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: NYT (1-30-10)
[Dee Dee Myers was press secretary for President Bill Clinton]
Barack Obama, reeling from the Democratic defeat in the Massachusetts Senate race, isn’t the first president to get an unwelcome anniversary gift a year after taking office. On Jan. 20, 1994, Attorney General Janet Reno announced that, at President Bill Clinton’s request, she had appointed Robert Fiske as special counsel to investigate the Whitewater case. What we didn’t know then was that seven months later, Mr. Fiske would be replaced by Ken Starr, whose investigation would ultimately lead to the president’s impeachment. But what those of us on the Clinton staff were learning fast after 12 tumultuous months on the job was how little control we had over our own unfolding drama. The cockiness of the campaign was giving way to a humility imposed by history....
As the people in the Obama administration look back over the first year, and forward to the future, they should do all they can to move their...
Barack Obama, reeling from the Democratic defeat in the Massachusetts Senate race, isn’t the first president to get an unwelcome anniversary gift a year after taking office. On Jan. 20, 1994, Attorney General Janet Reno announced that, at President Bill Clinton’s request, she had appointed Robert Fiske as special counsel to investigate the Whitewater case. What we didn’t know then was that seven months later, Mr. Fiske would be replaced by Ken Starr, whose investigation would ultimately lead to the president’s impeachment. But what those of us on the Clinton staff were learning fast after 12 tumultuous months on the job was how little control we had over our own unfolding drama. The cockiness of the campaign was giving way to a humility imposed by history....
As the people in the Obama administration look back over the first year, and forward to the future, they should do all they can to move their...
Sunday, January 31, 2010 - 16:42
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SOURCE: NYT (1-30-10)
[Richard V. Allen is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and was national security advisor to President Ronald Reagan.]
...Coupled with the basic policy framework, Reagan’s was one of the most carefully planned presidential transitions in modern political history, replete with teams of “Reaganauts” dispatched to each department and agency in the days following the election. Staffing lists were compiled, and presidential and subcabinet appointments were made swiftly, background and vetting checks completed and requisite Senate hearings scheduled....
One other thing stands out: Reagan’s ability to get along with Democrats, something he had shown he could do as governor of California. Although the House of Representatives was controlled by Democrats, the president managed to pass his tax reduction package. He also found a way, through one-on-one sessions with senatorial opponents of both parties, to gain Congressional approval of the sale of Awacs radar...
...Coupled with the basic policy framework, Reagan’s was one of the most carefully planned presidential transitions in modern political history, replete with teams of “Reaganauts” dispatched to each department and agency in the days following the election. Staffing lists were compiled, and presidential and subcabinet appointments were made swiftly, background and vetting checks completed and requisite Senate hearings scheduled....
One other thing stands out: Reagan’s ability to get along with Democrats, something he had shown he could do as governor of California. Although the House of Representatives was controlled by Democrats, the president managed to pass his tax reduction package. He also found a way, through one-on-one sessions with senatorial opponents of both parties, to gain Congressional approval of the sale of Awacs radar...
Sunday, January 31, 2010 - 16:35
SOURCE: NYT (1-30-10)
[James Fallows was chief speechwriter for President Carter.]
Things were tough as Jimmy Carter prepared for his 1978 State of the Union address, one year into his term. But they seemed, strangely, hopeful. The president’s big domestic initiative that year was a national energy policy. The gas-station lines and first-ever spike in fuel prices in the mid-1970s made this a genuine emergency. He hadn’t yet gotten the whole plan through, but the previous summer he had signed legislation creating the Department of Energy and begun imposing standards that, even after he was gone, kept improving the fuel efficiency of American cars, buildings and factories....
Inflation was going down. Job creation was going up. So as time came to put the speech together, everyone involved dared think about what else the administration could do, after such a good start. “There is all across our land a growing sense of peace and a sense of common purpose,” Mr. Carter said in his address...
Things were tough as Jimmy Carter prepared for his 1978 State of the Union address, one year into his term. But they seemed, strangely, hopeful. The president’s big domestic initiative that year was a national energy policy. The gas-station lines and first-ever spike in fuel prices in the mid-1970s made this a genuine emergency. He hadn’t yet gotten the whole plan through, but the previous summer he had signed legislation creating the Department of Energy and begun imposing standards that, even after he was gone, kept improving the fuel efficiency of American cars, buildings and factories....
Inflation was going down. Job creation was going up. So as time came to put the speech together, everyone involved dared think about what else the administration could do, after such a good start. “There is all across our land a growing sense of peace and a sense of common purpose,” Mr. Carter said in his address...
Sunday, January 31, 2010 - 16:32
SOURCE: NYT (1-30-10)
[Leonard Garment was a White House counsel during the Nixon Administration.]
In April 1969, three months after his inauguration, President Richard Nixon hosted a party at the White House to celebrate Duke Ellington’s 70th birthday and award the Duke the Medal of Honor. Great American jazz figures were there. Musicians played Ellington songs arranged by Gerry Mulligan. Joe Williams and Mary Mayo sang. Ellington danced with Rose Mary Woods. After dinner, the president had a nightcap with the pianist Earl Hines....
...A strike by Harvard students had erupted in the spring; the Vietnam Moratorium march had descended on Washington in October. The war had already begun to engulf Nixon’s presidency just as it had destroyed Johnson’s. What began in 1969 continued inexorably until Nixon was forced to resign in 1974. Years later, Nixon reflected that “if I underestimated the willingness of the North Vietnamese to hang on and resist a negotiated settlement ... they also...
In April 1969, three months after his inauguration, President Richard Nixon hosted a party at the White House to celebrate Duke Ellington’s 70th birthday and award the Duke the Medal of Honor. Great American jazz figures were there. Musicians played Ellington songs arranged by Gerry Mulligan. Joe Williams and Mary Mayo sang. Ellington danced with Rose Mary Woods. After dinner, the president had a nightcap with the pianist Earl Hines....
...A strike by Harvard students had erupted in the spring; the Vietnam Moratorium march had descended on Washington in October. The war had already begun to engulf Nixon’s presidency just as it had destroyed Johnson’s. What began in 1969 continued inexorably until Nixon was forced to resign in 1974. Years later, Nixon reflected that “if I underestimated the willingness of the North Vietnamese to hang on and resist a negotiated settlement ... they also...
Sunday, January 31, 2010 - 16:29
SOURCE: WaPo (1-30-10)
[Andrew Baker, a rabbi, is director of international Jewish affairs for the American Jewish Committee.]
World leaders, Holocaust survivors and World War II veterans gathered at Auschwitz on Wednesday to mark the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp. Poland has long shouldered responsibility for preserving this tragic site, which has become a virtual synonym for the Holocaust. Its gas chambers and crematoria, rail platforms and endless rows of wooden barracks were evidence of the systematic and mechanized murder of European Jews that the Nazis had perfected. The ashes of over a million victims are in its soil.
World leaders, Holocaust survivors and World War II veterans gathered at Auschwitz on Wednesday to mark the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp. Poland has long shouldered responsibility for preserving this tragic site, which has become a virtual synonym for the Holocaust. Its gas chambers and...
World leaders, Holocaust survivors and World War II veterans gathered at Auschwitz on Wednesday to mark the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp. Poland has long shouldered responsibility for preserving this tragic site, which has become a virtual synonym for the Holocaust. Its gas chambers and crematoria, rail platforms and endless rows of wooden barracks were evidence of the systematic and mechanized murder of European Jews that the Nazis had perfected. The ashes of over a million victims are in its soil.
World leaders, Holocaust survivors and World War II veterans gathered at Auschwitz on Wednesday to mark the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp. Poland has long shouldered responsibility for preserving this tragic site, which has become a virtual synonym for the Holocaust. Its gas chambers and...
Saturday, January 30, 2010 - 19:22
SOURCE: Daily Mail (UK) (1-29-10)
[Laurence Rees wrote Auschwitz: The Nazis And The Final Solution, and wrote and produced the BBC TV documentary series of the same name.]
When liberation came, it came quickly. One night in January 1945, as ten-year-old Eva Mozes Kor and her twin sister Miriam lay in their bunks at Auschwitz-Birkenau, they were suddenly awoken by a huge explosion.
Outside, the winter sky was red with flames.
The Nazis had blown up the crematoria where the bodies of hundreds of thousands of Jews had been burned, for fear that the approaching Soviet Army would discover them
Moments later, Eva and Miriam were forced by guards out of their barracks with all the other young twins in Birkenau and marched by the SS down the road to the main camp at Auschwitz, one-and-a-half miles away.
It was a miracle that any of them were alive, for all had been subject to Dr Mengele's evil medical experiments in 'hereditary biology'.
In one...
When liberation came, it came quickly. One night in January 1945, as ten-year-old Eva Mozes Kor and her twin sister Miriam lay in their bunks at Auschwitz-Birkenau, they were suddenly awoken by a huge explosion.
Outside, the winter sky was red with flames.
The Nazis had blown up the crematoria where the bodies of hundreds of thousands of Jews had been burned, for fear that the approaching Soviet Army would discover them
Moments later, Eva and Miriam were forced by guards out of their barracks with all the other young twins in Birkenau and marched by the SS down the road to the main camp at Auschwitz, one-and-a-half miles away.
It was a miracle that any of them were alive, for all had been subject to Dr Mengele's evil medical experiments in 'hereditary biology'.
In one...
Saturday, January 30, 2010 - 10:01
SOURCE: Smithsonian Magazine (1-1-10)
We think we know the Revolutionary War. After all, the American Revolution and the war that accompanied it not only determined the nation we would become but also continue to define who we are. The Declaration of Independence, the Midnight Ride, Valley Forge—the whole glorious chronicle of the colonists’ rebellion against tyranny is in the American DNA. Often it is the Revolution that is a child’s first encounter with history.
Yet much of what we know is not entirely true. Perhaps more than any defining moment in American history, the War of Independence is swathed in beliefs not borne out by the facts. Here, in order to form a more perfect understanding, the most significant myths of the Revolutionary War are reassessed.
I. Great Britain Did Not Know What It Was Getting Into...
Actually, the British cabinet, made up of nearly a score of ministers, first considered resorting to military might as early as January 1774, when word of the Boston Tea Party...
Thursday, January 28, 2010 - 16:47
SOURCE: LA Times (1-27-10)
[Edward Serotta directs the Jewish historical institute Centropa in Vienna (centropa.org).]
During a trip to Israel earlier this month, I stopped in Stein's secondhand bookshop on King George Street in Jerusalem....
A visit to Stein's always provides a glimpse of another era. It was while perusing the books there a couple of weeks ago that I came upon a volume of essays by Leo Baeck, who was Germany's most famous reform rabbi during the early 20th century.
Opening the book, I found this handwritten inscription: "To my darling Richard on his bar mitzvah, 11 September 1926, Papa."
Because Jewish boys are bar mitzvahed at 13, this Richard must have been born somewhere in Germany in 1913, the year before World War I began. The kaiser ruled the land then, and men like Albert Einstein, Paul Ehrlich, James Franck and Fritz Haber were doing the scientific research that had brought them, or would bring them, Nobel prizes in Germany's...
During a trip to Israel earlier this month, I stopped in Stein's secondhand bookshop on King George Street in Jerusalem....
A visit to Stein's always provides a glimpse of another era. It was while perusing the books there a couple of weeks ago that I came upon a volume of essays by Leo Baeck, who was Germany's most famous reform rabbi during the early 20th century.
Opening the book, I found this handwritten inscription: "To my darling Richard on his bar mitzvah, 11 September 1926, Papa."
Because Jewish boys are bar mitzvahed at 13, this Richard must have been born somewhere in Germany in 1913, the year before World War I began. The kaiser ruled the land then, and men like Albert Einstein, Paul Ehrlich, James Franck and Fritz Haber were doing the scientific research that had brought them, or would bring them, Nobel prizes in Germany's...
Wednesday, January 27, 2010 - 11:27
SOURCE: New Republic (1-25-10)
[Sean Wilentz is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor of History at Princeton University.]
[Ulysses S.] Grant may be on the verge of finally receiving his due. Quietly, outside the view of most readers—including professional historians who do not specialize in the Civil War era—Grant’s reputation, including his service in the White House, has enjoyed a friendly revision over the past fifteen years. A handful of unconventional scholars, including Richard N. Current, Brooks D. Simpson, Jean Edward Smith, and Josiah Bunting III, have attempted to vindicate Grant from some of the worst accusations against him. Joan Waugh’s engrossing new book advances that salutary revision by examining Grant’s public reputation during and after his lifetime, and exploring what it reveals about shifting intellectual trends....
Waugh describes how the estimation of Grant, especially as a political leader, has itself had a curious and telling history. That his presidency has ranked so low for so...
Tuesday, January 26, 2010 - 16:12
SOURCE: NYT (1-26-10)
[Samuel Pisar is an international lawyer and the author of “Of Blood and Hope.”]
Sixty-five years ago, to the day, the Soviets liberated Auschwitz, while the Americans were approaching Dachau. For a survivor of these two infernos to be still alive and well, with a new and happy family that has resurrected for me the one I had lost seems almost unreal. When I entered Eichmann and Mengele’s gruesome universe at the age of 13, I measured my life expectancy in days, weeks at the most.
In the early winter of 1944, World War II was coming to an end. But we in the camps knew nothing. We were wondering: What is happening in the world outside? Where is God? Where is the pope? Does anyone out there know what is happening here to us? Do they care?
Russia was devastated. England was resisting, her back against the wall. And America? She was so far away, so divided. How could she be expected to save civilization from the seemingly invincible forces of darkness...
Sixty-five years ago, to the day, the Soviets liberated Auschwitz, while the Americans were approaching Dachau. For a survivor of these two infernos to be still alive and well, with a new and happy family that has resurrected for me the one I had lost seems almost unreal. When I entered Eichmann and Mengele’s gruesome universe at the age of 13, I measured my life expectancy in days, weeks at the most.
In the early winter of 1944, World War II was coming to an end. But we in the camps knew nothing. We were wondering: What is happening in the world outside? Where is God? Where is the pope? Does anyone out there know what is happening here to us? Do they care?
Russia was devastated. England was resisting, her back against the wall. And America? She was so far away, so divided. How could she be expected to save civilization from the seemingly invincible forces of darkness...
Tuesday, January 26, 2010 - 14:50
SOURCE: Independent (UK) (1-26-10)
[Alan Hamilton has written articles published in The Independent and The Times.]
Why are we asking this now?
In January 1945, some 10,000 Allied prisoners of war were evacuated from the prison where the escape made famous in the film The Great Escape had taken place the year before. They were forced on a trek west on Hitler's orders to escape the Russians to the east. This week, veterans of the so-called Long March, and their relatives, are to recreate their ordeal as a training exercise in survival for today's young RAF softies, whom they suspect of being insufficiently schooled in the rigours of getting back to Blighty through a hostile environment in a harsh winter. The escape officer is Dr Howard Tuck, a Cambridge historian, born long after the end of real hostilities.
What's Dr Tuck's battle plan?
To capture the bitter flavour of the decision by senior Nazi officers to round up the Allied prisoners in Stalag Luft III camp in...
Why are we asking this now?
In January 1945, some 10,000 Allied prisoners of war were evacuated from the prison where the escape made famous in the film The Great Escape had taken place the year before. They were forced on a trek west on Hitler's orders to escape the Russians to the east. This week, veterans of the so-called Long March, and their relatives, are to recreate their ordeal as a training exercise in survival for today's young RAF softies, whom they suspect of being insufficiently schooled in the rigours of getting back to Blighty through a hostile environment in a harsh winter. The escape officer is Dr Howard Tuck, a Cambridge historian, born long after the end of real hostilities.
What's Dr Tuck's battle plan?
To capture the bitter flavour of the decision by senior Nazi officers to round up the Allied prisoners in Stalag Luft III camp in...
Tuesday, January 26, 2010 - 10:57
SOURCE: Guardian (UK) (1-26-10)
[Alan Posener is a correspondent and commentator for Die Welt and Welt am Sonntag in Berlin and one of Germany's most influential bloggers. His latest book, Benedict's Crusade, is a critique of Benedict XVI.]
On 27 January, Germany will commemorate the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp by Soviet troops. Though most Germans now face up to their past guilt and their present responsibilities, the road has not been easy. It wasn't until 40 years after the second world war that a (West) German president found the courage to say that 8 May, the day Hitler's army surrendered, was "a day of liberation for Germans, too".
More recently, the German pope, Benedict XVI, used a visit to Auschwitz to suggest that Germans had been the victims of "a band of criminals", who had gained power "by lies and terror" and used the German people "as an instrument", thus denying that the Nazis were perfectly open about their...
On 27 January, Germany will commemorate the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp by Soviet troops. Though most Germans now face up to their past guilt and their present responsibilities, the road has not been easy. It wasn't until 40 years after the second world war that a (West) German president found the courage to say that 8 May, the day Hitler's army surrendered, was "a day of liberation for Germans, too".
More recently, the German pope, Benedict XVI, used a visit to Auschwitz to suggest that Germans had been the victims of "a band of criminals", who had gained power "by lies and terror" and used the German people "as an instrument", thus denying that the Nazis were perfectly open about their...
Tuesday, January 26, 2010 - 10:30
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (1-25-10)
[Michael Gove is MP for Surrey Heath and Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families.]
This Wednesday we remember the greatest crime ever inflicted by man against his fellow man. Holocaust Memorial Day allows us to reflect on the bleakest chapter in the history of the 20th century. And there is a special urgency in the call to remember this year, of all years - because the shadow of the Holocaust continues to fall over the world today.
Mass murder is still deployed as a political tool by tyrants, from Burma to Zimbabwe. Racism is returning to the streets of Europe, from St Petersburg to Antwerp. And, hard though it is to credit after the horrors of the last century, anti-Semitism is creeping back into the corridors of power.
We know that Nazi ideology still has the power to motivate evil men. From the Swedish fascist who tried to acquire the "Arbeit macht frei" sign which hung over the gates of Auschwitz, to the British...
This Wednesday we remember the greatest crime ever inflicted by man against his fellow man. Holocaust Memorial Day allows us to reflect on the bleakest chapter in the history of the 20th century. And there is a special urgency in the call to remember this year, of all years - because the shadow of the Holocaust continues to fall over the world today.
Mass murder is still deployed as a political tool by tyrants, from Burma to Zimbabwe. Racism is returning to the streets of Europe, from St Petersburg to Antwerp. And, hard though it is to credit after the horrors of the last century, anti-Semitism is creeping back into the corridors of power.
We know that Nazi ideology still has the power to motivate evil men. From the Swedish fascist who tried to acquire the "Arbeit macht frei" sign which hung over the gates of Auschwitz, to the British...
Monday, January 25, 2010 - 10:31
SOURCE: Foreign Policy (1-21-10)
[Betty Glad is Olin D. Johnston professor of political science emerita at the University of South Carolina and author of An Outsider in the White House: Jimmy Carter, His Advisors, and the Making of American Foreign Policy.]
The hottest new trend of 2010, it seems, is making half-baked comparisons between Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama. Writing in Foreign Policy, historian Walter Russell Mead warns us, "[T]he conflicting impulses influencing how [Obama] thinks about the world threaten to tear his presidency apart -- and, in the worst scenario, turn him into a new Jimmy Carter." There are some real similarities between the two U.S. presidents, it's true. Both men came to office following deeply unpopular Republican presidencies and were outsiders with relatively little national security experience. Both had to depend heavily on their staff for policy advice and direction. But beyond these superficial observations, the comparisons are generally based on the...
The hottest new trend of 2010, it seems, is making half-baked comparisons between Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama. Writing in Foreign Policy, historian Walter Russell Mead warns us, "[T]he conflicting impulses influencing how [Obama] thinks about the world threaten to tear his presidency apart -- and, in the worst scenario, turn him into a new Jimmy Carter." There are some real similarities between the two U.S. presidents, it's true. Both men came to office following deeply unpopular Republican presidencies and were outsiders with relatively little national security experience. Both had to depend heavily on their staff for policy advice and direction. But beyond these superficial observations, the comparisons are generally based on the...
Friday, January 22, 2010 - 15:00
SOURCE: Blog Them Out of the Stone Age (1-5-10)
[Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh teaches military history at the U.S. Naval Academy.]
Sometimes I think military historians fret too much about our relationship with academic colleagues uninterested and unsympathetic to the sorts of issues that exercise us (for some good meditations on the issue, I would direct readers to look at a recent issue of Historically Speaking), but more of us could follow Mark Grimsley’s lead in trying to engage with our colleagues in different sub-disciplines, who might sometimes be skeptical of the value of military historians carving out their own intellectual and professional space. Otherwise, there is a risk that military history becomes the exclusive domain of either scholars affiliated with the national security state (including myself) or those reliant on the financial support of the broader reading public. Academics too frequently sneer at these alternative means of support, but the university remains the most intellectually coherent arena for...
Sometimes I think military historians fret too much about our relationship with academic colleagues uninterested and unsympathetic to the sorts of issues that exercise us (for some good meditations on the issue, I would direct readers to look at a recent issue of Historically Speaking), but more of us could follow Mark Grimsley’s lead in trying to engage with our colleagues in different sub-disciplines, who might sometimes be skeptical of the value of military historians carving out their own intellectual and professional space. Otherwise, there is a risk that military history becomes the exclusive domain of either scholars affiliated with the national security state (including myself) or those reliant on the financial support of the broader reading public. Academics too frequently sneer at these alternative means of support, but the university remains the most intellectually coherent arena for...
Thursday, January 21, 2010 - 15:59
SOURCE: Korea Times (1-14-10)
Several victims of wartime sexual slavery and their supporters held a rally in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul two days ago. It was the 900th such gathering by the former ``comfort women," who have met there every Wednesday for 18 years to demand the Japanese government's acknowledgement [sic] and apology.
Sadly, no Japanese officials have bothered to come out of the embassy gate to meet them, or even watch them. Tokyo's ``total neglect" tactic is in line with its snubbing of resolutions on the matter adopted by the legislatures of the United States, EU, Canada and the Netherlands.
No government with a minimal sense of shame would behave like this. Tokyo alleges its imperial army ― in other words, its government ― was not involved in the recruitment and management of the sex slaves, which it says was done by private contractors. Even if this is right by any chance, could it be possible for private firms to operate military...
Sadly, no Japanese officials have bothered to come out of the embassy gate to meet them, or even watch them. Tokyo's ``total neglect" tactic is in line with its snubbing of resolutions on the matter adopted by the legislatures of the United States, EU, Canada and the Netherlands.
No government with a minimal sense of shame would behave like this. Tokyo alleges its imperial army ― in other words, its government ― was not involved in the recruitment and management of the sex slaves, which it says was done by private contractors. Even if this is right by any chance, could it be possible for private firms to operate military...
Thursday, January 21, 2010 - 12:41
SOURCE: Times Online (UK) (1-18-10)
[Oliver Kamm is a leader writer and columnist at The Times (of London)]
I was unimpressed with Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's book Hitler's Willing Executioners, and it's unlikely (unless anyone pays me to review it) that I'll read his new book on genocide. But the FT has published its review today, by Hugh Carnegy, and it contains an aside that is worth disposing of. According to Carnegy:
"Nor does Goldhagen spare western democracies from his fierce analysis. Britain’s suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion in colonial Kenya is branded eliminationist. Truman is declared a “mass murderer” for the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which Goldhagen insists Truman knew was militarily unnecessary."
If Goldhagen has done any archival research on the Pacific War, then I'm not familiar with it. But a document found in the Library of Congress by one of my correspondents, Robert Newman, ought to make Goldhagen pause in his confident assertions about what...
Thursday, January 21, 2010 - 00:33
SOURCE: The New Republic (1-20-10)
[John Summers is the author of Every Fury on Earth.]
"Masscult is bad in a new way: it doesn’t even have the theoretical possibility of being good,” Dwight Macdonald scolded in Against the American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture. “Those who consume Masscult might as well be eating ice-cream sodas, while those who fabricate it are no more expressing themselves than are the ‘stylists’ who design the latest atrocity from Detroit.” Macdonald wanted to title his book Reactions, but bothering the memory of William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain conveyed the new tone of astringency well enough....
Against the American Grain, published in 1962, collected Macdonald’s essays on Mark Twain, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and James Agee and his accusations of cultural malpractice against Webster’s New International Dictionary, the Encyclopedia Britannica, the University of Chicago, and the Bible. There were minor, trend-spotting pieces such as “Amateur...
Wednesday, January 20, 2010 - 19:08
SOURCE: The New Republic (1-15-10)
[Isaac Chotiner is the executive editor of The Book.]
Right-wing Churchill worship is a well-known phenomenon. It has been picked apart with a thoroughness to match the study of Churchill himself. Caspar Weinberger—Ronald Reagan’s first secretary of defense—kept a large store of Churchill memorabilia and rarely passed up the opportunity to laud the British hero. Republican presidents from Nixon to George W. Bush have found it useful to summon the great man’s image. At the dawn of the Gulf war, the late Jack Kemp chose to quote Churchill’s diary during a cabinet meeting at which he had been asked to recite a prayer. The substitution must have gone almost unnoticed among politicians who tend to view Churchill as a kind of deity. When Barack Obama, soon after taking office, returned a bust of the former prime minister (first installed in the Oval Office by his immediate predecessor, naturally) to London, the conservative blogosphere almost lost its mind....
...
Right-wing Churchill worship is a well-known phenomenon. It has been picked apart with a thoroughness to match the study of Churchill himself. Caspar Weinberger—Ronald Reagan’s first secretary of defense—kept a large store of Churchill memorabilia and rarely passed up the opportunity to laud the British hero. Republican presidents from Nixon to George W. Bush have found it useful to summon the great man’s image. At the dawn of the Gulf war, the late Jack Kemp chose to quote Churchill’s diary during a cabinet meeting at which he had been asked to recite a prayer. The substitution must have gone almost unnoticed among politicians who tend to view Churchill as a kind of deity. When Barack Obama, soon after taking office, returned a bust of the former prime minister (first installed in the Oval Office by his immediate predecessor, naturally) to London, the conservative blogosphere almost lost its mind....
...
Wednesday, January 20, 2010 - 18:45
SOURCE: China Beat (Blog) (1-20-10)
[Geremie R. Barmé is an Australian Research Council Federation Fellow and Professor of Chinese History in The ANU College of Asia & the Pacific. He is also the editor of China Heritage Quarterly.]
The year 2009 was marked by a series of important anniversaries in the history of the People’s Republic of China. Some of these were commemorated with due pomp and circumstance in the official media and dissected at length during learned gatherings and discussions. Others, those events that I think of as ‘dark anniversaries’, passed by in an atmosphere of heightened alertness, surveillance and official anxiety. Dark anniversaries are the signposts of quelled protests, social unrest and state violence, events such as the 1959 rebellion in Lhasa, the shutting down of the Xidan Democracy Wall in Beijing in 1979, the tragedy of the 1989 protest movement and the religious repression of 1999. Such events offer alternative narratives to the official Party-state story of modern China...
The year 2009 was marked by a series of important anniversaries in the history of the People’s Republic of China. Some of these were commemorated with due pomp and circumstance in the official media and dissected at length during learned gatherings and discussions. Others, those events that I think of as ‘dark anniversaries’, passed by in an atmosphere of heightened alertness, surveillance and official anxiety. Dark anniversaries are the signposts of quelled protests, social unrest and state violence, events such as the 1959 rebellion in Lhasa, the shutting down of the Xidan Democracy Wall in Beijing in 1979, the tragedy of the 1989 protest movement and the religious repression of 1999. Such events offer alternative narratives to the official Party-state story of modern China...
Wednesday, January 20, 2010 - 18:44
