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.
[Mr. Lewis is a former general director of the Institute of Economic Affairs, London.]
On Oct. 21 1805, off Cape Trafalgar on the Spanish coast, Admiral Lord Nelson won the greatest battle in the annals of sail, routing Napoleon's Navy without losing a single ship himself. The Queen launches this year's bicentennial celebrations in Portsmouth today. It's understandable that the British should honor a triumph that put paid to Napoleon's plans for invading their island, and began a century in which Britannia ruled the waves.
Why should anyone but the Brits commemorate the birth of British imperialism? In addition to the French, Americans look back on that era with misgivings. Trafalgar marked the start of the worst period of Anglo-American relations on record that culminated in an unnecessary war in 1812.
The British blockade of...
[Mr. Brookhiser is the author of "Alexander Hamilton, American" (Free Press, 2000) and the forthcoming "What Would the Founders Do? Our Problems, Their Solutions" (Basic).]
When I was a boy my family had a Time-Life book on the mind which featured a chart of the presumed IQs of famous dead men. Goethe, as I recall, led the pack, at 210. But the Founding Fathers did very well: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington all scored over 150. As the Fourth of July approaches, we'd do well to remember that the Founders were a smart lot, with few gentleman's Cs among them. Yet they didn't know everything. They were strongest in law, political philosophy, and history -- all essential subjects for revolutionaries and statesmen. But another subject, equally vital to the success and happiness of...
Chester Finn, in the newsletter of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation (6-16-05):
Philadelphia's public school system, under the leadership of Paul Vallas, has been making so much progress on so many fronts that it's a special disappointment when they blunder. But blunder they are doing.
In February, the"School Reform Commission" voted to offer courses in African and African American history in the city's high schools. Last week, the district decreed that every high school student, beginning with September's freshman class, will be required to take a year-long course in African and African-American history. That course, tentatively slated for 10th grade, becomes one of the 23.5 units required for graduation and joins U.S. history, world history, and geography on the list of mandatory high-school social studies courses. (Nobody has said what will happen to the African-American parts of the U.S. history course or the African parts of...
Q: As a historian what are you trying to accomplish with this book? What's your goal here?
DM: I want people to see that all-important time in a different way-in the way it was. For of a number of reasons, including the absence of photographs, we tend to see the men and women of the Revolution as not quite real. And we have far too little sense of what they suffered. Unlike the people you see in Mathew Brady's photographs from the Civil War, the men and women of the Revolution seem more like characters in a costume pageant. And it's a pageant in which the performers are all handsome as stage actors, with uniforms and dress that are always costume perfect. I want to be inside that other time. I want to...
Michael Cross-Barnet, in LA Times (6-26-05)
[Mr. Cross-Barnet, formerly an editor at the Los Angeles Times, is an editor at the Baltimore Sun.]
The letter hasn't yellowed much since it arrived on a summer's day in 1955. And the words have lost none of their power.
"You are hereby commanded to appear before the Internal Security Subcommittee … of the Senate of the United States," the subpoena declares.
It was addressed to my father at the New York Times, where he was a copy editor. Senators investigating communism in newspapers wanted to ask Melvin Barnet about his politics and the people he knew from his days as a young radical in the 1930s.
Two choices with profound consequences followed soon after. The first, my father's, cost him his career. The second was...
Joshua Wolf Shenk, in Time Magazine (7-4-05)
[Mr. Shenk is the author of Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness, to be published in September by Houghton Mifflin.]
... after 140 years of manipulation, can Lincoln's memory ever again find its true shape?
Abraham Lincoln died shortly after 7 a.m. on April 15, 1865. "Now he belongs to the ages," Edwin Stanton, Lincoln's Secretary of War, said at the President's deathbed. It was a prescient thought, because it suggested not only the long cultural presence ahead for Lincoln but also the fact that generations would possess him.
From the start, his memory was molded to serve a purpose. When telegraph wires clicked with the news that Lincoln had been shot at Ford's Theatre, the nation was facing the monumental and confounding task of...
John Tierney, in the NYT (6-25-05):
The actors from HBO's "Deadwood" are coming to the scene of their crimes today, and they can expect a hero's welcome when they pose for pictures on Main Street. Some people in the real Deadwood are offended by the series' lurid language and scenes, but the ones who work in the tourist industry recognize a central truth about the Old West: violence sells...
...But if you talk to some historians and economists about Deadwood and the rest of the West, you get a much different picture from what's on television - or what's been taught in history classes.
These revisionists' history, unlike the one now fashionable in academia, is not a grim saga of settlers exploiting one another, annihilating natives and despoiling nature. Nor is it...
Roy Rosenzweig, in the Chronicle for Higher Education (6-24-05):
[Mr. Rosenzweig is a professor of history and new media at George Mason University and director of the university's Center for History and New Media. He is co-author, with Daniel J. Cohen, of Digital History: A Guide to Preserving, Presenting, and Gathering the Past on the Web, scheduled to be published in the fall by the University of Pennsylvania Press.]
"What's the big deal?" was the grumpy question of a fellow participant in a workshop at the Library of Congress in the summer of 1996. The library was showing off its still very new digital archive, which it had dubbed American Memory. The workshop aimed to show how the Web-based repository of photographs, documents, newspapers, films, maps, and sounds could transform teaching. My...
Anne Applebaum, in the Washington Post (6-22-05):
According to its director, the Smithsonian's Museum of American History needs new plumbing, new wiring and better lighting. So desperately does the building require renovation, in fact, that there is talk of shutting the whole place down for a year or two, of bringing in some fresher architecture, even of designing a "museum for the 21st century." But while they're at it, maybe the curators of this hugely popular, hugely prominent museum on the Mall should also spend some time talking about what, precisely, their museum is for .
I realize this is no easy task. Probably best known to generations of Washington children for its large collection of trains, the Museum of American History is the one part of the Smithsonian that justly deserves to be called "the nation's attic...
[Mr. Dreier, professor of politics and director of the Urban & Environmental Policy program at Occidental College, is co-author of Place Matters: Metropolitics for the 21st Century (University Press of Kansas, 2005) and The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City (University of California Press, 2005).]
On June 13, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution apologizing for its failure to adopt federal anti-lynching legislation, first proposed 105 years ago at a time when lynchings were a frequent occurrence. In the first half of the 20th century, several hundred anti-lynching laws were filed in Congress, and three were passed by the House of Representatives, but the Senate -- controlled by Southern Democrats, who used the filibuster -- consistently refused to adopt the law. One of the most powerful was Richard...
Michael Dobbs, in Washington Post (6-20-05)
The Watergate scandal had reached a peak, and President Richard M. Nixon was furious about press leaks. His suspicions focused on the number two man at the FBI, W. Mark Felt, a 31-year bureau veteran. He ordered his aides to "confront" the presumed traitor.
Another man may have panicked. Over the previous six months, Felt had been meeting secretly with Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, helping him and fellow Post reporter Carl Bernstein with a series of sensational scoops about the abuse of presidential...
Jeremy Hildreth, in the WSJ (6-14-05):
[Mr. Hildreth is co-author of Brand America: The Mother of All Brands, out now from Cyan Books.]
In the 1920s, one quarter of the world's population fell under the rule of the British Empire. And while it's more popular to decry its consequences, the empire brought education, relative prosperity and the concept of liberty to many far-flung places.
Roughly twice the size of Spain's empire, thrice that of France's and five times larger than the Roman Empire, the British Empire remains the greatest such agglomeration the world has ever known. The Brits had their shortcomings and foibles -- slavery, brutality, a tendency to call adult servants "boy," etc -- but in the Anglophone hegemony department, they're a tough act to follow.
The museum, which has many photographs and...
James Oliver Horton, for Historynow.org (6-18-05):
[Mr. Horton is the Benjamin Banneker Professor of American Studies and History at George Washington University.]
... The March on Washington at which King delivered his speech was the largest political demonstration in U.S. history that had occurred up to that point, an inspiring occasion. It was a day filled with lofty words from a range of speakers, from NAACP president Roy Wilkins and John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to actor Charlton Heston representing a contingent of artists, including Harry Belafonte, Marlon Brando, Diahann Carroll, Ossie Davis, Sammy Davis Jr., Lena Horne, Paul Newman, and Sidney Poitier. Heston read a speech prepared by the African American writer James Baldwin, and John Lewis then reflected the sentiment of the day with his declaration that, “We...
David Waldstreicher, for Historynow.org (6-18-05):
[Mr. Waldstreicher is a Professor of History at Temple University]
The Fourth of July, or Independence Day, as it has come to be known, is perhaps the most and the least American of holidays. It is the most American because it marks the beginning of the nation, because it rapidly became an occasion for expressing what America is all about, and because it is locally and voluntarily observed. It is the least American because it was created mostly out of English material.
Beginning in the sixteenth century, at times of great controversy over matters of church and state, people in the British Isles began to use official and unofficial anniversaries in order to make political statements. Celebrating – or refusing to celebrate – the monarch could be controversial when questions of dynastic succession or...
Pavel Litvinov, in the Washington Post (6-18-05):
[Mr. Litvinov was a dissident active in human rights causes in the Soviet Union, now lives in the United States.]
Several days ago I received a telephone call from an old friend who is a longtime Amnesty International staffer. He asked me whether I, as a former Soviet "prisoner of conscience" adopted by Amnesty, would support the statement by Amnesty's executive director, Irene Khan, that the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba is the "gulag of our time."
"Don't you think that there's an enormous difference?" I asked him.
"Sure," he said, "but after all, it attracts attention to the problem of Guantanamo detainees."
The word "gulag" was a bureaucratic acronym for the main prison administration in Stalin's...
Isaac Herzog, in the NYT (6-18-05):
[Mr. Herzog is Israel's minister of construction and housing.]I recently received a letter from a former high school teacher of mine in Tel Aviv. He was liberated from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp by a British Army unit in which my father served. Now, he was criticizing me for working on the government's plan to withdraw from 21 Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip and 4 in the West Bank. "How dare you pull Jews out of their homes?" he wrote. "This is just like what the Nazis did to us!"
Unfortunately, I am no longer surprised when a Jew compares me and other Israeli officials to Nazis. It has become part of the rhetoric of those who oppose withdrawal, including the tiny minority who threaten violent resistance. But my old teacher was not threatening me; he was crying out as if in the middle of a nightmare....
John
Barrett, From his Jackson List (6-15-05):
[Mr. Barrett is the editor of the memoirs of of Supreme Court Justice Robert
Jackson.]
After “Deep Throat” was identified definitively two weeks ago, I read for the first time former senior FBI official W. Mark Felt’s previously little-noticed memoir, The FBI Pyramid from the Inside (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1979). Felt’s book, which he published while awaiting federal trial for conspiring to violate civil rights by approving illegal house searches, is a spirited defense of the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover.
I was interested, and amused, to read in the book Felt’s categorical denials (see pp. 225-26, 249; cf. p. 259) that he had been Bob Woodward’s Watergate source. It also—of course—caught my eye that Felt began his very first...
Jim Sleeper, in the American Prospect (6-17-05):
[Mr. Sleeper, a lecturer in political science at Yale, examines tensions between American market hedonism and moral education in the 40th-anniversary issue of the quarterly Salmagundi, out this fall.]
“Ranting like yours against capitalism is so over,” a vaguely neoconservative friend and writer of learned essays chided me last winter as I ranted, indeed, against proposals to privatize Social Security. Recently, another writer-acquaintance, David Brooks, chided French and Dutch voters for rebuffing “higher living standards” (more jobs and consumer goods) by refusing to ratify the European Union’s proposed constitution, in an effort to defend their outmoded social-welfare networks and their ineffable “quality of life.”
But if resistance...
