[Peter Preston is a columnist for the Guardian and the Observer.]

Ece Temelkuran is brilliant and beautiful – but, above all, brave. You have to be brave if you're a Turkish journalist covering Armenia, with genocide, cynicism, and truth shredded over 95 years. Temelkuran writes about Yerevan and Ankara and mutual incomprehension, but she could be writing about Cyprus, Kashmir, Korea, Israel; anywhere that is locked in a timewarp of malign remembrance.

In 1915 Ottoman Turkey systematically killed or deported Armenians; an act of genocide in which up to a million and a half people died. But why does 1915 matter in 2010? It was the question that Temelkuran's murdered friend, the Armenian editor, Hrant Dink, asked, and the question Temelkuran set out to answer. To those who live just over the ludicrously sealed border from Turkey, it matters because that was when the killing began and Armenians became another giant diaspora, scattered from Los Angeles to Paris. It...

[Rubén Martínez is an English professor at Loyola Marymount University. He is finishing a book about the desert West and borderlands for Metropolitan Books.]

Seventy-eight years ago, on Oct. 8, 1932, David Alfaro Siqueiros — at the age of 36 already an important Mexican artist but not yet the icon he would become — sweated shirtless on a cool fall night as he "painted for dear life," The Times' art critic, Arthur Millier, wrote at the time.

He was on a deadline, and running late. The unveiling of the work "America Tropical" was just hours away, and the very center of the mural had yet to be filled in....

So far the elements of the mural included a Maya pyramid, the sinewy and winding branches of jungle trees, and an eagle hovering with open talons. On his final night of work Siqueiros added an indigenous man crucified on a double cross, with the eagle — now undeniably an overt reference to American imperialism — bearing down on...

[Jeffrey Wasserstrom is a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, and the author, most recently, of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, published this year by Oxford University Press. His commentaries and reviews have appeared in a wide range of academic journals, as well as in general interest periodicals such as Time and Newsweek.]

For someone who’s been dead almost 35 years, Mao Zedong (1893-1976) has been getting a lot of attention lately....

In part because of this attention, it is hardly surprising that allusions to the lingering influence of Mao’s thoughts and policies crop up routinely in Western news reports. In television coverage of the 2008 Olympics, for example, shots of the giant portrait of Mao were often shown as a shorthand method for reminding viewers that, all the megamalls and McDonalds notwithstanding, the People’s Republic of China was still a country governed by a Communist Party. And a recent Los...

[Martin Shaw is a historical sociologist of war and global politics, and professor of international relations and politics at the University of Sussex.]

Political wars around the history of genocide are most evident in controversies over the Holocaust (see "The Holocaust, genocide studies, and politics", 18 August 2010). But they are also sharpening around Rwanda, where in 1994 the “Hutu Power” regime killed hundreds of thousands of Tutsis as well as moderate Hutus (see Gérard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, 1954-94: History of a Genocide [C Hurst, 2nd edition, 1998]).

The political context of this development is that the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) government headed by Paul Kagame - which ended the genocide when it seized power - is both determined to use the west's guilt at failing to stop the 1994 genocide to entrench its own impunity, and trade on the victims of the Rwanda genocide in order to deflect criticism of its domestic authoritarianism and...

[Fredrik Logevall is a professor at Cornell University and co-author of America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity. Kenneth Osgood is a professor at Florida Atlantic University and author of Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad.]

The annual Values Voter Summit might seem an unlikely place to get a preview of the 2012 presidential debate on foreign policy. True, the gathering of several thousand conservative activists, sponsored by the Family Research Council, typically features a parade of Republican stars, many of them hoping for a shot at the top spot on the GOP ticket. But the attendees tend to focus on domestic issues that matter to social conservatives: religious freedom, protection of marriage, and abortion. The breakout sessions during the 2009 summit, held last September in Washington, featured topics like “The Threat of Illegal Immigration,” “Countering the Homosexual Agenda in Public Schools,” and “Global Warming Hysteria:...

[Robert Messenger is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.]

Marcel Bigeard, who died on June 18 at the age of 94, was a paragon of a new type of professional warrior that arose during the Cold War. For while the United States and the Soviet Union (and their many allies) built large-scale militaries for an eventual hot war, what came instead were proxy wars in places like Vietnam and the Congo. These did not require the technology-laden and discipline-heavy units prepared to fight in the Fulda Gap, but instead small, mobile units of soldiers dedicated to an intense operational tempo. And they required resourceful officers, able to adapt the methods of guerillas and willing to lead by example. Bigeard, who rose from the ranks to four-star general, was such a soldier: emphasizing physical fitness and endurance, preferring to live rough with his men, and a master of the topography of battlegrounds. He refused to carry a weapon into combat, feeling his job was to lead not to...

[Robin Wilson founded the Belfast-based think-tank Democratic Dialogue. He now works as an independent researcher.]

From the moment Tony Blair arrived in Northern Ireland to save the talks at Castle Buildings in Easter week 12 years ago—detecting the ‘hand of history’ on his shoulder—it was evident that the political future of the region would play a key part in the history of Blair himself.

As the sheen burnished by Peter Mandelson quickly faded from ‘New’ Labour—more spin than substance was the cry from the disillusioned left-wing comic Ben Elton—Northern Ireland came to represent the Crown jewel in his government’s first term.

In the second terms, as Blair behaved more like an executive president and became mired down in his vainglorious project with George W Bush to topple Saddam Hussein, Northern Ireland if anything became even more critical to his narcissistic concern with image.

He wanted to go down in the history books, like his...

[Maureen Dowd is a columnist for the NYT.]

We went sledding there and played hide and seek, rolled Easter eggs and stole our first kisses. We could be dragged away only when we heard our mom’s vibrant whistle, signaling dinner.

When we were little, Fort Stevens was just a cool playground, with dry moats and tall mounds and a couple of cannons, located across the street from our Catholic grade school and down the block from our house.

My mom, an ardent student of the Civil War, explained that the fort was an important part of history — the scene of a battle in which a sitting American president came under enemy fire and the only time the nation’s capital was attacked by the Confederate Army....

[Mr. White is professor of economics at George Mason University. This op-ed draws on his forthcoming book, "The Clash of Economic Ideas."]

Earlier this summer George Soros and some leading Keynesian economists criticized what they regarded as Germany's overly strict fiscal discipline. Yet Germany's real output expanded at a robust 9% annual rate in the second quarter, while the U.S. economy grew at an anemic 1.6% rate. So is Germany now a role model for how to recover?

In a June op-ed, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble justified his government's decision to cut spending, citing "aversion to deficits and inflationary fears, which have their roots in German history in the past century." He was presumably making a reference to the destructive hyperinflation of the 1920s.

Yet Mr. Schäuble might have cited another relevant episode from his nation's history. Sixty-two years ago Germany became a role model for recovery from a...