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: Transcript of an interview posted by democracynow.org (10-6-06)
[Glenn Morris, member of the Leadership Council of the American Indian Movement of Colorado <http://www.coloradoaim.org/>; . Attorney and Associate Professor of Political Science at University of Colorado at Denver. ]
GLENN MORRIS: Columbus Day began -- most people don't know -- as a state holiday in Colorado in 1907. But what's more important for people to understand is the ideology behind Columbus Day and why there is a Columbus Day in the United States or in Colorado. And there's been a lot of discussion lately about Hugo Chavez at the United Nations, when he raised up Noam Chomsky's book, Hegemony or Survival.
And if we could begin a little bit by just reducing the terms “hegemony” and “ideology” to their simplest forms: if an ideology is a set of ideas that allows a nation or a people to describe reality in terms that are comfortable for them, but more importantly, that describes the world as it should be...
GLENN MORRIS: Columbus Day began -- most people don't know -- as a state holiday in Colorado in 1907. But what's more important for people to understand is the ideology behind Columbus Day and why there is a Columbus Day in the United States or in Colorado. And there's been a lot of discussion lately about Hugo Chavez at the United Nations, when he raised up Noam Chomsky's book, Hegemony or Survival.
And if we could begin a little bit by just reducing the terms “hegemony” and “ideology” to their simplest forms: if an ideology is a set of ideas that allows a nation or a people to describe reality in terms that are comfortable for them, but more importantly, that describes the world as it should be...
Saturday, October 7, 2006 - 14:00
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SOURCE: WSJ (10-6-06)
Thirty-two years into his career as a writer of books, Bob Woodward has won a reputation as slipshod ("Wired"), slippery ("All the President's Men," "The Final Days"), opportunistic ("Veil"; everything) and generally unaware of the implications even of those facts he's offered that have gone unchallenged. As a reporter he's been compared to a great dumb shark, remorselessly moving toward hunks of information he can swallow but not digest. As a writer his style has been to lard unconnected sentences with extraneous data in order to give his assertions a fact-y weight that suggests truth is being told. And so: On July 23, 1994, at 4:18 p.m., the meeting over, the president gazed out the double-paned windows of the Oval Office, built in October 1909 by workers uncovered by later minimum wage legislation, and saw the storm moving in. "I think I'll kill my wife," he said, the words echoing in the empty room. I made that up. It's my homage....
Friday, October 6, 2006 - 09:56
SOURCE: Special to HNN (12-31-69)
[C. Ikehara has been a Librarian for over ten years. His Masters Degree in Library Science is from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.]
"Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it." (George Orwell)
In Germany, there is a flap over a production of an opera performance that includes a scene with the bloody severed head of Mohammed as well as that of other religious founders. That scene was created by that production's director and as far as I know, the composer (Mozart) and librettist did not indicate in their stage directions that severed heads of religious founders were to be used in their opera IDOMENEO:
"Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours." (John Ruskin)
If all this seems far removed from your life...
Friday, October 6, 2006 - 07:00
SOURCE: Boston Globe (10-1-06)
[Rashid Khalidi holds the Edward Said Chair in Arab Studies at Columbia University, where he directs the Middle East Institute. This essay is adapted from his new book, ``The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood" (Beacon Press). ]
AS I WRITE, with rival Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah unable to agree on the fundamental basis for a new coalition government, and with the devastating effects of the Israeli and international boycott provoked by Hamas's victory in last January's elections, the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza Strip appears to be tottering. Whether it survives or not, the prospect of the independent state that the Palestinians have never had, and that many expected to emerge from this Authority, seems as distant as ever.
The United Nations resolution of 1947 that led to the establishment of Israel called for such a state. In the years before that, Palestinians similarly failed to win independence...
AS I WRITE, with rival Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah unable to agree on the fundamental basis for a new coalition government, and with the devastating effects of the Israeli and international boycott provoked by Hamas's victory in last January's elections, the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza Strip appears to be tottering. Whether it survives or not, the prospect of the independent state that the Palestinians have never had, and that many expected to emerge from this Authority, seems as distant as ever.
The United Nations resolution of 1947 that led to the establishment of Israel called for such a state. In the years before that, Palestinians similarly failed to win independence...
Tuesday, October 3, 2006 - 20:24
SOURCE: NY Sun (9-29-06)
.... it should come as no surprise that five years after 9/11, there now appears to be a growing number of people who say Al Qaeda did not perpetrate the attacks on that day. They believe this, in spite of the fact that the terror was witnessed firsthand by thousands of people and tens of millions more on live television. Osama bin Laden has even taken credit for the attacks, and that confession is captured on videotape as well. But to conspiracy theorists, evidence is as irrelevant as truth. Every man, woman, and child on earth could have been standing on Chambers Street on the morning of September 11, 2001. It doesn't matter.
The theories are pretty far-fetched, but that doesn't matter either — the more outrageous and illogical they are, the more legitimate they become. So a professor at the University of Wisconsin (no less) says our vice president, Dick Cheney, was behind it all (and the professor keeps his job). Charlie Sheen, that eminent actor, tells us it wasn't the...
The theories are pretty far-fetched, but that doesn't matter either — the more outrageous and illogical they are, the more legitimate they become. So a professor at the University of Wisconsin (no less) says our vice president, Dick Cheney, was behind it all (and the professor keeps his job). Charlie Sheen, that eminent actor, tells us it wasn't the...
Tuesday, October 3, 2006 - 16:24
SOURCE: Christianity Today (9-29-06)
[Mark A. Noll is the Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame and the author of numerous books, including The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (University of North Carolina).]
... In retrospect, it is clear that the fundamentalist-modernist controversies of the early 20th century had greatly weakened American Protestantism, leading to an intellectual collapse. By the 1950s, specific Christian influence of any sort was rare in the nation's leading universities or in first-level discussions of public policy. Fundamentalists had lost the battles against evolution and the higher criticism of Scripture. So they had angrily opted out of mainstream academic life. Modernists had made their peace with the dominant paradigms of the secular university, but were left with little to offer that was explicitly Christian....
Evangelicalism was by no means dead. But its capacity to shape national mores or to influence national agendas in...
... In retrospect, it is clear that the fundamentalist-modernist controversies of the early 20th century had greatly weakened American Protestantism, leading to an intellectual collapse. By the 1950s, specific Christian influence of any sort was rare in the nation's leading universities or in first-level discussions of public policy. Fundamentalists had lost the battles against evolution and the higher criticism of Scripture. So they had angrily opted out of mainstream academic life. Modernists had made their peace with the dominant paradigms of the secular university, but were left with little to offer that was explicitly Christian....
Evangelicalism was by no means dead. But its capacity to shape national mores or to influence national agendas in...
Tuesday, October 3, 2006 - 16:05
SOURCE: New Yorker (9-25-06)
Marie Antoinette, the ex-Queen of France, wa thirty-seven when she was taken from her cell in th Conciergerie, the fourteenth-century fortress on the Îl de la Cité, and paraded in an open oxcart to th scaffold in the Place de la Révolution, a mile away Some of the onlookers in the vast crowd lining th route that morning, on October 16, 1793, may hav been among those screaming obscenities at her i 1789, when they marched with pikes on Versailles; o axed their way, in 1792, into her apartment in th Tuileries, where they spent their fury on her mirror and closets; or waved the severed head of her frien and look-alike, the lovely Princesse de Lamballe, on halberd outside her window. But now they observed a eerie silence.
Her husband, Louis XVI, who lost his title when the monarchy was abolished, had been guillotined nine months earlier, though he was spared the indignity of riding in a tumbrel with bound hands. The Jacobin extremists then seized her son. The...
Her husband, Louis XVI, who lost his title when the monarchy was abolished, had been guillotined nine months earlier, though he was spared the indignity of riding in a tumbrel with bound hands. The Jacobin extremists then seized her son. The...
Tuesday, October 3, 2006 - 15:16
SOURCE: WSJ (10-2-06)
[Mr. Norberg, a senior fellow at the Center for the New Europe, is author of "In Defense of Global Capitalism" (Cato, 2003).]
... In the last 100 years, we have created more wealth than in the 100,000 years before that, and not because we work more. To the contrary: In the last century, work hours have been halved in the Western world. It is because new ideas have made it possible for us to work smarter and find easier ways to satisfy our needs and demands.
The people we should thank are the innovators and entrepreneurs, the individuals who see new opportunities and risk exploring them -- the people who find new markets, create new products, think out new ways to handle commodities commercially, organize work in new ways, design new technology or transfer capital to more productive uses. The entrepreneur is an explorer, who ventures into uncharted territory and opens up the new routes along which we will all be traveling soon enough. Simply to look...
... In the last 100 years, we have created more wealth than in the 100,000 years before that, and not because we work more. To the contrary: In the last century, work hours have been halved in the Western world. It is because new ideas have made it possible for us to work smarter and find easier ways to satisfy our needs and demands.
The people we should thank are the innovators and entrepreneurs, the individuals who see new opportunities and risk exploring them -- the people who find new markets, create new products, think out new ways to handle commodities commercially, organize work in new ways, design new technology or transfer capital to more productive uses. The entrepreneur is an explorer, who ventures into uncharted territory and opens up the new routes along which we will all be traveling soon enough. Simply to look...
Monday, October 2, 2006 - 21:02
SOURCE: Baltimore Sun (9-30-06)
The death this week of Toguri D'Aquino, who was better known as Tokyo Rose, was the last of the infamous World War II enemy radio propagandists. She was 90.
Axis Sally, her sultry-voiced European counterpart who broadcast for Radio Berlin during the war years, was actually Maine-born Mildred Elizabeth Sisk.
Born in Portland and raised in New York City and Ohio, she later took the name of Mildred Gillars after her mother remarried.
Gillars had planned to be an actress and studied drama at Ohio Wesleyan University. After dropping out of college in the late 1920s, she traveled to Europe and then returned to New York, where she worked as a bit player in musical comedies, stock companies and vaudeville.
In the early 1930s, while studying at Hunter College, Gillars fell in love with Max Otto Koischwitz, her professor, who had been born in Germany and was a naturalized American citizen. He later renounced his citizenship and returned to Germany....
Axis Sally, her sultry-voiced European counterpart who broadcast for Radio Berlin during the war years, was actually Maine-born Mildred Elizabeth Sisk.
Born in Portland and raised in New York City and Ohio, she later took the name of Mildred Gillars after her mother remarried.
Gillars had planned to be an actress and studied drama at Ohio Wesleyan University. After dropping out of college in the late 1920s, she traveled to Europe and then returned to New York, where she worked as a bit player in musical comedies, stock companies and vaudeville.
In the early 1930s, while studying at Hunter College, Gillars fell in love with Max Otto Koischwitz, her professor, who had been born in Germany and was a naturalized American citizen. He later renounced his citizenship and returned to Germany....
Sunday, October 1, 2006 - 17:33
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