[Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. His most recent collection of essays is titled Love, Poverty, and War.]

When I first began to plan my short biography of Thomas Jefferson, I found it difficult to research the chapter concerning the so-called Barbary Wars: an event or series of events that had seemingly receded over the lost horizon of American history. Henry Adams, in his discussion of our third president, had some boyhood reminiscences of the widespread hero-worship of naval officer Stephen Decatur, and other fragments and shards showed up in other quarries, but a sound general history of the subject was hard to come by. When I asked a professional military historian—a man with direct access to Defense Department archives—if there was any book that he could recommend, he came back with a slight shrug.

But now the curious reader may choose from a freshet of writing on the subject...

Once when I was teaching a composition class at the university, I flew back from New York for class and neglected to get back on Central Standard Time. I came bustling into the classroom and walked to the front, took off my coat, set my briefcase on the table, smiled at the students assembled, and was about to open my mouth and start talking about the importance of structure in comic writing and then something struck me as Not Right. Familiar faces were missing. I leaned down and said to a girl in the front row, "This isn't composition, is it." She said, "No, it's math." "Good," I said. "That's what I thought." And picked up my briefcase and coat and headed for the exit, as a young man with a crewcut and clear-rimmed glasses arrived and set his briefcase on the table. He was the math guy. Not me. And he knew more about structure.

A simple mistake, one that anyone could make, and isn't that true of all of them? Divorce, episodes of...

[Michael Berenbaum is a leading expert on the Holocaust. He is the former director of the United States Holocaust Museum Research Institute and President of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.]

In honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day this week, it’s worthy to wonder: What’s the difference between Holocaust denial in the West and Holocaust denial as practiced by the President of Iran and his followers?

In the West, Holocaust denial challenges the fundamental history of the Holocaust — gas chamber, crematoria, systematic killing of Jews, the personal participation of Hitler in imposing what the Nazis called “The Final Solution to the Jewish Problem.”
Holocaust denial in the Muslim world is part of the migration of discredited myths – including the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion and the conspiracy of world domination, the blood libel, and even the charge of deicide — which have been rejected in the post-Holocaust world by Western...

[Tribune cultural critic.]

He claimed it was about World War II, but it couldn't have been. Not really. It was Vietnam, right? Had to be. The pointlessness. The gore. The absurdity. That novel had Vietnam written all over it -- in letters stamped crisp and deep, like the data on a dog tag.

Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" (1969) was ostensibly about one war but wound up being interpreted as a commentary on another. As admirers of Vonnegut, who died last Wednesday at 84, point out, that's a common fate for a war novelist: You write about one hell, you're automatically connected to a fresher one.

"Writers have to sidestep sometimes to get people to look at things," says Bill Savage, senior lecturer in English at Northwestern University. "Any war novel is essentially about every war. What all war stories have in common is the dehumanizing effects they have on the people who fight them."

And so it was...

[Anthony Grafton is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History. He can be reached at grafton@princeton.edu. ]

... I'm on leave this year. Instead of teaching and urging seniors to read piles of books and ransack the darkest corners of JSTOR, I've been doing it myself. And I've had a little time to reflect on an issue that oddly connects the world of workshops and seminars with that of seniors writing theses: Collaboration.

In the sciences and the social sciences, collaboration is normal. In Nature and other scientific journals, the authors of articles come not as individuals but as battalions. Teams of professors, postdocs, grad students and undergraduates — sometimes several teams at several universities — carry out big experimental projects. Many practitioners of the so-called hard social sciences like demography do the same. Distinguished economists often have writing partners (to hire one great economist...

Standing on a hill in East Jerusalem, amid the clash of religious and political orthodoxies, stands a musty old museum devoted to human progress. When you walk into the Rockefeller Museum with its old-fashioned display cases crowded with ancient pottery shards and oil lamps, you can begin by looking at the stone tools of early man. Then you proceed room by room through the invention of agriculture and cities, winding up finally with the statues and reliquaries of the medieval era.

What you’re really looking at is a philosophy of history. The museum was set up in 1938, when scholars still spoke confidently of mankind’s upward march from primitive culture to higher civilization. History is portrayed here as a great, unified story, with crucial pivot moments when humanity leapt forward — when people first buried their dead, when they moved from animistic faiths to polytheism, when they learned to cultivate reason and philosophy.

These days, historians hate those...

[John Brady Kiesling is a former US diplomat and author of "Diplomacy Lessons: Realism for an Unloved Superpower".]

The new Greek textbook seems a sensible attempt to match the teaching of history to current Greek reality. Among its goals is to downplay the inevitability of national/racial/religious conflict in the Balkans, to reduce the sense of Greek victimisation by hostile outsiders and to weaken the myth that Greek national independence is a gift of the church.
 
Thousands of young Greek university graduates wait ten years on a roster for appointment as a schoolteacher. The pay is miserable, and they start their career in a remote village. If they looked more carefully at the Greek history they aspire to teach, they might well opt for another profession.
 
The Iraq on our television screens resembles late Ottoman Macedonia a century ago. When Greek, Bulgarian or Vlach freedom fighters arrived in the village in 1907, the...

[Gyan Prakash, a professor of history at Princeton University, is the author of Another Reason: Science and The Imagination of Modern India, among other books.]

E.M. Forster's A Passage to India ends with a poignant exchange between Aziz, a young Muslim doctor, and Fielding, a Briton sympathetic to Indians. Though Aziz is acquitted of the false charge of molesting a British woman, he is deeply wounded by the experience and wants nothing to do with the colonial race. Fielding, an old friend, seeks him out and asks why they cannot be friends again.

But the horses didn't want it--they swerved apart; the earth didn't want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they issued from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn't want it, they said in their hundred voices. "No, not yet," and the sky said, "No, not there....

David Gelernter: No

[David Gelernter is a national fellow of the American Enterprise Institute.]

Israeli government authorities are building a ramp to allow non-Muslims to reach the enormous platform atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The old ramp was condemned as unsafe and torn down several years ago. The interim ramp that replaced it was designed for short-term service only. (Muslims have their own private access routes.) The new ramp is controversial. Some ramp must be built or non-Muslims will have no way to reach the site; but leading Israeli experts say that the ramp under construction will disturb an archeological garden outside the Mount's boundaries, and ought to be moved.

Still, Muslim complaints (and blood-curdling threats) to the contrary, the new ramp poses "no risk whatsoever to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which stands about 100 meters to the east," says the eminent archaeologist Eilat Mazar of the Hebrew University and the...