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: Foreign Policy (11-8-10)
[Stephen M. Walt, the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international affairs at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and a contributing editor at Foreign Policy, is the author of Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy and, with coauthor J.J. Mearsheimer, The Israel Lobby. He blogs at http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/.]
Two years into Barack Obama's presidency, it has become a cliché to observe that the newish president, who spent his 2008 campaign promising a U-turn from his deeply unpopular predecessor's activities abroad, has ended up with a foreign policy that looks surprising like George W. Bush's. The United States has more troops in Afghanistan than it did at the end of the Bush years, Guantánamo is still open, efforts to engage Iran have failed, and while American soldiers may have begun pulling back from Iraq, they've left plenty of Western defense contractors in their wake.
...
Two years into Barack Obama's presidency, it has become a cliché to observe that the newish president, who spent his 2008 campaign promising a U-turn from his deeply unpopular predecessor's activities abroad, has ended up with a foreign policy that looks surprising like George W. Bush's. The United States has more troops in Afghanistan than it did at the end of the Bush years, Guantánamo is still open, efforts to engage Iran have failed, and while American soldiers may have begun pulling back from Iraq, they've left plenty of Western defense contractors in their wake.
...
Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - 06:56
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SOURCE: American Interest (blog) (11-8-10)
[Walter Russell Mead is Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. He blogs at The-American-Interest.com.]
As election returns drifted in from the nation’s far-flung precincts on November 6 and 7 of 1860, three solid, inescapable facts were clear. First, according to the law of the land, Abraham Lincoln has been elected President of the United States, with a term to begin in March of 1861. 152 of the 303 electoral votes were needed; although West Coast results will not be known until the Pony Express brings the news across the western deserts, the Illinois rail-splitter appears to have won 173 even without California and Oregon.
Second, as southern critics immediately and vociferously pointed out, Lincoln’s victory was entirely regional. He failed to carry a single state or even a congressional district south of the Mason Dixon line. Of the 16...
As election returns drifted in from the nation’s far-flung precincts on November 6 and 7 of 1860, three solid, inescapable facts were clear. First, according to the law of the land, Abraham Lincoln has been elected President of the United States, with a term to begin in March of 1861. 152 of the 303 electoral votes were needed; although West Coast results will not be known until the Pony Express brings the news across the western deserts, the Illinois rail-splitter appears to have won 173 even without California and Oregon.
Second, as southern critics immediately and vociferously pointed out, Lincoln’s victory was entirely regional. He failed to carry a single state or even a congressional district south of the Mason Dixon line. Of the 16...
Monday, November 8, 2010 - 09:17
SOURCE: CS Monitor (11-5-10)
Nov. 6 marks 150 years since Americans elected a little-known lawyer from Illinois as president of the United States.
The anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s victory also serves as the informal kickoff to the sesquicentennial of the Civil War. Ahead lie five years of commemorations, from the firing on Fort Sumter that began the conflict (April 2011) to the Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves in the Confederate states (January 2013) to the military turning point (Gettysburg, July 2013) to Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House and Lincoln’s assassination (April 2015).
Shiloh. Antietam. Fredericksburg. The battle of the ironclad ships, Monitor and Merrimac. Union naval officer David Farragut urging "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!" And much more. It all lies ahead – as Americans revisit the greatest national crisis since the founding of the United States, what some call “the second American revolution.”...
The anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s victory also serves as the informal kickoff to the sesquicentennial of the Civil War. Ahead lie five years of commemorations, from the firing on Fort Sumter that began the conflict (April 2011) to the Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves in the Confederate states (January 2013) to the military turning point (Gettysburg, July 2013) to Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House and Lincoln’s assassination (April 2015).
Shiloh. Antietam. Fredericksburg. The battle of the ironclad ships, Monitor and Merrimac. Union naval officer David Farragut urging "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!" And much more. It all lies ahead – as Americans revisit the greatest national crisis since the founding of the United States, what some call “the second American revolution.”...
Friday, November 5, 2010 - 10:46
SOURCE: Nixon Foundation (Blog) (11-3-10)
[David R. Stokes is a minister, broadcaster, columnist, and author. He is currently writing a book titled, Checkers—The Speech That Saved Nixon...
Thursday, November 4, 2010 - 11:39
SOURCE: The Atlantic (11-4-10)
On April 3, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. rose to speak in support of striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. "I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land," King announced. "And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man." And then he closed in his lyrical voice: "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord." The next day he lay dying on the second floor of the Lorraine Motel, struck in the cheek by an assassin's bullet.
The last line that King ever spoke in public came from a song, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," written by Julia Ward Howe in 1861. It was a fitting finale to the life of a great American because the story of the "Battle Hymn" is the story of the United States. The song, now approaching its 150th anniversary, is a hallowed treasure and a second national anthem. We have turned to it repeatedly in national crises...
The last line that King ever spoke in public came from a song, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," written by Julia Ward Howe in 1861. It was a fitting finale to the life of a great American because the story of the "Battle Hymn" is the story of the United States. The song, now approaching its 150th anniversary, is a hallowed treasure and a second national anthem. We have turned to it repeatedly in national crises...
Thursday, November 4, 2010 - 09:55
SOURCE: Truthout (11-3-10)
[Bill Moyers is an acclaimed American journalist, author, documentarian and public commentator.]
Bill Moyers speech at Boston University on October 29, 2010, as a part of the Howard Zinn Lecture Series.
I was honored when you asked me to join in celebrating Howard Zinn’s life and legacy. I was also surprised. I am a journalist, not a historian. The difference between a journalist and an historian is that the historian knows the difference. George Bernard Shaw once complained that journalists are seemingly unable to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization. In fact, some epic history can start out as a minor incident. A young man named Paris ran off with a beautiful woman who was married to someone else, and the civilization of Troy began to unwind. A middle-aged black seamstress, riding in a Montgomery bus, had tired feet, and an ugly social order began to collapse. A night guard at an office complex in Washington D.C...
Wednesday, November 3, 2010 - 16:57
SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed (11-3-10)
[Scott McLemee writes for Inside Higher Ed.]
Next week, Crown Publishers will issue President George W. Bush’s memoir Decision Points, covering what the former president calls “eight of the most consequential years in American history,” which seems like a fair description. They were plenty consequential. To judge from the promotional video, Bush will plumb the depths of his insight that it is the role of a president to be “the decider.” Again, it’s hard to argue with his point -- though you have to wonder if he shouldn’t let his accumulated wisdom ripen and mellow for a while before serving it.
Princeton University Press has already beat him into print with The Presidency of George W. Bush: A First Historical Assessment, edited by Julian E. Zelizer, who is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton. The other 10 contributors are professors of history, international relations, law, and political science, and they cover the expected bases -- the “War...
Next week, Crown Publishers will issue President George W. Bush’s memoir Decision Points, covering what the former president calls “eight of the most consequential years in American history,” which seems like a fair description. They were plenty consequential. To judge from the promotional video, Bush will plumb the depths of his insight that it is the role of a president to be “the decider.” Again, it’s hard to argue with his point -- though you have to wonder if he shouldn’t let his accumulated wisdom ripen and mellow for a while before serving it.
Princeton University Press has already beat him into print with The Presidency of George W. Bush: A First Historical Assessment, edited by Julian E. Zelizer, who is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton. The other 10 contributors are professors of history, international relations, law, and political science, and they cover the expected bases -- the “War...
Wednesday, November 3, 2010 - 14:06
SOURCE: Foreign Policy (11-2-10)
[Eden Naby is a cultural historian of the Middle East. Jamsheed K. Choksy is professor of Iranian and international studies at Indiana University.]
Screaming "kill, kill, kill," suicide bombers belonging to the Islamic State of Iraq, a militant organization connected to al Qaeda in Iraq, stormed a Chaldean church in Baghdad on Sunday. A spokesman for the group subsequently claimed they did so "to light the fuse of a campaign against Iraqi Christians." The assailants' more immediate grievance seems related to a demand that two Muslim women, allegedly held against their will in Egyptian Coptic monasteries, be released. When Iraqi government forces attempted to free approximately 120 parishioners who had been taken hostage, the terrorists -- who had already shot dead some of the churchgoers -- detonated their suicide vests and grenades, slaughtering at least half the congregation.
But the massacre in Baghdad is only the most spectacular...
Screaming "kill, kill, kill," suicide bombers belonging to the Islamic State of Iraq, a militant organization connected to al Qaeda in Iraq, stormed a Chaldean church in Baghdad on Sunday. A spokesman for the group subsequently claimed they did so "to light the fuse of a campaign against Iraqi Christians." The assailants' more immediate grievance seems related to a demand that two Muslim women, allegedly held against their will in Egyptian Coptic monasteries, be released. When Iraqi government forces attempted to free approximately 120 parishioners who had been taken hostage, the terrorists -- who had already shot dead some of the churchgoers -- detonated their suicide vests and grenades, slaughtering at least half the congregation.
But the massacre in Baghdad is only the most spectacular...
Wednesday, November 3, 2010 - 08:46
SOURCE: NYT (10-31-10)
[Adam Goodheart is the author of “1861: The Civil War Awakening,” to be published in April by Alfred A. Knopf. He lives in Washington, D.C., and on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where he is the Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.]
Seven score and 10 years ago, a little Pennsylvania town drowsed in the waning light of an Indian summer. Almost nothing had happened lately that the two local newspapers found worthy of more than a cursory mention. The fall harvest was in; grain prices held steady. A new ice cream parlor had opened in the Eagle Hotel on Chambersburg Street. Eight citizens had recently been married; eight others had died. It was an ordinary day in Gettysburg....
Half a century ago, as the nation commemorated the war’s centennial, a scruffy young man from Minnesota walked into the New York Public Library and began scrolling through reels of old microfilm, reading newspapers...
Seven score and 10 years ago, a little Pennsylvania town drowsed in the waning light of an Indian summer. Almost nothing had happened lately that the two local newspapers found worthy of more than a cursory mention. The fall harvest was in; grain prices held steady. A new ice cream parlor had opened in the Eagle Hotel on Chambersburg Street. Eight citizens had recently been married; eight others had died. It was an ordinary day in Gettysburg....
Half a century ago, as the nation commemorated the war’s centennial, a scruffy young man from Minnesota walked into the New York Public Library and began scrolling through reels of old microfilm, reading newspapers...
Monday, November 1, 2010 - 10:02
SOURCE: CHE (10-24-10)
[Dalton Conley is vice provost and dean of the social sciences and a professor of sociology at New York University. The paperback edition of his latest book, Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety, was published this year by Vintage.]
Does anyone really understand the 1970s? My excuse is that I was only 11 when they passed from the scene. What's yours? Even those folks 10 or 20 years older than I am, who ostensibly were at least semiconscious for the Equal Rights Amendment, Evel Knievel, busing, blackouts, Archie Bunker, Gerald Ford, pet rocks, disco, Jonestown, and stagflation can't seem to offer much in the way of sense-making for the "me decade."
Part of the problem in defining the era is that nobody can even agree when it really began, since of course, history rarely corresponds neatly to our calendar system of decades. Roughly, there...
Does anyone really understand the 1970s? My excuse is that I was only 11 when they passed from the scene. What's yours? Even those folks 10 or 20 years older than I am, who ostensibly were at least semiconscious for the Equal Rights Amendment, Evel Knievel, busing, blackouts, Archie Bunker, Gerald Ford, pet rocks, disco, Jonestown, and stagflation can't seem to offer much in the way of sense-making for the "me decade."
Part of the problem in defining the era is that nobody can even agree when it really began, since of course, history rarely corresponds neatly to our calendar system of decades. Roughly, there...
Monday, November 1, 2010 - 09:17
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