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: Edge of the American West (blog) (3-18-09)
A while back I was fortunate enough to go to a very pleasant conference at a very pleasant place on the centennial of Herbert Croly’s Promise of American Life. It was for me an unusually thought-provoking conference. I’m putting my paper from it here so I don’t lose it.
About a hundred years ago, Herbert Croly told the readers of his Promise of American Life that the titular promise would be fulfilled if the United States could realize democratic ideals by substantially diminishing, “economic and social inequalities.”[1] During the past three or four decades, income inequality in the United States has significantly increased; the real wages of top American earners have risen thirty percent while the real wages of those in the fiftieth percentile or under have risen by between five to ten percent. The rich have got much richer, while the not-so-rich have not.[2] At the same time, social mobility is low: a family with poverty-level income might, with hard work and good...
About a hundred years ago, Herbert Croly told the readers of his Promise of American Life that the titular promise would be fulfilled if the United States could realize democratic ideals by substantially diminishing, “economic and social inequalities.”[1] During the past three or four decades, income inequality in the United States has significantly increased; the real wages of top American earners have risen thirty percent while the real wages of those in the fiftieth percentile or under have risen by between five to ten percent. The rich have got much richer, while the not-so-rich have not.[2] At the same time, social mobility is low: a family with poverty-level income might, with hard work and good...
Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - 20:48
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SOURCE: Times (UK) (3-18-09)
[Jonathan Clayton is The Times’s Africa correspondent.]
On a balmy late afternoon in September 1990, John Paul II visited the small town of Mwanza, in northern Tanzania, and gave a speech that many believe set the tone for the Aids crisis in Africa.
Battered by conflicts and poverty, those inside the packed church and the huge crowds gathered outside hung on to every word. In particular, the Pope could give answers to this strange “slimming” disease that had seemingly come from nowhere to destroy entire communities. Some in the villages even whispered that it came from God himself as a punishment for past sins.
Tanzania, Uganda and the other countries surrounding Lake Victoria were then at the epicentre of HIV/ Aids, which was beginning its race down Africa’s highways to devastate every corner of the continent. Some nearby villages consisted only of the very old and very young while rows and rows of wooden crosses marked the graves of others....
On a balmy late afternoon in September 1990, John Paul II visited the small town of Mwanza, in northern Tanzania, and gave a speech that many believe set the tone for the Aids crisis in Africa.
Battered by conflicts and poverty, those inside the packed church and the huge crowds gathered outside hung on to every word. In particular, the Pope could give answers to this strange “slimming” disease that had seemingly come from nowhere to destroy entire communities. Some in the villages even whispered that it came from God himself as a punishment for past sins.
Tanzania, Uganda and the other countries surrounding Lake Victoria were then at the epicentre of HIV/ Aids, which was beginning its race down Africa’s highways to devastate every corner of the continent. Some nearby villages consisted only of the very old and very young while rows and rows of wooden crosses marked the graves of others....
Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - 06:57
SOURCE: American Spectator (3-16-09)
[Stephen Moore is a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board.]
Many economists have been warning that the policies of the last few years under the Bush administration followed by the coming economic populism of Barack Obama will lead the U.S. back into a 1930s-style Great Depression. That group includes my friend and coauthor Arthur Laffer. I wouldn't go so far. Our current constellation of policies—bailouts, a weak dollar, rising tax rates, windfall profit taxes, bloated economic stimulus bills, and reregulation of markets— looks to me more like a reprise of the 1970s. That decade wasn't the Great Depression, but the economic results were plenty rotten, delivering the worst performance for the stock market and family incomes since the 1930s. Are we going to see a repeat?
The story actually begins on January 18, 1966. That was the day America hit a gold-plated economic milestone, celebrated as a symbol of post–World War II industrial might and...
Many economists have been warning that the policies of the last few years under the Bush administration followed by the coming economic populism of Barack Obama will lead the U.S. back into a 1930s-style Great Depression. That group includes my friend and coauthor Arthur Laffer. I wouldn't go so far. Our current constellation of policies—bailouts, a weak dollar, rising tax rates, windfall profit taxes, bloated economic stimulus bills, and reregulation of markets— looks to me more like a reprise of the 1970s. That decade wasn't the Great Depression, but the economic results were plenty rotten, delivering the worst performance for the stock market and family incomes since the 1930s. Are we going to see a repeat?
The story actually begins on January 18, 1966. That was the day America hit a gold-plated economic milestone, celebrated as a symbol of post–World War II industrial might and...
Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - 06:34
SOURCE: Japan Focus/Asia-Pacific Journal (3-16-09)
[Radhika Desai is Professor of Political Studies at the Department of Political Studies, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. She is the author of Slouching Towards Ayodhya: From Congress to Hindutva in Indian Politics (2004), Intellectuals and Socialism: ‘Social Democrats’ and the Labour Party (1994) and numerous articles in Economic and Political Weekly, New Left Review, Third World Quarterly and other journals and edited collections on parties, culture, political economy and nationalism. Most recently she has edited Developmental and Cultural Nationalisms, a special issue of Third World Quarterly (2008, 29(3)). She is currently working on two books – When Was Globalization? Origin and End of a US Strategy and The Making of the Indian Capitalist Class. email: desair@cc.umanitoba.ca]
Like celebrities who ‘need no introduction’, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (hereinafter IC) should need no review. After all, it is one of the...
Tuesday, March 17, 2009 - 17:02
SOURCE: Middle East Report Online (3-16-09)
[Claudia Gazzini is a Ph.D. candidate at Oxford University.]
Under a tent in Benghazi on August 30, 2008, Silvio Berlusconi bowed symbolically before the son of ‘Umar al-Mukhtar, hero of the Libyan resistance to Italian colonial rule. “It is my duty to express to you, in the name of the Italian people, our regret and apologies for the deep wounds that we have caused you,” said the Italian premier.[1] Eastern Libya was the site of the bulk of the armed resistance to the Italian occupation, which lasted from 1911 to 1943. More than 100,000 Libyans are believed to have died in the counterinsurgency campaign, many in desert prison camps and in southern Italian penal colonies. Inside the tent, Berlusconi and Libyan leader Mu‘ammar al-Qaddafi signed a historic agreement according to which Italy will pay $5 billion over the next 20 years, nominally to compensate Libya for these “deep wounds.” The treaty was ratified by Italy on February 3 and by Libya on March 1.
...
Under a tent in Benghazi on August 30, 2008, Silvio Berlusconi bowed symbolically before the son of ‘Umar al-Mukhtar, hero of the Libyan resistance to Italian colonial rule. “It is my duty to express to you, in the name of the Italian people, our regret and apologies for the deep wounds that we have caused you,” said the Italian premier.[1] Eastern Libya was the site of the bulk of the armed resistance to the Italian occupation, which lasted from 1911 to 1943. More than 100,000 Libyans are believed to have died in the counterinsurgency campaign, many in desert prison camps and in southern Italian penal colonies. Inside the tent, Berlusconi and Libyan leader Mu‘ammar al-Qaddafi signed a historic agreement according to which Italy will pay $5 billion over the next 20 years, nominally to compensate Libya for these “deep wounds.” The treaty was ratified by Italy on February 3 and by Libya on March 1.
...
Tuesday, March 17, 2009 - 14:55
SOURCE: Britannica Blog (3-17-09)
As an American of Irish ancestry, I harbor mixed feelings about the potato. It is an essential foodstuff, of course, and, properly cooked, it can be delicious. Still, it was indirectly responsible for the cruel diaspora that nearly emptied the mother country of its people and sent them off to all corners of the world, where, as onetime Pogue Phil Chevron’s song “Thousands Are Sailing” (see the video) has it, we would forevermore “celebrate the land that makes us refugees.”
Ireland took to the potato late, as such things go, many decades after it was introduced to Europe from South America, and there Solanum tuberosum revealed itself as both a blessing and a curse. It must have seemed that thousands of years before to the farming peoples of the central Andes. Long ago,...
Tuesday, March 17, 2009 - 13:21
SOURCE: Nation (3-11-09)
[Brenda Wineapple's most recent book is White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Knopf), a finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for biography.]
It was "interesting," said Gertrude Stein of the Civil War, although she was far more intrigued by General Grant than Abraham Lincoln, whom she virtually ignored. She's the only one, so it seems, especially now with the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth, duly touted by committees, books and celebration, having arrived just a few weeks after President Barack Obama's historic inauguration, during which he took the oath of office using Lincoln's burgundy velvet Bible. But then Lincoln has been for a very long time enshrined as a legend, albeit a complex one, whose fate was sealed by the martyrdom that gave him to the ages, or angels, depending on how one recalls Secretary of War Edwin Stanton's tender benediction.
By 1865 the outlines of Lincoln's life were...
It was "interesting," said Gertrude Stein of the Civil War, although she was far more intrigued by General Grant than Abraham Lincoln, whom she virtually ignored. She's the only one, so it seems, especially now with the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth, duly touted by committees, books and celebration, having arrived just a few weeks after President Barack Obama's historic inauguration, during which he took the oath of office using Lincoln's burgundy velvet Bible. But then Lincoln has been for a very long time enshrined as a legend, albeit a complex one, whose fate was sealed by the martyrdom that gave him to the ages, or angels, depending on how one recalls Secretary of War Edwin Stanton's tender benediction.
By 1865 the outlines of Lincoln's life were...
Monday, March 16, 2009 - 18:22
SOURCE: NYT Book Review (3-12-09)
In Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s popular 19th-century novel “The Last Days of Pompeii,” a scrumptious multicourse dinner of the stereotypically Roman sort is served in the superbly appointed house of the hero, Glaucus. With its peristyle garden, luxurious furnishings, nimble attendants and anatrium filled with paintings that “would scarcely disgrace a Raphael,”Glaucus’ Campanian bachelor pad might serve as “a model at this day for the house of ‘a single man in Mayfair,’ ” Bulwer- Lytton wrote.
In her engrossingly mischievous “Fires of Vesuvius,” Mary Beard recreates the scene with gusto, pointing out that this Pompeiian mansion is in fact based closely on a real one, the so-called House of the Tragic Poet. But among some unsavory facts that Bulwer-Lytton “fails to point out to his readers,” Beard writes, is that the kitchen, too tiny to have produced much of a banquet anyway, was the site of the house’s only latrine. And worse: “Just over the back wall of the garden . . . was a...
In her engrossingly mischievous “Fires of Vesuvius,” Mary Beard recreates the scene with gusto, pointing out that this Pompeiian mansion is in fact based closely on a real one, the so-called House of the Tragic Poet. But among some unsavory facts that Bulwer-Lytton “fails to point out to his readers,” Beard writes, is that the kitchen, too tiny to have produced much of a banquet anyway, was the site of the house’s only latrine. And worse: “Just over the back wall of the garden . . . was a...
Monday, March 16, 2009 - 18:08
SOURCE: William Safire in the NYT Mag. (3-10-09)
Word has been bruited about that President Herbert Hoover used the word depression after the market crash of 1929 as a euphemism to avoid the more alarming panic. That does not check out. His earliest use of the word that the historian George Nash, author of a three-volume biography of Hoover, can find is in a speech in Colorado in 1928, near the end of his presidential campaign: “If you will study the consumption of meat, dairy products and fruit during the great depression and unemployment of 1920, you will find that in the necessary tightening of belts, the first economy was in the refined products of agriculture.”
After the October ’29 market crash he used the word depression on Dec. 3 of that year, and “the recent panic” two days later. In May 1930, he said, “We have been passing through one of those great economic storms which periodically bring hardship and suffering upon our people” and urged business and labor “to avoid accelerating the depression by the hardship...
After the October ’29 market crash he used the word depression on Dec. 3 of that year, and “the recent panic” two days later. In May 1930, he said, “We have been passing through one of those great economic storms which periodically bring hardship and suffering upon our people” and urged business and labor “to avoid accelerating the depression by the hardship...
Monday, March 16, 2009 - 16:26
SOURCE: Middle East Report (3-15-09)
[Ervand Abrahamian is a CUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of History, Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is author of A History of Modern Iran.]
Obituaries for the Islamic Republic of Iran appeared even before it was born. In the hectic months of 1979—before the Islamic Republic had been officially declared—many Iranians as well as foreigners, academics as well as journalists, participants as well as observers, conservatives as well as revolutionaries, confidently predicted its imminent demise. Taking every street protest, every labor strike, every provincial clash as the harbinger of its inevitable downfall, they gave the new regime a few months—at best, a few short years.
Such predictions were understandable. After all, Iran—not to mention world history—had produced few full-fledged theocracies. Regimes often taken to be theocracies turn out, upon closer examination, to have been no such thing. Cromwell...
Obituaries for the Islamic Republic of Iran appeared even before it was born. In the hectic months of 1979—before the Islamic Republic had been officially declared—many Iranians as well as foreigners, academics as well as journalists, participants as well as observers, conservatives as well as revolutionaries, confidently predicted its imminent demise. Taking every street protest, every labor strike, every provincial clash as the harbinger of its inevitable downfall, they gave the new regime a few months—at best, a few short years.
Such predictions were understandable. After all, Iran—not to mention world history—had produced few full-fledged theocracies. Regimes often taken to be theocracies turn out, upon closer examination, to have been no such thing. Cromwell...
Sunday, March 15, 2009 - 14:15
SOURCE: Times (UK) (3-12-09)
Edward Gibbon once said: “I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know no way of judging of the future but by the past.” It is a lesson that the British nation needs to learn again.
In a recent report on the teaching of history in schools, Ofsted pointed out that, too often, British children had no clear sense of chronology and no vantage point on historical change. For too long, the idea of a story unfolding in real time has given way to a series of fragments, themes ripped out of time. As a result, many pupils are unable to answer history's big questions and do not know enough of the story that brought their nation, and the world of which it is a part, to where it stands today.
That is why it was good to hear Michael Gove, the opposition education spokesman, say that a future Conservative government would insist on the teaching of narrative history. This means teaching history in a chronological order, with a...
In a recent report on the teaching of history in schools, Ofsted pointed out that, too often, British children had no clear sense of chronology and no vantage point on historical change. For too long, the idea of a story unfolding in real time has given way to a series of fragments, themes ripped out of time. As a result, many pupils are unable to answer history's big questions and do not know enough of the story that brought their nation, and the world of which it is a part, to where it stands today.
That is why it was good to hear Michael Gove, the opposition education spokesman, say that a future Conservative government would insist on the teaching of narrative history. This means teaching history in a chronological order, with a...
Friday, March 13, 2009 - 16:00
SOURCE: http://www.uticaod.com (3-11-09)
[Mary Chapin lives in New Hartford. She wrote and produced the first play written about Alice Paul and the quest for women’s rights. It was performed July 16, 1998, in Seneca Falls by members of the League of Women Voters and later that year at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute and Utica College. Two years ago, it was presented by the New Hartford Players at Utica Monday Nite.]
Women’s History Month, celebrated in March, could easily recognize a number of women, but Alice Paul stands out.
Paul was a young Quaker social worker from New Jersey when she left New York, upset at the cries of women and children being beaten in the tenements. She went to England to pursue her education and found, instead, the English Women’s Suffrage Movement, the Pankhurst women, and a true friend, Irish Catholic Lucy Burns.
Returning to the United States, Paul founded the National Women’s Party. She organized women to picket the White House, asking the...
Women’s History Month, celebrated in March, could easily recognize a number of women, but Alice Paul stands out.
Paul was a young Quaker social worker from New Jersey when she left New York, upset at the cries of women and children being beaten in the tenements. She went to England to pursue her education and found, instead, the English Women’s Suffrage Movement, the Pankhurst women, and a true friend, Irish Catholic Lucy Burns.
Returning to the United States, Paul founded the National Women’s Party. She organized women to picket the White House, asking the...
Thursday, March 12, 2009 - 19:46
SOURCE: Newstatesman (UK) (3-12-09)
[James Buchan was a Financial Times correspondent in the Middle East and is the author most recently of “The Gate of Air: a Ghost Story”.]
The unarmed city crowd first emerged as a force in Iranian politics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in protests against the growing influence of European commerce and, later, in the struggle for constitutional government in Iran. Cruelly suppressed under the two Pahlavi shahs, the crowd returned to the political stage during the revolution of 1979 in the cycle of demonstrations and public mourning that forced Mohammad Reza Pahlavi into exile. By encouraging hundreds of thousands of rural people to migrate to Tehran and the other major cities throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the Pahlavis had created the weapons of their own destruction.
Yet the protests in 1979 were as nothing to the extraordinary scenes of mourning at the funeral of the revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini a decade later. The chaotic...
The unarmed city crowd first emerged as a force in Iranian politics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in protests against the growing influence of European commerce and, later, in the struggle for constitutional government in Iran. Cruelly suppressed under the two Pahlavi shahs, the crowd returned to the political stage during the revolution of 1979 in the cycle of demonstrations and public mourning that forced Mohammad Reza Pahlavi into exile. By encouraging hundreds of thousands of rural people to migrate to Tehran and the other major cities throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the Pahlavis had created the weapons of their own destruction.
Yet the protests in 1979 were as nothing to the extraordinary scenes of mourning at the funeral of the revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini a decade later. The chaotic...
Thursday, March 12, 2009 - 07:08
SOURCE: City Journal (winter issue; accessed 3-6-09) (3-6-09)
Certain years in history carry a nearly sacred halo, so deeply are they associated with the idea of democratic revolution. Say 1848, and you summon up the springtime of nations, the rise of barricades in Paris and Frankfurt and Venice; say 1989, and it’s the Velvet Revolution, the collapse of Communism in East Berlin and Prague and Warsaw. Few people have such fond memories of the years between 1905 and 1915, which we more commonly associate with the various crises leading up to the First World War. Yet as Charles Kurzman reminds us in Democracy Denied, those years actually saw “a wave of democratic revolutions . . . consuming more than a quarter of the world’s population.”
The wave began with the 1905 Russian Revolution, when Tsar Nicholas II was forced to grant his people a constitution and a parliament. Inspired by the Russian example, Iranian democrats rebelled against the Shah in 1906; the Young Turks forced the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire to grant a constitution in...
The wave began with the 1905 Russian Revolution, when Tsar Nicholas II was forced to grant his people a constitution and a parliament. Inspired by the Russian example, Iranian democrats rebelled against the Shah in 1906; the Young Turks forced the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire to grant a constitution in...
Wednesday, March 11, 2009 - 15:58
SOURCE: Spiegel Online (3-4-09)
During World War II, industries big and small all over Germany became part of Hitler's massive war machine. The change even affected the predecessor of footwear legends Adidas and Puma, which -- oddly enough -- manufactured Germany's version of the bazooka.
When the starting shot rang out, the athletes surged forward. Jesse Owens dug his spikes deep into the racing track of Berlin's Olympic Stadium -- and the best sprinter of his day dominated the 100 meters race to win a gold medal at the 1936 Olympic Games. America's black superstar took home a total of four gold medals. And each of his victories represented minor triumphs for two German brothers as well -- Adolf ("Adi") and Rudolf Dassler -- the manufacturers of the sprinting shoes that carried the sprinter of the century from victory to victory.
Of course, success did not come as a total surprise. Herzogenaurach, the Dasslers' home town in Bavaria, has a long tradition as a center for shoemaking....
When the starting shot rang out, the athletes surged forward. Jesse Owens dug his spikes deep into the racing track of Berlin's Olympic Stadium -- and the best sprinter of his day dominated the 100 meters race to win a gold medal at the 1936 Olympic Games. America's black superstar took home a total of four gold medals. And each of his victories represented minor triumphs for two German brothers as well -- Adolf ("Adi") and Rudolf Dassler -- the manufacturers of the sprinting shoes that carried the sprinter of the century from victory to victory.
Of course, success did not come as a total surprise. Herzogenaurach, the Dasslers' home town in Bavaria, has a long tradition as a center for shoemaking....
Tuesday, March 10, 2009 - 21:49
SOURCE: NYT (3-9-09)
It happened to John F. Kennedy just days into his presidency. It will happen to President Obama, too. Probably it already has.
The bad news was delivered to Kennedy at breakfast with Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, Democrat of Texas, who said: “Mr. President, I don’t believe we have the votes …”
The new president, a former member of the House, was shocked. Even presidents believe what they read in the papers, and the conventional wisdom in 1961 was that “Mister Sam” controlled the 263 Democrats in the House. With only 174 Republicans, there should have been more than enough votes to do what Kennedy wanted done: expand the Rules Committee from 12 to 15 members.
By bringing the House Rules Committee in line in 1961, John F. Kennedy turned the Democratic South into Republican territory for decades. The 12 stood between Kennedy and his agenda. There were eight Democrats and four Republicans on Rules, the committee that controlled the schedule of the...
The bad news was delivered to Kennedy at breakfast with Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, Democrat of Texas, who said: “Mr. President, I don’t believe we have the votes …”
The new president, a former member of the House, was shocked. Even presidents believe what they read in the papers, and the conventional wisdom in 1961 was that “Mister Sam” controlled the 263 Democrats in the House. With only 174 Republicans, there should have been more than enough votes to do what Kennedy wanted done: expand the Rules Committee from 12 to 15 members.
By bringing the House Rules Committee in line in 1961, John F. Kennedy turned the Democratic South into Republican territory for decades. The 12 stood between Kennedy and his agenda. There were eight Democrats and four Republicans on Rules, the committee that controlled the schedule of the...
Tuesday, March 10, 2009 - 14:16
SOURCE: New Republic (3-18-09)
A generation ago, the total dismissal of the New Deal remained a marginal sentiment in American politics. Ronald Reagan boasted of having voted for Franklin Roosevelt. Neoconservatives long maintained that American liberalism had gone wrong only in the 1960s. Now, decades after Democrats grew tired of accusing Republicans of emulating Herbert Hoover, Republicans have begun sounding ... well, exactly like Herbert Hoover. When President Obama recently met with House Republicans, the eighty-two-year-old Roscoe G. Bartlett told him that "I was there" during the New Deal, and, according to one account, "assert[ed] that government intervention did not work then, either." George F. Will, speaking on the Sunday talk show "This Week," declared not long ago, "Before we go into a new New Deal, can we just acknowledge that the first New Deal didn't work?"
When Republicans announce that the New Deal failed--as they now do, over and over again,...
When Republicans announce that the New Deal failed--as they now do, over and over again,...
Tuesday, March 10, 2009 - 01:55
SOURCE: The Cutting Edge (3-9-09)
[Edwin Black is the New York Times best selling investigative author of IBM and the Holocaust, and his just released book, Nazi Nexus: America's Corporate Connections to Hitler's Holocaust (Dialog Press 2009), which can be see at www.nazinexus.com.]
Adolf Hitler was completely responsible for the Holocaust. But Hitler had help.
When zealous Nazis were motivated to wage war against an imaginary generation-to-generation Jewish conspiracy… when Nazis created ghastly extermination plans to help ensure their master race would rule the world… when the German military was enabled...
Monday, March 9, 2009 - 14:16
SOURCE: Independent (UK) (3-9-09)
[Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Exeter, Philip Hensher was among Granta 20 Best of Young British Novelists in 2003.]
In 1972, during one of a long series of skirmishes between the National Union of Mineworkers and Conservative governments, a Communist leader of the South Wales miners, Dai Francis, trying to organise flying pickets, had a call from Arthur Scargill.
According to Francis's son Hywel, Scargill said: "Look, Dai, we need pickets up at Saltley, in Birmingham ... tomorrow, Saturday." Dai paused. "But Wales are playing Scotland at Cardiff Arms Park." Scargill replied: "But Dai, the working class are playing the ruling class at Saltley."
Yes, no doubt about it, Scargill was always a figure of ludicrous comic appeal. With his hair, posturing, humourlessness and fantasies of power, he was a figure Dickens might have relished. Most of all, there was his office. We have Kim Howells as witness for...
In 1972, during one of a long series of skirmishes between the National Union of Mineworkers and Conservative governments, a Communist leader of the South Wales miners, Dai Francis, trying to organise flying pickets, had a call from Arthur Scargill.
According to Francis's son Hywel, Scargill said: "Look, Dai, we need pickets up at Saltley, in Birmingham ... tomorrow, Saturday." Dai paused. "But Wales are playing Scotland at Cardiff Arms Park." Scargill replied: "But Dai, the working class are playing the ruling class at Saltley."
Yes, no doubt about it, Scargill was always a figure of ludicrous comic appeal. With his hair, posturing, humourlessness and fantasies of power, he was a figure Dickens might have relished. Most of all, there was his office. We have Kim Howells as witness for...
Monday, March 9, 2009 - 09:35
SOURCE: Wall Street Journal (3-7-09)
[James Mann is the author of several books, including "Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet." He is author-in-residence at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.]
It was the question that preoccupied President Ronald Reagan: Was Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev a religious believer? Reagan held a series of summits with Gorbachev from 1985 to 1988, and as their meetings proceeded, Reagan sometimes speculated to his aides that Gorbachev's use of phrases such as "God bless" might be an expression of religious faith. Many of the summit sessions involved large groups of U.S. and Soviet officials, discussing issues like arms control and regional conflicts. But in one-on-one talks with Gorbachev outside the presence of other senior officials like Secretary of State George Shultz, Reagan sometimes ventured off in directions of his own. The eternal optimist, Reagan was convinced that Gorbachev was capable of changing the...
It was the question that preoccupied President Ronald Reagan: Was Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev a religious believer? Reagan held a series of summits with Gorbachev from 1985 to 1988, and as their meetings proceeded, Reagan sometimes speculated to his aides that Gorbachev's use of phrases such as "God bless" might be an expression of religious faith. Many of the summit sessions involved large groups of U.S. and Soviet officials, discussing issues like arms control and regional conflicts. But in one-on-one talks with Gorbachev outside the presence of other senior officials like Secretary of State George Shultz, Reagan sometimes ventured off in directions of his own. The eternal optimist, Reagan was convinced that Gorbachev was capable of changing the...
Monday, March 9, 2009 - 09:23
