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.
Richard B. Frank, in the Weekly Standard (8-8-05)
[Richard B. Frank, a historian of World War II, is the author of Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire.]
The sixtieth anniversary of Hiroshima seems to be shaping up as a subdued affair--though not for any lack of significance. A survey of news editors in 1999 ranked the dropping of the atomic bomb on August 6, 1945, first among the top one hundred stories of the twentieth century. And any thoughtful list of controversies in American history would place it near the top again. It was not always so. In 1945, an overwhelming majority of Americans regarded as a matter of course that the United States had used atomic bombs to end the Pacific war. They further believed that those bombs had actually ended the war and saved...
[Mr. Bloom is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale. This essay is adapted from his introduction to "Leaves of Grass (July, 1855 ed.)," just published by Penguin Classics.]
If you are American, then Walt Whitman is your imaginative father and mother, even if, like myself, you have never composed a line of verse.
You can nominate a fair number of literary works as candidates for the secular Scripture of the United States. They might include Melville's "Moby-Dick," Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," and Emerson's two series of "Essays" and "The Conduct of Life." None of those, not even Emerson's, are as central as the first edition of "Leaves of Grass," whose 150th anniversary we now mark.
Whitman, the American bard, our Homer and our Milton, broke the new road for the New...
David Broder, in the Wa Po (7-28-05):
Along with millions of others, my granddaughters Lauren, Nicole and Julia eagerly tore open the boxes containing"Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" as soon as the books arrived at the airport near the cabin where they were on vacation. They then disappeared into their rooms -- barely to reappear for the next 24 hours, while they were devouring the sixth in the best-selling series.
And thereby they proved David McCullough's point. Late last month, the prolific historian had said in a Senate hearing that his examination of school history textbooks had shown a disquieting trend. Over the years, he said, he has noticed that the typeface in those books is growing larger, the illustrations are more lavish and the content is shrinking. The authors and the teachers using these textbooks"seem...
David Kennedy, in Time (7- 25-05):
[Kennedy teaches history at Stanford University and is working on a book about the American national character.]
His left hand resting on an inexpensive Gideon Bible, Harry S Truman took the presidential oath of office on April 12, 1945. It was an extra 13 days before he received his first substantial briefing on the U.S. effort to develop an atomic weapon--a process fast approaching its climactic stage after more than three years of colossal expense, toil and urgency. Neither Secretary of War Henry Stimson nor Leslie Groves, overseer of the vast atomic project, was in a particular hurry to get the new President's ear because they knew that all the important choices about the Bomb had already been settled. Their conversation with the President on April 25 proceeded accordingly. "Within four months we shall in all probability have...
William Fowler, in the Boston Globe (7-23-05):
[William Fowler is director of the Massachusetts Historical Society.]
IT IS TIME for Massachusetts to recognize a great wrong. Two hundred and fifty years ago this summer, Massachusetts helped launch a brutal campaign of ''ethnic cleansing" against the Acadians of modern day New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.
In the early part of the 17th century hundreds of French peasant families migrated from France and settled in a region they called L'Acadie (modern day New Brunswick and Nova Scotia). These families diked and farmed the rich marshlands bordering the Bay of Fundy. Isolated from the principal French settlements in the Saint Lawrence River Valley, the Acadians evolved a distinct culture, one that drew heavily upon their native Micmac neighbors with whom they often...
Editor's Note: David Horowitz, the editor and founder of the conservative website, FrontPageMagazine.com, invited historian Timothy Burke to review Mr. Horowitz's recent book, Unholy Alliance. Mr. Horowitz published the review and his response; both are reprinted below. (Click here for Mr. Horowitz's response.) In an email to HNN Mr. Horowitz expressed his dissatisfaction with the review and offered a reward :
I invited Burke to take on my book because I regarded him as one of the more thoughtful academic leftists. What he came up with still amazes me. Instead of a review of the book he constructed an entire article that had almost nothing to do with what I had written to put me in my (non-academic) place. If you want to run the exchange you could note that I will offer similar space on my site (with a $150 remuneration) to an HNN historian who will actually respond to the argument of the book...
Alan Dershowitz, at frontpagemag.com (7-21-05):
“Give me a child for the first seven years and you may do what you like with him afterwards.”
This cynical defense of the brainwashing of children has been attributed variously to Stalin, Lenin and several religions and cults. Robert Shetterly, the author of a new book for young adolescents, apparently believes that propaganda is just as effective with impressionable boys and girls in their early teens. His seductive picture book entitled Americans who Tell the Truth, published by Dutton Children’s Books, would have brought a smile to the face of Uncle Joe Stalin.
In the guise of a “heartfelt book” that “grew out of soul-searching after 9/11,” Shetterly, has written a deceptive homage to radicals of the hard left. He glorifies such “great Americans” as Noam Chomsky, Emma Goldman, Howard Zinn, Amy Goodman and Ralph Nader. The irony, of course, is that...
At the end of last year a friend contacted me who was taking a course titled “Politics of the Middle East” at Diablo Valley College, a small community college located in northern California. My friend knew I frequently write about academic matters, particularly concerning anti-Israel and anti-U.S. indoctrination on US college campuses. And he asked me to help provide some written research materials for him to use for a verbal presentation in his class. He called me later to complain.
“You’ll never believe this,” he told me. “The instructor, an imam, dismisses the class, then he spreads paper towels from the restroom on the floor and prays facing East in the classroom for fifteen minutes during school hours. Talk about a separation of church and state in the classroom,” he complained.
“But was...
Daniel Pipes, in the NY Sun (7-19-05):
[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.]
Something possibly unprecedented has occurred in the battle with radical Islam. A leading Islamist organization has retracted its slurs against me and issued a public apology. This offers a small but important step in blocking the advance of Islamic extremism.
The imbroglio began more than two years ago, when President Bush nominated me for a position in the federal government. Leftists and Islamists opposed my appointment; one tactic they used was to try to get me to...
Thomas Woods, at lewrockwell.com (7-13-05):
In the course of promoting my new book, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, I have made the point that major historians of science today no longer hold the simplistic position that"religion" has been nothing but an obstacle to"science." This contention doubtless comes as a surprise to some people, since most of us have gone through life hearing and being taught that very idea.
The standard view was given its classical expression by Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) in his two-volume History...
Che Guevara, who did so much (or was it so little?) to destroy capitalism, is now a quintessential capitalist brand. His likeness adorns mugs, hoodies, lighters, key chains, wallets, baseball caps, toques, bandannas, tank tops, club shirts, couture bags, denim jeans, herbal tea, and of course those omnipresent T-shirts with the photograph, taken by Alberto Korda, of the socialist heartthrob in his beret during the early years of the revolution, as Che happened to walk into the photographer's viewfinder--and into the image that, thirty-eight years after his death, is still the logo of revolutionary (or is it capitalist?) chic. Sean O'Hagan claimed in The Observer that there is even a soap powder with the slogan "Che washes whiter."
Che products are marketed by big corporations and small businesses, such as the Burlington Coat Factory, which put out a television commercial depicting a...
[Alan Dershowitz is a professor of law at Harvard. His latest book is The Case For Peace (Wiley Aug 2005).]
Remember Professor Rashid Khalidi? He is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University and director of its Middle East Institute. He is a big part of Columbia’s anti-Israel problem, having infamously said, among other hateful utterances, that “the tragedy of September 11 was a godsend” to “American Likudniks and their Israeli counterparts” because it “enabled them to draft the United States to help fight Israel’s enemies.”[1] Now a serious charge of plagiarism has been leveled against Khalidi. This gives rise to a challenge not only to Columbia, but also to his triumvirate of anti-Israel supporters who commonly use the nuclear charge of “plagiarism” against their ideological enemies.
For more than 20 years the terrible triumvirate of Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, and Alexander...
[Mr. Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author, most recently, of "Thomas Jefferson: Author of America" (HarperCollins, 2005).]
All through the years 2003 and 2004 one used to hear it: "So, you think your Iraqi friends are about to adopt Jeffersonian democracy . . ." (pause for hilarious nudge, sneer, snigger or wink). After a bit too much of this at one debate in downtown New York, I managed to buy some time, and even get a laugh, by riposting that Iraqi democracy probably wouldn't be all that "Jeffersonian," since none of my Iraqi comrades owned any slaves. But I was conscious, here, of trading partly in the stupid currency of my opponents. (I would now phrase matters a little more assertively: The United States has yet to elect a black or Jewish president, while the Iraqi Parliament chose a Kurd as...
... In his brisk, balanced history of America's debates about God's public role, Feldman pokes one hole after another in the assumptions of activists on all sides of today's religious wars. Contemporary religious conservatives seem to think that Christian rules and assumptions pervaded everything about the early republic. They probably don't know (I didn't until I read Feldman) that when the Post Office was established Congress "legislated for seven-day mail delivery without anyone initially raising the problem of Sabbath violation." It was not until 1828, "with national religious consciousness growing," that religious leaders began complaining that post offices, "which doubled as...
Alexander O. Boulton, in a communication to HNN (7-8-05):
[Alexander O. Boulton, Associate Professor History, Villa Julie College.]
As a college professor who has taught World and U.S. History for over a dozen years, I am glad to see so many historical references in the news lately. Most of this recent attention to history is the result of Senator Richard Durbin’s remarks suggesting that American treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo might be compared to acts performed “by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags or . . . Pol Pot.” Apparently, many people were offended by his comments, but I was glad to see, in the uproar that followed, that there was a general assumption that most people shared some basic knowledge of these historic events. I was glad to see that most people seemed to be aware of Hitler’s campaign to exterminate Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals. I am not so sure, however, judging by my own students’ knowledge of history, that...
James Taranto, in the WSJ (7-6-06):
Roe v. Wade is a study in unanticipated consequences. By establishing a constitutional right to abortion, the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court no doubt thought they were settling the issue for good, accelerating a process of liberalization that was already under way in 1973. But instead of consensus, the result was polarization. The issue of abortion soon after, and for the first time, took a prominent place in national political campaigns. By 1980, both major political parties had adopted extreme positions--Republicans favoring a"pro-life" constitutional amendment to ban abortion, and Democrats opposing virtually all regulation on"pro-choice" grounds. Every presidential and vice-presidential nominee since then has toed the party line on abortion.
Polarization over abortion coincided with a period of Republican ascendancy. Since the parties split on abortion,...
This article was the subject of a Cliopatria Symposium
Gary Nash, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (7-1-05) (subscribers only):
"Who shall write the history of the American Revolution? Who can write it? Who will ever be able to write it?" Thus wrote John Adams in 1815 to Thomas Jefferson. "Nobody," Jefferson replied from Monticello, "except merely its external facts. ... The life and soul of history must be forever unknown."
Not so. For more than two centuries, historians have written about the American Revolution, striving to capture the "life and soul" of which Jefferson spoke. We now possess a rich and multistranded tapestry of the Revolution, filled with engaging biographies, local narratives, weighty explorations of America's greatest explosion of political thinking, annals of...
[Bill Witherup is a poet living in Seattle who writes on labor, nuclear issues, and prisons. His latest book is Down Wind, Down River: New and Selected Poems (West End Press, 2000). A longer version of this essay appears in the July 2005 issue of Political Affairs. Posted at Japan Focus on June 30, 2005.]
July 16, 2005, will be the sixtieth anniversary of the plutonium-fueled atomic
bomb, tested at White Sands, New Mexico. On July 15th and 16th the Los Alamos
Study Group, a nuclear-weapons watchdog, based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, will
hold poetry readings and a silent auction in Santa Fe and Albuquerque. John
Bradley, a fellow poet, and editor of Atomic Ghost: Poets Respond to the Nuclear
Age (1995), and Learning to Glow: A Nuclear Reader (2000), and this writer,
are two of the writers invited to participate.
As my father helped in the manufacture of the plutonium used...
Gary Younge, in the Naton (7-11-05):
For Buford Posey, a white man raised in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the Second World War had a civilizing influence."When I was coming up in Mississippi I never knew it was against the law to kill a black man," he says."I learned that when I went in the Army. I was 17 years old. When they told me, I thought they were joking."
For several decades Posey's assumption about the relative value of black life was effectively borne out by the state's judiciary. Among others, the murders of 14-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Till, in Money in 1955; the state's NAACP chairman Medgar Evers, in Jackson in 1963; the three young civil rights workers--James Chaney (21), Andrew Goodman (20) and Michael Schwerner (24)--in Philadelphia in 1964; and civil rights supporter Vernon Dahmer, in Hattiesburg in 1966 all went unpunished.
But recently history has been...
