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: National Review Online (12-17-07)
[Mr. Radosh, an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute and a contributing editor of the New York Sun, has written widely on Communism and anti-Communism.]
During the past decade we have seen a bold new attempt to resurrect the reputation and stature of Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, whose Senate investigations into Communism in the 1950s led to the word “McCarthyism,” a term used ever since to describe those who smeared their opponents falsely, ruined their careers, and practiced guilt by association. The reevaluation began with a 1996 column by liberal journalist Nicholas von Hoffman, who dared to claim that while McCarthy “got it all wrong” he was still “closer to the truth than those who ridiculed him.” In 2000, Arthur Herman produced a revisionist biography of McCarthy. And, most recently, Ann Coulter wrote that McCarthy was right: Liberals back then (as now) were “systematically undermining the nation’s ability to defend itself, while waging a bellicose campaign...
During the past decade we have seen a bold new attempt to resurrect the reputation and stature of Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, whose Senate investigations into Communism in the 1950s led to the word “McCarthyism,” a term used ever since to describe those who smeared their opponents falsely, ruined their careers, and practiced guilt by association. The reevaluation began with a 1996 column by liberal journalist Nicholas von Hoffman, who dared to claim that while McCarthy “got it all wrong” he was still “closer to the truth than those who ridiculed him.” In 2000, Arthur Herman produced a revisionist biography of McCarthy. And, most recently, Ann Coulter wrote that McCarthy was right: Liberals back then (as now) were “systematically undermining the nation’s ability to defend itself, while waging a bellicose campaign...
Friday, January 18, 2008 - 16:07
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SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Ed (1-14-08)
[Christopher Phelps teaches 20th-century American history at Ohio State University at Mansfield.]
We forget so much. We forget that he was hanging by a thread in 1968 at the time of his death, whose 40th anniversary we will mark in April. We forget that his moral authority had frayed, leaving his fund raising in free fall. We forget that in his final years, he faced not only a rising "white backlash" — the media term for white obduracy in the suburbs and working-class neighborhoods, North as well as South — but resentment from establishment liberals who thought he had executed too radical a turn by opposing a Democratic president and the Vietnam War. We forget that although blacks still looked to him more than any other leader, he was increasingly viewed with cynicism by young militants who derided him as "De Lawd" and thought his nonviolence too tepid for the times. We forget that police agencies from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to military...
We forget so much. We forget that he was hanging by a thread in 1968 at the time of his death, whose 40th anniversary we will mark in April. We forget that his moral authority had frayed, leaving his fund raising in free fall. We forget that in his final years, he faced not only a rising "white backlash" — the media term for white obduracy in the suburbs and working-class neighborhoods, North as well as South — but resentment from establishment liberals who thought he had executed too radical a turn by opposing a Democratic president and the Vietnam War. We forget that although blacks still looked to him more than any other leader, he was increasingly viewed with cynicism by young militants who derided him as "De Lawd" and thought his nonviolence too tepid for the times. We forget that police agencies from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to military...
Friday, January 18, 2008 - 15:05
SOURCE: Jamie Glazov at FrontPageMag.com (1-14-08)
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Bruce Bartlett, the former deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury for economic policy under George H.W. Bush. He was the former executive director of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress and he also served in the Office of Policy Development at the White House under Ronald Reagan. He is the author of the new book, Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party's Buried Past.
FP: Bruce Bartlett, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Bartlett: Thanks for the opportunity to discuss my new book.
FP: What inspired you to write this book?
Bartlett: I think the seeds were sown during the Trent Lott affair a few years ago. As you remember, Lott was then Senate Majority Leader and his long-time colleague, Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina was retiring. Lott had some kind words to say about Thurmond that were widely misconstrued by those on the left and in the major media as endorsing Thurmond’s racist past. It...
FP: Bruce Bartlett, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Bartlett: Thanks for the opportunity to discuss my new book.
FP: What inspired you to write this book?
Bartlett: I think the seeds were sown during the Trent Lott affair a few years ago. As you remember, Lott was then Senate Majority Leader and his long-time colleague, Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina was retiring. Lott had some kind words to say about Thurmond that were widely misconstrued by those on the left and in the major media as endorsing Thurmond’s racist past. It...
Thursday, January 17, 2008 - 21:25
SOURCE: Japan Focus (1-16-08)
[ANDRE VLTCHEK: novelist, journalist, playwright and filmmaker. Editorial Director of Asiana Press Agency, co-founder of Mainstay Press, publishing house for political fiction. His latest novel - "Point of No Return" - describes life of war correspondents and cynicism of post-colonial arrangement of the world. Andre lives in Asia and the South Pacific and can be reached at: andre-wcn@usa.net]
Jakarta~ At 4 PM on January 13, 2008, the main entrance to Pertamina Hospital in South Jakarta is besieged by scores of journalists. Almost all are local, as Indonesia rarely attract international media conglomerates, unless there is a deadly landslide, tsunami or airplane crash. Some reporters place the lenses of video and photo cameras against the glass of the hospital entrance, hoping to spot at least some action.
But there is hardly any detectable movement inside. General Suharto, the 86-year old former military dictator who...
Jakarta~ At 4 PM on January 13, 2008, the main entrance to Pertamina Hospital in South Jakarta is besieged by scores of journalists. Almost all are local, as Indonesia rarely attract international media conglomerates, unless there is a deadly landslide, tsunami or airplane crash. Some reporters place the lenses of video and photo cameras against the glass of the hospital entrance, hoping to spot at least some action.
But there is hardly any detectable movement inside. General Suharto, the 86-year old former military dictator who...
Thursday, January 17, 2008 - 20:17
SOURCE: New York Sun (1-4-08)
[Ronald Radosh is an adjunct senior fellow at the Hudson Institute; Prof. Emeritus of History at the City University of New York, and the author of many books, including "The Rosenberg File;" "Divided They Fell: The Demise of the Democratic Party, 1964-1996," and most recently, "Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left."]
For decades, the left has used the term "fascist" to attack just about anyone they disagree with. That behavior continues: The feminist author Naomi Wolf has recently come out with a book condemning what she calls the "fascist shift" in America, in which she describes the 10 steps she thinks America is taking that lead to fascism. (Of course, to Ms. Wolf the no. 1 fascist is President Bush.) Before her, the liberal journalist Joe Conason wrote a book titled "It Can Happen Here" — what could happen, of course, was American fascism emanating from the Bush...
For decades, the left has used the term "fascist" to attack just about anyone they disagree with. That behavior continues: The feminist author Naomi Wolf has recently come out with a book condemning what she calls the "fascist shift" in America, in which she describes the 10 steps she thinks America is taking that lead to fascism. (Of course, to Ms. Wolf the no. 1 fascist is President Bush.) Before her, the liberal journalist Joe Conason wrote a book titled "It Can Happen Here" — what could happen, of course, was American fascism emanating from the Bush...
Thursday, January 17, 2008 - 19:42
SOURCE: Ledeen blog (1-14-08)
[Mr. Ledeen, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of The War Against the Terror Masters: Why It Happened. Where We Are Now. How We’ll Win.]
Jonah Goldberg, my buddy and boss at NRO, has written a fun book called “Liberal Fascism” that has a lot of people talking, and maybe even thinking. It’s a careful book, maybe even too careful. Jonah keeps on telling us that he’s not trying to make any sweeping generalizations. Despite the provocative title, he’s not saying that liberalism is the same as fascism, or that fascists were really liberals, or any such thing. What he does say—and while it’s obviously news to most of the reviewers, it’s very old hat to anyone who had studied the history of fascism (that is, all eleven or so of us here in the United States)—is that many of the iconic figures in American liberalism (and among the British left as well) greatly admired Mussolini. As well they might, he says, since he was really one of them in many ways....
Jonah Goldberg, my buddy and boss at NRO, has written a fun book called “Liberal Fascism” that has a lot of people talking, and maybe even thinking. It’s a careful book, maybe even too careful. Jonah keeps on telling us that he’s not trying to make any sweeping generalizations. Despite the provocative title, he’s not saying that liberalism is the same as fascism, or that fascists were really liberals, or any such thing. What he does say—and while it’s obviously news to most of the reviewers, it’s very old hat to anyone who had studied the history of fascism (that is, all eleven or so of us here in the United States)—is that many of the iconic figures in American liberalism (and among the British left as well) greatly admired Mussolini. As well they might, he says, since he was really one of them in many ways....
Thursday, January 17, 2008 - 19:31
SOURCE: Is That Legal? (1-14-08)
[Eric Muller, UNC Law School.]
A s I noted yesterday, Stephen Griffin complained at Balkinization about what he labeled the"alternate reality conventional wisdom" on the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans that Jack Goldsmith and Curt Bradley present in their new casebook on foreign affairs law. As Griffin says,
The basic flavor of the new conventional wisdom is that the internment was justified on the basis of the knowledge available to government officials acting in good faith in the confused months following the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. Later, however, using the benefits of hindsight, “liberals” condemned the Korematsu case as racist and consigned it to the category of one of the worst decisions in the history of the American judiciary.I've now read the...
Tuesday, January 15, 2008 - 22:34
SOURCE: Washington DeCoded (1-11-08)
Last October, when the Lyndon B. Johnson Library released a new batch of recordings, one of the most revealing conversations went literally unnoticed. Yet the 13½ minute conversation between President Johnson and Justice Abe Fortas on January 11, 1967—”the day after LBJ had delivered his third œState of the Union address to Congress—”underscores one of the most astonishing insights ever to come from the once-secret tapes.
At the outset, in error, Lyndon Johnson blamed Robert F. Kennedy for fomenting the disbelief in the Warren Report that was widespread by late 1966. Indeed, both Johnson and Fortas viewed RFK’™s reach and influence with such suspicion that to them, it seemed conceivable that The New York Times had aborted its 1966 investigation into the Warren Commission because the Times’™s findings had turned out to be too favorable. Publication of a single story, much less a series, that put the commission in a positive...
At the outset, in error, Lyndon Johnson blamed Robert F. Kennedy for fomenting the disbelief in the Warren Report that was widespread by late 1966. Indeed, both Johnson and Fortas viewed RFK’™s reach and influence with such suspicion that to them, it seemed conceivable that The New York Times had aborted its 1966 investigation into the Warren Commission because the Times’™s findings had turned out to be too favorable. Publication of a single story, much less a series, that put the commission in a positive...
Sunday, January 13, 2008 - 19:49
SOURCE: Nation (1-10-08)
[Eric Foner, a member of The Nation's editorial board, is DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University and author, most recently, of Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction.]
One of the most arresting lectures I have ever heard at a historians' convention was delivered four years ago by Drew Gilpin Faust at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association. Taking as her starting point Robert E. Lee's possibly apocryphal remark, "It is well that war is so terrible--lest we should grow too fond of it," Faust blamed historians for succumbing to war's seductive power. By ascribing moral purposes and profound causes to what is really pointless slaughter, she insisted, historians obscure war's horror. Exhibit A was the American Civil War. More than 60,000 books dealing in one way or another with that conflict have been published since it ended, she observed. That's an average of more than one per day. If historians need war to...
One of the most arresting lectures I have ever heard at a historians' convention was delivered four years ago by Drew Gilpin Faust at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association. Taking as her starting point Robert E. Lee's possibly apocryphal remark, "It is well that war is so terrible--lest we should grow too fond of it," Faust blamed historians for succumbing to war's seductive power. By ascribing moral purposes and profound causes to what is really pointless slaughter, she insisted, historians obscure war's horror. Exhibit A was the American Civil War. More than 60,000 books dealing in one way or another with that conflict have been published since it ended, she observed. That's an average of more than one per day. If historians need war to...
Friday, January 11, 2008 - 16:04
SOURCE: American Prospect (1-8-08)
[David Neiwert is a freelance writer based in Seattle and the editor of the blog Orcinus. A National Press Club award winner for his reportage on the radical right, he is also the author of three books, most recently Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community.]
The public understanding of World War II history and its precedents has suffered in recent years from the depredations of revisionist historians -- the David Irvings and David Bowmans of the field who have attempted to recast the meaning of, respectively, the Holocaust and the Japanese American internment. Their reach, however, has been somewhat limited to fringe audiences.
It might be tempting to throw Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning into those same cloacal backwaters, but there is an essential difference that goes well beyond the likely much broader reach of Goldberg's book, which was...
The public understanding of World War II history and its precedents has suffered in recent years from the depredations of revisionist historians -- the David Irvings and David Bowmans of the field who have attempted to recast the meaning of, respectively, the Holocaust and the Japanese American internment. Their reach, however, has been somewhat limited to fringe audiences.
It might be tempting to throw Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning into those same cloacal backwaters, but there is an essential difference that goes well beyond the likely much broader reach of Goldberg's book, which was...
Tuesday, January 8, 2008 - 21:45
SOURCE: Froginawell (blog) (1-8-08)
[Mr. Hayford is Visiting Professor, Department of History, Northwestern University.]
The lively and informed blog, Jottings from the Granite Studio, January 8 has a well turned piece “This date in history: The Death of Zhou Enlai.” The piece shows that Zhou was a consummate statesman, one who perhaps snookered Nixon and Kissinger, who had a reputation for countering Mao’s excesses and acting the suave statesman.
I remember the reporter Harrison Salisbury telling a story about the cosmopolitan Zhou. At the Geneva Conference of 1954 Zhou went around a reception greeting each delegate in his own language, showing up the less worldly Khrushchev, who knew only Russian. Khrushchev, according to another story, later struck back by observing to Zhou how strange it was that he, Khrushchev, came from a peasant background while Zhou was quite...
Tuesday, January 8, 2008 - 19:07
SOURCE: FindLaw.com (1-3-08)
[Edward Lazarus, a FindLaw columnist, writes about, practices, and teaches law in Los Angeles. A former federal prosecutor, he is the author of two books -- most recently, Closed Chambers: The Rise, Fall, and Future of the Modern Supreme Court .]
The turning of a New Year goes hand in hand with a new set of anniversaries to be recalled and reflected upon. Supreme Court history will yield a number of these, including, in 2008, the 50th Anniversary of Trop v. Dulles and Cooper v. Aaron.
Both cases were very much products of the great issues of their day. And both have transcended their particular contexts (though these contexts were and are significant in themselves) to importantly shape the modern history of the Court.
Trop v. Dulles: Can a Military Deserter Lose His Citizenship? Chief Justice Earl Warren's Evolving Interpretation of the Eighth Amendment
At issue in Trop v. Dulles was whether Congress had the power to take away the...
The turning of a New Year goes hand in hand with a new set of anniversaries to be recalled and reflected upon. Supreme Court history will yield a number of these, including, in 2008, the 50th Anniversary of Trop v. Dulles and Cooper v. Aaron.
Both cases were very much products of the great issues of their day. And both have transcended their particular contexts (though these contexts were and are significant in themselves) to importantly shape the modern history of the Court.
Trop v. Dulles: Can a Military Deserter Lose His Citizenship? Chief Justice Earl Warren's Evolving Interpretation of the Eighth Amendment
At issue in Trop v. Dulles was whether Congress had the power to take away the...
Tuesday, January 8, 2008 - 18:25
SOURCE: AlterNet (12-30-07)
[Anneli Rufus is the author of several books, including Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto.]
If the left and right agree on almost nothing else, we agree at least on this: America's in terrible shape. Such shocking shape that -- how did we come to this? -- it might not actually survive.
And there our dialogue dissolves. The things about America you diagnose as lethal are the very things your megachurch-belonging cousin with the rifle rack in his truck prays might save its life. And vice-versa. Gay rights. Abortion rights. Prayer in the schools. Environmentalism. Corporations. Porn. There the shouting, and possibly shooting, begins.
How did we come to this? It's the '70s' fault, writes Thomas Hine in The Great Funk: Falling Apart and Coming Together (on a Shag Rug) in the Seventies (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2007), a richly if incriminatingly illustrated book about a traumatic "slum of a decade" in which "the country was running out of promise...
If the left and right agree on almost nothing else, we agree at least on this: America's in terrible shape. Such shocking shape that -- how did we come to this? -- it might not actually survive.
And there our dialogue dissolves. The things about America you diagnose as lethal are the very things your megachurch-belonging cousin with the rifle rack in his truck prays might save its life. And vice-versa. Gay rights. Abortion rights. Prayer in the schools. Environmentalism. Corporations. Porn. There the shouting, and possibly shooting, begins.
How did we come to this? It's the '70s' fault, writes Thomas Hine in The Great Funk: Falling Apart and Coming Together (on a Shag Rug) in the Seventies (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2007), a richly if incriminatingly illustrated book about a traumatic "slum of a decade" in which "the country was running out of promise...
Tuesday, January 8, 2008 - 15:23
SOURCE: NYT Book Review (1-6-08)
[Max Rodenbeck is the Middle East correspondent for The Economist.]
Few events in history have had so swift, profound and far-reaching an impact as the arrival of Islam. Within a mere 15 years of the Prophet Muhammad’s death, in A.D. 632, his desert followers had conquered all the centers of ancient Near Eastern civilization. They had erased a great and enduring regional power, Persia; reduced its brilliant rival, Byzantium, to a rump state; and carved from their territories an empire as vast as that of Rome at its height. Within 100 years, Muslim armies were harrying the frontiers of Tang dynasty China in the east, while 5,000 miles to the west, they had charged across Spain to clash with the Merovingian princes of what is now France.
The triumph was not just military. The explosive expansion of Islam severed at a stroke the 1,000-year-old links of commerce, culture, politics and religion that had bound the southern and northern shores of the Mediterranean. It...
Few events in history have had so swift, profound and far-reaching an impact as the arrival of Islam. Within a mere 15 years of the Prophet Muhammad’s death, in A.D. 632, his desert followers had conquered all the centers of ancient Near Eastern civilization. They had erased a great and enduring regional power, Persia; reduced its brilliant rival, Byzantium, to a rump state; and carved from their territories an empire as vast as that of Rome at its height. Within 100 years, Muslim armies were harrying the frontiers of Tang dynasty China in the east, while 5,000 miles to the west, they had charged across Spain to clash with the Merovingian princes of what is now France.
The triumph was not just military. The explosive expansion of Islam severed at a stroke the 1,000-year-old links of commerce, culture, politics and religion that had bound the southern and northern shores of the Mediterranean. It...
Monday, January 7, 2008 - 18:26
SOURCE: San Francisco Chronicle (12-23-07)
[Josiah Bunting III, president of the H. Frank Guggenheim Foundation and superintendent emeritus of the Virginia Military Institute, serves as chairman of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute's National Civic Literacy Board.]
Now that the season of holly and mistletoe and submitting college applications has arrived, high school seniors and their parents might want to consider how much students are really likely to learn at the university in which they will enroll next fall.
The answer, unfortunately, is not much. The results for American history are particularly dismal. In fact, a recent survey revealed that the typical college student actually loses knowledge about certain key themes relating to our national heritage.
This pattern was especially prominent among students at the most prestigious and expensive colleges included in the survey.
Last fall, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute commissioned a survey in which 14,000 randomly...
Now that the season of holly and mistletoe and submitting college applications has arrived, high school seniors and their parents might want to consider how much students are really likely to learn at the university in which they will enroll next fall.
The answer, unfortunately, is not much. The results for American history are particularly dismal. In fact, a recent survey revealed that the typical college student actually loses knowledge about certain key themes relating to our national heritage.
This pattern was especially prominent among students at the most prestigious and expensive colleges included in the survey.
Last fall, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute commissioned a survey in which 14,000 randomly...
Tuesday, January 1, 2008 - 22:11
SOURCE: NYT (1-1-08)
... One of the astonishing things about 1968 was how quickly each shocking, consciousness-altering event succeeded the last, leaving no time for people to reorient themselves. The mind-boggling occurrences seemed to come out of nowhere, like the Viet Cong who set off a depth charge beneath the Johnson presidency with the Tet offensive at the end of January.
When Walter Cronkite learned of the coordinated wave of attacks throughout South Vietnam by the Cong and North Vietnamese regulars he is reported to have said: “What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning this war.”
The nation shuddered. The U.S. had never lost a war, but now men padding around in black pajamas and flip-flops fashioned from discarded tires gave every appearance of battling the mightiest military on earth to a stalemate.
The New Hampshire primary was March 12. Eugene McCarthy, a quiet, cerebral and sometimes flaky senator from Minnesota who was calling for a negotiated...
When Walter Cronkite learned of the coordinated wave of attacks throughout South Vietnam by the Cong and North Vietnamese regulars he is reported to have said: “What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning this war.”
The nation shuddered. The U.S. had never lost a war, but now men padding around in black pajamas and flip-flops fashioned from discarded tires gave every appearance of battling the mightiest military on earth to a stalemate.
The New Hampshire primary was March 12. Eugene McCarthy, a quiet, cerebral and sometimes flaky senator from Minnesota who was calling for a negotiated...
Tuesday, January 1, 2008 - 21:41
