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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.

  • Russ Baker: What Gets Declassified?
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  • Jeffrey Lord: JFK and the Death of Liberalism
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  • David Grann: The Yankee Comandante -- A Story of Love, Revolution, and Betrayal
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  • Abigail Perkiss: From Policy to Practice: Remembering Brown II
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  • George Weigel: Catholic ‘Americanism’
  • Mona Charen: A High-School History Book Where Communism’s Crimes are disappeared.
  • Charlotte Furth: A Flourishing Profession: Reflections on a Career in Asian Studies
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  • David Hayes: Elizabeth II: A Long Reign and a Lost Republic
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  • Simon Schama: Celebrating Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee
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  • Nancy Gibbs: President, to President, to President ... POTUS' Best Confidant May Be His Predecessors
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  • John Nagl: Does Military Service Still Matter for the Presidency?
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  • Tim Stanley: Hitler is Not to be Trifled With
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  • Paul Rogers: Pan Am 103 ... Libya and A Case Unclosed
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  • David Makovsky and Olivia Holt-Ivry: Why Are Israeli Generals So Often Overruled?
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  • Clare Morgana Gillis: The End of History in the New Libya
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  • Alex Joffe: Sending "Mein Kampf" Back to School
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  • Warren Throckmorton: Faux History for the GOP
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  • Katherine Stewart: Texas's War on History
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  • Eamon Gilmore: The Queen Has Shown the Strength of Britain and Ireland's Relationship
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  • Colin Powell: Colin Powell on the Bush Administration's Iraq War Mistakes
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    Jacob Heilbrunn: Did Stalin Murder Lenin?

    SOURCE: National Interest (5-7-12)

    Jacob Heilbrunn is a senior editor at The National Interest.

    Did he do it? He would not be the first subordinate to seek to polish off his superior in an authoritarian system. History is replete with examples of a seemingly dutiful understudy scheming to remove his mentor.
     
    I'm talking, of course, about Stalin and Lenin. The theory that Stalin sped along the demise of the old boy—who wasn't actually that old when he died, a mere fifty-four—has been around for decades. Now it is being revived. Last Friday, at the annual University of Maryland School of Medicine conference about the deaths of famous historical figures, the Russian historian Lev Lurie suggested that while Lenin was undoubtedly in poor health in the 1920s, Stalin hastened his death by having the Soviet leader poisoned. The convulsions Lenin suffered shortly before his death, Lurie says, are not consistent with the symptoms of the stroke he had experienced. If Lurie is...
    Monday, May 7, 2012 - 18:53
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    Steve Chapman: Every President is a War President ... Politics Protects the Garrison State

    SOURCE: Chicago Tribune (5-6-12)

    Steve Chapman is a member of the Tribune's editorial board.

    Ninety-six years ago, when President Woodrow Wilson ran for re-election, two notable things happened: 1) His campaign used the slogan "He kept us out of war," and 2) he won.
     
    It has been a long time since any president could seek a second term while making that boast. Looking at recent history, you would conclude not that the Constitution allows the president to make war, but that it requires him to do so. Modern leaders don't brag about keeping us out of war but about getting us in.
     
    Barack Obama reinforces that truth more than any president of our era. He owed his victory in the 2008 Democratic primaries partly to his record of opposing the invasion of Iraq — which Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Edwards supported.
     
    "We've had enough of a misguided war in Iraq that never should have been fought — a war that...
    Monday, May 7, 2012 - 18:42
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    Ronald Radosh: Another Central American Tyrant Passes from the Scene: Farewell to Tomás Borge

    SOURCE: PJ Media (5-2-12)

    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.

    I cannot let this day pass without noting the death of one of Central America’s greatest tyrants, Tomás Borge. The obituary notice in today’s New York Times hardly lets readers know the kind of moral monster that Borge was. Perhaps the mourning by Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro is enough to let people understand how vile he was.

    Borge was one of the original group of Sandinista rebels who had been imprisoned by the authoritarian ruler of Nicaragua, Anastasio Somoza. He had been in prison for one year when in 1978 a raid by Sandinista troops (disguised in Nicaraguan army uniforms) seized the National Palace and held the leaders of Somoza’s regime hostage. The...
    Monday, May 7, 2012 - 12:14
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    Stephen Green: A Photo Essay Rebuttal to May Day

    SOURCE: PJ Media (5-2-12)

    Stephen Green began blogging at VodkaPundit.com in early 2002, and has since been featured in publications as diverse as Guard Experience Magazine, The New Individualist, TCS Daily, and right here at PJ Media. Along with frequent appearances on PJTV, he was also the host of PJM Political on Sirius-XM Satellite Radio. Steve lives with his wife and son in the hills and woods of Monument, Colorado, where he enjoys the occasional lovely adult beverage.

    Will Collier found an amazing essay from photographer Stefan Koppelkamm. He toured East Germany just after the Wall was knocked down (it did not “fall”) — and then went back this century to shoot the same locations. The before-and-afters will shock you....

    Do yourself...
    Monday, May 7, 2012 - 12:05
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    Shai Secunda: Our Zoroastrian Moment

    SOURCE: Jewish Ideas Daily (5-7-12)

    Shai Secunda is a Mandel fellow at the Scholion Center for Interdisciplinary Jewish Research, and a lecturer in the Talmud department at Hebrew University.  He blogs at the Talmud Blog, which he founded and now co-edits.

    The great contemporary scholar of religion Jonathan Z. Smith once remarked that the omnipresent substructure of human thought lies in the human capacity to make comparisons.  In ancient Sumer, scribes crafted intricate similes.  In classical Greece philosophers discussed and employed the critical tools of analogy and metaphor.  And following the European Enlightenment, university professors made their contribution by inventing the field we know today as "comparative religion."  From the field's earliest days, Zoroastrianism—the ancient dualistic religion of Iran, whose adherents worshiped Ahura Mazda ("Lord Wisdom") and his heavenly hosts and battled the evil Angra Mainyu ("Foul...
    Monday, May 7, 2012 - 11:00
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    Jeffrey Wasserstrom: On William Gibson's "Distrust that Particular Flavor"

    SOURCE: LA Review of Books (5-5-12)

    Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chair of the History Department at the University of California, Irvine, and the author, most recently, of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2010).

    I NEED TO BEGIN with a confession: I was a late arrival to the cyberpunk party. I wish I could say that, as an avid fan of Nineteen-Eighty-Four (1949), I was keeping my eye out in that year that Orwell made famous to see if some important new dystopian novel would appear. But I really wasn't doing anything of the kind. Deeply enmeshed in graduate work on Chinese history, I did not even notice the publication of William Gibson's now world-famous first novel Neuromancer. In fact, I don't think I read a single word by Gibson during that whole decade. And I have to admit further that, when I finally did first encounter his prose in the early 1990s, it was not by reading a novel or essay, but rather a book cover blurb, the one he wrote praising...
    Sunday, May 6, 2012 - 16:39
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    Christoph Gunkel: The Good Göring ... How a Top Nazi's Brother Saved Lives

    SOURCE: Spiegel Online (5-2-12)

    Christoph Gunkel writes for Spiegel Online.

    In downtown Vienna under the Nazis, two members of the SA had decided to humiliate an old woman. A crowd gathered and jeered as the stormtroopers hung a sign bearing the words "I'm a dirty Jew" around the woman's neck. Suddenly, a tall man with a high forehead and thick mustache pushed his way angrily through the mob and freed the woman. "There was a scuffle with two stormtroopers, I hit them and was arrested immediately," the man later said in a matter-of-fact statement.
     
    Despite this open act of rebellion, the man was released immediately. He only had to say his name: Albert Göring, brother of Hermann Göring, the commander of the German air force and Hitler's closest confidant.
     
    Years later, after the fall of the Third Reich, Albert Göring was arrested once again, this time by Americans. Again he gave his name, but this time it had the opposite effect.
    ...
    Thursday, May 3, 2012 - 18:42
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    Matthew Alexander: Osama bin Laden Was Not Caught Because of Torture but in Spite of It

    SOURCE: Daily Beast (5-3-12)

    Matthew Alexander is a twenty year veteran of the Air Force and Air Force Reserves.  He supervised or conducted over 1,300 interrogations in Iraq and led the interrogations that located the Al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed in an airstrike.  Alexander's latest book is Kill or Capture: How a Special Operations Task Force Took Down a Notorious Al Qaeda Terrorist. He is currently a Fellow at UCLA's Burkle Center for International Relations. 

    While some may celebrate the one-year anniversary of the death of Osama bin Laden, perhaps time would be better served evaluating why it came nine years too late. The sad truth is that bin Laden should have been dead twice in the first two years after 9/11.
     
    The first opportunity was missed in the mountains of Tora Bora early in the war in Afghanistan, when former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld insisted that local Afghan forces kill bin Laden rather than allowing...
    Thursday, May 3, 2012 - 18:18
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    Steven Plaut: Holocaust Lesson: Genocide Always in the Name of ‘Human Rights’

    SOURCE: FrontPageMag (4-30-12)

    Steven Plaut is a native Philadelphian who teaches business finance and economics at the University of Haifa in Israel. He holds a PhD in economics from Princeton. He is author of the David Horowitz Freedom Center booklets about the Hamas  and Jewish Enablers of the War against Israel.

    Every single act of genocidal aggression is couched in the language of human rights and the need for self-determination for minorities.   One of the most infamous began as a supposed struggle to defend the human rights of an oppressed minority group, as an innocent demand for self-determination.   All Hitler wanted was to achieve self-determination for the Sudeten Germans, to free them from oppression and mistreatment at the hands of democratic Czechoslovakia.

    Never mind that the ethnic Germans living under Czechoslovak rule were being treated infinitely better than were...
    Thursday, May 3, 2012 - 16:00
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    Adam Arenson: Stonewall Jackson's Arm Lies Here

    SOURCE: The Atlantic (5-2-12)

    Adam Arenson is an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at El Paso and the author of The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War. He blogs at adamarenson.com.

    This week in 1863, the celebrated Confederate General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson was returning from a nighttime reconnaissance ride near Chancellorsville, Virginia, when he was mistakenly shot by his own camp's picket guards. On May 2, Jackson's wounded arm was amputated; Jackson's chaplain, Beverley Tucker Lacy, buried it the next day in a nearby family graveyard. Seemingly on the mend, Stonewall Jackson was removed far behind the battle lines to recuperate at Fairfield Plantation, but his condition soon worsened. Stonewall Jackson died eight days later, on May 10, 1863, of pneumonia.

    General Robert E. Lee assessed the gravity of the...
    Thursday, May 3, 2012 - 11:25
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    Matthew J. Franck: The Founders Loved Mandates? Not So Fast

    SOURCE: National Review (5-1-12)

    Matthew J. Franck is director of the William E. and Carol G. Simon Center on Religion and the Constitution at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, N.J.

    As a legal argument against an act of Congress, “it’s unprecedented” does not carry all that much weight. After all, every first use of a legitimate congressional power was obviously without precedent. And there is, in the nature of things, no reason that such a first instance could not occur many years after the power itself was called into being by the Constitution.
     
    So when the individual mandate to purchase health insurance, now at issue in the Obamacare case before the Supreme Court, is denounced as unprecedented, that’s hardly a slam-dunk argument. It’s just the beginning of one. What one must show is that the unprecedented mandate is also improper — an illegitimate claim of authority under the Constitution. “It’s unprecedented” can add some rhetorical oomph to the more important...
    Tuesday, May 1, 2012 - 17:09
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    Jose A. Rodriguez: The Path to bin Laden’s Death Didn’t Start with Obama

    SOURCE: WaPo (5-1-12)

    Jose A. Rodriguez Jr. is a veteran of the CIA and the author of Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives.

    As we mark the anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s death, President Obama deserves credit for making the right choice on taking out Public Enemy No. 1.
     
    But his administration never would have had the opportunity to do the right thing had it not been for some extraordinary work during the George W. Bush administration. Much of that work has been denigrated by Obama as unproductive and contrary to American principles.
     
    He is wrong on both counts.
     
    Shortly after bin Laden met his maker last spring, courtesy of U.S. Special Forces and intelligence, the administration proudly announced that when Obama took office, getting bin Laden was made a top priority. Many of us who served in senior counterterrorism positions in the Bush administration were left...
    Tuesday, May 1, 2012 - 16:54
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    Thai Jones: The First of May

    SOURCE: Dissent Magazine (4-30-12)

    Thai Jones has a PhD from Columbia University. His new book—More Powerful Than Dynamite: Radicals, Plutocrats, Progressives, and New York’s Year of Anarchy—tells the forgotten history of a protest movement that divided the city in 1914. It is published by Walker Books and is in stores now.

    New York’s labor unions had a banner day planned for the First of May in 1914, with parades and celebrations scheduled across the city. Finnish and Bohemian socialists were congregating on the Lower East Side. Carpenters and cloak-makers would begin their march from Chelsea, while the United Hebrew Trades intended to start near Little Italy. By the afternoon, all these various strands would join in Union Square for an inspiring demonstration of working-class power in the nation’s greatest metropolis.

    Yet a note of apprehension threatened to spoil this grand pageant of solidarity. Anarchists and members of the Industrial Workers of the World—radicals far to the left of...
    Tuesday, May 1, 2012 - 16:28
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    Tim Cavanaugh: How the L.A. Riots Changed Nothing

    SOURCE: Reason.com (4-29-12)

    Tim Cavanaugh is managing editor of Reason.com.

    On the 20th anniversary of the Los Angeles riots, there are several pieces of good news. 

    First up: Jessica Evers, who while still in the womb was hit by a bullet that penetrated her seven-months-pregnant mother’s belly in 1992, is now a healthy and apparently happy young woman, coming up on her twentieth birthday as the celebrated "youngest victim" of the mayhem that followed the acquittal of four police officers in the beating of Rodney King. 

    Better yet, the conditions that contributed to the riots have in large part disappeared from South L.A. (which at the time was referred to as "South Central L.A." but was actually...
    Tuesday, May 1, 2012 - 16:27
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    Yossi Klein Halevi: Bibi’s Political Inheritance

    SOURCE: Tablet Magazine (5-1-12)

    Yossi Klein Halevi is a fellow at the Engaging Israel Project of the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and a contributing editor at the New Republic. He is completing a book about the paratroopers who fought in Jerusalem in 1967.

    Benzion Netanyahu, scholar of the Inquisition, secretary to Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and father of Bibi, was the last of the purist Revisionist Zionists. He carried Revisionism’s bitter battles against the Zionist left to the end of his 102 years. And his complicated relationship with his son tells the story of the successes and failures of the Revisionist movement.

    Through the 1930s and ’40s, Revisionist and left-wing Zionists argued vehemently about the nature of the future state and how to create it. Labor Zionists were socialists, Revisionists capitalists. Labor cooperated with the British mandate; the Revisionists revolted...
    Tuesday, May 1, 2012 - 16:18
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    Max Holland: New Questions About Deep Throat in ‘All the President’s Men’: Watergate Revisited

    SOURCE: The Daily Beast (5-1-12)

    Max Holland, a contributing editor at The Nation and the Wilson Quarterly, is the author of Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat.

    For several decades following the 1974 publication of All the President’s Men, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward have had to fend off critics of their bestselling account. For the most part, they have succeeded wildly, sloughing them off as ill-informed skeptics, untrustworthy revisionists, and plain sore losers.

    But now comes a criticism from perhaps the one person capable of putting All the President’s Men in its place by poking holes in the Deep Throat saga. That’s because the voice of dissent is...
    Tuesday, May 1, 2012 - 15:10
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