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 (1-12-11)
"Socialism is great!" Was there ever a statement riper for ironic mockery than this erstwhile catchphrase of the infant Chinese republic? How could a thinking people accept this and a host of other bald statements at face value, without so much as a raised eyebrow or a silently murmured really? And why, 60 years later, when the Chinese government calls the Dalai Lama a "devil with a human face," do none of its citizens seem to feel the urge to giggle?
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Irony, put simply, is a gap between words and their meaning, a space across which speaker and listener exchange a knowing wink. For this knowingness to be mutual, a web of common experiences and beliefs must exist, within which language adopts deeper echoes and associations. In China,...
SOURCE: American Conservative (1-10-11)
A farewell message was on Dwight Eisenhower’s mind well before the end of his term. Chatting with chief speechwriter Malcolm Moos in the Oval Office in May 1959, the president mentioned as an aside that there was one speech he particularly wanted to deliver. “I want to have something to say when I leave here,” Ike said. “I’m not interested in capturing headlines, but I want to have a message and I want you to be thinking about it well in advance.”
The president hoped Congress would extend an invitation for the speech, which should run 10 minutes. “We should be dropping ideas into a bin, to get ready for this,” Moos wrote later that day in a memo for the record.
Moos started rooting around that bin in earnest in the fall of 1960. He had been struck by the sheer number of companies connected to the burgeoning...
SOURCE: Guardian (UK) (1-12-11)
France is a curious country. You can talk about anything here: about paedophilia, about the most shameful passions, but not about our families' dishonour during the second world war – because that particular past just won't pass. Especially if you argue that to have taken part in the worst atrocities of the Nazi occupation one didn't necessarily have to be a monster.
My novels have been read by hundreds of thousands of people in France over the past quarter of a century. I'm reputed to be a lightly apparelled author, drunk on smiley sentimental literature. And then, at nearly 46 years of age – the age at which my father died – I confessed what my immoderate mirth was hiding all along and published a difficult, irrevocable book: Des gens très bien (Very Nice People). This 300-page crime novel, all of a sudden, sparked a crisis....
SOURCE: Huffington Post (1-4-11)
On July 28, Alex Pacas, 19, and Wyatt Whitebread, 14, of Mount Carroll, IL were suffocated to death, sinking into several thousand tons of quicksand-like shelled corn in the grain bin where they were working. The Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) quickly determined that their deaths were preventable if Haasbach, LLC, the grain elevator's owner, had followed proper safety regulations.
Such tragedies are more common than you might think. Every day, an average of 14 American workers...
SOURCE: WaPo (1-9-11)
SOURCE: American Conservative (1-10-11)
A farewell message was on Dwight Eisenhower’s mind well before the end of his term. Chatting with chief speechwriter Malcolm Moos in the Oval Office in May 1959, the president mentioned as an aside that there was one speech he particularly wanted to deliver. “I want to have something to say when I leave here,” Ike said. “I’m not interested in capturing headlines, but I want to have a message and I want you to be thinking about it well in advance.”
The president hoped Congress would extend an invitation for the speech, which should run 10 minutes. “We should be dropping ideas into a bin, to get ready for this,” Moos wrote later that day in a memo for the record.
Moos started rooting around that bin in earnest in the fall of 1960. He had been struck by the sheer number of companies connected to the burgeoning...
SOURCE: Foreign Policy (1-5-11)
The first time I met Sam Huntington, I was not yet his student; I was an intern for the New Republic. I was still an undergraduate at Yale, and there was a peculiar campaign being waged by a Yale math professor named Serge Lang to deny Sam Huntington a seat in the National Academy of Sciences. I was intrigued by the whole thing, so I went to interview Huntington.
He was more troubled by the campaign than I would have ever imagined. The basic premise was this: Sam was a hawk in general, and during the Vietnam War, he had written a number of pieces, including a long report for the government and a couple of articles in Foreign Affairs, on the matter. Lang believed that this made him effectively a war criminal and argued that Sam should therefore not be part of the National Academy of Sciences. In fact, while he...
SOURCE: Foreign Policy (1-5-11)
Of all of Samuel Huntington's contributions to the study of politics, the most important was his 1968 work Political Order in Changing Societies. This book was probably the last major attempt to write a general theory of political development, and its significance needs to be placed in the context of the ideas that were dominant in the 1950s and early 1960s. This was the heyday of "modernization theory," probably the most ambitious American attempt to create an integrated, empirical theory of human social change. Modernization theory had its origins in the works of late 19th-century European social theorists like Henry Maine, Émile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Max Weber. While based primarily on the experiences of early modernizers like Britain or the United States, they sought to draw from them general laws of...
SOURCE: Special to HNN (1-5-11)
[Arnold Reisman is an engineer and a retired professor of operations research at Case Western Reserve University. Born in Lodz in 1934, he came to the United States after World War II and is the author of numerous books about Holocaust refugees in Turkey, including Turkey's Modernization: Refugees from Nazism and Ataturk's Vision (New Academia, 2006).]
On December 6, 2010, in its Roundup: Talking About Historysection,HNN posted the article “Arnold Reisman: On an Armenian Manifesto Circa 1923.” In the article I wrote about a booklet which I found to be “a most interesting and incisive account of what had been happening among, and to, the Armenian people up to 1923.” As indicated in the earlier article “the original, was written by a most knowledgeable Armenian activist of the time, Hovhannes Katchaznouni who … knew every Party secret before, during, and after the founding...
SOURCE: YDS: The Clare Spark Blog (5-23-10)
[Clare Spark, an independent scholar, is the author of Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival, and she blogs at http://clarespark.com.]
During the last few weeks, an exceptionally portentous fight has broken out owing to a recent long and juicy article in the Spring 2010 edition of City Journal by Claire Berlinski. This essay was angrily dissected in several rebuttals by Ron Radosh in Pajamas Media, and by others on the Humanities Net internet site, the History of Diplomacy (H-Diplo). The conflict concerns whether or not both academic historians and their reading public have been fully informed of documents surreptitiously copied from the closed archives of the former Soviet Union, and now under wraps in Russia. Berlinski’s initial article, A Hidden History of Evil, reported that historians in high places had ignored the...
SOURCE: YDS: The Clare Spark Blog (12-29-10)
[Clare Spark, an independent scholar, is the author of Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival, and she blogs at http://clarespark.com.]
According to Jennifer Burns, historian and biographer of Ayn Rand, F. O. Matthiessen (1902-1950) was a victim of McCarthyism, hounded to death by zealous anticommunists. She does not provide evidence for this claim. While reading Ayn Rand’s novels and then two recent biographies, I was struck by the representation of Rand as another Captain Ahab: destructive, bossy, and, though an atheist, something of a Russian Jew. Similarly, Ahab was and continues to occupy the Romantic Wandering Jew archetype in the most important Melville literary studies. Their predecessor was Harvard professor F. O. Matthiessen, like Charles Olson, a hero to many in the New Left. For the first time on this website, I am looting a section of the seventh chapter of my book Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological...
SOURCE: Special to HNN (1-4-11)
Early American Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase presents us with something of an infamous story in the nation’s early history.
Chase, a staunch anti-constitutionalist turned fiery Federalist partisan and John Adams loyalist, is the only justice to be impeached in more than two hundred yesars of Supreme Court jurisprudence.
Campaigning for Adams’s re-election, strictly applying the Alien and Sedition Acts against authors of “libelous” anti-Federalist material, and later boldly criticizing Jefferson’s presidency as essentially compromising domestic tranquility, he made himself a truly exceptional target for Jefferson and his Republican colleagues.
Chase’s ultimate acquittal set important precedent for protecting the integrity of constitutional law and the independence of the judiciary from partisan squabbles and the political ebbs and flows of the nascent nation....
SOURCE: The Atlantic (1-1-11)
American politics is typically a grimy business of horses traded and pork delivered. Political speech, for its part, tends to be formulaic and eminently forgettable. Yet on occasion, a politician will transcend circumstance and bear witness to some lasting truth: George Wash- ington in his Farewell Address, for example, or Abraham Lincoln in his Second Inaugural.
Fifty years ago, President Dwight D. Eisenhower joined such august company when, in his own farewell address, he warned of the rise in America of the “military-industrial complex.” An accomplished soldier and a better-than-average president, Eisenhower had devoted the preponderance of his adult life to studying, waging, and then seeking to avert war. Not surprisingly, therefore, his prophetic voice rang clearest when as president he...
SOURCE: CHE (1-2-11)
Last spring began with no hint of any but the usual excitement of a new class. We were team-teaching a course on Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston, writers who represent opposing literary and political tendencies, intellectuals who disliked each other's work and said so in print. Wright found Hurston's prose in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) cloaked in "facile sensuality" and complained that she "voluntarily continues in her novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theater, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the 'white folks' laugh.'" Hurston mocked Wright's collection Uncle Tom's Children (1938) as "a book about hatreds. Mr. Wright serves notice by his title that he speaks of people in revolt, and his stories are so grim that the Dismal Swamp of race hatred must be where they live. Not...
SOURCE: Standpoint (UK) (1-3-11)
I wonder whether enough has been made by Adam Smith scholars, which I do not claim to be, of the intellectual connection between Smith and Charles Darwin. Darwin himself records how, during his last year at Cambridge, he spent much of his time studying Smith. And I have long been struck by the parallel between Smith's explanation of how economic order and growth is secured by the free interaction of individuals seeking their own personal satisfaction, "as if by an invisible hand", and Darwin's revolutionary insight, a century later, of how the remarkable natural order could arise spontaneously as a result of natural selection, without the need for an intelligent designer or divine watchmaker.
Be that as it may, I have been toiling in the field of political economy — and how...
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