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.
SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Ed (8-8-08)
Next month marks the 50th anniversary of publication of Grace Metalious's Peyton Place, one of the most notorious novels of its time. The book exposed the petty, sordid, and urgently erotic hidden life of a small town. A best seller of precedent-setting proportions, it was also widely disparaged by the literati of the 1950s, who saw it as little more than a prurient diversion. Today millions of viewers tune in weekly to watch Desperate Housewives, which exposes the petty and sordid eroticism of a contemporary suburb. Is Desperate Housewives just Peyton Place made over for today's audience? Surely in some ways, but the differences between them also highlight the extent to which our cultural life has become ever more self-reflexive.
The popularity of Peyton Place resulted from its relentless stripping away of social veneer during the postwar period, at a time when the appearance of domestic...
SOURCE: Blog on the website of The Nation (8-8-06)
Now the Los Angeles Times has published a page one story, "Vietnam Horrors: Darkest Yet," based on official government documents detailing 320 incidents of Vietnam war atrocities that were confirmed by army investigators. The documentation, according to the Times, comes from "a once-secret archive...
SOURCE: Summary in the Chronicle of Higher Ed of an article by Susannah Rutherglen in The American Scholar (summer edition) (8-7-06)
About 13,000 items were stolen from the museum after the fall of Baghdad, Ms. Rutherglen notes. Just as disastrous was the theft of inventory records and bookkeeping devices. And while many of the stolen objects have been recovered, "the restoration of the museum's collection 'as it was' will never be possible," she says.
Part of the blame for the looting goes to the regime of Saddam Hussein, the author says. As she explains it, "when the government fell, Iraqis expressed their rage against Saddam by taking vengeance on the museum." Also at fault...
SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Ed (8-7-06)
The presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson marked a sharp turn in the history of presidential scholarship. From FDR's New Deal 1930s until the mid-1960s, when the Johnson administration's main story line shifted from civil rights and the Great Society to its deepening and disastrous prosecution of the war in Vietnam, historians and political scientists had grown comfortable with the idea that the presidency was a powerful, benign force in American society. As Thomas E. Cronin concluded after reviewing dozens of college textbooks from the era, scholars typically regarded the presidency as being "benevolent, omnipotent, omniscient, and highly moral." The president, wrote Clinton L. Rossiter in his 1956 The American Presidency, an exemplary work of the period, is...
SOURCE: San Francisco Chronicle (8-6-06)
The other day, while browsing through the excellent two-volume set on the civil rights movement "Reporting Civil Rights," published by the Library of America, I was flabbergasted by a glaring absence. In that almost 1,000-page-long fiesta of journalism about a crucial period in the country's past, the presence of Latinos is nil. Not a single mention is made of César Chávez and the farmworkers. The index includes nothing about Chicanos.
The set first appeared in 2003, and reviews in the New York Times, the New Yorker, even The Chronicle failed to point out the omission. The anthology, which covers events from 1941 to 1973, showcases "eyewitness accounts of over 150 writers [offering] a panoramic perspective on the...
SOURCE: NYT (8-6-06)
The Light Dragoons fought mainly on horseback, using sabers, pistols, and light carbines. They marched from Winchester, Va., to Georgia, where, in the fall of 1779, they laid siege to Savannah. The following year, they fought in Charleston, S.C., narrowly escaping capture in a rout by the British. Redman's regiment fought the Creek Indians and the British early in 1782, ultimately triumphing over them in June at Sharon, Ga., near Savannah. After the war, Redman settled in Hardy County, where he and his wife kept a farm.
Four decades later, a neighbor and fellow veteran named John...
SOURCE: NYT (8-5-06)
IF Dec. 7 is the date that Americans remember for the infamy of Pearl Harbor, then Aug. 15 is the wrenching coda remembered by Japanese: the date on which, in 1945, Japan agreed to surrender in World War II. Under Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, however, Aug. 15 has been marked not just by dignified commemoration, but by repeated international brawls over his annual visits to the tainted Yasukuni war shrine.
Yasukuni is a beautiful, private Shinto monument in Tokyo to Japan’s 2.5 million war dead. It also glorifies more than a thousand Japanese war criminals, most notoriously a dozen top leaders convicted as Class A war criminals by the Allied war crimes tribunal at Tokyo, including Hideki Tojo, the wartime prime minister.
A...
SOURCE: European Jewish Press (8-4-06)
As France marks the 100th anniversary of the captain’s rehabilitation Professor Pascal Ory of the Sorbonne University discusses the Dreyfus affair.
EJP: Bernard Lazare and Emile Zola are celebrated as Dreyfus’s greatest defenders but Alfred Dreyfus was often accused of not fighting hard enough. Are these accusations justified?
Pascal Ory: Dreyfus was a symbol but the man himself didn’t interest many historians. It is only recently that we started studying his attitude. A biography of the...
SOURCE: Atlantic Monthly (9-1-06)
Several months ago, I discovered that I was being “considered for deletion.” Or rather, the entry on me in the Internet behemoth that is Wikipedia was.
For those of you who are (as uncharitableWikipedians sometimes say) “clueless newbies,” Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia. But it is like no encyclopedia Diderot could have imagined. Instead of relying on experts to write articles according to their expertise, Wikipedia lets anyone write about anything. You, I, and any wired-up fool can add entries, change entries, even propose that entries be deleted. For reasons I’d rather not share outside of therapy, I created a one-line biographical entry on “Marshall Poe.” It didn’t take long for my tiny article to come to the attention of Wikipedia’s self-appointed guardians. Within a week, a very active—and by most accounts responsible—Scottish Wikipedian named “Alai” decided that … well,...
SOURCE: Letter to the editor of American History (10-1-06)
Although it is true that President Eisenhower in February 1955 recommended the creation of a transcontinental highway system, the Interstate Highway System as we know it today was largely the product of Senator Gore, in his capacity as chairman of the Senate Committee on Public Works, and his very able administrative assistant, William G. Allen.
Senator Gore differed with Eisenhower primarily on how initial construction should be financed and on how ongoing maintenance should be funded. Congressional Republicans, with Eisenhower's backing, wanted a $101 billion, 10-year program financed primarily by bonds, with state and local governments paying...
Immediately after September 11, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), founded by Lynn Cheney and Senator Joseph Lieberman, published a report accusing universities of being the weak link in the war against terror and a potential fifth column. As if the general hint at treason was not enough, an appendix to the report listed the names of 117 "un-American" professors, staff members, and students, and the offending statements they had made.
A few months after ACTA‚s study was disseminated, Daniel Pipes, the director of a think tank called Middle East Forum, launched a blacklisting internet site called Campus Watch, which publishes dossiers on scholars who criticize US policy in the Middle East or Israel‚s treatment of Palestinians. On the website one finds a "Keep Us Informed"...
SOURCE: Atlantic (8-1-06)
fter Somali militiamen killed eighteen U.S. soldiers in October 1993, President Clinton convened his national-security team. He sat silently while being briefed. Then, his aide Richard Clarke recalled, “When they had talked themselves out, Clinton stopped doodling and looked up. ‘Okay, here’s what we’re going to do.’”
We imagine White House meetings to be efficient and focused on grave matters; we don’t imagine the president dithering, daydreaming, or making idle scribbles—especially during moments of national crisis. But presidents, like the rest of us, doodle. Dwight Eisenhower drew sturdy, 1950s images: tables, pencils, nuclear weapons. A Herbert Hoover scrawl provided the pattern for a line of rompers. Ronald Reagan dispensed cheery cartoons to aides. John F. Kennedy reportedly doodled the word poverty at the last...
SOURCE: WSJ (8-1-06)
PHNOM PENH -- One of the greatest crimes of the 20th century has gone unpunished for 30 years. Between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge systematically tortured, starved and "smashed" approximately 2.2 million fellow Cambodians, or between one-fourth and one-third of the entire population. Their list of enemies was long: the indigenous Muslim population, the Vietnamese minority, Buddhist monks, city dwellers, anyone with a diploma, and especially fellow Khmer Rouge suspected of treason, among others. All these groups and many others -- along with wives, husbands and children -- were annihilated in arguably the worst genocide ever perpetrated.
Why do I say "the worst genocide ever," when there is such stiff competition in a world that sometimes seems to have lost any sense of compassion? Because this genocide stands alone as having failed to bring any of the guilty to justice. From the Nuremberg...
