For a certain core group of patient, passionate cinephiles, The New World (New Line), Terrence Malick's retelling of the story of the Jamestown settlement, was already a major movie event before it even hit screens last Christmas. (Since withdrawn for a recut by the director, the movie reopens nationwide today in slightly shortened form.) Malick began his career with two films of an almost Rimbaudian purity and perfection: Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978). These movies, both of them lyrical reflections on doomed love against the backdrop of a cruel (but lushly filmed) nature, made Malick's name as a poetic and visionary director, on par with Stanley Kubrick or Francis Ford Coppola.

But post-Days of Heaven, Malick dropped out of sight. He refuses to be photographed, hasn't given a real press interview in more than 30 years, and fields whatever questions do cross his path with a vague, "Uh, I guess I don't want to talk about that." The Thin Red Line (1998...

The 2008 presidential election still is more than 33 months away, but the campaign to succeed President Bush started in earnest this week.

Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., seeking an almost certain re-election to that seat this year but with both eyes on her party's presidential nomination in two years, charged that the Bush administration "will go down in history as one of the worst that has ever governed our country."

She's wrong. As a serious student of politics and history in high school and college and a close observer as a journalist for more than a half-century, these presidents were the five "worst" in my book:

*Andrew Jackson, (D) 1829-37

*James Buchanan, (D) 1857-61

*Ulysses S. Grant, (R) 1869-77

*Herbert Hoover, (R) 1929-33

*Richard Nixon, (R) 1969-74

It's very unlikely Bush can crack that list in his remaining three years in office.

His tragic...

[Sydney high school history teacher Gregory Haines, in Quadrant magazine, laments the state of his profession.]

ACADEMIC history has been under threat and perhaps in decline for some time. In part, this is due to an overall decline in arts faculties and a consequent search for relevance, funding and position in enterprise universities which are increasingly geared for vocational training rather than broad education.

But there are other factors at work. The rise of postmodernism and theory in arts faculties, later in Australia than elsewhere, where the decline has commenced, has discredited what little education there is on offer.

Australian history has become particularly problematic for the academics. After a flourishing period from the 1960s to the '80s, when academic historians such as Manning Clark gave a strong lead in publishing, now, frequently, it is the non-academic writer who captures the market.

Perhaps the best example of...

NEW YORK'S junior senator, Hillary Rodham Clinton, joined quite a group of substance abusers the other day. In this bunch, no one is likely to even try kicking the habit.

The substance is history. The abuse is taking some of its most brutal and shameful chapters - slavery, the Holocaust, the massacre of American Indians - and exploiting them for whatever issue happens to land on the agenda.

Not that Mrs. Clinton invented the technique. She merely followed a well-worn path when she went to Harlem and likened the House of Representatives to a plantation, because, she said, its Republican leaders squelch dissident voices.

Did the senator serve history well (never mind the obvious question of whether not being able to speak up was truly the worst hardship endured by plantation slaves)?

"What she is doing is insulting anybody who suffered" during slavery, said William B. Helmreich, a sociologist at the City College of New York and...

Twenty-five years ago today, Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as the 40th President of the United States promising less intrusive government, lower tax rates and victory over communism. On that same day, the American hostages in Iran were freed after 444 days of captivity. If the story of history is one long and arduous march toward freedom, this was a momentous day well worth commemorating.

All the more so because over this 25-year period prosperity has been the rule, not the exception, for America--in stark contrast to the stagflationary 1970s. Perhaps the greatest tribute to the success of Reaganomics is that, over the course of the past 276 months, the U.S. economy has been in recession for only 15. That is to say, 94% of the time the U.S. economy has been creating jobs (43 million in all) and wealth ($30 trillion). More wealth has been created in the U.S. in the last quarter-century than in the previous 200 years. The policy lessons of this supply-side prosperity need...

[Joel Engel is an author and journalist in Southern California.]

A MEMORIAL SERVICE for former senator Eugene J. McCarthy was held last Saturday at the National Cathedral in Washington, and former president Bill Clinton was there to eulogize him. This was not surprising: President Clinton will probably be present to eulogize every other boomer icon, whenever photographers are permitted, for as long as his health permits. What was surprising, though, was that Clinton credited the senator, who died last month, for turning the country against the Vietnam War--the operative word being "credited."

"It all started when Gene McCarthy was willing to stand alone and turn the tide of history," said the forty-second president of the United States.

But "to stand alone and turn the tide of history" is the kind of language generally reserved for the likes of Churchill's warnings about Hitler at a time when no one wanted to hear...

...We live in a relativistic culture where television"reality shows" are staged or stage-managed, where spin sessions and spin doctors are an accepted part of politics, where academics argue that history depends on who is writing the history, where an aide to President Bush, dismissing reporters who live in the"reality-based community," can assert that"we're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." ...

Around the same time [as"our culture's enshrinement of subjectivity], biographies became increasingly infected with personal agendas. There was biography as pretentious exercise in deconstruction (Wayne Koestenbaum's"Jackie Under My Skin"), biography as spin job (Andrew Morton's"Diana: Her True Story"), biography as philosophical manifesto (Norman Mailer's"Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man") and biography as feminist polemic (Francine du Plessix Gray's"Rage and Fire: A Life of Louise Colet"). While some of these authors were candid about what they were up to,...

It might seem a little extreme to compare the Philadelphia of the 18th century A.D. with the Athens of the fifth century B.C., but seldom can any one city have been the center of so much learning, inquiry and innovation. And not just a center -- for work in astronomy, medicine, law and other fields -- but also a magnet. When Joseph Priestley, the virtual discoverer of oxygen, had his laboratory smashed by the mob that shouted "Church and King," he quit Birmingham, England, and removed his scientific instruments and his heretical religious opinions to Philadelphia. So did Thomas Paine, the self-taught customs officer and designer of the first iron bridge. Paine, the moral author of the Declaration of Independence, was lucky in his timing but also lucky in his patronage. Across the Atlantic, he bore with him a letter of recommendation from Dr. Benjamin Franklin in London. And if Philadelphia was Athens at all, then Franklin was, as well as its senior citizen, its Socrates....

In one of his more bizarre Oval Office confidences, Lyndon Johnson said that he didn’t want to “follow Hitler” but that Hitler had the right idea: “Just take a simple thing and repeat it often enough, even if it wasn’t true, why, people accept it.” Johnson was speaking by telephone to Martin Luther King, Jr., in Selma, Alabama, about how to convince Southern whites that Southern blacks deserved the franchise. The curious political-science tutorial came on the afternoon of January 15, 1965, King’s thirty-sixth birthday. Whatever he may have thought of Johnson’s inaccurate analogy, King had already begun repeating, on television, in the press, and from church pulpits, the moral necessity of a guaranteed vote for every American, regardless of color. Two weeks earlier, King had publicly announced that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the alliance of Baptist preachers he led, would launch voter-registration protests in Selma, where fourteen thousand four hundred whites had, by...