrust between [the] races."

The half-century after Plessy confirmed Harlan's dire prophecies. White supremacists bent on undoing the gains achieved during the Reconstruction Era disenfranchised blacks, severely limited their economic and educational opportunities, terrorized them through mob violence and systematically stigmatized them by extending segregationist laws and customs to practically every sphere of social life, from hospitals to prisons, beaches, restaurants, bathrooms and schools. In some courtrooms, witnesses of different races were required to take oaths on separate Bibles.

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court in Brown invalidated state laws requiring or permitting racial segregation in public primary and secondary schools. Such laws, the Court concluded, violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Simultaneously, in Bolling the Court held that the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment prohibited the federal government from racially segregating students in the District of Columbia."In the field of public education," the Court declared,"the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place."

These decisions marked a major step forward in the struggle for racial justice--one that surely warrants commemorating on its fiftieth anniversary. The rulings reflected and encouraged developments that would soon spark that burst of humane, bold and heroic action we now know as the civil rights movement. Brown and Bolling stemmed from an extraordinary campaign of social reform litigation mainly led by black attorneys who had themselves suffered cruel deprivations imposed by segregation. These decisions demonstrated that at least some sectors of the white establishment were willing to begin cautiously to challenge open, unembarrassed, official discriminations against blacks and other peoples of color....

We invited a wide range of commentators to participate in this special issue of The Nation, and they offer varying, sometimes conflicting assessments of Brown, its companion cases and its legacy. Judge Robert L. Carter revisits his ideas and motivations as one of the lead attorneys who argued the cases at trial and on appeal. Michael J. Klarman reconsiders the social milieu that surrounded the 1954 Supreme Court and evaluates Brown's place in civil rights history. Jack Bass shows how a remarkable cadre of progressive judges in the lower federal courts (most of them Republican appointees) were critical to enforcing Brown's mandate. Alan Richard returns to Clarendon County, South Carolina, to probe lingering tensions in a rural locale where school desegregation plaintiffs fifty years ago were brutally repressed. Michael Honey illuminates the ways in which desegregation struggles have intersected with efforts to advance the interests of urban black workers. Peter Schrag and Claude M. Steele each offer concrete strategies for improving the lot of disadvantaged minority students today. And the diverse participants in the forum that follows weigh the impact of Brown on an American society still afflicted by profound racial inequalities.

A recurrent message in this issue is that Brown v. Board of Education and its companion cases contributed in a major way to bettering America by delegitimizing racial segregation in public schooling. A second key theme, however, is that Brown's promise remains, to a considerable extent, unfulfilled. Jim Crow schooling is not a wrong inflicted in ancient times on people long since dead; it is an all too recent injustice that created unhealed wounds. A century ago, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote the famous words,"The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line." Despite all that has changed since Brown, his words remain a challenge for the twenty-first.

Editorial in the NYT (May 15, 2004):

Fifty years ago this month, the Supreme Court handed down a landmark civil rights decision, the first under the newly seated Chief Justice Earl Warren. Brown v. Board of Education, involving African-Americans and segregated schools, came two weeks later. Unlike Brown, the case called Hernandez v. Texas has been mostly relegated to legal footnotes. But this decision, which protected Mexican-Americans and the right to fair trials and helped widen the definition of discrimination beyond race, deserves more attention.

In Texas and throughout much of the Southwestern United States in the first half of the 20th century, people of Mexican origin were subjected to discrimination and worse. They were forced to use segregated public restrooms and attend segregated schools. Hundreds of them were killed in lynchings. And in Jackson County, Tex., where Mexican-Americans made up 14 percent of the population by the early 1950's, not a single person with a Spanish surname had been allowed to serve on a jury in 25 years. Some 70 Texas counties had similar records of exclusion.

The practice survived legal challenges until Pete Hernandez, a migrant cotton picker, was convicted by an all-Anglo jury in the murder of Joe Espinosa in Jackson County. Seeing an opportunity, a team of Hispanic civil rights lawyers from the American G.I. Forum and the League of United Latin American Citizens filed a suit that finally reached the Supreme Court in early 1954. Ignacio Garcia, a history professor at Brigham Young University who is writing a book about the Hernandez case, said that it marked the first time Hispanic lawyers had argued before the Supreme Court.

Chief Justice Warren, in delivering the court's unanimous opinion on May 3, rejected the state's argument that the absence of Hispanics on juries was a coincidence and that in any case, they were represented because Mexican-Americans were legally classified as white. In reversing Mr. Hernandez's conviction, the court held that in excluding Hispanics from jury duty, Texas had unreasonably singled out a class of people for different treatment. The defendant, it said, had been deprived of the equal protection guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, a guarantee"not directed solely against discrimination between whites and Negroes."

Today, the Hernandez case is little known even among civil rights experts. It came at a time when the pillars of discrimination were set to topple in quick succession. The Brown decision drew all of the nation's attention and set civil rights priorities along racial lines. Women began to serve on Texas juries in 1954, and their battle for inclusion would continue to be waged in the South for the next decade.

Somehow, the transcripts of the Hispanic lawyers' oral arguments before the Supreme Court in the Hernandez case and other records were lost. As for Mr. Hernandez, he was convicted in Mr. Espinosa's murder a second time, by a jury that included two Mexican-American men. He served his time, and then he disappeared. But the case that bears his name does not deserve the same fate. It ushered in an era of progress and hope whose promises we are still struggling to keep.

Cathy Young, in Reason magazine (May 2004):

Controversy rages as charges of anti-Semitism dog a beloved cultural icon. No, not Mel Gibson: The man at the center of this debate is the Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago, was once a revered symbol of moral resistance to the Soviet state. He probably deserves more credit than any other person for stripping away communism’s moral prestige among Western intellectuals.

Exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974, Solzhenitsyn alienated some erstwhile admirers with his Russian nationalism and his antipathy toward Western-style democracy; after his return to Russia 20 years later, the public’s reverence soon faded to polite indifference. Still, he retains his special status among the older intelligentsia and many Western anti-communists.

Accusations of anti-Semitism are not new for Solzhenitsyn. Critics have long pointed to passages in The Gulag Archipelago that selectively list the Jewish last names of labor camp commandants. And Solzhenitsyn’s historical novel August 1914, published in English in 1972, emphasizes the Jewishness of Dmitry Bogrov, assassin of Russia’s reformist prime minister Pyotr Stolypin.

Solzhenitsyn has claimed that he was merely telling it like it was, but August 1914 embellishes history considerably: While Bogrov was a thoroughly assimilated revolutionary from a family of third-generation converts, Solzhenitsyn saddles him with a Jewish first name, Mordko (a diminutive of Mordecai), and the fictitious motive of trying to undermine the Russian state to help the Jews.

Then came the news that Solzhenitsyn was writing a major history of the Jews in Russia. The first volume of Dvesti let vmeste (Two Hundred Years Together), covering the period from 1795 to 1916, appeared in 2001; the second volume followed in 2003. According to Solzhenitsyn, the work was intended to give an objective and balanced account of Russian-Jewish relations: "I appeal to both sides -- the Russians and the Jews -- for patient mutual understanding and admission of their own share of sin." This comment seems suspicious in itself, given that, for most of their history in Russia, Jews were victims of systematic oppression and violence. To talk about mutual guilt is a bit like asking blacks to accept their share of blame for Jim Crow.

What does Solzhenitsyn see as the Jews’ share of sin? Mainly, their participation in revolutionary activities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and then in the Soviet government. He rejects claims that communism in Russia was the result of a Jewish plot but asserts that Jews played a "disproportionate role" in the creation of a terrorist state "insensitive to the Russian people and disconnected from Russian history."

Just what does "disproportionate" mean? Jews were overrepresented among the socialist revolutionaries, but as the historian Richard Pipes points out in The New Republic, they were also overrepresented among Russian capitalists. What’s more, says Pipes, "the ranks of the revolutionaries were certainly dominated by Russians." A three-part series by Mark Deitch in the Russian daily Moskovskiy komsomolets last September noted that there were 43 Jews among the 300 major players on the Russian political scene in 1917 -- and only 16 of them were Bolsheviks.

Solzhenitsyn asserts that "the population of Russia, as a whole, regarded the new [revolutionary] terror as a Jewish terror" -- and seeks, if not to validate, then at least to excuse this perception. Deitch subjects Solzhenitsyn’s account to a withering analysis. After quoting historian Lev Krichevsky’s statement that "in 1918, at the time of the Red Terror, ethnic minorities made up about 50 percent of the central staff of the Cheka [the secret police]," Solzhenitsyn adds that "Jews were quite prominent" among those minorities.

But he omits Krichevsky’s actual data, which show that Jews made up less than 4 percent of the Cheka staff and held 8 percent of executive positions. On other occasions, though, Solzhenitsyn is not averse to exact numbers: He points out, for example, that six of the 12 Cheka investigators in the "department for the suppression of counter-revolution" were Jewish....

Craig McDonald, inThisWeek(May 13, 2004):

In 1998, Mansfield native Edward J. Larson earned the Pulitzer Prize in history for his book, Summer of the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion.

On May 20, Larson will come to Columbus to discuss Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory (Modern Library Chronicles, 337 pages, $21.95).

"There were lots of books on the concept of evolution or little parts of it," Larson recently told ThisWeek, "but there simply wasn't a readable, comprehensive book that people could just take off the shelf and understand how the theory of evolution has developed over time and where it came from. When you see the whole story together, it's much easier to understand the controversies that continue to plague the teaching of the theory of evolution today."

Larson, who is currently Russell Professor of History and Talmadge Professor of Law at the University of Georgia, said that when he speaks on the Scopes trial or other evolutionary topics, he often finds there is little meaningful grasp of the theory of evolution on the part of supporters or detractors.

"It would quickly become apparent that here's a controversy that splashes out of nowhere, such as in the Scopes trial," Larson said, "or as is happening in Ohio right now, suddenly there is a front-page controversy over this intelligent design issue -- where do these come from? Well, I got interested in going behind the Scopes trial and that led to my book on the work in the Gal·pagos (Evolution's Workshop). I finished that, but then I was beginning to see this huge continuum of history of objections of the sort that are being raised in Ohio today -- and they aren't fundamentally different than the types that were raised in Tennessee in 1925.

"They actually aren't fundamentally different from what have been raised since the very beginning," he continued. "I think a lot of people don't understand what the theory of evolution is, but they also don't understand the objections to the theory of evolution."

While evolution entered the consciousness of the greater public in the 1800s, the concept of intelligent design was also being fostered by figures such as William Paley and Georges Cuvier.

"They would argue that there is 'a design' here, a complexity that can't be explained --those would be arguments against (Charles) Darwin made by (Louis) Agassiz, made by (Richard) Owen," Larson said. Intelligent design "has a long and noble pedigree. You can actually follow intelligent design all the way back to the debates in ancient Greece."

In addition to exploring the history of the gradual development of the theory, Larson also places its development in the context of the social forces that helped shape the theory and --in one particularly dark instance -- a social movement that was informed by one interpretation of the concept of evolution.

Charles Darwin actually saw British imperialism as a kind of metaphor for natural selection.

"Very much so," Larson said. "It's very clear in Descent of Man. There's a subtle interplay. Darwin was a capitalist, very proud of how he greatly increased his inherited wealth by prudent stock investments. He was very proud and involved with British expansion ... he saw the survival of the fittest worldwide. ... His writings were also very much used to defend what Britain was doing."

At the other end of the spectrum was Ernst Haeckel, whose studies of evolutionary theory -- and his eventual creation of a secular philosophy dubbed "monism" which advocated a strong, centralized state -- would become twisted into tools for the emerging National Socialist movement. Haeckel, Larson said, "was certainly a warm advocate of World War I and his Monist League was foundational to the Nazi Party."

Although evolution has been a polarizing topic for centuries -- and continues to be so -- Larson said his goal in Evolution was to report accurately and objectively on the theory and the criticisms lodged against it.

"I'm not a partisan on this issue," Larson said. "There are books out there that are viciously pro-evolution and viciously pro-intelligent design. I'm not a biologist myself, I'm a historian of science. I don't have an oar in this pond, as it were, in the sense that I'm not trying to convince anybody one way or another."

Current polls indicate that 90 percent of adult Americans do not subscribe to "the full Darwinian vision of Evolution." Interestingly, Larson said that similar polls conducted in Europe and elsewhere reveal much different results.

"For at least 40 years, the results have been pretty consistent," Larson said. The number of Americans expressing a belief in a "full Darwinian vision" rarely rises above 9 percent, he said.

"In western Europe, you just don't find a high percentage for the Biblical view," he said. "You go to countries like the Netherlands and Germany and Sweden and you won't find any, literally. If you go to England, France, Italy and Spain -- eastern Europe -- you'll find a big growth in support for what would broadly be called 'theistic evolution.'"

In Islamic countries, he noted, it is actually a capital offense to teach the concept of evolution.

Euan Ferguson, in the Guardian (May 9, 2004):

THERE ARE THIMBLES. Lighters. Coasters. Ashtrays. Key-rings, of course. Tea-towels and T-shirts, penknives and paperweights, rucksacks and shoehorns and tankards and teacups: a sourly impressive amount of laminated plasticky tourist dreck, drenched in memorabilia of red, white, blue and gaudy. D-Day, they say; and 6 Juin 1944. Le Debarquement. Welcome To Our Liberators. Normandy Landings. Aux Heroiques!

This, they say, will be the last big anniversary: the last and the grandest. In 10 years' time, most of the old British and American soldiers who regularly take the battlefield tours, who have made friends with each other and with the visiting French and Polish and, from time to time, returning Germans, will be no more. They have already had 60 more years than they expected, that morning. Many now say those few hours have shaped every day of those 60 years. As the day has shaped Normandy herself: from the tourist-traps of Arromanches to the quiet memorials hidden throughout the bocage , the sweetly treacherous hedgerow country where nightmares were born in the days following June 6 1944, there are reminders of one huge established fact: we won.

The Allied victory, begun on that morning on these 50 miles of beaches, was to lead directly to Berlin, the death of Hitler, the collapse of the 1,000-year Reich and the end of the most destructive human conflict in history: and that this happened, that this victory was always destined, seems today as unquestionable as the sea still sweeping in to the beaches of Juno, Sword, Gold, Utah and Omaha.

Except it wasn't. What you won't find, among the memorabilia, are any references to the doubts, or to the mistakes. You won't see reproductions of the note scribbled in pencil by Eisenhower on the morning of the invasion - later found crumpled in his shirt pocket by his aide, Harry Butcher - intended to be read to the press the next day if it all went wrong.

'Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and the troops have been withdrawn,' he wrote, then scored out the last phrase to remove the passive voice, to take responsibility: '. . .and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. . . . If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine.'

You won't find any of the fatigued uncertainty chronicled in Ten Days to D-Day , by David Stafford, one of the better of the great many books being issued and reissued for this 60th anniversary - one shop lists over 150 current titles - in which we learn just how much we take for granted, how much could have gone so wrong.

In the Normandy sunshine last weekend, buses puttered and clogged the lanes. Over 1.5 million people a year now visit the area to view the beaches, the cemeteries, the slow-rotting carcasses of gun emplacements among the sedge and dogwort: a good number are veterans or their extended families but many have no direct link to that day, are simply there to view history and romance. But the most popular monuments are, if you look a little closer, actually testament to the things that went wrong, reminders of quite how flimsy the day's victory was.

The top of the Pointe du Hoc, the jutting rock nose which housed the six pivoting 155mm howitzers the Germans planned to use to cover both 'American' beaches, is still pocked with craters, and swarmed by tourists. They come here to remember the staggering bravery of the US 2nd Ranger Battalion, 200 of them under Lt Col James Rudder, who climbed the nine-storey rock from the sea with bayonets and grappling-hooks, while grenades rained down, and took the placements. What is often forgotten is that, due to a complete failure of intelligence, no one on the Allied side knew the guns had been moved a mile back and hidden in an orchard: the Rangers captured nothing more than telegraph poles swathed in cloth camouflage. It took them two days to be relieved; casualties were by then over 60 per cent.

Buses limp, too, through the little town of Ste Mere Eglise, where the shops, too, are always full of victory, of certainty: but this town was in fact a disaster, Allied paratroopers dropping right into the middle of the guns in the main square; a parachute and mannequin still dangle from the church tower, testament to the luck of John Steel of the 82nd's 505 Parachute Infantry, who feigned death after being caught there; he survived, but watched many comrades die below. And many memorial services now focus on Easy Green, on the shore near the beautiful American cemetery above: the peace, and the sunshine, belie the fact that Easy Green was the site of near-unending carnage on that day.

'Even the weather, of course, was deeply unreliable,' says military historian Max Hastings. 'It wouldn't have needed to have been much worse to have changed an awful lot. On paper, certainly, the odds were with the Allies, simply numerically: we had more tanks, more ships, more aircraft. But the Germans were always an unknown quantity: Churchill in particular had been deeply shocked by losses, where we should have won. And the other terrifying thing, in hindsight, is simply how much there was at stake. It is impossible to exaggerate how much of a blow defeat would have brought to the grand alliance.'

Had Eisenhower had even greater foresight, as we have hindsight, it's generally agreed he would have done some things differently. New tactics would surely have been brought to Omaha beach, defended not, as most of the others were, by dispirited ex-Eastern Front Germans and prisoners of war, 'striplings and greybeards', but by 12,000 silently redeployed and battle-hardened men of the 352nd Division. Less reliance would have been placed on the amphibious tanks, 90 per cent of which sank as soon as they hit the water. Transfers to landing craft would have occurred closer to shore, reducing fatal errors of pilotage. Had he been in a biblical frame of mind, he may even have borne in mind the numerological warnings in Revelations, and thought twice before launching the most ambitious amphibious assault in history on, precisely, the sixth hour of the sixth day of the sixth month...

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