[Michael C. Moynihan is a senior editor of Reason magazine.]

ON June 2, 1967, the shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, exited a performance of The Magic Flute at the Berlin Opera House to a throng of rock-throwing protesters, already into their second hour of battle with police.

As the situation escalated, Karl-Heinz Kurras, a detective sergeant in the West Berlin police force, approached an unarmed student he misidentified as a ringleader of the protest. After tussling with the suspect, Kurras unholstered his Walther PPK service pistol and squeezed the trigger. A single bullet smashed into the temple of 26-year-old student Benno Ohnesorg. He died 20 minutes later.

Stefan Aust, former editor of the newsweekly Der Spiegel and author of a popular history of Germany's Baader-Meinhof terror group (also known as the Red Army Faction), cites the Ohnesorg killing as "a turning point in the thinking and feeling of many" in Germany; a martyrdom...

[Ronald Spector is professor of history and international affairs at George Washington University. This essay is based on his talk at the FPRI Wachman Center’s History Institute for Teachers on What Students Need to Know About America’s Wars, Part 2: 1920-present, held May 2-3, 2009. ]

The Vietnam War—or as the Vietnamese call it, the American War—is the longest war in American history (so far) and the first one the U.S. clearly lost. More significant for our purposes, its history is also the most contested. How contested it is can be readily illustrated by the titles of two influential books published during the last three years. The most recent, by John Prados, is called Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War (University Press of Kansas, April 2009). The other, by Mark Moyar, is called Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-65 (Cambridge University Press, 2006). Whether the American war in Vietnam was an...

[Lauren Hilgers is a writer living Shanghai. She has written on China’s political, economic and legal issues for publications including Waters Magazine, the China Economic Review, Newsweek Select and is a regular contributor at the legal blog Balkinization.]

In a year fraught with sensitive Chinese anniversaries, June 4th is by far the most resonant in the United States. I was eight years old when Hu Yaobang, a former Communist Party secretary and advocate of political reform that had fallen from grace a year earlier, died. Students gathered in Tiananmen to mourn and stayed to protest. I remember hearing about hunger strikes and not knowing what they were. I remember watching on the news as the June 4th crackdown proceeded and protesters fled the capital city. In Shanghai, none of my Chinese friends share these memories.

June 4th, for many Shanghainese people my age, carries only passing significance. School textbooks dedicate short passages to a student...

[Melinda Liu was named Newsweek Beijing bureau chief in late 1998, returning to the bureau she herself opened in 1980... Her coverage of the Hong Kong handover in 1997 and Sino-U.S. relations in 1996 helped win the magazine the Overseas Press Club's Ed Cunningham Memorial Award for best magazine reporting from abroad....Liu was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota and is a magna cum laude graduate of Radcliffe College, Harvard. She is President of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China, and in October 2005 launched a Newsweek Web column titled "Asia Rising." http://www.newsweek.com/id/32420 ]]

... We still don't have a credible official number for the civilians who died due to the repression, for example. If the government simply told the truth about the number and identities of June 4 victims, it would help begin to clear the air.

Recently I also visited the elderly former university professor Ding Zilin,...

[Anouar Majid is the author of We Are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades Against Muslims and Other Minorities (2009). He is director of the Center for Global Humanities at the University of New England in Maine.]

This year, a few scholars are commemorating the 400th anniversary of one of the darkest episodes in history, an event that should be widely known and discussed, but which, alas, has remained buried in the archives of memory. In April 1609, King Philip III of Spain and his royal council made the fateful decision to expel all Spaniards of Muslim descent (known, pejoratively, as Moriscos, or little Moors) from his domains. This royal decree, not proclaimed publicly until months later, was, in essence, a final declaration of war on Islam. Since Granada, the last Islamic kingdom in the Iberian peninsula, had surrendered in 1492, Muslims, or Moors, had been steadily subjected to harassment and pressure to convert. But conversion, which turned Moors into Moriscos,...

[Yevgeny Kiselyov is a political analyst and hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.]

I would be fascinated to know if Westerners can fully appreciate the political significance behind President Dmitry Medvedev's decision to create a special commission "for counteracting attempts to falsify history to the detriment of Russia's interests." Most foreigners would probably say, "This is very strange. Doesn't Russia have more pressing problems it needs to tackle, such as the managing the crisis, modernizing the country's political and economic institutions or battling corruption?"

Had the year been 1950, when the Soviet Union was making colossal efforts to recover from the aftermath of World War II, foreigners would have been equally perplexed that Josef Stalin chose that moment to initiate a huge public debate on the Marxist approach to linguistics.

Two decades before that, Stalin rewrote the history of the Bolshevik...