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: New Yorker (5-14-07)
The technologies that we have available substantially define who we are. The nineteenth-century Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle didn’t much like the new industrial order, but he did understand the substantive relationship between human beings and their technologies: “Man is a Tool-using Animal. . . . Nowhere do you find him without Tools; without Tools he is nothing, with Tools he is all.” Seen in this light, my kitchen is a technological palimpsest. Even the older items were once innovations—like my Brown Betty teapot, whose design goes back to the seventeenth century but which is still produced in England, not having been significantly improved on since. And even the newest items contain design or functional elements from the past, such as the QWERTY keyboard of my laptop, patented in 1878.
The way we think about technology tends to elide the older things, even though the texture of our lives would be unrecognizable without them. And when we do consider technology in...
The way we think about technology tends to elide the older things, even though the texture of our lives would be unrecognizable without them. And when we do consider technology in...
Friday, June 29, 2007 - 15:53
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SOURCE: National Review Online (6-29-07)
[Former Secretary of Education William J. Bennett is the author of America: The Last Best Hope, Volume 2 (From a World at War to the Triumph of Freedom), and the Washington fellow of the Claremont Institute.]
Tens of millions of Americans are about to celebrate our nation’s Founding. The worrisome question is, will future generations take to this celebration the way we have for the past 231 years if they do not know the first, second, or third thing about their country?
Two years ago, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough told the U.S. Senate that American History was our nation’s worst subject in school. The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (a.k.a., “our Nation’s Report Card”), released last month, bears that out again. Our children do worse in American history than they do in reading or math. McCullough testified we were facing the prospect of national amnesia, saying, “Amnesia of society is just as detrimental as amnesia for the...
Friday, June 29, 2007 - 15:21
SOURCE: Daily Pennsylvanian (student newspaper) (6-28-07)
[Elizabeth Song is a College junior from Clemmons, N.C.]
In Philadelphia's graveyards, history comes alive. Take a stroll through the cobble-stoned heart of Old City, and you'll find some of America's earliest burial grounds.
Christ Church Burial Ground is one of these. On the corner of 5th and Arch streets, the church's property holds the graves of seven signers of the Declaration of Independence, including that of Benjamin Franklin.
Franklin's grave is littered with pennies from well-wishers - $3,000 a year's worth, according to Tourism Director Anne McLaughlin.
Philadelphia mayors, numerous naval notables and medicinal pioneers occupy some of the 4,000 or so grave sites - along with female domestics, merchants, slaves and infant children. The burial ground's youngest member is Edward Roberts (just three hours old), and its eldest member lived to be over a century.
Burial ground coordinator John Hopkins, who has devoted...
In Philadelphia's graveyards, history comes alive. Take a stroll through the cobble-stoned heart of Old City, and you'll find some of America's earliest burial grounds.
Christ Church Burial Ground is one of these. On the corner of 5th and Arch streets, the church's property holds the graves of seven signers of the Declaration of Independence, including that of Benjamin Franklin.
Franklin's grave is littered with pennies from well-wishers - $3,000 a year's worth, according to Tourism Director Anne McLaughlin.
Philadelphia mayors, numerous naval notables and medicinal pioneers occupy some of the 4,000 or so grave sites - along with female domestics, merchants, slaves and infant children. The burial ground's youngest member is Edward Roberts (just three hours old), and its eldest member lived to be over a century.
Burial ground coordinator John Hopkins, who has devoted...
Thursday, June 28, 2007 - 21:33
SOURCE: Japan Focus (6-10-07)
[Greg Lockhart is a former army officer, turned Vietnam literary scholar and translator. His book, The Minefield: An Australian Tragedy in Vietnam was published in May 2007 by Allen & Unwin of Australia.]
In 1967 the commander of First Australian Task Force (1ATF), Brigadier Stuart Graham ordered the construction of an 11 kilometre ‘barrier fence and minefield’ in Phuoc Tuy Province, southern Vietnam. This ‘barrier’, which ran for some 11 kilometres through the southern Phuoc Tuy, would constitute the biggest blunder in Australian military history since the Second World War. It would also constitute a story of strategic self-destruction that epitomised both Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War and the wider Australian imperial tradition of sending expeditions to far-flung wars.
In Vietnam, the purpose of Graham’s ‘barrier’ was to separate and to shield Phuoc Tuy’s most densely populated villages in the southwestern District of Long Dat from his enemy’...
In 1967 the commander of First Australian Task Force (1ATF), Brigadier Stuart Graham ordered the construction of an 11 kilometre ‘barrier fence and minefield’ in Phuoc Tuy Province, southern Vietnam. This ‘barrier’, which ran for some 11 kilometres through the southern Phuoc Tuy, would constitute the biggest blunder in Australian military history since the Second World War. It would also constitute a story of strategic self-destruction that epitomised both Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War and the wider Australian imperial tradition of sending expeditions to far-flung wars.
In Vietnam, the purpose of Graham’s ‘barrier’ was to separate and to shield Phuoc Tuy’s most densely populated villages in the southwestern District of Long Dat from his enemy’...
Thursday, June 28, 2007 - 19:15
SOURCE: Japan Focus (6-19-07)
[Tessa Morris-Suzuki is Professor of Japanese History, Convenor of the Division of Pacific and Asian History in the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University, and a Japan Focus associate. Her book Exodus to North Korea: Shadows from Japan's Cold War has just been published at Rowman & Littlefield ]
When, in mid-2005, Japan’s Yomiuri newspaper began to publish a series of articles on the question of “war responsibility”, the event attracted nationwide and even international interest. Now the newspaper series has become a book, published in a two-volume version in Japanese and in a one-volume abridged English translation entitled Who Was Responsible? From Marco Polo Bridge to Pearl Harbour. There can be no doubt that these publications mark an important moment in the long and vexed history of East Asia’s “history wars” – the ongoing conflicts between Japan and its neighbors (particularly China and both Koreas) about memory of and responsibility for...
When, in mid-2005, Japan’s Yomiuri newspaper began to publish a series of articles on the question of “war responsibility”, the event attracted nationwide and even international interest. Now the newspaper series has become a book, published in a two-volume version in Japanese and in a one-volume abridged English translation entitled Who Was Responsible? From Marco Polo Bridge to Pearl Harbour. There can be no doubt that these publications mark an important moment in the long and vexed history of East Asia’s “history wars” – the ongoing conflicts between Japan and its neighbors (particularly China and both Koreas) about memory of and responsibility for...
Thursday, June 28, 2007 - 18:47
SOURCE: Foreign Policy Research Institute (5-1-07)
On March 24–25, 2007 FPRI’s Marvin Wachman Fund for International Education hosted 44 teachers from 23 states across the country for a weekend of discussion on teaching about the Military in U.S. history. The Institute was held at and co-sponsored by the Cantigny First Division Museum in Wheaton, Ill. It was webcast to registrants worldwide (see www.fpri.org/education/militaryushistory for videocasts and texts of lectures).
The History Institute for Teachers is co-chaired by David Eisenhower and Walter A. McDougall and made possible by a grant from the Annenberg Foundation. Future history weekends include Teaching Military History: Why and How, also to be held at and co-sponsored by the First Division Museum.
Paul Herbert, Ph.D., Colonel, US Army (Ret.), Executive Director of the Cantigny First Division Foundation, welcomed participants to Cantigny. The Museum grounds were provided by the estate of Robert McCormick, editor-owner of the...
Thursday, June 28, 2007 - 17:31
SOURCE: Foreign Policy Research Institute (6-1-07)
[David Satter is Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of Age of Delirium: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union (Yale 2001) and Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State (Yale, 2004). This essay is based on his presentation at Living Without Freedom: A History Institute for Teachers sponsored by FPRI’s Marvin Wachman Fund for International Education, May 5–6, 2007, held at and co-sponsored by the National Constitution Center and the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia. FPRI’s History Institute program is chaired by David Eisenhower and Walter A. McDougall and receives core support from the Annenberg Foundation. The program on Living without Freedom was supported by a grant from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.]
Not all the mechanisms of repression in unfree societies are violent. People can be conditioned to obey, and once the proper conditions have been put in place, the influence of mass...
Not all the mechanisms of repression in unfree societies are violent. People can be conditioned to obey, and once the proper conditions have been put in place, the influence of mass...
Thursday, June 28, 2007 - 17:23
SOURCE: Washington Decoded (6-11-07)
[Priscilla J. McMillan is the author of Marina and Lee (Harper & Row, 1977), and more recently, The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Modern Arms Race (Viking, 2005).]
After decades of speculation about a grassy knoll, the Zapruder film, and an acoustical tape, the man behind it all is too often overlooked. Lee Oswald was not a cardboard figure but a human being, and although he had barely turned twenty-four at the time he killed President Kennedy, he had a motive.
Oswald was a believing Marxist, and his motive was to strike the deadliest blow he could imagine at capitalism in the United States. Oswald had been headed that way most of his sentient life. He had, by his account, become seriously interested in politics at fifteen or sixteen, when someone on a street corner in the Bronx handed him a leaflet about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had been executed two years earlier as spies for the Soviet Union. At eighteen, huddled in his...
After decades of speculation about a grassy knoll, the Zapruder film, and an acoustical tape, the man behind it all is too often overlooked. Lee Oswald was not a cardboard figure but a human being, and although he had barely turned twenty-four at the time he killed President Kennedy, he had a motive.
Oswald was a believing Marxist, and his motive was to strike the deadliest blow he could imagine at capitalism in the United States. Oswald had been headed that way most of his sentient life. He had, by his account, become seriously interested in politics at fifteen or sixteen, when someone on a street corner in the Bronx handed him a leaflet about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had been executed two years earlier as spies for the Soviet Union. At eighteen, huddled in his...
Wednesday, June 27, 2007 - 20:44
On April 30th, 1977, a rag tag army of 2,400 people descended, marching and singing, on Seabrook, New Hampshire, to protest the building of a new nuclear power station.
Inspired by the civil rights movement and mentored by the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group, the "Clamshell Alliance," a small group of local activists, had trained the crowd to express their collective frustration with the powerful nuclear lobby. The tactic was non-violent civil disobedience.
A "Village Square" was established on the grounds of the plant to encourage education, discussion, and resistance to the nuclear industry. A legislative assembly was formed and passed ordinances banning nuclear power and the transportation of waste "in town's limits." Toilets were installed, tents pitched, and by 10 pm, respecting their self-imposed curfew, the Clams went to sleep.
The Clamshell had structured the crowd into "affinity groups...
Inspired by the civil rights movement and mentored by the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group, the "Clamshell Alliance," a small group of local activists, had trained the crowd to express their collective frustration with the powerful nuclear lobby. The tactic was non-violent civil disobedience.
A "Village Square" was established on the grounds of the plant to encourage education, discussion, and resistance to the nuclear industry. A legislative assembly was formed and passed ordinances banning nuclear power and the transportation of waste "in town's limits." Toilets were installed, tents pitched, and by 10 pm, respecting their self-imposed curfew, the Clams went to sleep.
The Clamshell had structured the crowd into "affinity groups...
Wednesday, June 27, 2007 - 19:15
SOURCE: WSJ (6-25-07)
[Miss Shlaes, a Bloomberg columnist and visiting senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is author of the just-published "The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression" (HarperCollins), from which this is adapted.]
The late Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. was a true liberal -- a man who welcomed debate. Just before he died this winter, he wrote, quoting someone else, that history is an argument without end. That, Schlesinger added, "is why we love it so."
Yet concerning Schlesinger's own period of study, the 1930s, there has been curiously little argument. The American consensus is Schlesinger's consensus: that FDR saved democracy from fascism by co-opting the left and far right with his alphabet programs. Certainly, an observer might criticize various aspects of the period, but scrutiny of the New Deal edifice in its entirety is something that ought to be postponed for another era -- or so we learned long ago. Indeed, to take...
The late Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. was a true liberal -- a man who welcomed debate. Just before he died this winter, he wrote, quoting someone else, that history is an argument without end. That, Schlesinger added, "is why we love it so."
Yet concerning Schlesinger's own period of study, the 1930s, there has been curiously little argument. The American consensus is Schlesinger's consensus: that FDR saved democracy from fascism by co-opting the left and far right with his alphabet programs. Certainly, an observer might criticize various aspects of the period, but scrutiny of the New Deal edifice in its entirety is something that ought to be postponed for another era -- or so we learned long ago. Indeed, to take...
Wednesday, June 27, 2007 - 15:12
SOURCE: http://www.newsleader.com (6-26-07)
From the death notice that appeared in the Staunton Spectator, you'd never have known there was anything special about Lorenzo Sibert, who died Sept. 25, 1881:
"In Staunton, on Sept. 25th, of paralysis of brain, Lorenzo Sibert, aged 77 years and 4 months."
And that was it. Not a single additional line was devoted to the life of a man who came within a hair's breadth of changing the outcome of the Civil War. Sibert, bankrupt and forgotten, was buried in an unmarked grave in Thornrose Cemetery.
But in 1860, Lorenzo Sibert was hot stuff. This master iron worker from Mount Solon invented, patented and successfully tested for the United States government a carbine that could fire 48 shots without reloading, or 600 times a minute "consecutively for 12 hours."
Sibert called it the Virginia Pacificator, and in 1861 the Staunton Spectator hailed it as "the greatest gun of the age."
Interestingly, Sibert...
"In Staunton, on Sept. 25th, of paralysis of brain, Lorenzo Sibert, aged 77 years and 4 months."
And that was it. Not a single additional line was devoted to the life of a man who came within a hair's breadth of changing the outcome of the Civil War. Sibert, bankrupt and forgotten, was buried in an unmarked grave in Thornrose Cemetery.
But in 1860, Lorenzo Sibert was hot stuff. This master iron worker from Mount Solon invented, patented and successfully tested for the United States government a carbine that could fire 48 shots without reloading, or 600 times a minute "consecutively for 12 hours."
Sibert called it the Virginia Pacificator, and in 1861 the Staunton Spectator hailed it as "the greatest gun of the age."
Interestingly, Sibert...
Tuesday, June 26, 2007 - 20:56
SOURCE: WSJ (6-26-07)
[Mr. Cohen is a New York University law professor specializing on China and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.]
This is a time for commemorations in China, some public, others necessarily private. The 10th anniversary of Hong Kong's return to Beijing's rule is currently the subject of official celebrations in both places. Also, thanks to the autonomy conferred on their Special Administrative Region, tens of thousands of devoted Hong Kong democrats recently demonstrated their continuing determination to remember the June 4, 1989, massacre in the territory. In mainland China, by contrast, any attempts to recall the Tiananmen tragedy were again severely repressed.
Yet a third major event of modern Chinese history -- the "antirightist movement" of 1957-58 -- is being publicly ignored in both the mainland and Hong Kong, despite its impact on millions of Chinese intellectuals and the course of their country's development, and despite its...
This is a time for commemorations in China, some public, others necessarily private. The 10th anniversary of Hong Kong's return to Beijing's rule is currently the subject of official celebrations in both places. Also, thanks to the autonomy conferred on their Special Administrative Region, tens of thousands of devoted Hong Kong democrats recently demonstrated their continuing determination to remember the June 4, 1989, massacre in the territory. In mainland China, by contrast, any attempts to recall the Tiananmen tragedy were again severely repressed.
Yet a third major event of modern Chinese history -- the "antirightist movement" of 1957-58 -- is being publicly ignored in both the mainland and Hong Kong, despite its impact on millions of Chinese intellectuals and the course of their country's development, and despite its...
Tuesday, June 26, 2007 - 20:34
SOURCE: San Francisco Chronicle (6-10-07)
[Tony Platt, professor emeritus of social work at Cal State Sacramento, is the author, with Cecilia O'Leary, of "Bloodlines: Recovering Hitler's Nuremberg Laws, From Patton's Trophy to Public Memorial" (Paradigm Publishers, 2006). Alexandra Minna Stern is the Zina Pitcher collegiate professor of the history of medicine at University of Michigan and the author of "Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America" (University of California Press, 2005). ]
Many communities around the country are grappling with what to do about schools, buildings, monuments and public places named after Confederate heroes or people who profited off slavery and racism. The University of Colorado renamed a residence hall after it came to light that the original honoree had participated in a 19th century massacre of American Indians. Brown University did a thorough study of the "grievous crimes" committed by its founders who owned slaves or...
Many communities around the country are grappling with what to do about schools, buildings, monuments and public places named after Confederate heroes or people who profited off slavery and racism. The University of Colorado renamed a residence hall after it came to light that the original honoree had participated in a 19th century massacre of American Indians. Brown University did a thorough study of the "grievous crimes" committed by its founders who owned slaves or...
Tuesday, June 26, 2007 - 19:16
SOURCE: http://www.courier-journal.com (6-22-07)
[Richard Labunski is a journalism professor at the University of Kentucky and author of "James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights." (www.richardlabunski.com)]
June is not just a time to celebrate the beginning of summer. It is an occasion to remember two extraordinary individuals -- one practicing the art of politics, the other the art of music -- who during this month in 1788 changed the world for the better.
James Madison, the shy intellectual from Virginia who was small in stature and had a thin voice, battled the charismatic Patrick Henry for three weeks beginning June 2 at the Virginia Ratifying Convention in a sweltering converted theater in downtown Richmond. The 170 delegates, who had been elected by the people, were closely divided over whether the most populous state should approve the Constitution and join the union.
Henry and other Anti-Federalists believed the...
June is not just a time to celebrate the beginning of summer. It is an occasion to remember two extraordinary individuals -- one practicing the art of politics, the other the art of music -- who during this month in 1788 changed the world for the better.
James Madison, the shy intellectual from Virginia who was small in stature and had a thin voice, battled the charismatic Patrick Henry for three weeks beginning June 2 at the Virginia Ratifying Convention in a sweltering converted theater in downtown Richmond. The 170 delegates, who had been elected by the people, were closely divided over whether the most populous state should approve the Constitution and join the union.
Henry and other Anti-Federalists believed the...
Tuesday, June 26, 2007 - 18:47
SOURCE: New Republic (6-13-07)
[Merlin Chowkwanyun is a PhD student in history at the University of Pennsylvania.]
It seemed like just another harmless moment on daytime TV: Oprah Winfrey began an"Ask Dr. Oz" segment with the physician Mehmet Oz, and the two arrived at the subject of excessive sweating. Oz cited high blood pressure as a major cause and then asked Winfrey if she knew why black Americans experienced hypertension at disproportionate rates.
No problem so far. But then Winfrey answered Oz's question by reviving what scholars have called the"slavery hypothesis" of hypertension. Black Americans, that thesis holds, experience greater rates of hypertension today because those slaves most likely to survive the brutal journey to the New World had bodily constitutions that retained higher amounts of sodium; with more sodium, they were likelier to survive ailments related to salt- and water-deprivation that often resulted in death. But, while sodium-retention became an adaptive trait that helped many...
Tuesday, June 26, 2007 - 18:21
SOURCE: Education Week & Gadfly (6-22-07)
The United States isn't the only land where primary-secondary schooling was traditionally the responsibility of the states or provinces, while the national government played a minor, even peripheral role. Nor are we the only people now struggling to adapt that old decentralized arrangement to the realities of the 21st century, with its globalizing economy, rising mobility, instant communications, and ebbing affection for local idiosyncrasy--and agonizing over what mechanisms might best yield a measure of high-standard uniformity and accountability without shackling schools and educators to a deadening, politically vulnerable, bureaucratic sameness.
That something needs to change is clearer every day, as we observe the peculiar risks and odd incentives of a policy regimen in which states set their own standards and tests--and pay for the lion's share of education costs--even as they are held to account by Washington for their performance and told what to do with poorly...
That something needs to change is clearer every day, as we observe the peculiar risks and odd incentives of a policy regimen in which states set their own standards and tests--and pay for the lion's share of education costs--even as they are held to account by Washington for their performance and told what to do with poorly...
Friday, June 22, 2007 - 06:07
SOURCE: Washington Post (6-20-07)
In many quarters, the role of religion in public life and foreign policy is under question as a source of hatred and extremism. But this year marks the 200th anniversary of history's strongest counterexample -- the strange, irrational end of the British slave trade.
By 1820, some 2.6 million Europeans had left their homes for the Americas. And perhaps 9 million Africans had also made the journey -- in chains, branded like cattle and packed like cordwood. Every slave voyage involved murder, since expected losses were more than 10 percent. Some captives died from disease; some starved themselves to death, thus willing the only form of freedom available to them.
The trade had been developed and expanded by the most enlightened and culturally progressive nations of Europe. Investors over the years included Isaac Newton, John Locke, the British royal family and the Church of England. Little stigma was attached to this mainstream form of commerce in the late 18th...
By 1820, some 2.6 million Europeans had left their homes for the Americas. And perhaps 9 million Africans had also made the journey -- in chains, branded like cattle and packed like cordwood. Every slave voyage involved murder, since expected losses were more than 10 percent. Some captives died from disease; some starved themselves to death, thus willing the only form of freedom available to them.
The trade had been developed and expanded by the most enlightened and culturally progressive nations of Europe. Investors over the years included Isaac Newton, John Locke, the British royal family and the Church of England. Little stigma was attached to this mainstream form of commerce in the late 18th...
Wednesday, June 20, 2007 - 13:32
SOURCE: The Hartford Courant (6-13-07)
Forty years ago, on June 13, 1967, President Lyndon Johnson strode into the Rose Garden for a news conference, accompanied by a tall, distinguished black man.
"I shall send to the Senate this afternoon," Johnson said, "the nomination of Mr. Thurgood Marshall to the position of associate justice of the Supreme Court. ... He is best qualified by training and by very valuable service to the country. I believe it is the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man and the right place." Marshall was then best known for his role as an architect of Brown v. Board of Education and the effort to overturn legal segregation.
But what both Marshall and Johnson understood was that that struggle was never only about blacks but about the soul and future of our country.
During his quarter-century on the court, Marshall advanced a jurisprudence of freedom, opportunity and justice that improved the lives of all Americans. He...
"I shall send to the Senate this afternoon," Johnson said, "the nomination of Mr. Thurgood Marshall to the position of associate justice of the Supreme Court. ... He is best qualified by training and by very valuable service to the country. I believe it is the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man and the right place." Marshall was then best known for his role as an architect of Brown v. Board of Education and the effort to overturn legal segregation.
But what both Marshall and Johnson understood was that that struggle was never only about blacks but about the soul and future of our country.
During his quarter-century on the court, Marshall advanced a jurisprudence of freedom, opportunity and justice that improved the lives of all Americans. He...
Wednesday, June 13, 2007 - 21:15
SOURCE: Washington DeCoded (6-13-07)
[Priscilla J. McMillan is the author of Marina and Lee (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), and more recently, The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Modern Arms Race (New York: Viking, 2005).]
After decades of speculation about a grassy knoll, the Zapruder film, and an acoustical tape, the man behind it all is too often overlooked. Lee Oswald was not a cardboard figure but a human being, and although he had barely turned twenty-four at the time he killed President Kennedy, he had a motive.
Oswald was a believing Marxist, and his motive was to strike the deadliest blow he could imagine at capitalism in the United States. Oswald had been headed that way most of his sentient life. He had, by his account, become seriously interested in politics at fifteen or sixteen, when someone on a street corner in the Bronx handed him a leaflet about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had been executed two years earlier as spies for the Soviet Union. At...
After decades of speculation about a grassy knoll, the Zapruder film, and an acoustical tape, the man behind it all is too often overlooked. Lee Oswald was not a cardboard figure but a human being, and although he had barely turned twenty-four at the time he killed President Kennedy, he had a motive.
Oswald was a believing Marxist, and his motive was to strike the deadliest blow he could imagine at capitalism in the United States. Oswald had been headed that way most of his sentient life. He had, by his account, become seriously interested in politics at fifteen or sixteen, when someone on a street corner in the Bronx handed him a leaflet about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had been executed two years earlier as spies for the Soviet Union. At...
Wednesday, June 13, 2007 - 16:30
SOURCE: WSJ Opinion Journal (6-13-07)
BAGHDAD, Iraq--Americans keen to understand the ongoing struggle for a new Iraq can be guided by the example of their own history. In the 1860s, your country fought a great struggle of its own, a civil war that took hundreds of thousands of lives but ended in the triumph of freedom and the birth of a great power. Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation signaled the destruction of the terrible institution of slavery, and the rise of a country dedicated, more than any other in the world of nation-states then and hence, to the principle of human liberty.
Our struggle in Iraq is similar to the great American quest, and is perhaps even more complicated. As your country was fighting that great contest over its unity and future, Iraq was a province of an Ottoman empire steeped in backwardness and ignorance. A half a century later, the British began an occupation of Iraq and drew the borders of contemporary Iraq as we know them today. Independence brought no relief to the...
Our struggle in Iraq is similar to the great American quest, and is perhaps even more complicated. As your country was fighting that great contest over its unity and future, Iraq was a province of an Ottoman empire steeped in backwardness and ignorance. A half a century later, the British began an occupation of Iraq and drew the borders of contemporary Iraq as we know them today. Independence brought no relief to the...
Wednesday, June 13, 2007 - 14:14
