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: Guardian (UK) (9-7-10)
[Francis Beckett's new book, Firefighters and the Blitz, is now in bookstores in the United Kingdom.]
...We think of [the blitz] as a time when cheerful cockneys defied the Nazi menace; and that's not wrong, but it is a small part of the story. People knew someone had blundered. Britain had had plenty of time to prepare: the Home Office had been thinking about mass bombing since 1933, and in 1937 German bombers supporting Franco in the Spanish civil war destroyed the town of Guernica and killed 2,000 citizens. Deep shelters had been built in Barcelona, which proved very successful, and there was a move to build them in London, but it was never done. Families were given Anderson shelters (named after the home secretary, Sir John Anderson) instead. This, as the author Stephen Spender wrote in 1945 in Citizens in War, "overlooked the fact that in the majority of homes there was no room for an Anderson shelter". So Londoners forced the authorities to permit the use...
...We think of [the blitz] as a time when cheerful cockneys defied the Nazi menace; and that's not wrong, but it is a small part of the story. People knew someone had blundered. Britain had had plenty of time to prepare: the Home Office had been thinking about mass bombing since 1933, and in 1937 German bombers supporting Franco in the Spanish civil war destroyed the town of Guernica and killed 2,000 citizens. Deep shelters had been built in Barcelona, which proved very successful, and there was a move to build them in London, but it was never done. Families were given Anderson shelters (named after the home secretary, Sir John Anderson) instead. This, as the author Stephen Spender wrote in 1945 in Citizens in War, "overlooked the fact that in the majority of homes there was no room for an Anderson shelter". So Londoners forced the authorities to permit the use...
Tuesday, September 7, 2010 - 13:52
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SOURCE: NOLA.com (9-5-10)
[Robert Travis Scott is Capital Bureau Chief of the New Orleans Times-Picayune.]
Who killed Huey Long? Was it an assassination? A fisticuffs turned fatal? A police cover-up?...
The official metal plaque marking the fateful spot in the state Capitol is careful not to take sides. It says only that Long "died September 10, 1935, from a bullet wound inflicted here on September 8, 1935. He was 42 years old."
On that, everyone agrees. The rest of the story has accumulated clouds of doubt for three quarters of a century and seems destined to remain without clear resolution.
"The only premise that I personally believe in, is that no matter what theory that you believe in personally, there exists serious and believable evidence that disputes your theory, as well as all the other theories," said Michael Wynn, a Louisiana historical collector and co-author of a play about the shooting in which the audience decides what happened...
Who killed Huey Long? Was it an assassination? A fisticuffs turned fatal? A police cover-up?...
The official metal plaque marking the fateful spot in the state Capitol is careful not to take sides. It says only that Long "died September 10, 1935, from a bullet wound inflicted here on September 8, 1935. He was 42 years old."
On that, everyone agrees. The rest of the story has accumulated clouds of doubt for three quarters of a century and seems destined to remain without clear resolution.
"The only premise that I personally believe in, is that no matter what theory that you believe in personally, there exists serious and believable evidence that disputes your theory, as well as all the other theories," said Michael Wynn, a Louisiana historical collector and co-author of a play about the shooting in which the audience decides what happened...
Tuesday, September 7, 2010 - 13:14
SOURCE: The Atlantic (9-4-10)
[Henry D. Fetter is the author of Taking on the Yankees: Winning and Losing in the Business of Baseball and has written widely about the business and politics of sports.]
It is not often that sports intersect with the larger world in any meaningful way. But 50 years ago this week, at the 1960 Olympics in Rome, it did.
That year may now be viewed through the soft-focus lens of romantic nostalgia for the "American Century" at its peak, but that was not the prevailing mood of the moment. National confidence was still reeling from the shock of the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, reinforcing Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's boast the year before that "We will bury you." Pundits (not that they were called that at the time—there were so few of them that they could be identified by name) worried about America's loss of "national purpose" and lack of resolve to face the challenges ahead. A big power summit conference in May had broken up...
It is not often that sports intersect with the larger world in any meaningful way. But 50 years ago this week, at the 1960 Olympics in Rome, it did.
That year may now be viewed through the soft-focus lens of romantic nostalgia for the "American Century" at its peak, but that was not the prevailing mood of the moment. National confidence was still reeling from the shock of the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, reinforcing Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's boast the year before that "We will bury you." Pundits (not that they were called that at the time—there were so few of them that they could be identified by name) worried about America's loss of "national purpose" and lack of resolve to face the challenges ahead. A big power summit conference in May had broken up...
Tuesday, September 7, 2010 - 11:10
SOURCE: NYT (9-6-10)
[Hampton Sides is the author, most recently, of “Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin.”]
BILL RICHARDSON, New Mexico’s departing governor, is known for his studied sense of theater. But when he recently declared that he would hold a hearing to consider a posthumous pardon for the state’s most notorious resident — William Bonney, a k a Henry McCarty, a k a Billy the Kid — a lot of us wondered if he had lost his mind.
What’s to be gained by dredging up stories from a tired old shoot’em-up? Why should we care about a trigger-happy sociopath who’s been moldering in his grave for almost 130 years? New Mexico has a rich history, but some episodes from the past are best left there.
At issue is a deal made in 1879 by one of Mr. Richardson’s predecessors, Lew Wallace (later the author of “Ben-Hur”). Wallace promised to grant Billy the Kid amnesty for murders he committed during the so-...
BILL RICHARDSON, New Mexico’s departing governor, is known for his studied sense of theater. But when he recently declared that he would hold a hearing to consider a posthumous pardon for the state’s most notorious resident — William Bonney, a k a Henry McCarty, a k a Billy the Kid — a lot of us wondered if he had lost his mind.
What’s to be gained by dredging up stories from a tired old shoot’em-up? Why should we care about a trigger-happy sociopath who’s been moldering in his grave for almost 130 years? New Mexico has a rich history, but some episodes from the past are best left there.
At issue is a deal made in 1879 by one of Mr. Richardson’s predecessors, Lew Wallace (later the author of “Ben-Hur”). Wallace promised to grant Billy the Kid amnesty for murders he committed during the so-...
Tuesday, September 7, 2010 - 09:10
SOURCE: Slate (9-6-10)
Brendan I. Koerner is a contributing editor at Wired and a columnist for Gizmodo. His first book, Now the Hell Will Start, is out now.
The nation will observe Labor Day this coming Monday, allowing millions to enjoy the waning days of summer, as well their last chance to wear white pants without earning a "tsk tsk" from Miss Manners. How did this early September holiday get its start?
Though President Grover Cleveland declared Labor Day a national holiday in 1894, the occasion was first observed on Sept. 5, 1882, in New York City....
Monday, September 6, 2010 - 11:52
SOURCE: American Spectator (9-3-10)
[Christopher Orlet writes from Belleville, Illinois.]
Hearing the song "Lillie Shull" the other day made me wonder whatever became of murder ballads. A century ago there was scarcely a small town murder that wasn't memorialized in song. This was especially true of the non-literate musically inclined mountain folk of the Border States. It was a trait they carried with them from Scotland, but one that has not survived modernization, which is too bad.
Murder ballads seem to have died out around the time of the Great Depression. The genre underwent a brief resurgence during the '60s folk revival -- who hasn't heard the Kingston Trio's maudlin version of "Tom Dooley"? -- though few new ballads were written. From time to time, murder ballads are dusted off by contemporary singer-songwriters, which is how I learned about "Lillie Shull."
Murder ballads were cautionary tales, usually taking the point of view of the condemned man...
Hearing the song "Lillie Shull" the other day made me wonder whatever became of murder ballads. A century ago there was scarcely a small town murder that wasn't memorialized in song. This was especially true of the non-literate musically inclined mountain folk of the Border States. It was a trait they carried with them from Scotland, but one that has not survived modernization, which is too bad.
Murder ballads seem to have died out around the time of the Great Depression. The genre underwent a brief resurgence during the '60s folk revival -- who hasn't heard the Kingston Trio's maudlin version of "Tom Dooley"? -- though few new ballads were written. From time to time, murder ballads are dusted off by contemporary singer-songwriters, which is how I learned about "Lillie Shull."
Murder ballads were cautionary tales, usually taking the point of view of the condemned man...
Monday, September 6, 2010 - 11:38
SOURCE: American Spectator (9-3-10)
[Matt Purple is a freelance writer in Washington, D.C.]
[Glenn Beck] rings true in one sense. The left long ago abandoned [Martin Luther] King's dream of racial unity. Instead craven progressive operators use the word "racist" as an assault weapon against their political enemies, to the point that the word has lost its real meaning. The left has cynically exploited the civil rights movement to its advantage. Beck is completely correct about that.
He's also correct that, to the extent that King's dream was equal opportunity under the law, conservatives are again his heirs. The left, with its obsession over preferences for different groups, long ago abandoned this tradition.
But Beck also can't neatly fit his own agenda into King's dream. There's been a larger argument made implicitly by Beck and explicitly by a handful of other commentators that were King alive today, he would have been a conservative. David Horowitz has declared outright...
[Glenn Beck] rings true in one sense. The left long ago abandoned [Martin Luther] King's dream of racial unity. Instead craven progressive operators use the word "racist" as an assault weapon against their political enemies, to the point that the word has lost its real meaning. The left has cynically exploited the civil rights movement to its advantage. Beck is completely correct about that.
He's also correct that, to the extent that King's dream was equal opportunity under the law, conservatives are again his heirs. The left, with its obsession over preferences for different groups, long ago abandoned this tradition.
But Beck also can't neatly fit his own agenda into King's dream. There's been a larger argument made implicitly by Beck and explicitly by a handful of other commentators that were King alive today, he would have been a conservative. David Horowitz has declared outright...
Monday, September 6, 2010 - 11:31
SOURCE: American Spectator (9-3-10)
[Matthew Omolesky specialized in European affairs at the Whitehead School of Diplomacy's graduate program, and received his juris doctor from The Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law.]
On the morning of July 17, 2010, the residents of the French commune of Saint-Aignan awoke to the sound of rioting, though few in the picturesque Loire Valley village could have guessed the reason for all the tumult. The previous night, a Traveler and robbery suspect by the name of Luigi Duquenet had barreled through a police checkpoint in his car, injuring a gendarme in the process, and was accelerating towards a second checkpoint before he was shot and killed. Within hours, dozens of incensed fellow gens du voyage, armed with hatchets and crowbars, were rampaging through the medieval streets of Saint-Aignan, chopping down trees, setting cars alight, pillaging stores, and storming the village police station. "It was," as Mayor Jean-Michel Billon put it, "a settling...
On the morning of July 17, 2010, the residents of the French commune of Saint-Aignan awoke to the sound of rioting, though few in the picturesque Loire Valley village could have guessed the reason for all the tumult. The previous night, a Traveler and robbery suspect by the name of Luigi Duquenet had barreled through a police checkpoint in his car, injuring a gendarme in the process, and was accelerating towards a second checkpoint before he was shot and killed. Within hours, dozens of incensed fellow gens du voyage, armed with hatchets and crowbars, were rampaging through the medieval streets of Saint-Aignan, chopping down trees, setting cars alight, pillaging stores, and storming the village police station. "It was," as Mayor Jean-Michel Billon put it, "a settling...
Monday, September 6, 2010 - 07:52
SOURCE: Gay City News (9-1-10)
[Doug Ireland is a longtime radical political journalist and media critic.]
While the gay media has been awash in unwarranted hosannas over the recent coming-out declaration by former Republican National Committee chair Ken Mehlman — who has not apologized for running the most homophobic presidential campaign in US history — the LGBT press has been ignoring an infinitely more significant development under way with vastly more important implications for the Republican Party: the increasing acceptance by historians that the loving heart of Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator and the first GOP president, found its natural amorous passions overwhelmingly directed toward those of his own sex.
This shifting consensus about Lincoln’s sexual orientation is certainly the most stunning and effective rebuke to the Republican Party’s scapegoating of same-sex love for electoral purposes, which came to fever pitch during the 2004 race that Mehlman spearheaded for George W...
While the gay media has been awash in unwarranted hosannas over the recent coming-out declaration by former Republican National Committee chair Ken Mehlman — who has not apologized for running the most homophobic presidential campaign in US history — the LGBT press has been ignoring an infinitely more significant development under way with vastly more important implications for the Republican Party: the increasing acceptance by historians that the loving heart of Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator and the first GOP president, found its natural amorous passions overwhelmingly directed toward those of his own sex.
This shifting consensus about Lincoln’s sexual orientation is certainly the most stunning and effective rebuke to the Republican Party’s scapegoating of same-sex love for electoral purposes, which came to fever pitch during the 2004 race that Mehlman spearheaded for George W...
Thursday, September 2, 2010 - 19:45
SOURCE: Foreign Policy (9-2-10)
[Sudhir Hazareesingh teaches politics at Balliol College, Oxford University.]
It increasingly seems that French statesman Charles de Gaulle was right when he proudly claimed in 1952 that "everyone has been, is, or will be a Gaullist." Certainly, France is experiencing a surge of interest in its former president: The country has just lavishly celebrated the 70th anniversary of de Gaulle's launch of the French Resistance on the BBC airwaves, and the public has been bombarded with conferences, exhibitions, radio and television programs, and publications of all kinds, from hagiographic works to novels (Benoît Duteurtre's Return of the General, in which de Gaulle comes back from the dead to save France once again) to comic-strip adaptations (Jean-Yves Ferri's De Gaulle at the Beach). The third volume of de Gaulle's War Memoirs has even been put on the standard high school curriculum.
But France is not alone in actively kindling admiration for its former...
It increasingly seems that French statesman Charles de Gaulle was right when he proudly claimed in 1952 that "everyone has been, is, or will be a Gaullist." Certainly, France is experiencing a surge of interest in its former president: The country has just lavishly celebrated the 70th anniversary of de Gaulle's launch of the French Resistance on the BBC airwaves, and the public has been bombarded with conferences, exhibitions, radio and television programs, and publications of all kinds, from hagiographic works to novels (Benoît Duteurtre's Return of the General, in which de Gaulle comes back from the dead to save France once again) to comic-strip adaptations (Jean-Yves Ferri's De Gaulle at the Beach). The third volume of de Gaulle's War Memoirs has even been put on the standard high school curriculum.
But France is not alone in actively kindling admiration for its former...
Thursday, September 2, 2010 - 19:10
SOURCE: Foreign Policy (8-31-10)
[Alex Massie, a former Washington correspondent for the Scotsman, writes for the Spectator and blogs at www.spectator.co.uk/alexmassie.]
During a visit to Kosovo this summer, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife Cherie met with a remarkable group of children. The young Kosovar boys had each been born soon after NATO's bombing campaign successfully drove Serbian forces from the province in 1999. More significantly, each child was named Tonibler in Blair's honor.
As one of the boys' mothers put it: "I hope to God that he grows up to be like Tony Blair or just a fraction like him."
The curiously touching scene was a reminder that reputation is a matter of perspective. In Kosovo, Blair's leadership of the campaign to oust Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic has made him a hero; in Britain his determination to deal with Saddam Hussein has had the opposite effect. You're not...
During a visit to Kosovo this summer, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife Cherie met with a remarkable group of children. The young Kosovar boys had each been born soon after NATO's bombing campaign successfully drove Serbian forces from the province in 1999. More significantly, each child was named Tonibler in Blair's honor.
As one of the boys' mothers put it: "I hope to God that he grows up to be like Tony Blair or just a fraction like him."
The curiously touching scene was a reminder that reputation is a matter of perspective. In Kosovo, Blair's leadership of the campaign to oust Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic has made him a hero; in Britain his determination to deal with Saddam Hussein has had the opposite effect. You're not...
Thursday, September 2, 2010 - 08:12
SOURCE: WSJ (9-2-10)
[Daniel Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.]
From the vantage point of history, Barack Obama's prime-time speech announcing the Iraq war's end is less important than the speech he gave eight years ago as a state senator in Illinois. This was the October 2002 "dumb war" speech to an anti-Iraq war rally in Chicago's Federal Plaza. Back then, Mr. Obama had a more complex view of the stakes in Iraq than he does now.
Today, the Iraq war has been reduced to not much more than a long, bloody and honorable gunfight between U.S. troops and various homicidal jihadists and insurgents inside Iraq, a war sustained by George Bush, Dick Cheney and some neocon advisers mainly to "impose" democracy on the Iraqis.
I think it is a profound mistake to confine the war's significance to the borders of Iraq. Mr. Obama himself raised the central question about Iraq in that 2002 speech: Did Saddam Hussein pose a...
From the vantage point of history, Barack Obama's prime-time speech announcing the Iraq war's end is less important than the speech he gave eight years ago as a state senator in Illinois. This was the October 2002 "dumb war" speech to an anti-Iraq war rally in Chicago's Federal Plaza. Back then, Mr. Obama had a more complex view of the stakes in Iraq than he does now.
Today, the Iraq war has been reduced to not much more than a long, bloody and honorable gunfight between U.S. troops and various homicidal jihadists and insurgents inside Iraq, a war sustained by George Bush, Dick Cheney and some neocon advisers mainly to "impose" democracy on the Iraqis.
I think it is a profound mistake to confine the war's significance to the borders of Iraq. Mr. Obama himself raised the central question about Iraq in that 2002 speech: Did Saddam Hussein pose a...
Thursday, September 2, 2010 - 08:10
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