One of the more convenient side-effects of the explosion of interest in family history is that you need never again be stumped for what to give your nearest and dearest for Christmas. Instead of a lacklustre pair of socks or bottle of whisky, what could be more thrilling than a voucher that entitles the grateful recipient to extended access to the online version of the 1901 census?

For we are all historians now, chroniclers not so much of big events like the 1832 reform bill but of what year Auntie Joan went into service, or why Great-Grandfather Billy had to marry only five months before his eldest was born. Our heads are full not of kings and queens but of the housemaids, grocers and sheep stealers whose shreds of DNA make up who we feel ourselves to be today.

You see this new breed of historian every time you enter a local record office on the outskirts of a county town: hunched over microfiche, pencil in hand (Biros count as lethal weapons), in search of...

The textbooks don't explain why the Pilgrims had only a meager harvest in 1621, so we will. For their first two years in Plymouth, the settlers conducted an experiment in communalism. It wasn't until 1623 that they divided the land into private plots and could look forward to the kind of bounty that many of us enjoyed yesterday. In his "History of Plimoth Plantation," the colony's governor, William Bradford, wrote about how the settlers studied human nature and laid the foundation for true Thanksgiving:

All this while no supply was heard of, neither knew they when they might expect any. So they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery.

At length, after much debate of things, the Governor (with the advice of the chiefest amongst them) gave way that they should set corn every man for his own particular.... And so assigned to every family...

[Rodney Stark is university professor of the social sciences at Baylor University. This essay is adapted from The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, to be published in December by Random House.]

When Europeans first began to explore the globe, their greatest surprise was not the existence of the Western Hemisphere, but the extent of their own technological superiority over the rest of the world. Not only were the proud Maya, Aztec, and Inca nations helpless in the face of European intruders, so were the fabled civilizations of the East: China, India, and Islamic nations were "backward" by comparison with 15th-century Europe. How had that happened? Why was it that, although many civilizations had pursued alchemy, the study led to chemistry only in Europe? Why was it that, for centuries, Europeans were the only ones possessed of eyeglasses, chimneys, reliable clocks, heavy cavalry, or a system of music notation?...

Eighty-five years ago, allegations that a black man had tried to assault a white woman in a city elevator spurred hundreds of whites to attack what was one of the country's most prosperous black communities, a bustling neighborhood called Greenwood.

Wess Young was only 3, but he still remembers his mother rousing him from bed in the middle of the night, and the gunshots crackling like fireworks as they ran through the burning streets to escape the riot. Otis Clark, who was 18, recalls blood spraying across him when a friend was shot in the hand as they tried to flee in an ambulance from a local funeral home.

Today, the two are among fewer than 100 known survivors of the May 31-June 1, 1921 riot, for which no one was punished and no reparations ever paid, despite the loss of hundreds of lives, businesses and fortunes. With survivors dying off, activists are hoping to change that, spurred not only by the injustice done to riot victims, but also by the plight of...

One of the oddities of conventional biography is that when the subject is a person of great influence and renown, his or her private life is scanted at best, ignored at worst. We know, for example, that Franklin D. Roosevelt's mother was overbearing and dominating and that he was unhappy in prep school and college, but these crucial aspects of youth usually are noted by his biographers and then passed over, so that the march of great events -- the Depression, the 1932 election, the New Deal, court-packing, World War II -- can be given full-dress treatment. Even the polio that Roosevelt suffered in 1921, when he was 39, goes little mentioned once its onset and treatment have been discussed and analyzed.

This is in strange contrast to biographies of writers, artists, movie stars and others of "creative" bent, whose most intimate secrets are explored, often with obvious relish, either in the hope that they can explain the sources of the subjects' art or for gossip...

[Yuki Tanaka, Hiroshima Peace Institute, is a Japan Focus Coordinator and author of Hidden Horrors. Japanese War Crimes in World War II.]

It is widely believed that the major source of kamikaze suicide pilots was the Air Force Cadet Officer System in the Japanese Imperial Navy and Army Forces, which recruited university and college students on a voluntary basis. In fact, however, the majority of kamikaze pilots were young noncommissioned or petty officers, that is graduates of Navy and Army junior flight training schools. A total of 708 noncommissioned Army officers died as kamikaze pilots, while the total death toll of Army Air Force officer class kamikaze pilots was 621. In the Navy, 1732 petty officers died as kamikaze pilots compared with 782 officers. Many assume that the majority of kamikaze pilots were former college students, because the letters-home, diaries and wills of these young men, who became kamikaze pilots through the Air Force Cadet Officer System, were...

[Harvey A. Silverglate is of counsel to the law firm of Good & Cormier. Norman S. Zalkind is a member of Zalkind, Rodriguez, Lunt & Duncan.]

A FEDERAL lawsuit we recently filed seeks to reaffirm a guiding American legal principle endangered by the ''culture wars," namely the right to an unrestrained mind, free of censorship and state orthodoxies.

Centered broadly on competing historical interpretations of a century-old conflict but, more precisely, on technical evaluations of a recently enacted Massachusetts statute, our lawsuit challenges the Massachusetts Department of Education's attempt to stamp its imprimatur on a single view of history, to the exclusion of all others, on the minds of our high school students.

The plaintiffs are two public school teachers, a high school senior, and the Assembly of Turkish American Associations. Though from different backgrounds and points of view, all the plaintiffs and lawyers in this...

[James E. McWilliams, a history professor at Texas State University at San Marcos, is the author of "A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America."]


...The native American food that the Pilgrims supposedly enjoyed would have offended the palate of any self-respecting English colonist - the colonial minister Charles Woodmason called it "exceedingly filthy and most execrable." Our comfort food, in short, was the bane of the settlers' culinary existence.

Understanding this paradox requires acknowledging that there's no evidence to support the holiday's early association with food - much less foods native to North America. Thanksgiving celebrations occurred irregularly at best after 1621 (the year of the supposed first Thanksgiving) and colonists observed them as strictly religious events (conceivably by fasting).

It wasn't until the mid-19th century that domestic writers began to play down Thanksgiving's...

Japan's Unit 731 remains central to the fiercely contested China-Japan controversy over war crimes and war memory, and to the international debate on science and ethics. With a staff of more than 10,000, including many of Japan’s top medical scientists, 731 and its affiliated units conducted human experiments, including vivisection, on Chinese and other victims in Manchukuo and throughout China between 1933 and 1945. The experiments tested, among other things, the lethality of biological weapons and sought to determine the ability of the human body to survive in the face of various pathogens and in conditions such as extreme cold.

Tsuneishi Keiichi is Japan's leading specialist on biowarfare. His voluminous studies conducted over thirty years in Japan, China, the United States and Europe, have provided core material for all writing hitherto on the Ishii Network. In the following careful resumé essay, he concentrates on organization and function, omitting much of the...