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: WSJ (8-18-10)
[Ms. Ali, a former member of the Dutch parliament, is the author of "Nomad: From Islam to America—A Personal Journey through the Clash of Civilizations," which has just been published by Free Press.]
What do the controversies around the proposed mosque near Ground Zero, the eviction of American missionaries from Morocco earlier this year, the minaret ban in Switzerland last year, and the recent burka ban in France have in common? All four are framed in the Western media as issues of religious tolerance. But that is not their essence. Fundamentally, they are all symptoms of what the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington called the "Clash of Civilizations," particularly the clash between Islam and the West.
Huntington's argument is worth summarizing briefly for those who now only remember his striking title. The essential building block of the post-Cold War world, he wrote, are seven or eight historical civilizations of which the...
What do the controversies around the proposed mosque near Ground Zero, the eviction of American missionaries from Morocco earlier this year, the minaret ban in Switzerland last year, and the recent burka ban in France have in common? All four are framed in the Western media as issues of religious tolerance. But that is not their essence. Fundamentally, they are all symptoms of what the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington called the "Clash of Civilizations," particularly the clash between Islam and the West.
Huntington's argument is worth summarizing briefly for those who now only remember his striking title. The essential building block of the post-Cold War world, he wrote, are seven or eight historical civilizations of which the...
Wednesday, August 18, 2010 - 10:18
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SOURCE: World Affairs Journal (8-17-10)
[Vladimir Kara-Murza JR. is the Washington bureau chief of RTVi television network. He was previously a correspondent for the newspapers Novye Izvestia and Kommersant and editor in chief of the Russian Investment Review.]
Russia is famously a country with an unpredictable past. With a brief exception of the 1990s, regimes of the day freely rewrote the historical narrative for their own expediency. A famous Soviet-era joke advised that the latest edition of the encyclopedia had a regrettable misprint: instead of “distinguished statesman, hero of socialist labor” the paragraph should read “enemy of the people, convicted foreign spy.”
Under ex-KGB apparatchiks who seized control of the Russian government a decade ago, the discussion of Soviet crimes became unfashionable. The new leaders declared the USSR’s dissolution “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century,” reinstated the Stalinist national anthem, approved a school textbook referring to...
Russia is famously a country with an unpredictable past. With a brief exception of the 1990s, regimes of the day freely rewrote the historical narrative for their own expediency. A famous Soviet-era joke advised that the latest edition of the encyclopedia had a regrettable misprint: instead of “distinguished statesman, hero of socialist labor” the paragraph should read “enemy of the people, convicted foreign spy.”
Under ex-KGB apparatchiks who seized control of the Russian government a decade ago, the discussion of Soviet crimes became unfashionable. The new leaders declared the USSR’s dissolution “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century,” reinstated the Stalinist national anthem, approved a school textbook referring to...
Wednesday, August 18, 2010 - 07:48
SOURCE: New Republic (8-17-10)
[Dore Gold is an Israeli statesman who has served in various diplomatic positions under several Israeli governments. He is the current President of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.]
The argument that Israel is a colonialist entity is often marshaled to undermine the Jewish state’s legitimacy. The theme has certainly permeated Western academia, almost uncritically. For decades, it has been employed against Israel in one international forum after another. In 1973, the U.N. General Assembly gave initial momentum to this idea when it condemned the “unholy alliance between Portuguese colonialism, South African racism, Zionism, and Israeli imperialism.”
That association of Israel with colonialist regimes set the stage in 1975 for the most insidious resolution ever adopted in the General Assembly against Israel, which stated that Zionism was a form of racism. It helped cement the Afro-Asian bloc behind both the resolution and the movement to delegitimize...
The argument that Israel is a colonialist entity is often marshaled to undermine the Jewish state’s legitimacy. The theme has certainly permeated Western academia, almost uncritically. For decades, it has been employed against Israel in one international forum after another. In 1973, the U.N. General Assembly gave initial momentum to this idea when it condemned the “unholy alliance between Portuguese colonialism, South African racism, Zionism, and Israeli imperialism.”
That association of Israel with colonialist regimes set the stage in 1975 for the most insidious resolution ever adopted in the General Assembly against Israel, which stated that Zionism was a form of racism. It helped cement the Afro-Asian bloc behind both the resolution and the movement to delegitimize...
Tuesday, August 17, 2010 - 12:13
SOURCE: EricFoner.com (9-1-10)
[Eric Foner is DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University.]
In 1855, Abraham Lincoln, then making his living as an Illinois lawyer, represented William Dungey, a dark-complexioned man who was suing his brother-in-law for slander for referring to Dungey as “Black Bill, a Negro.” Lincoln challenged the veracity of defense depositions that claimed that Dungey was known to be of mixed racial ancestry. Dungey was actually Portuguese, Lincoln told the jury. “My client is not a Negro,” he added, “though it is no crime to be a Negro—no crime to be born with a black skin.” Lincoln won the case, and Dungey received an award of $600. Had he lost, Dungey would have been stripped of the right to vote and been subject to imprisonment, as he was married to a white woman. Illinois law did make it a crime, under certain circumstances, to be “born with a black skin.”...
Such cases demonstrate two essential qualities of race as a historical category. First, as...
In 1855, Abraham Lincoln, then making his living as an Illinois lawyer, represented William Dungey, a dark-complexioned man who was suing his brother-in-law for slander for referring to Dungey as “Black Bill, a Negro.” Lincoln challenged the veracity of defense depositions that claimed that Dungey was known to be of mixed racial ancestry. Dungey was actually Portuguese, Lincoln told the jury. “My client is not a Negro,” he added, “though it is no crime to be a Negro—no crime to be born with a black skin.” Lincoln won the case, and Dungey received an award of $600. Had he lost, Dungey would have been stripped of the right to vote and been subject to imprisonment, as he was married to a white woman. Illinois law did make it a crime, under certain circumstances, to be “born with a black skin.”...
Such cases demonstrate two essential qualities of race as a historical category. First, as...
Monday, August 16, 2010 - 16:59
SOURCE: Weekly Standard (8-16-10)
[Ross Terrill, associate in research at Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, is the author of Mao (currently a bestseller in China), The New Chinese Empire, and Madam Mao.]
...In Shanghai, a high school textbook, History, painstakingly crafted a mile or two from the Expo site and launched at schools in 2006, suggested what reformers think should await the six-year-old. Here Chinese history is less conflicted and more “harmonious” (a tactful nod to President Hu Jintao’s favorite term for his governance) than in previous Chinese textbooks. There is less about political leaders, battles, and China’s past sufferings, more about technology, economic forces, religion, environment, and social behavior....
But, revealingly, History was canceled in 2007 and hurriedly replaced by a more politically correct and nationalistic text. Attacks on the book had rolled in from the left (“Bill Gates has replaced Mao Zedong,” “Where is Marxism?,” “Where is class struggle...
...In Shanghai, a high school textbook, History, painstakingly crafted a mile or two from the Expo site and launched at schools in 2006, suggested what reformers think should await the six-year-old. Here Chinese history is less conflicted and more “harmonious” (a tactful nod to President Hu Jintao’s favorite term for his governance) than in previous Chinese textbooks. There is less about political leaders, battles, and China’s past sufferings, more about technology, economic forces, religion, environment, and social behavior....
But, revealingly, History was canceled in 2007 and hurriedly replaced by a more politically correct and nationalistic text. Attacks on the book had rolled in from the left (“Bill Gates has replaced Mao Zedong,” “Where is Marxism?,” “Where is class struggle...
Monday, August 16, 2010 - 13:51
SOURCE: American Spectator (8-13-10)
[Mark Tooley is president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington, D.C. and author of Taking Back the United Methodist Church.]
Somewhat surprisingly, the 65th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki this month passed without many sharp condemnations and calls for repentance by left-leaning church officials. The head of the Two Futures Project, a coalition for left-leaning evangelicals urging a nuclear free world, blogged for the Huffington Post about the atomic anniversaries serving as a reminder of the urgent need for nuclear disarmament. In Switzerland the head of the World Council of Churches (WCC) likewise urged complete "nuclear abolition" based on memories of those destroyed Japanese cities.
"Again we mourn the people who died from the atomic bombings of 1945 and extend our solidarity and resolve to those who survive," declared the Geneva-based WCC chief, noting that "65 years on, nuclear bombs still threaten...
Somewhat surprisingly, the 65th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki this month passed without many sharp condemnations and calls for repentance by left-leaning church officials. The head of the Two Futures Project, a coalition for left-leaning evangelicals urging a nuclear free world, blogged for the Huffington Post about the atomic anniversaries serving as a reminder of the urgent need for nuclear disarmament. In Switzerland the head of the World Council of Churches (WCC) likewise urged complete "nuclear abolition" based on memories of those destroyed Japanese cities.
"Again we mourn the people who died from the atomic bombings of 1945 and extend our solidarity and resolve to those who survive," declared the Geneva-based WCC chief, noting that "65 years on, nuclear bombs still threaten...
Friday, August 13, 2010 - 12:32
SOURCE: American Spectator (8-13-10)
[Michael Johnson spent 17 years at McGraw-Hill, including six years as a news executive in New York. He now writes from Bordeaux in France.]
Voltaire, that ultimate freethinker and lifelong iconoclast, has never quite lost his audience. His epigrams are among the favorites of speechwriters and his political writings seem almost contemporary. Indeed he would make a suitable patron of today's U.S. Libertarian Party if its elders cared to look back far enough. (They tend to stop at Thomas Jefferson.)
Although Voltaire is absent from the party's materials, his spirit lives on in the libertarian movement, co-founder David Nolan told me recently.
In accidental Voltairean terms, the party rejects any attempt to constrain freedom of speech and calls for tolerance and a free, competitive market. Its platform lines up with Voltaire in its call for a world "where individuals are free to follow their own dreams in their own ways, without interference from...
Voltaire, that ultimate freethinker and lifelong iconoclast, has never quite lost his audience. His epigrams are among the favorites of speechwriters and his political writings seem almost contemporary. Indeed he would make a suitable patron of today's U.S. Libertarian Party if its elders cared to look back far enough. (They tend to stop at Thomas Jefferson.)
Although Voltaire is absent from the party's materials, his spirit lives on in the libertarian movement, co-founder David Nolan told me recently.
In accidental Voltairean terms, the party rejects any attempt to constrain freedom of speech and calls for tolerance and a free, competitive market. Its platform lines up with Voltaire in its call for a world "where individuals are free to follow their own dreams in their own ways, without interference from...
Friday, August 13, 2010 - 12:30
SOURCE: Independent (UK) (8-12-10)
[Rupert Cornwell is Washington correspondent for the Independent.]
I never met Tony Judt but I will miss him, badly. First and foremost of course there's the loss of his historical scholarship, his marvellous books and his evident relish of intellectual combat. Our lives, geographically at least, were also not dissimilar. We both lived for long spells on the continent of Europe before settling, by accident or design, in the US.
Then there were the two dozen or so essays-cum-memoirs that appeared in The New York Review of Books in the months before his death last weekend of motor neurone disease. Unsparing, intimate and elegiac, each alone was worth the annual subscription to the magazine. But I'll miss him most of all as the wisest student and interpreter of contemporary Europe on this side of the Atlantic – perhaps on either side.
That, it should be said, is not how he was primarily seen here. Judt was best known for his criticism of Israel's...
I never met Tony Judt but I will miss him, badly. First and foremost of course there's the loss of his historical scholarship, his marvellous books and his evident relish of intellectual combat. Our lives, geographically at least, were also not dissimilar. We both lived for long spells on the continent of Europe before settling, by accident or design, in the US.
Then there were the two dozen or so essays-cum-memoirs that appeared in The New York Review of Books in the months before his death last weekend of motor neurone disease. Unsparing, intimate and elegiac, each alone was worth the annual subscription to the magazine. But I'll miss him most of all as the wisest student and interpreter of contemporary Europe on this side of the Atlantic – perhaps on either side.
That, it should be said, is not how he was primarily seen here. Judt was best known for his criticism of Israel's...
Thursday, August 12, 2010 - 16:13
SOURCE: Financial Times (UK) (8-11-10)
[David Pilling became the Financial Times' Asia Editor, based in Hong Kong, in September 2008.]
As peace doves fluttered across the ghostly skeleton of Hiroshima’s Atomic Bomb Dome last Friday and a sombre Buddhist temple bell tolled, the presence of one man added to the poignancy of what is always a bitter and beautiful ceremony. That man was John Roos, US ambassador to Japan and the first representative of the US government to attend the memorial in the 65 years since the atomic bomb was dropped.
In one sense, President Barack Obama’s decision to send the ambassador was straightforward. Despite the risk of creating a backlash in the US, where some critics thought Mr Roos’s presence could be misinterpreted as an apology, Hiroshima is a potent symbol for the nuclear disarmament that the US president has championed. Ever since Mr Obama’s Prague speech calling for a nuclear-free world last year, officials from Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been pressing him to...
As peace doves fluttered across the ghostly skeleton of Hiroshima’s Atomic Bomb Dome last Friday and a sombre Buddhist temple bell tolled, the presence of one man added to the poignancy of what is always a bitter and beautiful ceremony. That man was John Roos, US ambassador to Japan and the first representative of the US government to attend the memorial in the 65 years since the atomic bomb was dropped.
In one sense, President Barack Obama’s decision to send the ambassador was straightforward. Despite the risk of creating a backlash in the US, where some critics thought Mr Roos’s presence could be misinterpreted as an apology, Hiroshima is a potent symbol for the nuclear disarmament that the US president has championed. Ever since Mr Obama’s Prague speech calling for a nuclear-free world last year, officials from Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been pressing him to...
Thursday, August 12, 2010 - 16:12
SOURCE: The Root (8-10-10)
[Regina Jones, a lifelong resident of Los Angeles, published SOUL Newspaper from 1965 to 1982. Today she is working on the SOUL Legacy Collection, which has been donated to UCLA.]
"Officer needs help," an urgent whisper came through my headset. I stopped breathing and tilted my head to listen. There it was again: "Officer needs help."
"Officer requesting help, please give your location and identify yourself." My voice was well-modulated -- after all, it was part of my job as a LAPD radio dispatcher to sound calm. But I was terrified. An "officer needs help" call means imminent danger. The lives of two men were in my hands. I was their lifeline. It was the kind of moment that sometimes gave me bad dreams.
I yelled out so that everyone in communications could hear me -- "Officer needs help! I don't have the unit or location" -- while hitting the switch that turned the emergency red light atop my...
"Officer needs help," an urgent whisper came through my headset. I stopped breathing and tilted my head to listen. There it was again: "Officer needs help."
"Officer requesting help, please give your location and identify yourself." My voice was well-modulated -- after all, it was part of my job as a LAPD radio dispatcher to sound calm. But I was terrified. An "officer needs help" call means imminent danger. The lives of two men were in my hands. I was their lifeline. It was the kind of moment that sometimes gave me bad dreams.
I yelled out so that everyone in communications could hear me -- "Officer needs help! I don't have the unit or location" -- while hitting the switch that turned the emergency red light atop my...
Wednesday, August 11, 2010 - 14:13
SOURCE: The Australian (8-11-10)
[Gareth Evans, former foreign minister and president emiritus of the International Crisis Group, is co-chair of the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament.]
People sometimes forget that the boy who cried wolf ended up being eaten.
True, nobody has been killed by a nuclear weapon since the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 65 years ago this month. And with Cold War tensions long past, it is all too easy for policymakers and publics to resist the doomsayers, be complacent about the threats that these weapons continue to pose, and to regard attempts to eliminate them, or contain their spread, as well-meaning but futile.
But the truth is that it is sheer dumb luck -- not statesmanship, good professional management or anything inherently stable about the world's nuclear weapon systems -- that has let us survive so long without catastrophe. With 23,000 nuclear weapons (equivalent to 150,000 Hiroshimas) still in existence,...
People sometimes forget that the boy who cried wolf ended up being eaten.
True, nobody has been killed by a nuclear weapon since the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 65 years ago this month. And with Cold War tensions long past, it is all too easy for policymakers and publics to resist the doomsayers, be complacent about the threats that these weapons continue to pose, and to regard attempts to eliminate them, or contain their spread, as well-meaning but futile.
But the truth is that it is sheer dumb luck -- not statesmanship, good professional management or anything inherently stable about the world's nuclear weapon systems -- that has let us survive so long without catastrophe. With 23,000 nuclear weapons (equivalent to 150,000 Hiroshimas) still in existence,...
Tuesday, August 10, 2010 - 18:20
SOURCE: Guardian (UK) (8-10-10)
[Justin McGuirk is the editor of Icon, the international architecture and design magazine. An award-winning journalist and critic, his writings on design culture range from the architecture of Palestinian refugee camps to the design of electric shavers.]
...Any sightseers embarking on a tour of Moscow's avant-garde architecture from the early 20th century had better brace themselves for a catalogue of degradation. The more hallowed the building in the architectural history books, the greater its decrepitude. Take the Narkomfin building, designed by Moisei Ginzburg with Ignaty Milnis in 1928 to house the workers of the commissariat of finance. This radical apartment block, which spearheaded the idea of collective living, is one of the most important surviving constructivist buildings. And it is literally crumbling – indeed it's in such a sorry state that I was amazed to find that people still live in it. Then there is another constructivist masterpiece, Konstantin Melnikov'...
...Any sightseers embarking on a tour of Moscow's avant-garde architecture from the early 20th century had better brace themselves for a catalogue of degradation. The more hallowed the building in the architectural history books, the greater its decrepitude. Take the Narkomfin building, designed by Moisei Ginzburg with Ignaty Milnis in 1928 to house the workers of the commissariat of finance. This radical apartment block, which spearheaded the idea of collective living, is one of the most important surviving constructivist buildings. And it is literally crumbling – indeed it's in such a sorry state that I was amazed to find that people still live in it. Then there is another constructivist masterpiece, Konstantin Melnikov'...
Tuesday, August 10, 2010 - 17:20
SOURCE: Tony Platt at his Blog (8-6-10)
[Tony Platt is recently retired from some 40 years of full-time teaching American history, public policy, and social sciences at University of Chicago (1966-1968), Berkeley (1968-1977), and California State University, Sacramento (1977-2007). I completed an undergraduate degree at Oxford University (1960-1963) and received my doctorate from Berkeley in 1966.]
I'm traveling around New Mexico for the first time, my eyes opened wide by colors, clouds, and light. It's all quite wonderful until I go through the security check into the Los Alamos compound, where some 10,000 employees work on "The World's Greatest Science Protecting America." This mind-numbing experience is reinforced when I visit local museums, hoping to find intellectual engagement or at least some recognition of what it means that such an extraordinarily sensual terrain is home to the world record for mass killing in a single day.
How does the state deal with this conundrum in its public...
Tuesday, August 10, 2010 - 13:55
SOURCE: WilliamEamon.com (Blog) (8-2-10)
[William Eamon is Regents Professor of History and Dean of the Honors College at New Mexico State University.]
Nowadays we think of curiosity as an emotion necessary for the advancement of knowledge, indeed as the well-spring of scientific discovery. It was not always so.
Saint Augustine, in the fourth century, stated the traditional medieval view of curiosity, and it wasn’t favorable. In the Confessions, the Bishop of Hippo made inquisitiveness in general the subject of a vicious polemic, thereby setting the tone for the debate over intellectual curiosity for centuries. Augustine included curiositas in his catalog of vices, identifying it as one of the three forms of lust (concupiscentia) that are the beginning of all sin (lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and ambition of the world). The overly curious mind exhibits a “lust to find out and know,” not for any practical purpose but merely for the sake of knowing. Thanks to the “disease of curiosity” people...
Nowadays we think of curiosity as an emotion necessary for the advancement of knowledge, indeed as the well-spring of scientific discovery. It was not always so.
Saint Augustine, in the fourth century, stated the traditional medieval view of curiosity, and it wasn’t favorable. In the Confessions, the Bishop of Hippo made inquisitiveness in general the subject of a vicious polemic, thereby setting the tone for the debate over intellectual curiosity for centuries. Augustine included curiositas in his catalog of vices, identifying it as one of the three forms of lust (concupiscentia) that are the beginning of all sin (lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and ambition of the world). The overly curious mind exhibits a “lust to find out and know,” not for any practical purpose but merely for the sake of knowing. Thanks to the “disease of curiosity” people...
Tuesday, August 10, 2010 - 11:54
SOURCE: City Journal (8-1-10)
[Joel Mokyr is the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences and a professor of economics and history at Northwestern University. His latest book is The Enlightened Economy: Britain and the Industrial Revolution.]
Was the Enlightenment a Good Thing? At first blush, the question sounds almost sacrilegious. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment, after all, taught us to be democratic and to believe in human rights, tolerance, freedom of expression, and many other values that are still revered, if not always practiced, in modern societies. On the other hand, historians question whether the Enlightenment actually led to brotherhood and equality (it did not, of course), and even freedom, its third objective, was achieved only partially and late. Some have even suggested that its ideas of human “improvement” may have had unintended bad consequences such as twentieth-century totalitarianism, racism, and colonialism.
Yet the debate has obscured the most hardy and...
Was the Enlightenment a Good Thing? At first blush, the question sounds almost sacrilegious. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment, after all, taught us to be democratic and to believe in human rights, tolerance, freedom of expression, and many other values that are still revered, if not always practiced, in modern societies. On the other hand, historians question whether the Enlightenment actually led to brotherhood and equality (it did not, of course), and even freedom, its third objective, was achieved only partially and late. Some have even suggested that its ideas of human “improvement” may have had unintended bad consequences such as twentieth-century totalitarianism, racism, and colonialism.
Yet the debate has obscured the most hardy and...
Tuesday, August 10, 2010 - 11:48
SOURCE: Huffington Post (8-9-10)
[Greg Mitchell is co-author of"Hiroshima in America" and writes the popular Media Fix blog for The Nation. He is the former editor of Nuclear Times and Editor...
Monday, August 9, 2010 - 18:11
SOURCE: New Republic (7-19-10)
[John Summers is visiting scholar in history at Boston College.]
*The Admirable Radical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent, 1945–1970
by Carl Mirra
Before Staughton Lynd vanished from intellectual society, he was one of the country’s most recognizable and controversial academics. “I was to be an American Lenin and a tenured professor at an Ivy League university,” he has recalled of the hopes he inherited from his famous parents, Robert and Helen Lynd. By 1970, the year Carl Mirra concludes his new biography, Lynd represented a new model of scholarly activism. But Mirra, a former U.S. Marine and conscientious objector, identifies with his subject so completely that the biography is best read as a collaboration. And this absence of critical distance confirms the old suspicion that Lynd’s scholarly activism abolished distinctions worth preserving. Lynd was never a historian who selects significant problems for study, but one who knows most of the answers...
*The Admirable Radical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent, 1945–1970
by Carl Mirra
Before Staughton Lynd vanished from intellectual society, he was one of the country’s most recognizable and controversial academics. “I was to be an American Lenin and a tenured professor at an Ivy League university,” he has recalled of the hopes he inherited from his famous parents, Robert and Helen Lynd. By 1970, the year Carl Mirra concludes his new biography, Lynd represented a new model of scholarly activism. But Mirra, a former U.S. Marine and conscientious objector, identifies with his subject so completely that the biography is best read as a collaboration. And this absence of critical distance confirms the old suspicion that Lynd’s scholarly activism abolished distinctions worth preserving. Lynd was never a historian who selects significant problems for study, but one who knows most of the answers...
Monday, August 9, 2010 - 14:07
SOURCE: The New Republic (8-4-10)
[Staughton Lynd is an historian and activist. He currently lives in Youngstown, Ohio.]
In a review essay entitled “What Politics Does to History,” July 19, 2010, John Summers states that my work on the American Revolution “helped initiate the long fashion for sneering at dead white men of ideas, and turned history from a means of understanding to a record of heroes and villains.” Mr. Summers also finds in my work a “refusal to acknowledge the many-sidedness of history" that "has been part of [my] method from the beginning.” What he calls “the Lynd-Zinn school of historiography” in his view has “difficulty conceding that mass movements could be anything but democratic and progressive.” Most egregiously, Mr. Summers writes: “Lynd was never a historian who selects significant problems for study, but one who knows most of the answers in advance.”
The reality is that regarding one issue after another, I reached conclusions quite different from my initial...
In a review essay entitled “What Politics Does to History,” July 19, 2010, John Summers states that my work on the American Revolution “helped initiate the long fashion for sneering at dead white men of ideas, and turned history from a means of understanding to a record of heroes and villains.” Mr. Summers also finds in my work a “refusal to acknowledge the many-sidedness of history" that "has been part of [my] method from the beginning.” What he calls “the Lynd-Zinn school of historiography” in his view has “difficulty conceding that mass movements could be anything but democratic and progressive.” Most egregiously, Mr. Summers writes: “Lynd was never a historian who selects significant problems for study, but one who knows most of the answers in advance.”
The reality is that regarding one issue after another, I reached conclusions quite different from my initial...
Monday, August 9, 2010 - 14:07
SOURCE: The New Republic (8-4-10)
[Carl Mirra is Associate Professor of Social Studies in the Ruth S. Ammon School of Education at Adelphi University. He is author of The Admirable Radical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent with a foreword by Howard Zinn (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2010).]
I am the author of the biography, The Admirable Radical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent, 1945-1970, that was nominally reviewed by John H. Summers in “What Politics Does to History” (TNR online July 19, 2010). The essay was couched as a review, but reads instead like a broadside against my subject, with little reference to the specific arguments raised in the biography. Summers accuses Lynd of refusing to “acknowledge the many-sidedness of history” in part because my subject “knows most of the answers in advance.” Summers’s “review” suffers precisely from his conscious distortion of the record to arrive at this own predetermined conclusions. In other words, Summers “knows most of the answers in advance...
I am the author of the biography, The Admirable Radical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent, 1945-1970, that was nominally reviewed by John H. Summers in “What Politics Does to History” (TNR online July 19, 2010). The essay was couched as a review, but reads instead like a broadside against my subject, with little reference to the specific arguments raised in the biography. Summers accuses Lynd of refusing to “acknowledge the many-sidedness of history” in part because my subject “knows most of the answers in advance.” Summers’s “review” suffers precisely from his conscious distortion of the record to arrive at this own predetermined conclusions. In other words, Summers “knows most of the answers in advance...
Monday, August 9, 2010 - 14:06
SOURCE: Special to HNN (8-9-10)
Editor's Note: This letter was submitted to New Republic 7/20 but not published
[Jesse Lemisch is Professor Emeritus of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York.]
As another historian of the Left, I have had my disagreements with Staughton Lynd about issues around scholarship and activism for more than forty years."Who Will Write a Left History of Art While We Are All Putting our Balls on the Line?" I inquired of Lynd in 1968 reprinted in Journal of American History, September 1989). But it would never occur to me to start a critical piece, as does John Summers ["What Politics Does to History," TNR, July 19], with the notion that Lynd"vanished from intellectual society," as if this were some willful act on Lynd's part. Having been rejected by fourteen colleges and universities in the Chicago area for frankly political reasons, as well as from Yale, he remade himself as a creative left lawyer and continues to...
[Jesse Lemisch is Professor Emeritus of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York.]
As another historian of the Left, I have had my disagreements with Staughton Lynd about issues around scholarship and activism for more than forty years."Who Will Write a Left History of Art While We Are All Putting our Balls on the Line?" I inquired of Lynd in 1968 reprinted in Journal of American History, September 1989). But it would never occur to me to start a critical piece, as does John Summers ["What Politics Does to History," TNR, July 19], with the notion that Lynd"vanished from intellectual society," as if this were some willful act on Lynd's part. Having been rejected by fourteen colleges and universities in the Chicago area for frankly political reasons, as well as from Yale, he remade himself as a creative left lawyer and continues to...
Monday, August 9, 2010 - 14:06
