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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.

  • Tony Dokoupil: Madman in Chief
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  • David Anderson: It's Not Just Kenya. Squaring up to the Seamier Side of Empire is Long Overdue
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  • James Wizeye: To Claim Tutsis Caused Rwanda's Genocide is Pure Revisionism
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  • Stephen Ellis: Mandela, Communism, and South Africa
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  • Jewish Daily Forward: Liberate the Letter, Pt 2
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  • Aaron Friedberg: The Unrealistic Realist
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  • Nicholas de Monchaux: The Spirit of the Spacesuit
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  • Matthew Levitt: Iranian Doublespeak on the Anniversary of the AMIA Bombing
  • Paul Collins: How To Get Ahead in Tabloid Journalism ... Murdoch's Minions Have Nothing on the Journalists of 1897
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  • Edward Herman and David Peterson: We're Not Genocide Deniers. We Just Want to Uncover the Truth about Rwanda and Srebrenica
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  • Armin Thurnher: Waltzing Past the Graveyard
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  • Carl T. Bogus: A Liberal Reads the Great Conservative Works
  • John Campbell: South Africa After Mandela
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  • Tom Ricks: Was the JFK the Flat-Out Absolute Worst President of the Twentieth Century?
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  • James Gleick: Books and Other Fetish Objects
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  • Stephen M. Walt: Nationalism Rules
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  • Joyce Hoffmann: The Making of the President’s Press Corps
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  • Guy Gugliotta: The U.S. Capitol at War
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  • Walter Williams: Young Americans’ Ignorance Baffling
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  • Warren Rosenblum: Vive la France!
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    Carole Joffe: Betty Ford and the Change in Our Political Culture

    SOURCE: Dissent Magazine (7-14-11)

    Carole Joffe is a professor at the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco, and is the author of Dispatches from the Abortion Wars: The Costs of Fanaticism to Doctors, Patients, and the Rest of Us (Beacon).

    How much I appreciated your gracious letter telling of plans for the Western Regional Conference on Abortion and inviting me to attend.

    Although my upcoming personal and official commitments will not permit me to be with you, I am grateful for this opportunity to convey my warmest greetings to all attending and my hopes for the success of the Conference.

    So wrote Betty Ford, in February 1976, to the organizers of one of the first medical conferences on abortion to take place in the United States after the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973....
    Thursday, July 14, 2011 - 12:03
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    Paul Kengor: Predicting the Soviet Collapse

    SOURCE: National Review (7-14-11)

    Paul Kengor is professor of political science at Grove City College. His books include The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism and the newly released Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century.

    It was 20 years ago this summer that the final disintegration of the Soviet Union rapidly unfolded. In June 1991, Boris Yeltsin was freely elected president of the Russian Republic, with Mikhail Gorbachev clinging to power atop the precarious USSR. In August, Communist hardliners attempted a dramatic...
    Thursday, July 14, 2011 - 11:59
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    Mary C. Curtis: Why Does America Romanticize Slavery?

    SOURCE: The Root (7-14-11)

    Mary C. Curtis, an award-winning Charlotte, N.C.-based journalist, is a contributor to The Root, Fox News Charlotte, NPR, Creative Loafing and the Nieman Watchdog blog. She was national correspondent for Politics Daily. Follow her on Twitter. 

    ...The "statement" that caused such a ruckus is in the preamble to a "marriage vow" signed by GOP presidential hopefuls Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum; it condemns pornography and same-sex marriage but finds a silver lining in slavery. That odious institution may have "had a disastrous impact on...
    Thursday, July 14, 2011 - 11:53
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    David McCullough: Vive la Similarité

    SOURCE: NYT (7-13-11)

    David McCullough, a winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, is the author, most recently, of “The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris.”

    THE recent arrest in New York of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then the head of the International Monetary Fund, has caused some people to question the American-French relationship. Though we will probably never see a Bastille Day when French flags fly along Main Street and strains of “La Marseillaise” fill the airwaves, July 14 would not go so largely unobserved here were we better served by memory. For the ties that bind America and France are more important and infinitely more interesting than most of us know.

    Consider that the war that gave birth to the nation, our war for independence, would almost certainly have failed had it not been for heavy French financial backing and military support, on both land and sea. At the crucial surrender of the...
    Thursday, July 14, 2011 - 11:08
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    Maureen Dowd: Hitler’s Talking Dogs

    SOURCE: NYT (7-12-11)

    Maureen Dowd is a columnist for the NYT.

    At this late date, when we believe we know absolutely everything about Adolf Hitler, could it be that he was even crazier than we thought?

    From Caligula to Nero to Qaddafi, dictators are often not just cruel and evil, but lunatics. It’s very rare to find a rational dictator. Absolute power deranges them and gives them delusions and fantasies. So we shouldn’t be surprised by news reports suggesting the Führer was batty beyond even Mel Brooks’s satire.

    First, an MI5 document was declassified in London in April, revealing megalomaniacal schemes for Nazis to rise again if they lost the war by scattering sleeper agents around the world; and by killing Allied officers with poison infused in sausages,...
    Wednesday, July 13, 2011 - 09:03
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    Terry Gardner: A healthy dose of American history

    SOURCE: LA Times (7-10-11)

    Terry Gardner is a travel writer.

    Reporting from Boston, Philadelphia and New York—

    Paul Revere was captured on April 18, 1775, before he could warn the residents of Concord, Mass., that the British were coming. (He did make it to Lexington, Mass.)

    No Revolutionary War battle was ever fought at Valley Forge, Pa., even though Gen. George Washington and his troops were there for nine months, including during a horrific winter.

    Gustave Eiffel — he of tower fame — gave our...
    Tuesday, July 12, 2011 - 14:14
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    Rick Perlstein: Betty Ford, Pioneer

    SOURCE: NYT (7-11-11)

    Rick Perlstein is the author of “Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.”

    THE obituaries for Betty Ford, who died Friday at the age of 93, were filled with colorful stories about an incongruous life: former Martha Graham dancer, dispenser of scandalous comments to the media, alcohol and drug addict. So colorful, in fact, that they may crowd out her historical importance — which may well have been greater than those of her husband, President Gerald R. Ford.

    Though she was never an elected official, industry titan or religious leader, few Americans changed people’s lives so dramatically for the better. I learned it for myself in the most unlikely of places: a Ford family estate sale in 2007.

    Some historical background:...
    Tuesday, July 12, 2011 - 12:07
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    David Goldfield: Evangelicals, Republicans and the Civil War

    SOURCE: NYT (7-6-11)

    David Goldfield is the Robert Lee Bailey Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, where he teaches courses on the American South. He is the author or editor of 16 books, including “Still Fighting the Civil War”; “The American Journey”; and, most recently, “America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation.”

    We often hear the phrase “the party of Lincoln” ascribed to the Republican Party. The image conjures a political movement dedicated to the abolition or restriction of slavery and to saving the Union. A less well-known feature of the party’s early years was its grounding in the evangelical Christianity of the Second Great Awakening.

    Not all evangelicals were Republicans, nor were all Republicans evangelicals. But many of its adherents brought a messianic zeal to the political issues of the day, particularly...
    Monday, July 11, 2011 - 17:00
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    Niall Stanage: Northern Ireland’s McIlroy Transcends Boundaries

    SOURCE: NYT (7-10-11)

    Niall Stanage is a staff writer for The Hill newspaper in Washington.

    Rory McIlroy’s religion was, until a few days ago, a mystery to Barry McGuigan.

    “Is he Catholic? Really?” McGuigan said. “I didn’t know that. I thought he was a Protestant young guy.”

    McGuigan was a precursor of a kind to McIlroy, the young golfer who has become Northern Ireland’s latest sporting hero in the wake of his...
    Monday, July 11, 2011 - 16:19
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    Jewish Daily Forward: Liberate the Letter!

    SOURCE: Jewish Daily Forward (7-6-11)

    When Ron Chernow was travelling the country last year to talk about his new biography of George Washington, he was often asked about Washington’s 1790 letter to the Jews of Newport, R.I. — the one that famously promised that the United States government would give “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”

    “There were very few speeches that I made where people didn’t ask about that letter,” Chernow recalled. “I can vouch for the fact that there’s tremendous curiosity out there.”

    He’s curious, too. Even though Chernow spent six years reading through Washington’s...
    Thursday, July 7, 2011 - 12:32
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    Mao Yushi: Judging Mao as a Man

    SOURCE: WSJ (7-6-11)

    Mr. Mao is an economist and the chairman of the Unirule Institute.

    Editor's note: This article is adapted from a longer essay that has now been removed from the website of Caixin magazine. After it was published, pro-Maoist groups have called for the author to be prosecuted for sedition and treason. The translation is by Jude Blanchette.

    Mao Zedong was once a god. With the uncovering of more and more documents and information, he is gradually returning to human form.

    Some still view Chairman Mao as a god, however, and view any critical discussion of him as blasphemous. If these people have their way, we will never be able to analyze him, never directly face his legacy, never question his spirit....
    Thursday, July 7, 2011 - 05:42
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    Eleanor Clift: Nancy Reagan at 90

    SOURCE: The Daily Beast (7-5-11)

    Eleanor Clift is a contributing editor for Newsweek.

    As an aspiring actress in Hollywood, Nancy Davis shaved two years off her age, claiming July 6, 1923, when she was born in 1921. A woman being coy about her age is not uncommon, and the truth didn’t come out until the onetime actress was in the White House as first lady. “I told a little fib,” she said.

    Not that she minds anymore that well wishers are keeping count. Reagan turns 90 on Wednesday, a milestone to celebrate as much for the life she has lived as her longevity. She’ll mark the day by attending a luncheon in her honor at the home of a longtime friend, Ruth Jones, whose husband headed Northrup...
    Wednesday, July 6, 2011 - 11:34
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    David E. Shi: A War of Independence that Divided American Colonies

    SOURCE: Atlanta Journal-Constitution (7-1-11)

    David E. Shi, an Atlanta native, is president emeritus and professor of history at Furman University. He is the co-author of “America: a Narrative History.”

    History celebrates winners and often forgets losers. Yet it is worth remembering on this Independence Day that Americans both won and lost the Revolutionary war. The struggle for independence was as much a brutal civil war fought between Americans (“Patriots” versus “Loyalists”) as it was a conventional conflict between American and British armies. Americans killed Americans in large numbers.

    The act of choosing sides divided families and friends, towns and cities. John Adams of Massachusetts, one of the leading revolutionaries and a future president, noted that many of the Tories (a derisive term for Loyalists, implying that they were monarchists) were “my cordial, confidential and bosom friends.”...
    Tuesday, July 5, 2011 - 18:16
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    Charles Desnoyers: Centennial Gala in Philly Inspired Today's China

    SOURCE: Philadephia Inquirer (7-4-11)

    Charles Desnoyers is associate professor of history and director of Asian Studies at La Salle University. His book on Chinese observer Li Gui is called, A Journey to the East (University of Michigan Press, 2004)

    'July 4th is the day on which Washington founded the nation. The evening before, at 7:30 p.m., the vice president and the mayor of Philadelphia attended a banquet with the exhibition officials of various countries, after which they took carriages to sightsee. The lamps of all the streets and thoroughfares lit up the heavens and the sound of guns shook the earth. There were hundreds of amusements on hand, and the exploding fireworks and flags draped everywhere all contributed to the festivities. ... The...
    Tuesday, July 5, 2011 - 18:03
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    Gordon S. Wood: How the Complete Meaning of July Fourth Is Slipping Away

    SOURCE: The New Republic (7-4-11)

    Gordon S. Wood is Alva O. Way University Professor Emeritus at Brown University and the author, most recently, of Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815.

    At least one of the Founders thought that Independence Day would become important. When the Continental Congress voted for independence on July 2, 1776, John Adams, who more than any other single Founder was responsible for that vote, was ecstatic. America’s declaring of independence from Great Britain, he told his wife Abigail, marked “the most memorable Epocha in the History of America.” He hoped that the day would be “celebrated by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated,” he said, “as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with...
    Tuesday, July 5, 2011 - 17:43
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    Alexander Heffner: Why Doesn’t John Adams Have a Memorial?

    SOURCE: WaPo (6-30-11)

    Alexander Heffner, a Washington Post intern, has written for the Boston Globe, Newsday and RealClearPolitics.

    When President Obama ponders tough decisions at the White House, he may join the cadre of presidents who have sought inspiration in the Truman Balcony’s stunning vista, gazing at the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial, which commemorate our first and third commanders in chief. But there’s a man missing from this presidential panorama.

    Where is John Adams, our feisty second president and lifelong American patriot? If George Washington was the sword of the revolution and Thomas Jefferson the pen, why have we neglected the voice of our nation’s independence?

    Adams himself predicted this omission. “Monuments will...
    Tuesday, July 5, 2011 - 14:47
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    Michael White: Ronald Reagan and the Joy of Myth-making

    SOURCE: Guardian (blog) (7-5-11)

    Michael White is assistant editor and has been writing for the Guardian for more than 30 years, as a reporter, foreign correspondent and columnist. He was political editor from 1990-2006, having previously been the paper's Washington correspondent (1984-88) and parliamentary sketchwriter (1977-84).

    I stayed the course with the Reagan posse after the unveiling of his statue in Grosvenor Square yesterday. That meant attending the gala dinner in the City of London's gorgeous Guildhall and being teased by colleagues in the hack pack for joining assorted toasts to the 40th president, the Queen and others deemed (by the hacks) to be Guardian class enemies.

    Never mind, it was a fascinating tribal occasion, as tribal occasions often are for...
    Tuesday, July 5, 2011 - 07:30
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    Mehdi Hasan: Ronald Reagan Was No Hawk – and Certainly No Neocon

    SOURCE: Guardian (UK) (7-4-11)

    Mehdi Hasan is senior editor (politics) at the New Statesman and a former news and current affairs editor at Channel 4. His New Statesman blog is here. He is co-author of Ed: the Milibands and the Making of a Labour Leader.

    Ronald Reagan is back. Today more than a thousand people crowded into London's Grosvenor Square to ...
    Tuesday, July 5, 2011 - 06:48
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    Condoleezza Rice: Reagan's Vision of Liberty Still Guides us Today

    SOURCE: USA Today (7-2-11)

    Condoleezza Rice is a former U.S. secretary of State and is the official representative of former first lady Nancy Reagan at a series of Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation Centennial Celebrations in Europe this week.

    Nearly 30 years ago, Ronald Reagan spoke to the British Parliament and declared that the march of freedom and democracy would leave the Soviet Union" on the ash heap of history."

    Many remember these famous words as much for their boldness as they do for their prescience. Perhaps less...
    Tuesday, July 5, 2011 - 06:34
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    Jed Babbin: Bob Gates' Legacy

    SOURCE: American Spectator (7-5-11)

    Jed Babbinserved as a Deputy Undersecretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush. He is the author of several bestselling books including Inside the Asylum and In the Words of Our Enemies.

    In five years as defense secretary, Dr. Robert Gates transformed the American military and put it on a course that will limit its ability to defend us for decades to come.

    Gates' term as defense secretary began under President Bush and ended after more than two years of Barack Obama's presidency. Of Gates' "accomplishments," three stand out, each of them a significant part of Obama's agenda.

    First is the sociological experimentation that he and Obama have imposed on the military. Second is the path of weakness and withdrawal from the global war against Islamic terrorism. Third is the diminution of our armed services' ability to develop and use conventional forces, investing only in forces...
    Tuesday, July 5, 2011 - 06:30
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