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.
I recently received a request from the chair of the Harvard University department of history for help in a search to fill a tenured position in a designated subfield (I'm being intentionally vague here) of U.S. history. Neither an invitation to apply myself nor a request for other nominations, the letter rather asked me to evaluate a list of seven scholars, and add others if desired, "both in absolute terms and relative to one another." Less than two years previously, as part of the promotion-and-tenure process within our department at Chicago, I had similarly been asked to rank a particular candidate in relation to an enumerated list of academic peers. Complying with the request on that occasion, I had nevertheless expressed serious reservations about the process.
My complaint in that instance having obviously fallen on deaf ears, I have...
[Steve Fraser is a writer and historian living in New York. Gary Gerstle is a professor of history at the University of Maryland at College Park. This essay is adapted from the book they edited, Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy, published this month by Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2005 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.]
... Over the last quarter-century, historians have by and large ceased writing about the role of ruling elites in the country's evolution. Or if they have taken up the subject, they have done so to argue against its salience for grasping the essentials of American political history. Yet there is something peculiar about this recent intellectual aversion, even if we accept as true the beliefs that democracy, social mobility, and economic dynamism have...
Sara Dogan, at frontpagemag.com (3-28-05):
[Sara Dogan is National Campus Director of Students for Academic Freedom.]
Since its inception, the Academic Bill of Rights has endured frequent criticism from members of the academy, who claim that its tenets will infringe on professors’ right to free expression in the classroom. These opponents most often cite the Bill’s statement that faculty have an obligation to make students aware of the “spectrum of significant scholarly views” on the subjects they teach and the prohibition on using the classroom “for purposes of political, ideological, religious, or anti-religious indoctrination.”
We have repeatedly pointed out that the precepts of our Bill are taken directly from official pronouncements on academic freedom made by the American Association of University Professors. As the principal...
[Gil Troy is professor of history at McGill University and the author of ''Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s."]
THE MFA'S exhibit ''Speed, Style, and Beauty: Cars from the Ralph Lauren Collection" is ridiculous, excessive, and fun, indulging everyone's inner shopper. ''The cars are equally as unattainable as any Gaugin, but we imagine owning them," MFA curator Darcy Kuronen told an interviewer, equating great art and flashy sports cars as just more toys to crave. Yet this shameless exhibit of exhibitionism, celebrating Ralph Lauren...
It's been nine years since Annie Gilbert Coleman last did traditional downhill skiing, and although the falling snow makes it a little tough to see and she's using unfamiliar equipment, she quickly finds the one "black diamond" slope here at tiny Swiss Valley....
Taking a break after a few more runs, we shake fresh snow from our hats and clunk our way toward a table in the wood-beamed lunchroom. Ski areas like this, in flat, Midwestern farm country, "can't claim the scenery" or terrain of Europe, as do the Colorado resorts, Ms. Coleman says. But, she notes, gesturing out the window to the A-frame dining lodge below, "they can do the Alpine references" in the architecture. And of course, they can do it with their names.
"It's a prototypical local ski area," she says.
Or, as she will later announce cheerfully to her husband...
And Judas Iscariot who also betrayed him ..." With these words, St Mark ends his list of the chosen 12 apostles. It's the first mention of Judas, and it stamps him indelibly. Throughout the Christian centuries, red-haired, yellow-gowned Judas has been a synonym for traitor; a Judas- king signifying treachery towards one to whom you owe loyalty ....
Scholars have, however, been questioning his role, and asking why the Church for centuries laid such stress on it. That role has actually always been ambiguous, if only because the Gospels insist that Jesus knew that one of his apostles would betray him, "that the scriptures might be fulfilled". If so, then Judas may be seen almost as a scapegoat, the man forced by destiny to play this part. One may ask why it was necessary that one of the apostles should betray him since...
[Francis Fukuyama is a professor of international political economy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the author, most recently, of ''State-Building.'']
THIS year is the 100th anniversary of the most famous sociological tract ever written, ''The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,'' by Max Weber. It was a book that stood Karl Marx on his head. Religion, according to Weber, was not an ideology produced by economic interests (the ''opiate of the masses,'' as Marx had put it); rather, it was what had made the modern capitalist world possible. In the present decade, when cultures seem to be clashing and religion is frequently blamed for the failures of modernization and democracy in the Muslim world, Weber's book and ideas deserve a fresh look.
Weber's argument centered on...
The idea that the French respect their intellectuals dies hard among the British. And when you wander around the streets of any French city it's easy to see why. Rues Voltaire, Hugo and Racine tend to recur just round the corner from the equally conventional Rue Bonaparte. At municipal and state level, French government likes to claim its cultural reputation by acclaiming the glorious cultured dead. La terre et les morts , happily, includes les intellos as well as the cavalry.
London's geographical centre, by contrast, records no Shakespeare Square, Milton Street or Dickens Place. Instead, we have Trafalgar Square - and nearby Waterloo Place. War and bloodshed - preferably of a Frog-bashing kind - is what the official mind of Britain has traditionally gone for when it wants to claim some public space for its own values.
Both France's British admirers and her critics can seize on this fact and use it to support their case....
The revolution may not be televised, but it will probably be reenacted.
Around for decades, re-creating historical events for television is flourishing as never before. Once viewed as unsophisticated, hopelessly inaccurate and at times even cheesy, the reenactments are now a documentary staple able to inject thrilling action sequences and emotional complexities into the conventional, staider format of narration, static visuals, archival footage and talking-head interviews. Although the hybrid technique of combining the documentary and docudrama style is winning newfound respect, it still rankles traditionalists concerned over the blurring of reality and fiction.
The technique recently rocketed to national attention as E! Entertainment began unrolling its daily reenactments of the Michael Jackson trial. While Jackson redux continues to draw smirks and darts from cultural critics, reenactments nevertheless are being credited...
Robert Spencer, at frontpagemag.com (3-22-05):
[Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch; author of Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West (Regnery), and Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith (Encounter); and editor of the essay collection The Myth of Islamic Tolerance: Islamic Law and Non-Muslims (Prometheus). He is working on a new book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the Crusades (forthcoming from Regnery).]
Ever mindful of keeping the West on the defensive and portraying it as the guilty party in today’s global jihad, Al-Azhar (the highest ranking religious authority in Egypt and most respected Sunni Muslim authority in the world), has asked the Vatican for an official apology for the Crusades. Sheikh Fawzi Zafzaf, President of the Interfaith Dialogue Committee of Al-Azhar...
[Laurel Leff is associate professor of in the School of Journalism at Northeastern University and author of Buried by The Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper, which has just been published by Cambridge University Press. This article was made available by The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies.]
Controversy has erupted over C-Span’s plan to broadcast a speech by a Holocaust denier to “balance” broadcast of remarks by a Holocaust scholar.
“Balance” is a cherished concept for journalists, but sometimes it can run amok. Consider the textbook, The Reporter and the News, a 1935 volume that was then used to train American journalists. The book offers a startling example of a news story that needs to be “balanced,” that demands that “both sides in a controversial matter be given a...
On March 31, Rashid Khalidi, Columbia's Edward Said Professor, will deliver what the New York Sun has called a "job talk" at Princeton. Earlier this month, the paper reported that "Khalidi has thrown his hat into the ring for the Niehaus chair in contemporary Muslim studies at Princeton and to take charge of that university's Transregional Institute, according to the sources, who are at the New Jersey school."
At Columbia, Khalidi directs the Middle East Institute, and its scope is fairly obvious from its name. But what is the Transregional Institute? It's short for the Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa, and Central...
Scott Sherman, in the Nation (3-16-05):
In December 2003 Rabbi Charles Sheer, the director of the Columbia/Barnard chapter of Hillel, the Jewish campus organization, dispatched an e-bulletin to alumni, students and supporters. There was much to report: In 2002 a movement of students and professors had urged Columbia to divest from companies that manufactured and sold weaponry to Israel. In the end, Rabbi Sheer had vanquished the prodivestment forces with a well-executed campaign that garnered 33,000 signatures. "There have not been any major divestment campaigns on any US campus, and almost no anti-Israel student-initiated activity--speakers, films or demonstrations--on our campus," Sheer noted with pride. "That's the good news." The bad news? "The battleground regarding the Middle East at Columbia University has shifted to the classroom....
Serge Schmemann, in the NYT (3-22-05):
There was a lot of talk 10 years ago, when the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II was being celebrated, that the great war was finally over. Europe was one again, Germany and Japan (not to mention Italy) were fully back in the democratic fold, the "greatest generation" was having a grand last hurrah, a new century was about to dawn. Now here comes the 60th, and suddenly the old resentments are out again in force.
First there were the rumbles over whether Germany should participate at D-Day ceremonies (it did). Now the presidents of Estonia and Lithuania have announced they're not going to Moscow for Victory Day festivities - the end of the Nazi occupation, they argue, was simply a change of totalitarian occupier. President Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland accepted the invitation, but urged Russia to...
George F. Kennan, who died last week at 101, was a unique figure in American history. I greatly admired him but disagreed with him profoundly on many critical issues, and, in the 35 years I knew him, I often reflected on this strange paradox.
His extraordinary memoirs had made the idea of a life in the Foreign Service seem both exciting and intellectually stimulating to me. He had watched Joseph Stalin at close hand, and sent Washington an analysis of Russia that became the most famous telegram in U.S. diplomatic history. This was followed closely by the most influential article ever written on American foreign policy, the "X" article in Foreign Affairs, which offered an easily understood, single-word description for a policy ("containment") that our nation was to pursue for 40 years -- with ultimate success...
Jacob Heilbrunn, an editorial writer for The Los Angeles Times, is completing a book on neoconservatism.
Douglas J. Feith was becoming excited. After spending an afternoon discussing the war in Iraq with him, I asked what books had most influenced him. Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy and a prominent neoconservative, raced across his large library and began pulling down gilt-edged volumes on the British Empire. Behind his desk loomed a bust of Winston Churchill.
It was a telling moment. In England right-wing historians are portraying the last lion as a drunk, a dilettante, an incorrigible bungler who squandered the opportunity to cut a separate peace with Hitler that would have preserved the British Empire. On the American right, by contrast, Churchill idolatry has reached its finest hour. George W...
... If you can see only one of the shows that he [Sen. Ted Stevens (Alaska)] wants to banish or launder, let me recommend the series that probably has more four-letter words, with or without participles, than any in TV history. That would be "Deadwood" on HBO. Its linguistic gait befits its chapter of American history, the story of a gold-rush mining camp in the Dakota Territory of the late 1870's. "Deadwood" is the back story of a joke like "The Aristocrats" and of everything else that is joyously vulgar in American culture and that our new Puritans want to stamp out. It's the ur-text of Vegas and hip-hop and pulp fiction. It captures with Boschian relish what freedom, by turns cruel and comic and exhilarating, looked and sounded like at full throttle in frontier America before anyone got around to building churches or a government.
Its...
Steven Aftergood, in Slate (3-17-05):
The government does a remarkable job of counting the number of national security secrets it generates each year. Since President George W. Bush entered office, the pace of classification activity has increased by 75 percent, said William Leonard in March 2 congressional testimony. His Information Security Oversight Office oversees the classification system and recorded a rise from 9 million classification actions in fiscal year 2001 to 16 million in fiscal year 2004.
Yet an even more aggressive form of government information control has gone unenumerated and often unrecognized in the Bush era, as government agencies have restricted access to unclassified information in libraries, archives, Web sites, and official databases. Once freely available, a growing number of these sources are now barred to the public as "sensitive but unclassified" or "for...
Jeffrey Rosen, in the Atlantic Monthly (April 2005):
[Jeffrey Rosen is a law professor at George Washington University and the legal-affairs editor of The New Republic. He profiled the former attorney general John Ashcroft for The Atlantic last April.]
In his thirty-four years on the Supreme Court, William Rehnquist participated enthusiastically in the annual Christmas party for the justices and their clerks. "He and I wrote the Christmas show the year I clerked for him, in 1975," recalls Craig M. Bradley, who now teaches law at Indiana University.
One carol that year was sung to the tune of "Angels From the Realms of Glory." It went like this: "Liberals from the realm of theory should adorn our highest bench / Though to crooks they're always chary / at police misdeeds they blench." ("The word 'blench' came from Rehnquist," Bradley says. "I didn't...
Max Boot, in the LAT (3-17-05):
To see where the balance of power lies in American academia, look no further than the University of Colorado, where the Ward Churchill scandal has claimed its first victim. No, not Churchill, the professor who gained national notoriety for describing the victims of the World Trade Center attack as"little Eichmanns" who basically deserved what they got. He's stepped down as chairman of the ethnic studies department, but he's still teaching classes and earning $94,242 a year, in spite of the university's attempts to sack him.
It's the university president who's heading out the door. Elizabeth Hoffman tendered her resignation on March 7 because of the Churchill controversy and more familiar problems of hanky-panky in football recruiting and excessive debauchery at student parties. Whatever Hoffman's alleged failings, they are...
