[Tim Harper is reader in south-east Asian and imperial history at the University of Cambridge. This article draws on his recent books, with Christopher Bayly, Forgotten Armies: Britain's Asian Empire and the War With Japan (Penguin, 2004) and Forgotten Wars: The End of Britain's Asian Empire (Penguin, 2007)]

The far east has too often been seen as a distant and relatively minor theatre of the war in Europe. This perspective needs to be reversed. The great Asian war had a seismic momentum of its own. Fighting began in 1931 and there was barely a hiatus when Japan surrendered to the allies in August 1945. Between 1941 and 1945 alone, war claimed around 24 million lives in Japanese-occupied Asia, perhaps 3 million Japanese, and 3.5 million more in India through war-related famine. Of these victims, the European, American and Australasian casualties numbered perhaps 1% of the total. But such tallies do not convey the full scale of the tragedy.

Roads to war...

[Meredith Hindley is senior writer for HUMANITIES.]

In the aftermath of the Senate hearings to consider the president’s nominee to become the next U.S. Supreme Court justice, it’s hard to remember that the process wasn’t always like this. There weren’t always weeks of media coverage, and there weren’t always hearings. Nor did individual senators spend hours calling witnesses, making statements, or cross-examining the nominee. In fact, the first nominee didn’t testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee until 1925, when Harlan Stone proposed an appearance to answer questions about his ties to Wall Street. It would be another fourteen years and five justices until nominee Felix Frankfurter appeared before the committee to address rumors that he was secretly a Communist. Starting with John Harlan in 1955, all nominees appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Southern senators, unhappy with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, wanted the opportunity to...

On September 11, 2001, a fellow New Yorker and friend of mine, a public health historian who knew instantly what the dangers were, bicycled directly into the smoke, ash, and chemicals that hung over lower Manhattan searching for his daughter whose school was only blocks away from the collapsed buildings. She was, it turned out,"safe" in that same pall of dangerous smoke. She had been evacuated to the street with her class in time to see people leaping or falling to their deaths from the upper floors of one of the crippled towers. You probably couldn't live in New York City that day and not be connected, however indirectly, to someone who died. In my case, it was the father of a classmate of my son's, a photographer, who also advanced into the chaos near one of the towers, leaving behind an eerie, moving trail of photographs.

As for myself, I was on my bedroom floor...

[Daniel Brook is a journalist whose writing has appeared in Harper's, Dissent, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Boston Globe, among other publications. Brook was a finalist in the 2003 Livingston Awards for Young Journalists and won the 2000 Rolling Stone College Journalist Competition while a student at Yale. He lives in Philadelphia. He is the author of The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America.]

A month after 9/11, Fouad Ajami wrote in the New York Times Magazine, "I almost know Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian [at] the controls of the jet that crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center." While the Middle East scholar had never met the lead hijacker, Ajami knew his type: the young Arab male living abroad, tantalized by yet alienated from Western modernity, who retreats into fundamentalist piety.

Eight years after 9/11, we still almost know Mohamed Atta. We can almost see him, a gaunt and spectral figure making his...

Much of Sam Tanenhaus's book is given over to the rating of recent presidents. We are told, for instance: "Of the last six Republican presidents, three (Nixon, Reagan, and George W. Bush) had strong ties to movement conservatism, while three (Eisenhower, Ford, George H.W. Bush) did not." He counts the last three superior to the first three. That was not the popular judgment of those men. After all, Nixon and Reagan were reelected, while Ford and Bush I were not. Furthermore, in the latest survey of historians ranking the presidents, Reagan is rated tenth while Bush I one is eighteenth, and Ford is twenty-second.[1] Clearly Tanenhaus is using his own measure of good and bad presidents, different from either electoral success or historical reputation. What is it? He notes that the first three, in line with "movement conservatism," broke the law (Watergate, Iran-contra, Geneva Conventions), while the latter three "respected the established boundaries of...

Pat Buchanan, in a London debate timed to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the British and French declaration of war against Germany, has blamed Winston Churchill for starting the Second World War. (Read about it here: U.S. politician puts blame on Churchill for Second World War.) This follows close on the heels of Buchanan's widely published essay blaming the Poles for provoking the Nazi invasion.

The debate was sponsored by Intelligence Squared and took place in London's Methodist Central Hall. Two historians who debated Buchanan took dim views of Buchanan's historical analysis. Antony Beevor said:

"I never expected to hear Pat Buchanan backing up Vladimir Putin's idea that somehow the Brits were responsible for World War Two."Pat Buchanan's arguments during the debate were quite bizarre. At times people didn't know whether he was sympathising with Hitler or just being anti-British." Historian Richard Overy said:"I thought what Pat Buchanan said...

[Stephen G. Rademaker, senior counsel of BGR Government Affairs LLC, was an assistant secretary of state from 2002 to 2006, with responsibility for arms control, nonproliferation and international security.]

Twice in 25 years, Afghanistan has been cast in American politics as the "good" war, worthy of American support, and contrasted with a "bad" war that allegedly was not. The first time, this worked out reasonably well for America and its Afghan allies. It is unclear whether that will be true this time around.

Twenty-five years ago, Afghanistan was the setting for "Charlie Wilson's War," chronicled in George Crile's book and the movie of the same name. At the heart of that story is a seeming paradox: A Democratic congressman from Texas leads Speaker Tip O'Neill's Congress to stake out a position well to the right of Ronald Reagan on whether America should try to defeat the Red Army in Afghanistan. Urged on by Wilson for the...

... When the World Conference on Racism arrived in Durban [in 2001], many delegates were shocked by the mood in the streets: tens of thousands of residents joined protests outside the conference center, holding signs that said landlessness = racism and new apartheid: rich and poor. South Africa's disillusionment, though particularly striking given its recent democratic victory, was part of a much broader global trend, one that would define the conference, both in the streets and in the assembly halls. Around the world, developing countries were increasingly identifying the so-called Washington Consensus economic policies as little more than a clever rebranding effort, a way for former northern colonial powers to continue to drain the southern countries of their wealth without being inconvenienced by the heavy lifting of colonialism. Roughly two years before Durban, a coalition of developing countries had refused to further liberalize their economies, leading to the collapse of World...

At his living room table, 92-year-old Rochus Misch shows me some of his old photo albums. Private pictures he had taken more than 60 years ago. There are colour images of Mr Misch in an SS uniform at Adolf Hitler's home in the Alps, snapshots of Hitler staring at rabbits, and photos of Hitler's mistress and future wife Eva Braun.

For five years, SS Oberscharfuehrer Rochus Misch had been part of Adolf Hitler's inner circle, as a bodyguard, a courier and telephone operator to the Fuehrer.

"My first meeting with Hitler was rather strange," Mr Misch recalls."I'd been in the job 12 days when Hitler's chief adjutant, a man called Bruckner, started asking me questions about my grandmother, about my childhood.

"Then he got up and walked towards the door. Being an obedient soldier, I flung myself forward to open it, and there was Hitler standing right behind the door. I felt cold. Then I felt hot. I felt every emotion standing there opposite Hitler....