George Shadroui, in FrontPageMag.com (March 5, 2004):

Until the mid 1960s, it could be argued, the National Book Awards, a much heralded and sought after honor, was a fair recognition of great writing across different perspectives and genres – poetry, fiction, non-fiction, history, etc. But increasingly since the 1960s, the awards have been an exercise in political as much as literary judgment.

To refresh memories, during the 1950s and into the early 1960s a host of writers were honored who crossed the political and cultural spectrum. James Dickey, Wallace Stevens, John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren won in the arena of poetry. Walker Percy and William Faulkner took honors for their fiction. All were men of arguably conservative sensibilities, even if not notably political. Prominent liberals also were recognized, among them Rachel Carson, George Kennan, Ralph Ellison, Archibald MacLeish and William Shirer. Whether one agreed or disagreed with the choices, there was ecumenical representation that suggested the absence of political or cultural litmus tests.

Things began to change in the 1960s as the radical left began mobilizing against American power and the Vietnam War. In 1966, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. won for his adoring portrait of the short-lived Kennedy administration, A Thousand Days. In 1968, liberal icon George Kennan was honored for his memoirs. In 1969, Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night, an anti-Vietnam war memoir, captured a National Book Award.

As we head into the 1970s, Erik H. Erikson is honored in 1970 for his work on Gandhi and his non-violent techniques, a politically correct stance in the midst of the anti-war movement. Other winners included former communist and leftist Lillian Hellman for her memoir, An Unfinished Woman; James MacGregor Burns for his flattering biography of Franklin Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom; Joseph Lash for Eleanor and Franklin; and France Fitzgerald for Fire in the Lake, a book that glorified the Viet Cong.

This trend toward liberal and leftist perspectives continued over the next two decades. Winners included Murray Kempton, Peter Gay, Joyce Carol Oates, Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, Irving Howe, Schlesinger again for another Kennedy portrait, Robert Jay Lifton, Peter Matthiessen, Malcolm Cowley, Barbara Tuchman, Susan Sontag, Edmund Morris, Ronald Steel, Victor Navasky of the Nation magazine, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, Alice Walker, Alan Brinkley, etc.

Not only are many of these folks left or liberal in their views, so is the subject matter. We find biographies of Norman Thomas, the Kennedys, Huey Long, Walter Lippmann, FDR and Eleanor, Lyndon Johnson, etc. There are multiple studies on slavery and Western complicity in that sordid business. There are critical accounts of the dropping of the Atomic bomb at the end of World War II, and the failures of the American system to deal with seemingly intractable social ills, but very little that celebrates Western contributions to freedom and democracy. No prominent conservative or Republican person is even the subject of a winning book save Theodore Roosevelt, though a number of authors are honored in the non-fiction categories for their critical reviews of the U.S. role in Vietnam -- Fitzgerald and Mailer being joined by Gloria Emerson, for Winners and Losers, Neil Sheehan for The Bright Shining Lie, and James Carroll for An American Requiem.

As we move into the 1990s, virtually every nonfiction winner was written by liberals or noted leftists: Orlando Patterson, at Harvard, for his book Freedom (1991); Gore Vidal for his collection of essays, United States (1993); Tina Rosenberg, for The Haunted Land (1995); Carroll for An American Requiem (1996), Edward Ball, former Village Voice writer, for Slaves in the Family (1998); John Dower for his book, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (1999); and Robert Caro, for Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (2002).

The question that must be asked of the NBA and those publishers who often drive nominations is this: were all of these books of such a high quality that they necessarily closed the door on those written by conservatives? Emerson’s book on Vietnam, for example, took a major hit not from the right but from fellow liberal Garry Wills, who criticized Emerson in the New York Review of Books in 1977 for inserting herself too often into the Vietnam story she was trying to tell.

Wrote Wills: “But Emerson herself shows a groupie tendency for all those connected with the war…. sees malice where there was little, and saintliness where there was little, and has no mind at all for sorting out various kinds of mindlessness on both sides.” Not the type of endorsement one expects for a National Book Award winner.

The skeptic might ask why it matters, particularly if the work honored is of high quality. The answer is obvious. Prestigious awards mean more attention, resources, and venues for discussing history, and ultimately more notoriety, which means greater book sales, more readers and more power in the debate over ideas.

And many of those who have won have not been shy about using their status to pronounce on the issues of the day. We all know that Mailer and Vidal are actively baiting the Bush administration, and they are hardly alone. James Carroll and John Dower, to pick two relatively recent winners, also have been given platforms for criticizing the Iraq war effort. In both cases, their credibility as witnesses to history are built upon their work and the recognition it has received.

Carroll, whose memoir on Vietnam is highly critical of the United States, has nothing good to say about the war in Iraq either. Writing in the Boston Globe in September 2003, Carroll opened with this riveting proclamation: “The War is Lost.” He goes on: “The Bush administration’s hubristic foreign policy has been efficiently exposed as based on nothing more than hallucination. High-tech weaponry can kill unwilling human beings, but it cannot force them to embrace an unwanted idea.” Carroll then argues: “Sooner or later, the United States must admit that it has made a terrible mistake in Iraq, and it must move quickly to undo it.”

It has to be observed that by most historical measures liberating 50 million people in a matter of months, with American losses totaling in the hundreds, would be called a remarkable success. Remember, we lost 3,000 people in 90 minutes on 9/11. Many of the war’s opponents certainly predicted much worse – thousands of dead soldiers, the unleashing of weapons of mass destruction, regional instability, etc. Instead, rogue regimes – Iran, Libya, Syria and North Korea – are beginning to cooperate on issues of arms proliferation and weapons of mass destruction, and known terrorists are sending missives lamenting the refusal of the United States to withdraw because our troops are suffocating the terrorist effort. Yes, the war continues and the terrorists are clearly undaunted by holy traditions (witness the most recent attacks in Baghdad and Karbala) that our critics insist we respect.

Dower, another scholar on the left, also is called upon to issue an indictment of Bush. Writing in the Manchester Guardian in November 2002, Dower argues that efforts to compare post-World War II Japan with Iraq are absurd. He observes that not a single attack was launched against American occupation forces in Japan after the cessation of hostilities in 1945, and he argued, rightly, that this would not be the case in Iraq. Then again, Japan had just been through almost a decade of war and had been totally defeated and threatened with decimation. So he is right that comparisons are not always instructive, but we might reach different conclusions as to why.

This past December, writing in the Los Angeles Times, Dower takes Bush to task again for trying to make the case that Iraq, like Japan and Germany, could be rebuilt and transformed. “What are we to make of this murky use of history? The truth is that what is happening in Iraq presents a stunning and fundamental contrast to what took place in occupied Japan and Germany over a half century ago – and not a positive one.”

Dower may be correct that an attempt to compare the situations has marginal value, but was Bush trying to draw a direct parallel? One thinks not. The situation in Iraq differs from the situation in Japan and Germany, but for many reasons Dower does not explore. The United States did not firebomb Baghdad the way allies did Dresden, for example. Is Dower complaining about that? We also did not drop an atomic bomb on Tikrit, though surely that would have reduced resistance from Al Qaeda and hard-core Baathists. Nor does Dower inform readers that in post-war Germany attacks against American troops continued for several years.

Sheehan, author of The Bright Shining Lie, took America to task in the 1980s for its arrogance in dealing with Vietnam. In an interview with Harry Kresler, Sheehan argues: “we didn’t understand the Vietnamese whom we were allegedly helping, and we didn’t understand the Vietnamese we were fighting.” He observes that the United States failed to grasp the historical enmity between China and Vietnam, a regional tension that transcended allegiance to communism. However, it remains true that despite the Sino-Soviet split, or the nationalism of the Vietnamese, both China and the Soviet Union were providing major support for the communists in the north and the insurgency in the south.

An article by Fox Butterfield (himself a National Book Award winner) that appeared in the New York Times magazine in the early 1980s demonstrated, if not that U.S. war policy was correct, that many of the assumptions of anti-war activists were flawed. Few leftists in the "peace" movement would have conceded that a North Vietnamese victory would result in millions of “liberated” Vietnamese fleeing in boats or being imprisoned or killed in “reeducation” camps, though no one is likely to win many awards for pointing this out.

On another front, after the collapse of the Soviet system, Tina Rosenberg went to Eastern Europe to document the aftermath of that historic transformation. One might have hoped she would focus on the obvious atrocities perpetrated by communist regimes. Instead, she wound up – in part -- romanticizing communism and its leadership and portraying the anti-communist sentiments of the new governments as a major problem confronting the newly liberated states.

In the final pages of her NBA winning book, The Haunted Land, she writes: “Fascism espouses repugnant ideas, but communism’s ideas of equality, solidarity, social justice, an end to misery, and power to the oppressed are indeed beautiful….Communism is lofty and grand, but human beings are flawed creatures, unwilling to pay communism the tribute of sacrifice it demands.”

Here we have clear evidence of Arthur Koestler’s claim that the poetry of communism remains seductive even as the reality of it leads to the nightmare of totalitarianism. But even the alleged “poetry” of communism is overstated. Reread The Communist Manifesto. It is not a hymn to brotherhood but a declaration of war on all save the working class, and particularly on those who do not embrace underlying Marxist assumptions. In her NBA acceptance speech Rosenberg, who is now an editorial writer for the New York Times, thanks Mikhail Gorbachav for making her work possible, but does not mention the United States or its role in liberating Eastern Europe (much less Ronald Reagan).

One could go on this way. Indeed, scanning the list of winners over three decades it is difficult to find more than a smattering of conservative writers, historians or thinkers. Robert Nozick in 1975 was honored for Anarchy, State and Utopia and Henry Kissinger in 1980 for White House Years. You could argue that Tom Wolfe, who won for Right Stuff, has conservative leanings. Certainly, he has shown up at National Review’s anniversary dinners and has had some fun at the expense of radicals. Likewise, though Fox Butterfield writes for the liberal New York Times, his book, China: Alive in the Bitter Sea, has been rightly praised for its honest portrait of life under communist rule. Carlos Eire, who won for his book, Waiting for Snow in Havana, did not hesitate to observe during his acceptance speech that he would be imprisoned for his writings were he still in Cuba. Bill Buckley won not for his political commentary, but for his mystery, Stained Glass. David Horowitz and Peter Collier managed a nomination for their book on the Rockefellers, but that was before their turn to the right.

This obvious political slant does a disservice to the marketplace of ideas and the notion of basic fairness. After all, if Gore Vidal deserved a National Book Award for his collection of essays, why not William F. Buckley, Jr. for his collection of speeches, Let Us Talk of Many Things, which traces the political and cultural landscape of our nation over four decades? If communist apologist Lillian Hellman’s memoir was instructive, what about Horowitz’s memoir, Radical Son, which documents his fascinating intellectual journey?

Other notable books by conservatives come to mind that not only did not win, but did not even warrant a finalist mention: Michael Novak for The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, George Gilder for Wealth and Poverty, Charles Murray for Losing Ground and Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom for America in Black and White. These works were ground-breaking studies dealing with some of the most difficult issues of our day and surely compared with other books NBA judges chose to honor. While we are at it, how is it that the judges of the National Book Award have managed to overlook entirely Allan Bloom, Thomas Sowell, William Safire, George Will, Russell Kirk, and others.

Christopher Lasch is an interesting case. He has always been a good read, whether writing as a leftist back in the 1960s or 1970s, or as a reformed leftist in the 1980s and early 1990s. Though he won the National Book Award for The Culture of Narcissism, which was certainly a worthy effort, it could be argued that his most expansive and impressive book was The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics. Why did he not win or even get nominated again after embracing a more a more nuanced position toward progressive ideologies? That he had already won is not an argument against. After all, David McCullough and Schlesinger have both won twice.

One possible explanation could be the judges. Though I was unable to obtain a complete list over the years (the names are not readily shared or available), a review of the judges since 2001 turned up a disproportionate representation of writers with alternative or left to liberal perspectives: Richard Rodriguez, a liberal commentator for the Public Broadcasting System; Christine Stansell, a Princeton professor whose history on the Bohemians includes a romantic portrait of John Reed, Emma Goldman and other communists; Alex Kotlowitz, whose book, There Are No Children Here, documents life in a Chicago housing project; and Terry Tempest Williams, a prominent pro-environment activist from Utah. Others included Gail Buckley, author and daughter of entertainer Lena Horne, Mary Karr, a professor at Syracuse University, Jonathon Kirsch, book editor of the Los Angeles Times, Lawrence Jackson, professor at Emory University, and Michael Kinsley, one of liberalism’s leading lights. The only judge with any clear connections to conservatism was Terry Teachout, who has written for the Wall Street Journal and Commentary and who edited a collection of Whittaker Chamber’s journalism.

Whatever the talents of these writers, and in some cases they are significant, it can still be fairly observed that most are hardly immersed in the political or cultural mainstream of America. Is there any question that the institutional embrace of counterculture or alternative viewpoints amounts to a bias against those who celebrate business ingenuity, free enterprise or the dominant traditions of Western culture?

Unfortunately, favoritism in the direction of the liberal/left perspective is not limited to the National Book Awards. The folks over at the University of Georgia who bestow Peabody Awards have recognized Bill Moyers on eight occasions for his television work, including “The World of Ideas” and an MX Missile Debate he hosted in 1980. An on-line search of the Peabody winners discloses that Bill Buckley’s Firing Line, though it raised intellectual and policy discussion to the highest levels for over three decades, never won. Surely, a man considered one of our great public intellectuals should have been recognized for his lifetime contribution to debate and policy analysis, don’t you think? Oprah Winfrey has been.

Here is the raw fact. Since the 1960s, of the 90 writers (give or take a couple) honored by the NBA in nonfiction categories for books that dealt with historical, political or political culture matters, only three or four could be called conservative. More than 60 have had clear ties to leftist/liberal causes or concerns. In fact, it is difficult to find a conservative who has made the finalist list in the past 20 years. This is even less intellectual diversity that the faculties of American college campuses. It seems as though we have become so accustomed to an exclusionary culture that no one even notices anymore.

Khang Hyun-sung, in the South China Morning Post (March 2, 2004):

Contradictory historical claims by China and South Korea over an ancient kingdom that ceased to exist 1,300 years ago has led to an unlikely alliance between the two Koreas, with important implications for a future reunified Korea.

The warrior kingdom of Koguryo, which for almost a century straddled most of the Korean peninsula and a considerable part of what today is northeastern China, was dragged into the public spotlight last year by a Beijing-backed study that concluded it was historically an integral part of China.

The claim has been fiercely rejected by South Korea and the country's academics who consider Koguryo (BC 37-AD 668) to be one of the founding kingdoms of the country and the basis for the word "Korea".

"It is an indisputable historical fact that Koguryo is the root of the Korean nation and an inseparable part of our history," South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon said.

"We will sternly and confidently deal with any claims or arguments harming the legitimacy of our rights," he said after the Chinese Institute of Social Science released the report as part of its Northeast Asia project.

The issue has also struck a raw nerve with North Korea, which is lobbying to have Koguryo temples placed on Unesco's world cultural heritage list of historical sites. It has been blocked by Beijing, which is presenting Koguryo tombs in northeast China as substitutes.

In recent months, the North Korean media has published several broadsides against claims by Chinese academics that Koguryo was a vassal state that maintained a tributary relationship with China.

Koguryo fended off successive waves of invading Chinese armies of the Sui and Tang dynasties to defend its sovereignty, noted North Korea's official newspaper Minju Joson.

South Korea has also responded by setting up a research institute with the task of supporting the territorial and cultural sovereignty of the kingdom.

The historical dispute goes beyond accusations of historical revisionism and highlights long-term, potentially competing geopolitical ambitions for the area.

Emily Eakin, in the NYT (Feb. 28, 2004):

In February 1766, taken aback by the violent reaction to the Stamp Act, its latest attempt to impose taxes on the restive American colonies, Britain summoned Benjamin Franklin to Parliament in London. The interview, which lasted several hours, was less than friendly. The Americans, Franklin reminded his interrogators, were voracious consumers of British goods, buying them at a rate that far exceeded the colonies' staggering population growth. But this lucrative spending habit, he warned, should not be taken for granted.

The colonists could either produce necessities themselves or do without, he testified. As for"mere articles of fashion," he said, they"will now be detested and rejected."

A month later the Stamp Act was repealed. And American trade in British goods — valued at more than a million pounds a year — continued at a galloping pace. But Franklin's words represented a turning point in the struggle for independence, says T. H. Breen, the William Smith Mason professor of American history at Northwestern. Americans, he argues, had discovered a political weapon without which the Revolution might not have been successful: consumerism.

Is it possible that a signature attribute of contemporary America — and a trait for which it is frequently criticized — lay at the heart of its most inspiring foundational achievement? This is the startling implication of Mr. Breen's new book,"The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence," published earlier this month by Oxford University Press. In his account, the self-sufficient yeoman farmer of Jeffersonian lore is nowhere to be found. Even before America was a nation, Mr. Breen insists, it was a society of consumers.

Deceptively simple, his argument goes like this: two and a half million strong and scattered along 1,800 miles of coastline, the colonists had little in common besides a weakness for what Samuel Adams derisively termed"the Baubles of Britain." When Britain imposed stiff taxes on this appetite for stuff — without granting any political representation — Americans responded with an ingenious invention with instant and widespread appeal: the consumer boycott. By the time the First Continental Congress was convened in September 1774, transforming mass consumer mobilization into a successful political rebellion was a relatively straightforward task.

Or, as Mr. Breen, 61, explained in a recent telephone interview:"Every predictive model that one could have put forward at the time indicated that the colonies, should they beat the British, would have broken into 13 separate entities. Yet somehow enough colonists found enough common cause to make war on what was the strongest military power in the world. How did they create the bond of political trust so that if one city protested or resisted the British, the rest said, `We'll stand with you'? It was this great swelling of consumer experience that was the transformative element."

It sounds far-fetched, possibly scandalous: pinning Americans' success in the war for independence even partly on their common experience in the marketplace. Moreover the notion seems to contradict the long-standing assumption among scholars that lofty ideas elegantly expressed — and a brisk trade in political pamphlets and newspapers — were sufficient to unite the public behind the revolutionary cause.

But in keeping with the latest academic trends, intellectual history is out and material culture is in. Consumerism in particular is a hot topic in American studies these days, and Mr. Breen's book comes garnished with encomiums from senior members of his field, including Joseph J. Ellis, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of"Founding Brothers" (Knopf, 2001), who calls it"the most original interpretation of how the American Revolution happened to appear in print in the last 50 years."

David Clark Knowlton, associate professor of anthropology at Utah Valley State College, in the Salt Lake Tribune (Feb. 29, 2004):

The controversies stemming from the University of Utah History Department's attempt to fill the position vacated by the untimely death of Dean L. May raise issues of consequence to all of us. While the members of that department have to make the often-difficult decision of who to hire, all of us have a horse in this race.

    The Salt Lake Tribune paraphrased a professor in the department saying that"anyone who studies the history of the American West can teach Utah history." It also quotes the department chair, Eric Hinderaker, on the need to"differentiate between Mormon history and Mormon studies."

    Of course we in Utah, no matter our religion or ethnicity, have an interest in how the history of our state and region is taught in the state's flagship university. The extent of our interest is informed by discussions underlying the perspectives of the aforementioned scholars.

    So-called Western history has tended to be the hegemonic story of the expansion of the dominant U.S. society over the territory of the American West. As a result, until recently, as Professor Patricia Limerick of the University of Colorado notes, it has not taken account of other peoples inhabiting the region and their stories. Thus it did not grasp the story of Utes, Paiutes, Shoshones, Cheyenne, Hopis, Navajos, etc., in their struggles with the national economic and political project.

    It did not include Hispanics, even though this land was part of Mexico and numerous people were forcibly joined to the U.S. when their homes became part of this country.

    It has tended to not see half of the mainstream population, women.

    Similarly, Western history tends to be a discourse with a missing center, a doughnut, to paraphrase Indiana historian Jan Shipps. It has ignored one of the most densely populated areas of the region along with its people's social dynamics and concerns. Both Shipps and Limmerick claim it substantially ignores the Mormons.

    The Mormon culture region does present some complications. The main one may stem from the fact that Mormons are both a people and a religion. Thus someone who can decipher this increasingly important corner of the American tapestry must have skills that join religious history with the more standard approaches of social, political and economic analysis.

    For too long, Mormon history has been relegated to a ghetto called Mormon studies. Mormons are an increasingly important component of our national society. The influence of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is growing in the U.S. and abroad. Its members are prominent in many fields of endeavor and, especially, in national politics. Even American history is becoming increasingly difficult to narrate without some understanding of Mormons.

    Unlike standard Western history, Mormon history requires international skills. Whether because of the migration of large numbers of Welsh, English and Danes (on which Brigham Young depended for survival and which gave this region a distinctive population) or because more than half of all Mormons now live in other countries, a Mormon historian must have an awareness of international issues.

    Standard Western history is simply not an adequate disciplinary base from which to study or teach about this people. Mormon history is broader than Western history. Furthermore, Western history increasingly needs Mormon history to come out of its ghetto and broaden the story of the American West.

    This matters to all of us. It is not simply something for academics to argue about in dusty journals or at some academic coffeehouse.

    A quality public university such as the U. has a dual mission. It must house representatives of the range of academic concerns that crisscross the globe with abandon. It also, for reasons of political survival if for no other, must represent the life and concerns of its host society in its research and teaching.

    To be sure, the U. continues a tradition of positively engaging its local hosts, as I experienced when I was a visiting professor there. However, much still needs to be done.

    It is not my place to intervene in affairs internal to the U.'s history department. However, as the discussion has become public, it is appropriate to weigh in. I feel strongly that Dean May should not be replaced by a mainstream Western historian. Such hegemonic history would break a relationship between the history department and its hosts. This is not about religion. It is about good, professional history and its relationship with a people.

From the official newsletter of the Nixon Library & Birthplace (March 1, 2004):

There's yet another “new Nixon.”

Nixon Milner, born to Todd and Lisa Milner, arrived at 9:30 p.m. on December 18, 2003. With jet-black hair and deep blue eyes, this healthy newborn is one of Sydney, Australia's newest citizens.

The Nixon name is no coincidence. Todd, and equity dealer, and Lisa, an accountant, indeed named their baby after America's 37 th President.

The admiration the Milners share for President Nixon stems from Todd's American roots and an appreciation of U.S. history. “I think Richard Nixon was President during a very interesting as well as a very difficult time,” said Todd Milner. “It amazes me how many people are not aware, or conveniently overlook, his foreign policy achievements.”

The Milners are proud of their son's chosen name and feel strongly about RN's legacy. “I think that President Nixon was a tremendous, tenacious politician with good intentions at heart,” said Todd. “He certainly played an important role in history,and I regard him highly as a President, and for his achievements in office.”

Todd views RN's historic trip to China and his 1968 presidential victory after losing the governorship of California as his greatest accomplishments. He also admires the late President for the way he “pulled himself back up after his resignation to contribute to society as an author and speaker.”

Since little Nixon's birth, the Milners have found that most people comment on what an original name they have chosen for their son. They look forward to telling their son about his namesake.

Lisa, born and raised in Sydney, met Todd through a mutual friend.

While Todd and Lisa have no immediate plans to travel to the U.S., they do plan on visiting when little Nixon is old enough to appreciate the trip. They hope to make it to Yorba Linda to introduce Nixon Milner to President Nixon and his legacy.

By the way, little Nixon's not the first Milner named after the President. Todd and Lisa used to have a pet poodle named Milhous.

Alisa Solomon, in the Village Voice (Feb. 25-March 2, 2004):

In a gesture that consolidates the 1990s culture wars, the post-9-11 chill on dissent, and the relentlessness of hawkishly pro-Israel lobbying, the U.S. House voted unanimously last fall to establish an advisory board to monitor how effectively campus international studies centers serve"national needs related to homeland security" and to assess whether they provide sufficient airtime to champions of American foreign policy. Currently the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions is considering a parallel provision for its upcoming higher education reauthorization bill. The bill will likely go to the floor in March.

Though it's just a few paragraphs in an arcane piece of routine legislation reauthorizing a relatively small amount of money to what's called"area studies," the advisory board provision represents an ominous offensive against academic freedom and oppositional views. For decades now, since the end of the McCarthy period that saw countless academics expelled from the classroom for their views and international research controlled by a Cold War agenda, the critical assault on left-leaning professors has been launched from books, articles, websites, and media broadcasts—unpleasant enough for the people targeted, but still the stuff of discourse. Even the creepy post-9-11 list of 40 profs accused by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni of giving comfort to America's adversaries turned out to have no teeth.

But the very possibility of legislation sounds old alarms anew. Even if the measure does not make it past the Senate—ranking Democrats on the panel don't expect it to get much traction—the very idea of ideological feds inspecting campus lecture halls takes the culture wars to a perilous new level.

The seven-member advisory board—which would include two appointees"from federal agencies that have national security responsibility"—would oversee the country's 118 international studies centers. This year, they shared about $95 million under Title VI of the Higher Education Act. Centers may use the funds only for graduate student fellowships, language instruction, and lectures and other public programs. They do not hire faculty or offer courses—traditional departments such as art history or political science do that. The centers then involve local faculty from across the disciplines who have expertise in such areas as Latin America, Russia, Africa, and East Asia. Only 17 of the nation's international studies centers focus on the Middle East—covering the Arab countries, Turkey, Israel, and Iran—but no one doubts that they are the intended targets of the legislation.

"The priority of those behind this is defending Israel from any criticism," says Zachary Lockman, director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center at New York University."They understand that universities are one of the few places where debate and argument take place that cannot be heard in the media or anywhere else."

Indeed, the most vociferous critics of the centers have been three right-wing Zionist think-tankers : Stanley Kurtz of the Hoover Institution and a columnist for the National Review Online ; Martin Kramer, whose screed Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle East Studies in America was published by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy; and Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum, whose website Campus Watch posted"dossiers" on professors whom Pipes deemed to hold unacceptable views on Islam, Palestinian rights, and U.S. or Israeli policy. Students were urged to send in reports on teachers who made any dubious remarks.

Jennifer Barnett Reed, in the Arkansas Times (Feb. 27, 2004):

We all know the elementary-school stories of the Underground Railroad: tales of Harriet Tubman's daring trips south to lead more slaves to freedom, of kindly white Northern abolitionists hiding fugitives in concealed cellar rooms, ushering them down secret passageways toward freedom.

But those stories, it turns out, are only the pale, one-dimensional, mythologized version of who and what made up the Underground Railroad.

The truth is a much richer epic: giant, sprawling, ever-shifting, the unwritten histories of slaves who ran and slaves who stayed behind, free blacks in the North, Native Americans in the West, and otherwise ambivalent whites moved to single acts of assistance.

The Underground Railroad was vaster and less formal than the memoirs of conductors suggest. Its routes started in the South, ushering slaves north to free states and Canada, but also west to Indian Territory and California, south to Mexico and the Spanish colony of Florida, aboard New Orleans steamships bound for the Caribbean, and onto New England whalers headed for the frigid waters off the coast of Alaska.

The National Park Service has been trying to recover and preserve this larger story since the mid-1990s. Its Network to Freedom project redefines the Underground Railroad broadly as"resistance to slavery through escape and flight" - in short, anything slaves did or used to steal away to freedom - and recognizes it as the first major chain of events in the fight for civil rights.

"This project is different from anything else the Park Service has done," said James Hill, head of the Network to Freedom region that includes Arkansas."There's not a land base or any one particular site at this point."

The Network is set up like the National Register of Historic Places, Hill said. It includes sites connected with the Underground Railroad - homes, churches, even the Great Dismal Swamp in North Carolina and Virginia - as well as educational programs and research facilities. There are over 125 so far in 25 states and the District of Columbia.

Ferreting out Underground Railroad sites has been easy in some Northern states (Ohio alone has 24 so far), Hill said. But they tell only part of the tale.

"To tell the story accurately you have to go down South, where people were leaving from," he said.

And that means Arkansas, where the Underground Railroad is a more elusive beast. A few histories of slavery in the state mention runaways, but no one's ever really sat down and studied the subject in detail.

Enter Charles Bolton, UALR professor and Arkansas history expert. Bolton has signed on with the National Park Service to do a three-year study of the state's fugitive slave phenomenon: how many and who they were, where they ran from and where they were headed, how they traveled and who might have helped them.

"Chances are [runaway slaves] were relying on other slaves and free blacks, instead of white abolitionists, in the South," Hill said."And the truth is, if it weren't for the desire for freedom of African-American slaves, there wouldn't have been any Underground Railroad."

Clarence Page, in the Chicago Tribune (Feb. 25, 2004):

Black History Month was never intended to make people uncomfortable--unless maybe they ought to be.

Nevertheless, despite the best of intentions, a misunderstanding of what the month is all about can lead sometimes to a whopper of an embarrassment.

That's sort of what happened recently at Connecticut's Suffield High School when a group of sociology students decided to hang posters around the school to promote April as"White History Month."

Shortly after they were nabbed, the five students explained to their upset principal, Thomas Jones, that, alas, it was all a misunderstanding, according to The Hartford Courant. The students had been assigned to"explore the effect of rumors." They decided the posters would be a real nifty way to do that. Needless to say, their experiment triggered a lot of rumors, especially in the school's small but understandably alarmed black student population.

The principal scolded the white students for their insensitivity and turned them over to a teacher who reportedly specializes in civil rights and cultural sensitivity issues. In this way, the school at large was able to turn the incident into what one school board official called a"teachable moment," an opportunity to educate both offenders and the offended about differences in how the world looks through each other's eyes.

Good for them. No long-term harm done, I hope. This particular high school poster flap is the most embarrassing incident related to Black History Month that I can recall since early 2001. That was when then-Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore revoked a proclamation declaring May to be"European Heritage and History Month." The governor had learned to his deep dismay that the request for the commemoration had come from a white separatist group headed by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. Such an embarrassment.

But you don't need to be a klansman, past or present, to ask"Why don't we have a White History Month?" I've heard that question quite a few times over the years. So have other black people I know. Some of us have come up with a list of appropriate responses to it, such as:

1."Because every month is white history month."

2."Because white history has not been lost, stolen or suppressed over the years as much as black history has."

3."Yo' mama!"

4."History is taught so poorly in our schools these days that maybe we should have a white history month."

5."That's right. I said, `Yo' mama'!!!"

Now, now. We should all try to manage our anger at such moments. Such encounters reveal precisely what Black History Month was intended to remedy: an ignorance about history--black and otherwise. That's why I oppose so-called"political correctness." We need more dialogue, not less....

when the late black scholar Carter G. Woodson dreamed up what was then called Negro History Week in 1926, he too dreamed of the day when it no longer would be needed.

He imagined a day when every student's education would include such African-American figures as Crispus Attucks, who died in the Boston Massacre; Matthew A. Henson, who co-discovered the North Pole with Robert Peary, and Benjamin Banneker, the pioneer scientist who helped conduct the first survey of Washington.

It was important, Woodson felt, that African-Americans understand that we had more to our history than our victimization. In fact, there was a much greater all-American story to be told in how mightily many of our ancestors had triumphed despite adversity.

Woodson imagined a day when the contributions of people from various races, ethnicities and, for that matter, genders would be taught fairly and properly. Then Americans might move more swiftly toward a society where such differences would no longer matter.

Unfortunately, history seems to be given such a low priority in today's schools that I sometimes wonder whether Woodson's dream day is slipping further away.

Dru Sefton, for the Newhouse News Service (Feb. 2004):

Rosie the Riveter -- the collective nickname evokes images of American women going from kitchens to factories in a home-front effort to win World War II, then relinquishing those jobs to returning soldiers after fighting ceased.

But the reality is far more nuanced, shaped by a massive propaganda effort, entrenched gender and race issues, and the need to move into a postwar consumer economy.

"Generalizations assume that all Rosies were the same, with the same motivations," said Sherna Berger Gluck, author of"Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, the War and Social Change."

Not so, Gluck said. Black women, for instance,"had a chance to earn very good money for the first time, and they wanted to keep those jobs."

The experiences of women who toiled stateside will be part of the new Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historical Park, under construction in Richmond, Calif. The park, which focuses on the entire home-front experience during the war, is gathering stories and artifacts for its Rosies section. Assistance in the effort is provided by sponsors including Ford Motor Co. (www.ford.com/go/rosie).

The 150-acre park on San Francisco Bay north of Oakland is at the site of four Henry Kaiser Shipyards that produced 747 ships, more than any other domestic wartime complex. A Ford assembly plant was also there; workers built nearly 50,000 Jeeps and 90,000 tanks.

The home-front effort"was an enormously important part of the war story," said Judy Hart, park superintendent."It was a time of great progress in equal opportunity, mixed with wide and deep discrimination. It was working through, on a personal, one-on-one basis, layers of prejudice and preconceived ideas, that so deeply and permanently changed America forever."

The memorial will strive to capture the diversity of the Rosies."A story this rich and nuanced is best told by the individual," Hart said."Once visitors listen to a number of stories, they will understand just how varied the experience was."

The number of employed women went from 12.8 million in 1940 to 13.9 million in '42, then 15.6 million in April '43 and 17.7 million in July '43, according to 1943 War Manpower Commission figures. Later statistics showed the peak in 1944 at 18.4 million -- more than 35 percent of the work force.

And each Rosie had"very different experiences, depending on where she was in her life cycle," said Gluck, director of the Oral History Program at California State University, Long Beach. She spent four years listening to Rosies before her book, a collection of reminiscences, came out in 1987.

After the war,"Some stayed in the work force, some got married, some went back home, others went home but returned to work in the 1950s," Gluck said.

It's hard to get precise figures, Gluck said, but it's estimated that half the women working on aircraft production in Los Angeles during the Korean War were former Rosies.