[Jim Duffy is a historian and political commentator.]

Ireland loves its history. But it likes one-sided history. The side may change, depending on each generation's fad, fashion or political correctness.

Take the early 20th century myth: how an oppressed Ireland rose up against its British oppressor in 1916. Not exactly. In reality only a tiny fringe rose. Far from having the country behind them, they needed protection from Dublin mobs, while nationalist newspapers called for the execution of Pearse, Connolly and the rest of the leaders.

Roll on a couple of years to the triumph of republicanism in the 1918 general election, and many of its critics jumped on the 1916 bandwagon, with far more claiming to have been in the GPO than physically would have fitted in the building. And yet, somehow Ireland was neither as anti-British nor as pro-Sinn Fein as the later spin suggested.

Throughout the 1920s Remembrance Sunday wreath-layings at the...

It's 100 years since Greta Lovisa Gustafson was born in the Southern Maternity Hospital in Stockholm. It has been 15 years since her death and more than 60 since she retired from acting, but no one seems any closer to unravelling the enigma of Greta Garbo. Just how did a plump shop assistant in a Stockholm department store become the brightest star in the MGM firmament? And what precisely did Garbo do with her time during that immense hiatus between her final film, Two-Faced Woman, in 1941, and her death in 1990?

The film-maker and historian Kevin Brownlow, whose new documentary Garbo (co-directed with Christopher Bird) was commissioned to mark the centenary, acknowledges that the life of the actress remains shrouded in mystery. He tells about his one near-encounter with his subject. He spotted Garbo, in a street in New York, laden with supermarket bags. At the time, he was desperate to speak to her for a series he was making about Hollywood. 'I tried hard to meet her, but...

Captain Cook: British imperial bully or benevolent explorer? It is a question that historians have been debating for decades, and which is now being tackled by one of Sydney's leading museums.

A new exhibition at the Museum of Sydney, titled "Cook's Sites", consists of a dozen contemporary photographs of places Cook visited during his three voyages of discovery around the Pacific. The photographs are enormous, several metres wide, and are contrasted with sketches and paintings of the same views produced by Cook's official artists more than 200 years ago.
...
Cook has long been regarded as the founding father of white settlement in Australia and New Zealand. Australia's national anthem, Advance Australia Fair, originally contained the unashamedly jingoistic verse:

When gallant Cook from Albion sailed,

To trace wide oceans o'er,

True British courage bore him on,

'Til he landed on our shore.

But...

The title of this exhibition is a bit misleading. Forgotten Empire, the British Museum calls its spectacular resurrection of ancient Persia. Yet the Persians are as notorious in their way as Darth Vader, the Sheriff of Nottingham, General Custer, or any other embodiment of evil empire you care to mention. They are history's original villains.

In its day, which lasted from the middle of the 500s BC until the defeat of Darius III by Alexander the Great in 331 BC, the Persian empire ruled a vast portion of the then-known world from the Nile to the Indus. It connected the Mediterranean with modern Afghanistan. Rich beyond dreams, powerful beyond dispute, the great kings ruled from their mighty palaces at Susa and Persepolis, tolerating the religions and cultures of subject peoples and harvesting the creativity of near eastern civilisation that had already, before they came along, invented writing and urban life. ...

The most vivid portrait of a Persian ruler isn't...

The Saints went marching out, an apt metaphor of Hurricane Katrina, even though it was part of football's footnote to the disaster. The New Orleans Saints played their NFL home games in the Superdome and thus needed a new home. For now, at least, the team's headquarters will be in San Antonio. Meanwhile, more important, hundreds of Pee Wee, high school and college football teams, as well as other fall sports, have also been displaced.


With Americans drowning in their attics, the postponement or relocation of games might seem trivial. But it's not. These games do need to go on.


"Sports needs to be restored as quickly as possible," says Ronald Kamm, immediate past president of the International Society for Sports Psychiatry. "It reduces stress, bonds people and offers a veneer of normalcy."


It might be only a veneer, but it's a critical one in the hurricane's swath -- Southern states where the passion for football...

My mother always told me that when a person dies, one should not say anything bad about him. My mother was wrong. History requires truth, not puffery or silence, especially about powerful governmental figures. And obituaries are a first draft of history.

So here's the truth about Chief Justice Rehnquist you won't hear on Fox News or from politicians. Chief Justice William Rehnquist set back liberty, equality, and human rights perhaps more than any American judge of this generation. His rise to power speaks volumes about the current state of American values.

Let's begin at the beginning. Rehnquist bragged about being first in his class at Stanford Law School. Today Stanford is a great law school with a diverse student body, but in the late 1940s and early 1950s, it discriminated against Jews and other minorities, both in the admission of students and in the selection of faculty. Justice Stephen Breyer recalled an earlier period of Stanford's history: "When...

... [T]here's little dispute that President Bill Clinton got it right when he named James Lee Witt as the FEMA Director in 1993. As amazing as it sounds, Witt was the first FEMA head who came to the position with direct experience in emergency management, having previously served as the Director of the Arkansas Office of Emergency Services for four years.

Witt was among the many Arkansas friends and associates of Clinton who accompanied the President to Washington during his first , term. At the start, however, Witt seemed among the least likely to become a major player in the Administration.

FEMA haq been labeled a "political dumping ground" in one Congressional report, and Senator Ernest F. Hollings, a Democrat from South Carolina, had called the agency "the sorriest bunch of bureaucratic jackasses" he had ever known.

The public and press also held FEMA in low regard, primarily because of how the agency had handled two big...

... Rehnquist was appointed by Richard Nixon to the Supreme Court as an associate justice in 1971 and elevated to chief justice by Ronald Reagan in 1986. Those hearings were marked by accusations that the young Rehnquist had authored a memo, while clerking for Justice Robert Jackson in 1952, advocating for the constitutionality of segregation. He was similarly charged with having intimidated black voters at polling places in Arizona in the 1960s. What Rehnquist didn't do in response to those charges was what Clarence Thomas did: He didn't become bitter, or reclusive, or vengeful. Rehnquist denied them, then moved on, and—for the most part—the public did too.

Rehnquist's early writings could have melted paint. In 1973, when he and Byron White were the only dissenters in Roe v. Wade, his language was uncompromising: "To reach its result, the Court necessarily has had to find within the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment a right that was apparently completely unknown to...

Year Senate Judiciary Committee report on a Supreme Court nominee first published: 1916

Year Senate floor debate on a Supreme Court nomination first opened to public: 1929

Number of nominees who appeared before Senate Judiciary Committee before 1925: 0 (Harlan Fiske Stone was the first)

Number of nominees refused permission to speak before the committee: 1 (John Parker, 1930, later rejected)

Average time between nomination and Senate action on nominees in 19th century: 1 week

Average time between nomination and Senate action on nominees in last third of 20th century: 9 weeks