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: http://www.signandsight.com (10-29-07)
[Stefan Klemp is a historian and journalist. He is author of the book "Nicht ermittelt. Polizeibataillone und die Nachkriegsjustiz" (2005), and is director of historical research in Germany for the Simon Wiesenthal Center. ]
The murder of roughly 200 Jews in the night of March 24-25, 1945, in the eastern Austrian village of Rechnitz is now the subject of a heated debate, focussing on the question whether the murder occurred at a party thrown by a "Thyssen countess." This fact, however, has been common knowledge at the very latest since 1998, when historian Eva Holpfer published her findings (here in German as pdf file) on the "Rechnitz Massacre": The mass murder did take place that night, and was carried out by guests at a party at Schloss Rechnitz. Far more interesting, however, than the question of whether or not the heiress of a German industrialist family was involved, is the question of what happened to the murderers.
Files...
The murder of roughly 200 Jews in the night of March 24-25, 1945, in the eastern Austrian village of Rechnitz is now the subject of a heated debate, focussing on the question whether the murder occurred at a party thrown by a "Thyssen countess." This fact, however, has been common knowledge at the very latest since 1998, when historian Eva Holpfer published her findings (here in German as pdf file) on the "Rechnitz Massacre": The mass murder did take place that night, and was carried out by guests at a party at Schloss Rechnitz. Far more interesting, however, than the question of whether or not the heiress of a German industrialist family was involved, is the question of what happened to the murderers.
Files...
Wednesday, October 31, 2007 - 13:10
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SOURCE: OpenDemocracy.net (10-24-07)
[Patrick Wright, Professor at the Institute for Cultural Analysis, Nottingham Trent University, is the author of Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War (Oxford U. Press, 2007).]
When I started researching the Iron Curtain, I shared the widespread assumption that this symbolic device first descended into the world on 5 March 1946, when Winston Churchill went to the small town of Fulton in Missouri and, standing in a college gymnasium with President Truman at his side, gave the famous speech in which he warned of the new division of Europe: "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent . . ."
I assumed that the story of the Iron Curtain reached forward from that inaugural moment, through four decades of cold war to the events of 1989, when the Berlin wall was breached, the wire that had long divided Austria and Czechoslovakia was twisted into a great heart-shaped sculpture, and "people...
When I started researching the Iron Curtain, I shared the widespread assumption that this symbolic device first descended into the world on 5 March 1946, when Winston Churchill went to the small town of Fulton in Missouri and, standing in a college gymnasium with President Truman at his side, gave the famous speech in which he warned of the new division of Europe: "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent . . ."
I assumed that the story of the Iron Curtain reached forward from that inaugural moment, through four decades of cold war to the events of 1989, when the Berlin wall was breached, the wire that had long divided Austria and Czechoslovakia was twisted into a great heart-shaped sculpture, and "people...
Sunday, October 28, 2007 - 20:33
SOURCE: City Journal (10-24-07)
[Michael Knox Beran: The author is a contributing editor of City Journal.
His book, Forge of Empires 1861–1871: Three Revolutionary Statesmen and
the World They Made, is being published this month by Free Press.]
In 1861, free institutions seemed poised to carry all before them. In Russia, Tsar Alexander II emancipated 22 million serfs. In Germany, lawmakers dedicated to free constitutional principles prepared to assert civilian control over Prussia’s feudal military caste. In America, Abraham Lincoln entered the White House pledged to a revolutionary policy of excluding human bondage from the nation’s territories.
The new machinery of freedom, though Anglo-American in design, was universal in scope. At its core was the idea, as yet imperfectly realized, that all human beings possess a fundamental dignity. This was a truth that, Abraham Lincoln believed, was “applicable to all men and all times.” In 1861, the faith that all men have a right to life, liberty, and the fruits of...
Friday, October 26, 2007 - 16:14
SOURCE: American Heritage (10-15-07)
[Jillian Sim lives and writes in the desert Southwest.]
Thomas Jefferson, third President and author of the Declaration of Independence, is, as the historian Joseph J. Ellis put it, the American Sphinx. He may be most puzzling of all in his relationships with women. Those women—from mother to wife and also to putative slave mistress—have remained over the centuries comfortably invisible in the public record, their presence flashing feebly only when their master allowed their contributions to be known and remembered. It is a daunting task for a Jefferson biographer not only to illumine the lives and inner desires of these invisible women but also to attempt to reveal through them the deeply enigmatic man. But that is what Jon Kukla, who earlier produced a highly regarded account of the Louisiana Purchase, promises in his new biography, Mr. Jefferson’s Women (Knopf, 279 pages, $26.95).
Biographies of Jefferson are published almost constantly, each new addition boasting...
Tuesday, October 23, 2007 - 18:36
SOURCE: http://pajamasmedia.com (10-23-07)
[Jules Crittenden is a Boston Herald editor and columnist who has reported on politics, crime, science, foreign affairs, and maritime and military matters in the United States, Asia, the Balkans and the Middle East.]
... The Armenians have been fighting for a very long time, often without friends, in a part of the world where it is sometimes necessary to choose one’s allies and one’s enemies according to the circumstances as they present themselves. Their experience has made them tough, bitter, resourceful and determined, a people not to be trifled with. It has also made them very practical.
Consider the example of General Dro.
Drastamat “Dro” Kanayan was born during an earthquake in 1884, an Armenian in what is now eastern Turkey. He was buried in exile in a New England blizzard in 1956. In 2000, accompanying the party that brought his exhumed remains home, I witnessed his final triumphal return amid hail and the crash of lightning to Bash Abaran...
... The Armenians have been fighting for a very long time, often without friends, in a part of the world where it is sometimes necessary to choose one’s allies and one’s enemies according to the circumstances as they present themselves. Their experience has made them tough, bitter, resourceful and determined, a people not to be trifled with. It has also made them very practical.
Consider the example of General Dro.
Drastamat “Dro” Kanayan was born during an earthquake in 1884, an Armenian in what is now eastern Turkey. He was buried in exile in a New England blizzard in 1956. In 2000, accompanying the party that brought his exhumed remains home, I witnessed his final triumphal return amid hail and the crash of lightning to Bash Abaran...
Tuesday, October 23, 2007 - 18:19
SOURCE: A review in the New Republic of Ian Kershaw's Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941 (10-17-07)
[István Deák is Seth Low Professor Emeritus at Columbia University and the author, most recently, of Essays on Hitler's Europe (University of Nebraska Press).]
... In a stimulating "Afterthoughts" chapter, Kershaw reflects on whether these ten decisions could have been avoided, or others been made instead. His answer is that there were barely any alternatives. It is a little surprising, perhaps, in a book that studies the free historical agency of political and military leaders, and casts the individual in such a central role in history, to find this sense of historical inevitability; but it pervades Kershaw's book. In his telling, the British in May 1940 had really no choice but to hold out if they wanted to avoid total humiliation and the end of their empire, not to speak of the end of Western civilization. Unable to mount an invasion of Great Britain, Hitler had hardly any choice but to seek Britain's isolation through an attack on the Soviet Union. Stalin,...
... In a stimulating "Afterthoughts" chapter, Kershaw reflects on whether these ten decisions could have been avoided, or others been made instead. His answer is that there were barely any alternatives. It is a little surprising, perhaps, in a book that studies the free historical agency of political and military leaders, and casts the individual in such a central role in history, to find this sense of historical inevitability; but it pervades Kershaw's book. In his telling, the British in May 1940 had really no choice but to hold out if they wanted to avoid total humiliation and the end of their empire, not to speak of the end of Western civilization. Unable to mount an invasion of Great Britain, Hitler had hardly any choice but to seek Britain's isolation through an attack on the Soviet Union. Stalin,...
Tuesday, October 23, 2007 - 18:02
SOURCE: Oxford University Press Blog (10-22-07)
[The Oxford History of The United States series has won two Pulitzer Prizes, a Bancroft and a Parkman Prize. The newest addition, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848, by Daniel Walker Howe, looks at the period from the battle of New Orleans to the end of the Mexican-American War. Howe’s narrative history shows how drastically America changed in thirty years. Below Howe, Rhodes Professor of American History Emeritus, Oxford University and Professor of History Emeritus, University of California, looks at how October 22nd resonated throughout America.]
On October 22, 1844, somewhere between twenty-five and fifty thousand people gathered in groups all over the United States to watch the sky. They stayed up until after midnight, straining to see Jesus Christ coming out of the heavens. A Vermont farmer named William Miller, undeterred by his lack of knowledge of Hebrew or Greek, had applied his naive ingenuity to biblical study. Calculations based on...
On October 22, 1844, somewhere between twenty-five and fifty thousand people gathered in groups all over the United States to watch the sky. They stayed up until after midnight, straining to see Jesus Christ coming out of the heavens. A Vermont farmer named William Miller, undeterred by his lack of knowledge of Hebrew or Greek, had applied his naive ingenuity to biblical study. Calculations based on...
Monday, October 22, 2007 - 21:20
SOURCE: Independent Institute's Independent Review (10-1-07)
[Daniel Choi currently works at Notati, an Internet startup based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has a
Ph.D. in government from Harvard University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.]
Over the past few decades, as Karl Marx was thrown into the dustbin, Alexis de Tocqueville came surging back from the graveyard of intellectual history. Tocqueville’s main claim to fame is as the author of Democracy in America, which was originally published in two parts, in 1835 and 1840. Owing largely to this book, he is hailed today by almost universal consensus as a thinker of virtually superhuman prescience—indeed, as the supreme oracle of the modern age. Tocqueville now enjoys “magistral status,” observes one eminent commentator (Wolin 2001, 4). “No one seriously believes,” writes another, “that an author, dead for more than century, can say anything to us about the novelties we face, that he can explain us to ourselves. This is precisely what Tocqueville accomplishes, it seems to me, when he...
Monday, October 22, 2007 - 21:11
SOURCE: Haaretz (10-18-07)
[Michalis Firillas is on the editorial staff of Haaretz.]
... What can we learn from the German response to the Holocaust that might help Turkey alter its attitude toward the Armenian genocide? A loaded question? Obviously. An unfair one? Maybe. But is it a useful one? Definitely, and not only for the Turks. If there is one lesson we must have picked up on during the 20th century, it is that we are all "built" for genocide. There is no culture, polity, community that is immune from this. There are of course many ways of carrying out genocide. You can starve your victims, parch them, march them into the desert, shoot them, rape them, gas them, burn them, bomb them, hack them to pieces. You do not need to be an industrial powerhouse to do it quickly, efficiently. And by most standards, there is at least one genocide taking place right now, in East Africa.
Mentioning Turkey in the same sentence as the Holocaust is anathema to all Turks - and they are...
... What can we learn from the German response to the Holocaust that might help Turkey alter its attitude toward the Armenian genocide? A loaded question? Obviously. An unfair one? Maybe. But is it a useful one? Definitely, and not only for the Turks. If there is one lesson we must have picked up on during the 20th century, it is that we are all "built" for genocide. There is no culture, polity, community that is immune from this. There are of course many ways of carrying out genocide. You can starve your victims, parch them, march them into the desert, shoot them, rape them, gas them, burn them, bomb them, hack them to pieces. You do not need to be an industrial powerhouse to do it quickly, efficiently. And by most standards, there is at least one genocide taking place right now, in East Africa.
Mentioning Turkey in the same sentence as the Holocaust is anathema to all Turks - and they are...
Friday, October 19, 2007 - 17:46
SOURCE: http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal (10-17-07)
[Soli Ozel teaches at Istanbul Bilgi University's Department of International Relations and Political Science.]
The U.S. Congress has no moral authority to pass judgment on any other country’s history, particularly with its Iraqi invasion record in public view – nor does any other parliament or political body, for that matter. History cannot be legislated and politicians ought to stay away from trying to do so. It is not their duty.
This does not mean that historians can determine the outcome of what is essentially a political problem, either. To give something a label is a political act, which is precisely what complicates the matter. But the task of coming to terms with one’s history is the work and duty of that nation’s citizens. This was the position taken by the late Hrant Dink, the slain editor of an independent Armenian weekly, AGOS, who, on numerous occasions was treated by diaspora Armenians as a traitor or an “Uncle Tom,” or worse, because he wanted...
The U.S. Congress has no moral authority to pass judgment on any other country’s history, particularly with its Iraqi invasion record in public view – nor does any other parliament or political body, for that matter. History cannot be legislated and politicians ought to stay away from trying to do so. It is not their duty.
This does not mean that historians can determine the outcome of what is essentially a political problem, either. To give something a label is a political act, which is precisely what complicates the matter. But the task of coming to terms with one’s history is the work and duty of that nation’s citizens. This was the position taken by the late Hrant Dink, the slain editor of an independent Armenian weekly, AGOS, who, on numerous occasions was treated by diaspora Armenians as a traitor or an “Uncle Tom,” or worse, because he wanted...
Thursday, October 18, 2007 - 20:24
SOURCE: WSJ (10-17-07)
[Mr. Taranto is a columnist for the WSJ.]
... This is a very odd debate. For one thing, it is ultimately about nothing: Congress is not proposing to pass any law, merely to issue a nonbinding resolution--a statement of opinion. Congress issues such resolutions all the time, but usually they are either uncontroversial ("recognizing the 90th birthday of Ronald Reagan") or intended to put lawmakers on the spot by forcing them to take sides on some contentious question (such as whether to repudiate MoveOn.org's McCarthylike tactics). In this case, the statement itself is the point of the resolution.
Another odd aspect to the debate is the asymmetry between the two sides. The strongest proponents of the resolution are Armenian-American groups and congressmen with many constituents of Armenian extraction. There is little domestic opposition, but the Turkish government is vehemently against the resolution--so much so that it recalled its ambassador from...
... This is a very odd debate. For one thing, it is ultimately about nothing: Congress is not proposing to pass any law, merely to issue a nonbinding resolution--a statement of opinion. Congress issues such resolutions all the time, but usually they are either uncontroversial ("recognizing the 90th birthday of Ronald Reagan") or intended to put lawmakers on the spot by forcing them to take sides on some contentious question (such as whether to repudiate MoveOn.org's McCarthylike tactics). In this case, the statement itself is the point of the resolution.
Another odd aspect to the debate is the asymmetry between the two sides. The strongest proponents of the resolution are Armenian-American groups and congressmen with many constituents of Armenian extraction. There is little domestic opposition, but the Turkish government is vehemently against the resolution--so much so that it recalled its ambassador from...
Thursday, October 18, 2007 - 13:57
SOURCE: Time (10-18-07)
[Ms. Power is a professor at Harvard and the author of a study of genocide.]
Ninety-two years ago, the "Young Turk" regime ordered the executions of Armenian civic leaders and intellectuals, and Turkish soldiers and militia forced the Armenian population to march into the desert, where more than a million died by bayonet or starvation. That horror helped galvanize Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew, to invent the word genocide, which was defined not as the extermination of an entire group but rather as a systematic effort to destroy a group. Lemkin wanted the term — and the international legal convention that grew out of it — to encompass ethnic cleansing and the murdering of a substantial part of a group. Otherwise, he feared, the world would wait until an entire group had been wiped out before taking any action.
But this month in Washington these historical truths — about events carried out on another continent, in another century — are igniting...
Ninety-two years ago, the "Young Turk" regime ordered the executions of Armenian civic leaders and intellectuals, and Turkish soldiers and militia forced the Armenian population to march into the desert, where more than a million died by bayonet or starvation. That horror helped galvanize Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew, to invent the word genocide, which was defined not as the extermination of an entire group but rather as a systematic effort to destroy a group. Lemkin wanted the term — and the international legal convention that grew out of it — to encompass ethnic cleansing and the murdering of a substantial part of a group. Otherwise, he feared, the world would wait until an entire group had been wiped out before taking any action.
But this month in Washington these historical truths — about events carried out on another continent, in another century — are igniting...
Thursday, October 18, 2007 - 11:21
SOURCE: Minneapolis Star Tribune (10-16-07)
Until 30 years ago, visitors to the Rotunda of the Minnesota State Capitol could admire a painting of white soldiers vanquishing Sioux Indians at the battle of Killdeer Mountain, out in the western part of what later became North Dakota.
But these Sioux weren't fighting. They were fleeing.
That 1864 incident was more massacre than battle, costing the lives of two soldiers and 150 Indians, including women and children. The soldiers destroyed the Indians' village and possessions, and made the Sioux refugees in their own land. It was the culmination of a punitive military campaign that followed the Dakota Conflict of 1862, in which the eastern Sioux, or Dakota, attempted to drive white settlers from Minnesota. That war led to an official state policy of banishing or killing all Sioux, wherever they were found, even those who knew nothing of the war, such as those at Killdeer Mountain, whose bitter experiences would fuel the wars that stretched from George Armstrong...
But these Sioux weren't fighting. They were fleeing.
That 1864 incident was more massacre than battle, costing the lives of two soldiers and 150 Indians, including women and children. The soldiers destroyed the Indians' village and possessions, and made the Sioux refugees in their own land. It was the culmination of a punitive military campaign that followed the Dakota Conflict of 1862, in which the eastern Sioux, or Dakota, attempted to drive white settlers from Minnesota. That war led to an official state policy of banishing or killing all Sioux, wherever they were found, even those who knew nothing of the war, such as those at Killdeer Mountain, whose bitter experiences would fuel the wars that stretched from George Armstrong...
Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - 15:32
SOURCE: Common-Place.org (10-1-07)
[Philip Mead is a Ph.D. candidate in the history department at Harvard University. His dissertation examines interactions between civilians and soldiers in the Continental Army]
What can the experiences of General Thomas Gage, commander of British forces in North America from 1763 to 1775, teach the United States Army in Iraq? The officers of a field artillery battalion posed that question to members of the Harvard history department in May 2006. Intrigued, I agreed to walk the Freedom Trail with these forty officers, to see the sites where those eighteenth-century events happened. I was the only civilian amidst all these soldiers, almost all of whom had already seen combat in Iraq, and their questions and observations challenged my views of the present war in Iraq, the American Revolution, and the responsibilities of a historian in a time of war.
The battalion major contacted the history department in March. He and his fellow officers had received word that...
What can the experiences of General Thomas Gage, commander of British forces in North America from 1763 to 1775, teach the United States Army in Iraq? The officers of a field artillery battalion posed that question to members of the Harvard history department in May 2006. Intrigued, I agreed to walk the Freedom Trail with these forty officers, to see the sites where those eighteenth-century events happened. I was the only civilian amidst all these soldiers, almost all of whom had already seen combat in Iraq, and their questions and observations challenged my views of the present war in Iraq, the American Revolution, and the responsibilities of a historian in a time of war.
The battalion major contacted the history department in March. He and his fellow officers had received word that...
Tuesday, October 16, 2007 - 21:46
SOURCE: Common-Place.org (10-1-07)
[Tim Roberts is assistant professor of history at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. He is the author of Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism, forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press, and is currently researching the interaction of American overseas traders and missionaries during the early American republic. He thanks Bilkent students Ay?egül Avc?, Gül?ah ?enkol, and Veysel ?im?ek for their insights and corrections to this essay.]
How do you teach the early history of the United States to foreigners? Foreign students—in particular, those I've taught in Ankara, Turkey—know a lot about American pop culture. And they are familiar with American literature, if they have taken any courses in American studies, the main academic discipline for teaching and learning about America from abroad. But foreign students often know little, if anything, about American history. In a course I offered on U.S. foreign relations, I asked one...
How do you teach the early history of the United States to foreigners? Foreign students—in particular, those I've taught in Ankara, Turkey—know a lot about American pop culture. And they are familiar with American literature, if they have taken any courses in American studies, the main academic discipline for teaching and learning about America from abroad. But foreign students often know little, if anything, about American history. In a course I offered on U.S. foreign relations, I asked one...
Tuesday, October 16, 2007 - 21:41
SOURCE: Common-Place.org (10-1-07)
[Laurel Thatcher Ulrich teaches history at Harvard University. Her latest book is Well-behaved Women Seldom Make History (2007).]
For scholars, the story of how Betsy Ross made the first American flag is about as credible as Parson Weems's fable about little George Washington
For scholars, the story of how Betsy Ross made the first American flag is about as credible as Parson Weems's fable about little George Washington cutting down the cherry tree. Yet for more than a century, it has been an established part of American education. Among the general public, it shows no signs of going away.
The story emerged in the last third of the nineteenth century as the United States was redefining itself after the Civil War. In 1870, Ross's grandson, William J. Canby, read a paper before the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in which he claimed that in June of 1776, George Washington and two other members of the Continental Congress visited his grandmother in...
For scholars, the story of how Betsy Ross made the first American flag is about as credible as Parson Weems's fable about little George Washington
For scholars, the story of how Betsy Ross made the first American flag is about as credible as Parson Weems's fable about little George Washington cutting down the cherry tree. Yet for more than a century, it has been an established part of American education. Among the general public, it shows no signs of going away.
The story emerged in the last third of the nineteenth century as the United States was redefining itself after the Civil War. In 1870, Ross's grandson, William J. Canby, read a paper before the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in which he claimed that in June of 1776, George Washington and two other members of the Continental Congress visited his grandmother in...
Tuesday, October 16, 2007 - 21:29
SOURCE: Forbes (10-15-07)
[Mr. Lewis is a staff writer for Forbes.]
The future, as a concept, was born in ancient Mesopotamia, when people began studying the heavens for clues to impending events. But the Babylonians and their fellow stargazers (including the Maya) had a limited idea of the future: They thought time was cyclical, so they were not inclined to contemplate the shape of things to come. What goes around, comes around; why conjure up visions of an improved future Babylon if it will only be destroyed when the cycle ends?
These days, certain New Age seers who study the Mayan "Long Count" calendar have concluded that time's current cycle is due to end--cataclysmically--on Dec. 21, 2012. Consider yourself warned. But most of us look at time as a linear continuum, and we expect the future to be different than the present. For the more optimistic among us, the future will not merely be different--it will be better.
Where did we get this idea? Not from the...
The future, as a concept, was born in ancient Mesopotamia, when people began studying the heavens for clues to impending events. But the Babylonians and their fellow stargazers (including the Maya) had a limited idea of the future: They thought time was cyclical, so they were not inclined to contemplate the shape of things to come. What goes around, comes around; why conjure up visions of an improved future Babylon if it will only be destroyed when the cycle ends?
These days, certain New Age seers who study the Mayan "Long Count" calendar have concluded that time's current cycle is due to end--cataclysmically--on Dec. 21, 2012. Consider yourself warned. But most of us look at time as a linear continuum, and we expect the future to be different than the present. For the more optimistic among us, the future will not merely be different--it will be better.
Where did we get this idea? Not from the...
Tuesday, October 16, 2007 - 19:21
SOURCE: Maps of War (10-16-07)
How has the geography of religion evolved over the centuries, and where has it sparked wars? Our map gives us a brief history of the world's most well-known religions: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism. Selected periods of inter-religious bloodshed are also highlighted. Want to see 5,000 years of religion in 90 seconds? Ready, Set, Go!
Tuesday, October 16, 2007 - 17:43
SOURCE: WSJ/WaPo (10-16-07)
It goes without saying that the House resolution condemning Turkey for the "genocide" of Armenians in 1915 will serve no earthly purpose and that it will, to say the least, complicate if not severely strain U.S.-Turkey relations. It goes without saying, also, that the Turks are extremely sensitive on the topic and since they are helpful in the war in Iraq and a friend to Israel, that their feelings ought to be taken into account. All of this is true, but I would feel a lot better about killing this resolution if the argument wasn't so much about how the U.S. needs Turkey and not at all about the truthfulness of the matter.
Of even that, I have some doubt. The congressional resolution repeatedly employs the word genocide, a term used by many scholars. But Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish emigre who coined the term in 1943, clearly had what the Nazis were doing to the Jews in mind. If that is the standard -- and it need not be -- then what happened in the...
Of even that, I have some doubt. The congressional resolution repeatedly employs the word genocide, a term used by many scholars. But Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish emigre who coined the term in 1943, clearly had what the Nazis were doing to the Jews in mind. If that is the standard -- and it need not be -- then what happened in the...
Tuesday, October 16, 2007 - 17:00
SOURCE: Middle East Quarterly (9-1-05)
[Guenter Lewy is professor emeritus of political science, University of Massachusetts, and the author of The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide (University of Utah Press, 2005).]
The debate over what happened to Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I remains acrimonious ninety years after it began. Armenians say they were the victims of the first genocide of the twentieth century. Most Turks say Armenians died during intercommunal fighting and during a wartime relocation necessitated by security concerns because the Armenians sympathized with and many fought on the side of the enemy. For genocide scholars, the claims of the Armenians have become incontrovertible historical fact. But many historians, both in Turkey and the West, have questioned the appropriateness of the genocide label.[1]
The ramifications of the dispute are wide-reaching. The Armenians, encouraged by strong support in France, insist on a Turkish confession...
The debate over what happened to Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I remains acrimonious ninety years after it began. Armenians say they were the victims of the first genocide of the twentieth century. Most Turks say Armenians died during intercommunal fighting and during a wartime relocation necessitated by security concerns because the Armenians sympathized with and many fought on the side of the enemy. For genocide scholars, the claims of the Armenians have become incontrovertible historical fact. But many historians, both in Turkey and the West, have questioned the appropriateness of the genocide label.[1]
The ramifications of the dispute are wide-reaching. The Armenians, encouraged by strong support in France, insist on a Turkish confession...
Tuesday, October 16, 2007 - 15:09
