In the procession of anniversary celebrations by which we congratulate our predecessors for begetting us, 2007 is the year to honor our shaky beginnings at Jamestown, Virginia. The 108 men and boys who stepped ashore on May 14, 1607, and the four or five thousand who followed them in the next fifteen years were the victims of a failed business enterprise. But enough of them survived starvation and disease, their sponsors' negligence, and their own mistakes to start the first permanent settlement in what became the United States....

Helen Rountree has long been the principal authority on the outlooks, beliefs, and purposes of the "uncivil" Virginians, the Powhatans, the name she applies to all the tribes under the paramount chiefdom of the man Powhatan. Under the guise of biographies, Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough tells the story of Jamestown from the viewpoint of the "Real People." Since they left no written records, she has to rely (as we all...

Two years ago, TNR's Peter Beinart argued in his book The Good Fight, that a vibrant liberal tradition advocating a tough but realistic foreign policy was the heart of a mainstream liberal foreign policy. As reviewer James A. Lindsay explained in The Washington Post Book World, "In the years following World War II, it was Democrat Harry S. Truman who developed a coherent and compelling vision of national greatness in the dangerous world. The Cold War liberalism--a term Beinart takes as a compliment, not a slur--of Truman's Democratic Party unified the nation and provided a blueprint for promoting U.S. security and prosperity that lasted nearly half a century."

Now, a series of important documents and two new books provide more proof for Beinart's assertion. Alan Johnson, editor of an online magazine, Democraitya, has published recently released British Cabinet memos written by Labor's foreign minister, Ernest Bevin, in 1948. Bevin called for Europeans to take the...

... We are flush with anniversaries. The abolition of slavery on 25 March 1807 is still being observed. Ahead of us are the anniversaries of the Act of Union and the founding of Jamestown, to be marked by the Queen's state visit to Williamsburg and Washington, DC, in May.

British history, or at least the history of English expansion, is flashing past us with unnerving and, perhaps in Scotland, consequential speed. Anniversaries prompt questions and suggest reassessment, particularly in Jamestown, where the histories of Britain and Anglophone, Protestant America meet at the moment when the characteristics of one nation were transmitted to the new settlement and so to the America of today.

As yet, the Jamestown anniversary has attracted little fuss, but for world history, the precarious foothold gained by the English that summer is by far the most important of the '07 dates. It occurred in the reign of James I, but the achievement was really the result of...

... Colonial Williamsburg, where all this took place (about 150 miles south of Washington), is variously called a historical village or a living museum. But that means much more now than it once did. Aside from dramatizing historical controversies, the town is also caught up in living ones: debates about who writes history and how it is told, about what historical realism is and how it should be portrayed, even about what aspects of our past are to be celebrated in this strange combination of education and entertainment.

Everything here, for example, is from late-18th-century Virginia, with crucial exceptions including: no slavery apart from the dramatizations (although until just a few decades ago here forms of discrimination and segregation were still commonplace), flush toilets and freshly painted buildings as carefully tended as suburban developments, which in some ways Colonial Williamsburg resembles.

One doesn’t really step into the past here, or in any...

[Uri Avnery is a journalist, peace activist, former member of the Knesset and leader of Gush Shalom.] Incredible! In Palestinian schoolbooks, there is no trace of the Green Line! They do not recognize the existence of Israel even in the 1967 borders! They say that the"Zionist gangs" stole the country from the Arabs! That's how they poison the minds of their children!

These blood-curdling revelations were published this week in Israel and around the world. The conclusion is self-evident: The Palestinian Authority, which is responsible for the schoolbooks, cannot be a partner in peace negotiations. What a shock!

Truth is, there is nothing new here. Every few years, when all the other arguments for refusing to speak with the Palestinian leadership wear thin, the ultimate argument pops up again: Palestinian schoolbooks call for the destruction of Israel!

The ammunition is always provided by one of the"professional" institutions that deal with this matter. These...

Ancient history is to become a thing of the past, with the only exam board offering it as an A-level subject now planning to ditch the course.

The decision by the Oxford and Cambridge and Royal Society of Arts (OCR) exam board has led to concerns that pupils will no longer understand the legacies of ancient civilisations.

The subject has introduced students to topics such as the birth of Athenian democracy, the growth of the Roman Empire, the beginnings of Christianity, the revolt by Spartacus against slavery and the battle of Thermopylae, where the stand by an small Greek force against the Persians in 480 BCE became the byword for heroic struggles.

Last night experts were saying that all these were examples of history that would be lost on future generations.

The irony is that the subject is being ditched at a time when it is growing in popularity - with 1,000 students taking the exam compared with just 300 at the turn of the century....

It’s time for those (mostly male) readers interested in the Second World War to put down that umpteenth account of D?Day and turn to the new crop of books on the most colossal conflict the world has ever seen: the German-Soviet clash on the Eastern Front. Since the late 1980s, a historiographical revolution has been under way, as scholars fundamentally alter their understanding of this epic struggle, which killed 27 million Soviet soldiers and civilians and nearly 4 million Wehrmacht troops. They aren’t merely revising an established narrative; they’re discovering facets of the conflict—even entire battles—that had been lost to history.

Churchill’s chronicle of the Second World War, which has all but permanently fixed the contours of the conflict in the popular mind, deliberately played down the Soviet superpower’s pivotal role in defeating the Axis. Since then, while scholarship advanced on, say, the Allies’ air war against Germany or the North African campaigns, it was...

[Writer Brooke Allen, whose most recent book is Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers, is now a blogger at Britannica.]

I was interested to read the blog postings by Joseph Ellis and Michael and Jana Novak, having recently completed a book on the religious beliefs of the Founding Fathers. I was initially inspired to write the book after hearing from various politicians and pundits the statement that the United States had been founded on Christian principles. Having done a fair amount of reading on the subject, I felt this was a gross misrepresentation. Mr. Ellis is correct, I think, when he says that “the common conviction that bound together most of the Founders was the belief in the complete separation of church and state.”

There were Founders who disagreed with the policy of separation, of course, and to read about the deliberations in the Virginia legislature over Jefferson’s Virginia...

[Jim Castagnera is a Philadelphia lawyer and writer, and the Associate Provost/Associate Counsel at Rider University, Lawrenceville/Princeton, NJ.]

Don’t you always wonder how tough the he-men of the silver screen really are? I’ve always wondered about that. John Wayne, for instance… his real name was Marion Morrison. Was he the real-life equivalent of “A Boy Named Sue,” or was he a wimp? From “Flying Tigers” (1942) to “Sands of Iwo Jima” (1949), the Duke fought World War II on movie sets, not on battlefields.

Ronald Reagan likewise spent his war on a Hollywood back lot, staring in such B-reelers as “Hellcats of the Navy” and “This Is the Army.” He donned a real uniform as a second lieutenant in the Army Air Corps, but served in the First Motion Picture Unit, and not in the skies over Europe or the Pacific.

On March 30, 1981, aged 70, Reagan faced the first real bullets of his life. The assassination attempt, which wounded him, proved...