To the Editors:

In reviewing The Unknown American Revolution by Gary Nash ["The Other Founders," NYR, September 22], Edmund Morgan says that New Left historians have "compensated for political isolation by identifying themselves with the dispossessed of earlier times." He offers no evidence for this canard, which I think is sufficiently rebutted by the activity of Howard Zinn, myself, and many others in the civil rights and antiwar movements.

The essential difference between Morgan and historians who practice what Jesse Lemisch christened "history from the bottom up" becomes clear halfway through Morgan's review. Morgan asserts that it was the Founding Fathers who offered "the most radical challenge" at that time, namely, to declare independence. "Only after that," according to Morgan, "did the views, or rather the attitudes, of the people Nash celebrates begin to find expression in the institutions of the...

Your book spans a range from the myth of Orestes to the trials of Bernhard Goetz and O.J. Simpson. What changes did you observe during that long period?

Trials throughout the pre-modern world were very often explicitly religious rituals. Punishments, meanwhile, treated criminals as pollutants or pests. In ancient Athens, for example, murderers supposedly emitted a vapor that could be cleansed only by a court hearing. Celtic druids burned wrongdoers in huge wicker men. And lawyers in late medieval Europe prosecuted animals and human corpses if they seemed blameworthy enough. It’s too easy to dismiss those precedents as “superstitious.” Although our theories of proof and punishment have changed, I was always more struck by the continuities between past and present than by the differences. Trials are still structured so as to repair damage to the moral fabric of society. The hope remains that by exacting vengeance in court, we will achieve a moral balance.

You...

On Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, Winston Churchill was Minister of Munitions. As Big Ben struck 11, and the guns fell silent on the Western Front, he was looking out of his ministerial window over Northumberland Avenue.

The broad street was deserted. Suddenly, as he wrote, he saw "the slight figure of a girl clerk, distractedly gesticulating" dart out of the doorway of one of the government buildings that lined the street. "Then from all sides men and women came scurrying into the street. Streams of people poured out of the buildings. The bells of London began to clash."

As he watched the scene of celebration and pandemonium, Churchill reflected that after 52 months "of making burdens grievous to be borne and binding them on men's backs, at last, all at once, suddenly and everywhere the burdens were cast down".

As Minister of Munitions, in charge of vast factories, Churchill had been forced to impose his share of...

Was Athens — or Greece itself — destroyed by the war? An entire industry of classical scholarship once argued for postwar Hellenic "decline," and the subsequent tide of fourth-century poverty, social unrest, and class struggle as arising after the Peloponnesian War. Victorians, in turn, felt the loss was more a "what might have been," a conflict that had ended not just the idea of Athens but "the glory that was Greece" itself and the Hellenic civilizing influence in the wider Mediterranean.

Bernard Henderson, for example, ended his military history of the Peloponnesian War with the melancholy reflection that the romance of Greek history "for a half-century illumined the Imperial Democracy of Athens and the people's leaders. Athens falls, and the gleam lights on her no more. The City, for all Demosthenes' fiery if mistaken eloquence, lies henceforward in perpetual shadow." Alfred Zimmern, a utopian who was deeply involved in the work...

Who can argue with the honors paid to Rosa Parks, the woman described repeatedly as “the mother of the Civil Rights movement”? As the first woman ever to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda where, not too long ago, Ronald Reagan’s corpse lay, she is the heroine nobody can find fault with. Fifty years ago, she refused to give up her bus seat to a white man. In this simple act, the story goes, the American civil rights movement was born.

I wish the story could end on that high note. Instead, a hagiography filled with hypocrisy is slowly turning Rosa Parks into a conservative weapon against the present generation of antiracist activists, who are already being contrasted against Park’s “unassuming” and “modest” way of changing things, to quote Kyra Phillips on CNN. After celebrating Parks’ diminutive size and “quiet” courage, Phillips asked Reverend Joseph Lowery, an African American civil rights advocate, how Parks’ memory made him feel about all the current-day commentators...

Minister for Defence Willie O'Dea is to examine Army archives following a claim of conflicting accounts of the death of Irish soldiers in the Congo 45 years ago.

The Minister gave the commitment to Tony Gregory (Independent, Dublin Central) who said the Minister had repeated the inaccuracy, highlighted in a recent book (The Irish Army in the Congo, 1960/1964: The Far Battalions by David O'Donoghue) that nine members of the Defence Forces were killed in Niemba.

The new publication documented the fact that the records in the military archives, and in the history of the 33rd battalion, stated that eight members of the patrol died at Niemba and that Trooper Anthony Browne had died some days later, nearly three miles away, in a separate incident.

"The official version, contained in the Minister's reply, is that nine soldiers died at Niemba. However, the historically recorded version in the military archives, for whatever reason, has never been...

HISTORY

Despite the bloodthirsty, war-mongering nature of their invasion, we can be thankful that the Romans invaded Scotland. Had they never penetrated so far north, we might know a lot less about our ancestors. Calgacus - the Scots swordsman who led the Caledonian empire at the Mons Graupius battle of AD84 - is, after all, the first Scot recorded in history. His identity, and virtually all that we know about our early forebears, was recorded for us by Tacitus - celebrated historian of the Roman campaign in Britain.

WALLS

In AD 121, construction began on Hadrian's Wall, the major defensive barrier across northern Britain. But 20 years later, the subsequent general, Antonius, decreed it redundant and began a new defence 75 miles to the north, the Antonine Wall. It stretched from the Forth to the Clyde, and at 36 miles was less than half the length of Hadrian's and built from turf rather than stone. As its builders began and finished their allotted...

GREENSBORO, NORTH CAROLINA. A highway sign on the edge of town along I-85 welcomes motorists to Guilford County, “North Carolina’s Future.” The motto distills the story that the county, especially the county seat of Greensboro, and particularly its better-off white people, has told about itself since Jim Crow days, a story of Greensboro as vanguard of the New South, bustling, progressive, “on the move” in all ways, including those of racial “tolerance.” Greensboro’s school board was the first in the South to formally endorse desegregation, the day after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision. Years earlier, when the polio epidemic of 1947- 48 hit Guilford County more severely than any area of the country, the political powers mobilized to build a convalescent hospital in 95 days and to suspend the rules of race, admitting black and white children, hiring an interracial medical staff, and providing equal treatment. That testament to enlightened can-doism is...

Steaming towards Guy Fawkes's 400th, with Trafalgar's 200th in our wake, there is little purpose in regretting humankind's preoccupation with anniversaries. To do so is almost as pointless as to regret the existence of humankind itself. But it is surely not pointless to hope that both humankind and its anniversaries can be set to more constructive than destructive purposes.

This is specially true of anniversaries at the heart of a nation's foundation myths. There was a striking example of that this week in Ireland. Last Friday, speaking at his Fianna Fail annual conference in Killarney, prime minister Bertie Ahern electrified party supporters with a surprise announcement. From next year, he told them, the Irish army would resume its long discontinued Easter military parade down O'Connell Street, past the Dublin GPO building, focal point of the 1916 rising that led to the existence of the Irish republic itself. And not just that. Eleven years ahead of the event, the...