[Scott Carlson is a senior reporter at The Chronicle, covering architecture, sustainability, and energy.]

The Writer's Almanac notes that Franklin Hiram King was born on this day in 1848. He was an early advocate of sustainable agriculture and a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he studied soil and soil fertility.

Last year I happened to pick up a copy of Farmers of Forty Centuries, which documents King's travels through Japan, China, and Korea and his reflections on how farmers there had managed to feed so many people on so little land for so long. The book, first published in 1911, is amazing—required reading for anyone interested in sustainable agriculture or sustainability generally. Among the subjects: the reuse of waste material in the soil (including human manure, and the sanitation problems that go with that), the growing of rice, the production of silk, the struggle to find sufficient fuel, and local customs and diets (largely...

[Thomas Rid works at The Shalem Center in Jerusalem and at the Richard Koebner Minerva Center for German History at the Hebrew University.* He also is a non-resident fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations in the School for Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, in Washington, DC.]

Who produced the greatest strategists of all time, dead and alive? America or Europe?

Before wading into that minefield, we need some criteria, some points of orientation. The key should be a body of strategic theory, writings of general nature. Just making history or writing about it doesn’t count here. That excludes two sets of people who might otherwise be considered strategists or military writers: great military historians — like Hans Delbrück or Douglas Porch — and exceptionally gifted commanders, such as Napoleon or perhaps Petraeus.

First the old strategists of Europe. Most would go by one name only: Clausewitz, Jomini, Ardant du Picq,...

[Mathews is an education reporter for The Washington Post. He was the paper’s first Beijing bureau chief and returned in 1989 to help cover the Tiananmen demonstrations. With his wife, Linda Mathews, he is the author of One Billion: A China Chronicle. This piece originally ran in the September/October 1998 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review.]

President Clinton’s precedent-setting visit to China filled the front pages of American newspapers and led the evening television news for many days this summer. The stories focused on his controversial decision to attend a welcoming ceremony in Tiananmen Square, despite the stain of what reporters called the massacre of Chinese students there on June 4, 1989.

Over the last decade, many American rehttp://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/porters and editors have accepted a mythical version of that warm, bloody night. They repeated it often before and during Clinton’s trip. On the day the president arrived in Beijing, a...

[Ilan Stavans is a professor of Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst College. His latest book is Gabriel García Márquez: The Early Years (Palgrave Macmillan). He is general editor of The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, due out in September.]

Does the current crop of left-wing caudillos in Latin America, like Hugo Chávez, inspire the type of animosity their military counterparts once did? And will its members be turned into larger-than-life dictators in novels, as they were in Gabriel García Márquez's 1975 The Autumn of the Patriarch? Or have the literary intelligentsia finally given up the foolish practice of using fiction to pretend to force tyrants from their throne?

Those aren't rhetorical questions. For centuries, literature in the former Spanish colonies on this side of the Atlantic has sought to define itself, in part, as resistance to autocratic rulers, as if what justifies writing is fighting oppression and totalitarianism. There is a...

[Rodolfo F. Acuña, PhD, teaches at California State University Northridge[

Dear Steve Nuñez,

I just read the print version of your interview and it is precisely why I am reluctant to grant interviews. I attempted to be candid; however, I forgot that we are living in the age of Fox News which almost makes civil discourse impossible. This is disconcerting because there can be no resolution without people listening to each other.

The first distortion is your obsession with the word"occupied," which meaning has been totally mangled. I made two points: 1) America refers to two continents. Latin Americans chafe at the United States appropriating the term as if it had ownership of the word. They have called this chauvinistic. I did not call the book in question"Occupied Mexico." The title of my book is a metaphor for the European occupation of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. So, the question is, have Europeans treated the native peoples justly? In...

[Martin Kettle is an associate editor of the Guardian and writes on British, European and American politics, as well as the media, law and music.]

...[W]arnings surely apply to a labelling in the Guardian this week of Professor Niall Ferguson as a rightwing historian. Ferguson may or may not be usefully described as rightwing. "Irritating" is his own word for that. But he is certainly a historian – author of some formidable books with an occasional weakness for arresting overstatement. Calling him a rightwing historian, though, seems about as relevant as describing Cézanne as an anti-Dreyfusard painter....

This would be a serious mistake, because a lot – not all – of what Ferguson says on this subject is less rightwing than right. There is a lot of similarity between what he said this week and what the late Raphael Samuel, whom one would label a leftwing historian, wrote on the same subject about 20 years ago. Ferguson's argument, set out this week at...

[Christian Caryl is a contributing editor to Foreign Policy. His column, "Reality Check," appears weekly on ForeignPolicy.com.]

Those were the days: Economic upheavals wiped out long-established institutions and jolted self-satisfied elites. Terrorists declared war on the West in the name of eccentric utopias. New technologies collapsed geographical distance, bringing far-flung regions closer together and undermining the power of the traditional nation-state.

I could be talking, of course, about the early twenty-first century. But as a growing number of historians and commentators are realizing, all of the above applies equally well to the 1970s, a critical decade that deserves to be remembered for more than disco and bellbottoms. For those who lived through them -- at least in the United States -- the 1970s may have felt mostly like the moment when history ground to a halt: A dullsville interregnum between the highs of the 1960s and the Cold War...

[Jonathan Tremblay is a historian and is a Breaking News editor for the History News Network]

News has trickled out of Russia that several dissidents against Moscow’s government have been taped with prostitutes and or while engaging in some ‘unconventional’ behaviour. Ilya Yashin is amongst these dissidents and describes the ploy as a ‘honey trap’ set up by Russian officials to discredit him and the ideals of his protest movement. He claims he was simply getting involved in a ’summer romance’ when a woman lured him back to an apartment rigged with cameras. Yashin says he didn’t become suspicious “until drugs and sex toys were brought out”. In all seriousness, he was probably more tipped off by the Youtube video that was subsequently posted online. Whether or not the Russian government is directly involved in the ploy, the orchestration and success of the ‘honey trap’, in over a dozen cases in the past few months, has been guided by the age-old principle that sex makes...