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 (10-30-10)
MY attic office is walled with books on Lincoln and Lee, slavery and secession. John Brown glares from a daguerreotype on my desk. The Civil War is my sanctum — except when my 7-year-old races in to get at the costume box. Invariably, he tosses aside the kepi and wooden sword to reach for a wizard cloak or Star Wars light saber.
I was born in a different era, the late 1950s, when the last Union drummer boy had only just died and plastic blue-and-gray soldiers were popular toys. In the 1960s, the Civil War centennial recalled great battles as protesters marched for civil rights and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. declared from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, “One hundred years later, the Negro still is not free.”
Today the Civil War echoes at a different register, usually in fights over...
SOURCE: American Heritage (10-28-10)
On its 60th Anniversary, the Korean War looks much like Vietnam, a pointless conflict that gained nothing for those who began it: North Korea’s Kim Il-sung and South Korea’s Syngman Rhee, with the consent of the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin and China’s Mao Zedong. Yet it was far worse than that: The bloodletting in that corner of the northeast Asia was an exercise in human folly that cost all sides in the fighting nearly 4 million lives lost, missing, and wounded, not to mention the devastation of the peninsula from Pusan in the south to the Yalu River in the north. Not a single northern or southern Korean city escaped the ravages wrought by modern warfare. Public buildings and private homes were turned into piles of rubble,...
SOURCE: Huffington Post (10-22-10)
You might say that since ABC aired its most famous mini-series in 1977, that I have had a serious case of Roots envy. Like Alex Haley, I wanted to be able to find the ancestors on my family tree, deep into the depths of slavery. And to find the lost tribal or ethnic identity of our African ancestors, just as Haley claimed he had, would be more than I could imagine. Well, the Bible says be careful what you wish for. Now, with the digitization of a remarkable variety of public documents through companies such as Ancestry.com, and with affordable DNA tests, all of us can find out an extraordinary amount of information about our ancestors -- both our recent ancestors over the past few hundred years and our more distant ancestors, thousands of years ago.
...
SOURCE: The Atlantic (10-21-10)
Wherever you turn this October, candy beckons. Americans will spend an estimated $2 billion on candy during the Halloween season this year, and here's a fun fact from the California Milk Processors Board: "an average Jack-O-Lantern bucket carries about 250 pieces of candy amounting about 9,000 calories and about three pounds of sugar."
Phew. My molars are hurting just thinking about it. If treats are a temptation you hope to avoid, October is the cruelest month. And I can think of only one place in America where your Halloween composure is unlikely to be ruffled by endless quantities of cheap and glittering candies: the past.
Given the ubiquity of candy at this time of year, it is hard to imagine that 100...
SOURCE: openDemocracy (10-26-10)
After almost half a century of communist repression that followed the Second World War, Poland seems to have finally entered a better future. The country’s accession to the European Union in 2004 has triggered an impressive national metamorphosis. Historical towns are being restored to their former glory while construction companies work around the clock to deliver new infrastructure in the run up to the European football championships in 2012. Even the ubiquitous suburban concrete apartment blocks - once dull symbols of communist equality - look somewhat happy today, freshly painted in all the colours of the rainbow.
...
SOURCE: Ian C. Friedman at his blog (10-25-10)
[Ian C. Friedman is the author of four books; Manny Ramirez (2010), A to Z of Latino Americans (2007), American Rights: Freedom of Speech and the Press (2005), and Library in a Book: Education Reform (2003; revised 2010.) He is also the co-author of two books; Presidents: A Biographical Dictionary (2010) and American Inventors, Entrepreneurs, and Business Visionaries (2010.)]
As President Nixon successfully campaigned for reelection in 1972, many of his goals for Vietnamization were being met, including a decrease in U.S. casualties, a drop in spending for the war, the quieting of domestic dissent, an increase in his popularity, and the provision of time to negotiate a settlement. Leading Nixon’s negotiating team was his influential national security advisor, Henry Kissinger.
He was born Heinz Alfred Kissinger to a comfortably middle class Jewish family on May 27, 1923 in Furth, Germany. Conditions for Jews in Germany dramatically worsened during Kissinger’s...
SOURCE: LA Times (10-24-10)
As a boy, I paged through the old Renie Atlas of Los Angeles streets and later the Thomas Guide. The fact that there was a map linking my Lakewood neighborhood to the vast grid of Los Angeles made my suburban location more real to me. I naively assumed that the maps didn't lie. I expected to see avenues pointing due north and south and major streets going east and west. That's how nearly all cities were laid out in the West, unless an accident of coastline or unsuitable ground prevented it. But not Los Angeles, whose heart was made crooked.
Downtown Los Angeles is cocked about 36 degrees from the north-south grid that was Thomas Jefferson's dream for filling in the empty places on the blank...
SOURCE: WSJ (10-25-10)
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently asked Palestinian peace negotiators to acknowledge Israel as a Jewish state. Some critics have called this move cynical, because Palestinian leaders are unlikely to offer such an acknowledgment. But others oppose it for a more basic reason: They claim it is antidemocratic.
Israel, so the argument goes, affronts its non-Jewish citizens by identifying itself as a Jewish state and by using traditional religious emblems as official national symbols—for example, the Star of David on its flag.
Along the same lines, various Israeli intellectuals have proposed dropping "Hatikvah" (The Hope) as their country's national anthem, because it refers to the Jewish soul's millenial...
SOURCE: Prospect (UK) (10-25-10)
The west is still the “best”—if by that we mean richest, strongest, and most inventive. True, China now has the second biggest economy in the world and Japan the third; but Europe and north America still generate two thirds of the world’s wealth, own two thirds of its weapons, and spend more than two thirds of its R&D dollars—all despite having less than one-seventh of its population. The west still rules the roost.
But will this last? No. This much we know, because history tells us so. As Winston Churchill (no mean historian himself) put it: “The farther backwards you can look, the farther forwards you are likely to see.” If we look back far enough (to the last ice age), on a scale big enough (the whole planet), we can indeed identify the forces that drive...
SOURCE: The Nation (10-20-10)
I've been calling 1973, as I sort through my research for a political and cultural history of the United States in the '70s, the Year Without Christmas Lights. News of fuel shortages—what would come to be called the "energy crisis"—had begun cropping up in the spring, around the same time the resignations of Nixon confidants John Ehrlichman and Bob Haldeman introduced to a shocked Middle America the likelihood that the Watergate scandal went all the way to the top. By Memorial Day weekend, with Texaco rationing the sale of gasoline along the most heavily traveled highways, there was talk of outlawing the Indianapolis 500. "And pleasure boating," a letter writer to the Chicago Tribune suggested: "Better to go slow on gasoline than to be cold next winter."...
While writing books about the past, I think about the present. It's not...
SOURCE: The Atlantic (10-21-10)
[Alexis Madrigal is a senior editor for TheAtlantic.com. A former staff writer for Wired.com, he's the author of the forthcoming history of clean energy in America, Powering the Dream.]
We tend to associate space exploration with hulking rockets and massive R&D budgets, but there's a strange thread through the last fifty years of outsider space exploration. We've seen it recently in people sending cameras into space on balloons and more seriously in the Google Lunar X Prize competition. One of the big competitors there is a Romanian team that wants to float a rocket-laden balloon, which will then blast off for the moon. It sounds funny, but it's a real endeavor -- and it's...
SOURCE: National Interest (10-20-10)
Among the gifts brought by Lord Macartney, who came to Beijing in 1793 on a historic embassy intended to open China to British merchants, was a map of the world, which the Emperor Ch’ien-lung found unacceptable because the Middle Kingdom was represented on it as too small and not in the middle. As it happened, Macartney’s compatriots had already established their own cartographical supremacy. During the eighteenth century Greenwich was adopted as the prime meridian of longitude, a convention internationally ratified in 1884, and imperial maps using Mercator’s projection made Britain seem greater than it really was. Toward the end of the Second World War, American writers such as Nicholas John Spykman and Neil MacNeil urged that their country’s dominant geopolitical power should be recognized by redrawing maps of the world to...
SOURCE: American Heritage (10-13-10)
On Sunday, May 14, 1865, Benjamin Brown French, commissioner of public buildings for the District of Columbia, left his home on Capitol Hill to buy a copy of the Daily Morning Chronicle. “When I came up from breakfast I went out and got the Chronicle,” he wrote in his journal, “and the first thing that met my eyes was ‘Capture of Jeff Davis’ in letters two inches long. Thank God we have got the arch traitor at last.”
Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles also noted the Confederate president’s capture in his diary: “Intelligence was received this morning of the capture of Jefferson Davis in southern Georgia. I met [Secretary of War Edwin] Stanton this Sunday P.M. at Seward’s, who says Davis was taken disguised in women’s clothes. A tame and ignoble letting-down of the traitor.”
The story of Jefferson...
SOURCE: Post and Courier (SC) (10-19-10)
One hundred years ago South Carolina coastal dwellers, unbeknownst to them, were in the middle of an especially intense set of hurricane seasons. Never has the state felt the sting of three destructive storms in as many years. Storms can bring death and destruction without ever qualifying as hurricanes. In 1909 a gale came ashore on Aug. 16, peaking with 50 mile-an-hour winds. Less than a year after the flood from the 1910 storm, a true cyclone came ashore in August 1911.
The 1911 storm nearly broke the back of Lowcountry rice planting. As Duncan Heyward put it, when "I saw the ocean actually coming up Meeting Street. ... I knew ... that the death-knell of rice planting in South Carolina was sounded." The 1911 hurricane devastated...
SOURCE: WaPo (10-18-10)
Major combat operations in the American Revolution ended 229 years ago on Oct. 19, at Yorktown. For that we can thank the fortitude of American forces under George Washington, the siegecraft of French troops of Gen. Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, the count of Rochambeau - and the relentless bloodthirstiness of female Anopheles quadrimaculatus mosquitoes.
Those tiny amazons conducted covert biological warfare against the British army. Female mosquitoes seek mammalian blood to provide the proteins they need to make eggs. No blood meal, no reproduction. It makes them bold and determined to bite.
Some anopheles mosquitoes carry the malaria parasite, which they can inject into human bloodstreams when taking their meals. In eastern North America, A....
SOURCE: Pajamas Media (5-16-10)
[Ronald Radosh is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at The Hudson Institute, and a Prof. Emeritus of History at the City University of New York, Queensborough Community College.]
A few days ago, City Journal posted an important article on its website. It was written by Claire Berlinski, an American journalist who lives in Istanbul, and titled “A Hidden History of Evil: Why doesn’t anyone care about the unread Soviet archives?” We all know that since the fall of Communism, the world’s response to Soviet totalitarianism was quite different than that which occurred after the end of Nazism in 1945. The Nuremberg trials put the leaders of the defunct Third Reich on trial for war crimes, and in so doing, told the world the extent of how the entire Hitler regime was based on illegality, murder, genocide, and criminal behavior. Berlinski writes:
I...
SOURCE: The Atlantic (10-18-10)
Surely you've heard of Coal Oil Johnny, right?
Before J.R. Ewing, or the Beverly Hillbillies, or even John D. Rockefeller, there was Coal Oil Johnny. He was the first great cautionary tale of the oil age -- and his name would resound in popular culture for more than half a century after he made and lost his fortune in the 1860s....
John W. Steele, his real name, disputed the truth of some of these stories, but as in The Social Network, it's not really the facts that matter here. Coal Oil Johnny was a legend and like all legends, he became a stand-in for a constellation of people, things, ideas, feelings and morals -- in this case, about oil wealth and how it works....
I lucked into rediscovering Coal Oil Johnny. I have a thing for non-musical records,...
SOURCE: Foreign Policy (10-11-10)
Fifty years ago this past October, Vasily Grossman submitted for publication the greatest Russian novel of the 20th century. The KGB immediately destroyed all copies of what Grossman called Life and Fate (Zhizn' i sud'ba in Russian) except for two hidden by his friends, and he died in 1964 without ever seeing his work published. For more than a quarter-century, the book was unavailable in Russia. Finally, in 1988, it was embraced by the cultural revolutionaries of glasnost as they slashed and burned their way through the official narrative of Soviet history, encrusted with 70 years of lies. In their search for a usable past, something not to be rejected in disgust, not to shudder over, but to cherish and be inspired by, they were awed by the brave and nearly...
SOURCE: Huffington Post (10-14-10)
[Jason Saltoun-Ebin is the editor of The Reagan Files: The Untold Story of Reagan's Top-Secret Efforts to Win the Cold War and the creator of the website, http://www.thereaganfiles.com. He can be reached at thereaganfiles@gmail.com.]
Having spent the last decade studying the Reagan administration, and the last few years focusing on Reagan's National Security Council, I thought it could be useful for Mr. Donilon to get a quick review (and a few lessons) of where some of his contemporaries failed in what is one of the most difficult jobs in Washington. Since I know the Reagan administration best, I'll stick to the six national security advisers Reagan had in eight years.
Not much of a record has been declassified from Reagan's first national security adviser, Richard V. Allen, who came to the position after serving as a foreign policy adviser to Reagan during the 1980 campaign. Based on the little record that has been declassified, Allen seems to have seen the...
SOURCE: LA Times (10-8-10)
In 1972, John Lennon had a problem.
He and his wife, Yoko Ono, had been living in New York for a year, and they wanted to stay. But it happened also to be the year President Nixon was running for reelection. Opposition to the Vietnam War had reached a peak, and Lennon and Ono often showed up at antiwar rallies to sing "Give Peace a Chance" — and to tell their fans that the best way to give peace a chance was to vote against Nixon.
The Nixon White House responded by ordering Lennon deported....
In honor of what would have been Lennon's 70th birthday this month, I pulled a box from my garage containing documents I obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request about Lennon's deportation case...
