Roundup: Talking About History
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.
Rebecca Solnit, in www.tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute (May 6, 2004):
The law of unexpected consequences prevails so frequently that perhaps it should not be so unexpected. For example, Laura Bush's attempt early last year to hold a symposium on"Poetry and the American Voice" while her husband was planning to saturation-bomb Baghdad so appalled poet, publisher and symposium invitee Sam Hamill that he circulated a letter of outrage to Ms. Bush; his e-mail box filled up; he started poetsagainstthewar.org, to which more than ten thousand poets submitted poems; and so he became a major spokesperson against the war and an organizer of antiwar poets. Laura Bush's symposium was cancelled. In much the same way, the plans to celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus's crash into the Americas were overwhelmed by opposition to...
Jonathan Calt Harris, in National Review (May 5, 2004):
"Nothing in this title shall be construed to authorize the International Advisory Board to mandate, direct, or control an institution of higher education's specific instructional content, curriculum, or program of instruction."
The above sentence is apparently very difficult for academics to understand. It comes from a section of federal legislation — H.R. 3077, Section 633(b) — that has passed the House and is now before the Senate. The bill would establish an advisory board over the portion of government funds (approximately $90...
Lynne Spichiger, Director of Website Exhibits, Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association/Memorial Hall Museum, in a piece written expressly for HNN (April 29, 2004):
In the pre-dawn hours of February 29, 1704, a force of 240 French and Native allies launched a daring, surprise, three-hour raid on the English settlement of Deerfield, Massachusetts. By the end of the attack, 112 Deerfield men, women, and children were taken captive on a 300-mile forced march to Canada in brutal winter conditions. Some of the captives were later"redeemed" and returned to Deerfield, but some chose to remain living among their former French and Native captors.
For 300 years, this assault in contested lands has been interpreted via the dominant European viewpoint: as an unprovoked, brutal attack on an innocent village of English settlers. But the same event can be seen as a justified military action...
Peter Balakian, professor of English and the humanities at Colgate University, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (May 4, 2004):
On a recent book tour for The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response, I was asked by an eminent Armenian psychiatrist how I was able to write about massacre, deportation, rape, and torture without becoming depressed or even incapacitated. He told me that in his own course on trauma he found it nearly impossible to teach about the Armenian Genocide because it caused him such pain.
My response was not psychological. I would imagine that any writer who writes about the worst things human beings can do to each other has to deal, in a personal way, with the weight of those realities. Working in such domains can be depressing and even traumatic. You can feel as if you are living in an alternate universe. In my own case, many of my...
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