“Dear Folks,” the letter begins, “I think of you when I hear a Beethoven symphony or the words of a childhood hero repeated and more beautiful as I approach my forties. The strength and principles you planted into me at an early age, though inconsistent with the larger culture I grew up in, is now flowering in fertile soil. I see your faces in my mind and remember the courage both of you demonstrated during the McCarthy period when you were alone. How fortunate that Gail and David can grow up in a community that supports their ideals — it shows — they are so strong and independent, you would be proud. I work hard. I’m the administrator of the medical system in Jonestown. It’s the most exciting thing I’ve ever done. There is a song we sing that begins, ‘It feels good to rise with the morning sun,’ and ends, ‘It feels good to see all the work we’ve done and to know the future is now,’ it sums up my feelings about my life here. I am thousands of miles from you, the electronic...

[Bill Cash is Conservative MP for Stone.]

Today, 150 years ago, John Bright launched in Birmingham Town Hall his historic campaign for parliamentary reform and the vote for working men. The Liberal MP wrote to his wife that “The Times reporter called this morning to ask when I thought the meeting would be over that he might arrange for their special engine! Other men, I mean our public men, must be very little if I am so great.” The meeting ran late but The Times's special train still ensured the journalist met his deadline.

Bright, with Richard Cobden, his fellow believer in free trade, had in 1846 saved the masses from starvation by forcing Peel to repeal the Corn Laws. He turned his attention on October 27, 1858, to reducing “the fabric of privilege” by campaigning for the vote for all working men.

As G.M. Trevelyan noted: “That great audience swayed, like a cornfield beneath the wind, under the gusts of cheering and laughter that shook them as...

[Ben Macintyre is a columnist writing for The Times newspaper.]

The streets of Paris ask an insistent moral question, now more than half a century old but as pertinent as ever. On many street corners, small plaques commemorate those who faced up to Nazism: “Here died so-and-so, résistant de guerre.”

When I lived in Paris, I often pondered the question posed by these small memorials: what would I have done? Would I have done anything? Some Frenchmen and women actively collaborated during the war; many quietly acquiesced to protect themselves and their families. Those who chose to resist fascism did so in different ways: some secretly and discreetly, some with guns and actions, others with words. Those who spoke up, and out, were perhaps the bravest of all: the saints, and the martyrs.

Exactly 50 years after the death of Pope Pius XII, supporters of the wartime pontiff are demanding his beatification, the last step on the road to sainthood,...

Among the vintage French liquor and movie advertisements, the British Empire posters, and the American publicity art on display at an annual show in New York last week, you could see a rarity from China that, to me at least, summoned up one of the moral paradoxes of our time.

The print, from 1960, shows a line of workers and peasants marching under a giant red banner. Underneath is a caption that brought a kind of chill: "Oppose Rightist Tendencies," it reads. "Arouse Enthusiasm; Continue the Great Leap Forward."

The poster is one of the more expensive ($1,000) on sale at the East is Red booth within the poster show - East is Red (www.theeastisred.com) being the avocation of Dwight McWethy, an American business consultant who lives in Beijing and sells memorabilia from China's Cultural Revolution and other political movements, mostly to foreigners.

But why the chill? Certainly there's...

[Raymond Ibrahim is the editor of the Al-Qaeda Reader, translations of religious texts and propaganda.]

Precisely 100 years of Islamic conquests after Muhammad's death (632), the Muslims, starting from Arabia, found themselves in Gaul, modern day France, confronting a hitherto little known people — the Christian Franks. There, on October 11th, 732, one of the most decisive battles between Christendom and Islam took place, demarcating the extent of the latter’s conquests, and ensuring the survival of the former.

Prior to this, the Islamic conquerors, drunk with power and plunder, had, for one century been subjugating all peoples and territories standing in their western march — from Arabia to Morocco (al-Maghreb, the “furthest west”). In 711, the Muslims made their fateful crossing of the straits of Gibraltar, landing for the first time on European ground. Upon touching terra firma, the leader of the Muslims, Tariq bin Zayid, ordered all the boats used for the...

[Joseph Levine is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He has been active in groups devoted to Palestinian Rights and a just resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 1982.]

I have often been involved in arguments about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that focus on its history. Usually, the defender of current Israeli behavior urges the importance of appreciating all that Israel has been through and why it exists in the first place. I respond by reviewing the dispossession of 1948, terror attacks on Arab villages in the ’50s, Israeli provocations over the DMZ on the Golan Heights in the ’50s and ’60s, and on and on. Eventually and invariably, the defender of Israeli behavior insists that we not be so distracted by the history, that we need to focus on resolving the current conflict, not rehearsing the past. And thus we are struck by a larger question: is the history of Israeli-Palestinian relations important in our attempts to...

[Born in the United States, Alexander Rose was raised in Australia and Britain. A military historian and former journalist, he is the author of Washington's Spies: The Story of America's First Spy Ring, and his writing has appeared in the New York Observer, the Washington Post, Studies in Intelligence, and many other publications. His website is www.alexrose.com. His latest book is American Rifle: A Biography (FSB, 2008).]

Three of our presidents have been particularly fascinated by rifles: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. But all for different reasons.

Washington was what we would call an "early adopter" of rifle technology. As early as the French and Indian War (1754-1763), when he was first baptized into frontier warfare, the young, ambitious officer owned his own rifle. This was at a time when few, apart from frontiersmen, even knew what one was.

In 1775, for instance,...

[Timothy Garton Ash, a contributing editor to the Los Angeles Times Opinion pages, is a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and professor of European studies at Oxford University.]

Among the ways in which freedom is being chipped away in Europe, one of the less obvious is the legislation of memory. More and more countries have laws saying you must remember and describe this or that historical event in a certain way.

The wrong way depends on where you are. In Switzerland, you get prosecuted for saying that the terrible thing that happened to the Armenians in the last years of the Ottoman empire was not a genocide. In Turkey, you get prosecuted for saying it was. What is state-ordained truth in the Alps is state-ordained falsehood in Anatolia.

Of all the countries in Europe, France has the most intense and tortuous recent experience with "memory laws." It began rather uncontroversially in 1990, when denial of the Nazi Holocaust of...

The artifact landscape has changed. Hunting for arrowheads, Indian tools, and old-time treasures is not only politically incorrect but often illegal. Time was when a fairly casual stroll along a river or on a beach or through the forest could produce all kinds of finds which people didn't think twice about pocketing. Back in the late 1980s, I visited the home of an old-timer on Alki Point, and on one wall of his cabin was a museum-quality display of Clovis spear points.

I envied the days of my father, who seemed to have a knack for running across exciting stuff when he was young, from bones to old military buttons. When he worked at a logging camp on the Olympic Peninsula in the 1930s, two loggers came across a musket ball buried deep in a tree they were felling. My father, a college boy, asked to see it and the tree where they found it. By counting the rings, he estimated it had been fired in the late 1700s — right around the time the Spanish established Washington's first...