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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.

  • Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick: Defending the "Untold History of the United States"
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  • Walter Stahr: How Accurately Did Spielberg Capture Lincoln’s Time?
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  • Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore: The Great Silence of China
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  • Mary C. Curtis: What ‘Lincoln’ Leaves Out, and Why It Matters
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  • Gary Gutting: Learning History at the Movies
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  • Philip Zelikow: Steven Spielberg, Historian
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  • Steven Plaut: Just What Was Fundamentally Wrong with Bolshevism?
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  • Louis P. Masur: Lincoln at the Movies
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  • James Verini: The Cult of Massoud
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  • Michael Barone: Grand Old Parties ... The Republicans and Democrats Retain Their Original Character
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  • Thomas Meaney: Chicken Wire and Telephone Calls: On Robert Caro’s LBJ
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  • Tom Rollins: The Ghost of Yasser Arafat
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  • Lee Ruddin: Alistair Cooke ... A Modern Proponent of the Unsentimental Anglo-American Relationship
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  • James T. Patterson: Everything You Know About the 1960s is Wrong
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  • Michael Sontheimer: The Rise, Fall and Rebirth of Germany's Capital
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  • Walter Isaacson: The America Ben Franklin Saw
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  • Frank Jacobs: Thanksgiving is Un-American
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  • Madeleine Johnson: Why the Pilgrims Thrived at Plymouth
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  • Scott McConnell: Immigrants Against Empire
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  • Michael Newton: The Assassin’s Creed ... Were the Assassinations of Lincoln and Kennedy World-changing Events?
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    John Arquilla: Casualties of History ... The Thing We Shouldn't Forget About the Origins of Veterans Day

    SOURCE: Foreign Policy (11-9-12)

    John Arquilla is professor of defense analysis at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and author of Worst Enemy: The Reluctant Transformation of the American Military.

    All of our nation's veterans are honored on November 11, but it is important to recall that the origin of this observance was revulsion at the horrific casualties suffered by so many countries during World War I. Yes, a second and even more destructive conflict followed all too soon after the "war to end all wars," impelling a name change from Armistice Day to Veterans Day. And the rest of the 20th century was littered with insurgencies, terrorism, and a host of other violent ills -- most of which persist today, guaranteeing the steady production of new veterans, of which there are 22 million in the United States.

    But despite the seemingly endless parade of wars waged and fresh conflicts looming just beyond the bloody horizon, World War I still stands out for its...
    Wednesday, November 14, 2012 - 15:34
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    Yang Jisheng: China’s Great Shame

    SOURCE: NYT (11-13-12)

    Yang Jisheng, deputy editor of the historical journal Yanhuang Chunqiu and a former editor at the Xinhua News Agency, is the author of “Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962.” This essay was translated by Guo Jian from the Chinese.

    THIRTY-SIX million people in China, including my uncle, who raised me like a father, starved to death between 1958 and 1962, during the man-made calamity known as the Great Famine. In thousands of cases, desperately hungry people resorted to cannibalism.

    The toll was more than twice the number of fallen in World War I, and about six times the number of Ukrainians starved by...
    Wednesday, November 14, 2012 - 10:41
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    William N. Brown: The Right Way to Remember the Great War

    SOURCE: WaPo (11-9-12)

    The writer is the president of the Association of the Oldest Inhabitants of the District of Columbia.

    As we pause this Veterans Day to remember Americans who have served in the armed forces, I’d like to draw attention to an unresolved legislative issue that casts a shadow over an important moment of remembrance that will soon be upon us: the World War I centennial.

    This year, Rep. Ted Poe (R-Tex.) finally set aside a long-standing attempt to “nationalize” the D.C. World War I Memorial on the Mall. Unfortunately, the plan Poe has put forward in its place isn’t much better. He now seeks up to $10 million to create a World War I memorial on the other side of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, in Constitution Gardens. The time and effort...
    Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - 12:11
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    Glenn W. LaFantasie: From the Civil War to James Bond in One Quick Step

    SOURCE: Salon (11-12-12)

    Glenn W. LaFantasie is the Richard Frockt Family Professor of Civil War History at Western Kentucky University. He is working on a book about Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant.

    When I set out in the early 1990s to write a short biographical piece on Col. William C. Oates, the Confederate commander of the 15th Alabama Infantry, who failed to dislodge Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and his 20th Maine Regiment from the slopes of Little Round Top at Gettysburg on July 2, 1863, I had no idea where the project would take me.  For one thing, that brief sketch led eventually — some 15 years later — to my writing a biography of Oates, cradle to grave.  For another thing, it showed me how close our connections are to the past and how relevant is William Faulkner’s comment that the past is not dead; in fact, it’s not even past....

    For those who know [his granddaughter Maron Oates Leiter...
    Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - 09:56
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    Michael Trimble: The Evolutionary and Social History of Crying

    SOURCE: NYT (11-10-12)

    Michael Trimble is an emeritus professor of behavioral neurology and a consultant neuropsychiatrist at the Institute of Neurology, University College London, and the author of the forthcoming book “Why Humans Like to Cry: Tragedy, Evolution, and the Brain.”

    IN 2008, at a zoo in Münster, Germany, a gorilla named Gana gave birth to a male infant, who died after three months. Photographs of Gana, looking stricken and inconsolable, were ubiquitous. “Heartbroken gorilla cradles her dead baby,” Britain’s Daily Mail declared. Crowds thronged the zoo to see the grieving mother.

    Sad as the scene was, the humans, not Gana, were the only ones crying. The notion that animals can weep — apologies to Dumbo, Bambi and...
    Sunday, November 11, 2012 - 14:02
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    Lee Ruddin: The Anglo-American Unspecial Relationship of 1942-44

    SOURCE: Lee Ruddin (11-11-12)

    The relationship between Tony Blair and George W. Bush is likely to take center stage once more as we approach the tenth anniversary of the Iraq War. In the decade since, op-ed writers of all political stripes have pin-pointed the “unspecialness” of the British-American relationship to March 2003 when the UK supposedly fell in line with U.S. policy demands, purportedly without much hesitation or reservation, and marched in line onto the dusty plains of Mesopotamia.   

    Listening to Martha Kearney’s two-part program, GI Britain (BBC Radio 4), however, I would pin-point 1942 (the year in which some historians direct students of Anglo-American history to look upon as the start of the “special relationship”) as the annus horribilis in UK-U.S. relations and the start of the unspecial relationship between Whitehall and Washington.

    I say this for the simple reason that 70 years ago American troops started to arrive in war-ravaged Britain to form (a...
    Sunday, November 11, 2012 - 08:47
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    Jennifer L. Anderson: Exotic Mahogany, a History of Violence and Deception

    SOURCE: Bloomberg News (11-1-12)

    Jennifer L. Anderson is a professor of history at Stony Brook University. She is the author of “Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America.” The opinions expressed are her own.

    In 1780, Benjamin Franklin commissioned a large mahogany box from a London craftsman. His instructions for this custom-made item, intended to house a delicate scientific instrument, were unusually precise. In particular, he urged that special care be taken in selecting the mahogany because, in his words, there was “a great deal of difference in woods that go under that name.” He desired the “finest grained that you can meet with.”

    Franklin’s suspicions about what passed for mahogany suggest his awareness of a growing problem at the time: The precious trees were being rapidly depleted. Consequently, the size and quality of available mahogany was becoming increasingly erratic...
    Thursday, November 8, 2012 - 14:40
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    Richard Seymour: The British Have Invaded 90% of the World's Countries. Ha Ha?

    SOURCE: Guardian (UK) (11-6-12)

    Richard Seymour is a political activist who blogs at Lenin's tomb. He is the author of The Liberal Defence of Murder and The Meaning of David Cameron.

    The other countries must feel so left out. New research shows that practically everyone has been invaded by British troops at one point or another. A "staggering 90% of the world's nations" have been overrun by the turbulent Brits – Sweden, Mongolia and the Vatican City are among the 22 to have been tragically overlooked.
     
    If you think this is a facetious tone to adopt, it is nothing compared with the knockabout, what-a-larf tone of some of the coverage that has been lavished on this new book. In a way, this is what the book set out to accomplish. As its author says, it is lighthearted fun, and it claims not to take a moral stance on Britain's empire.
     
    In fact, that latter claim is not quite true. To begin with, the very posture of lighthearted...
    Tuesday, November 6, 2012 - 12:12
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    William S. Lind: Why Conservatives Hate War

    SOURCE: The American Conservative (11-6-12)

    William S. Lind is director of the American Conservative Center for Public Transportation and author of the Maneuver Warfare Handbook.

    One of the odder aspects of present-day politics is the assumption that if you are antiwar you are on the left, and if you are conservative you are “pro-war.” Like labelling conservative states red and liberal states blue, this is an inversion of historical practice.
     
    The opposition to America’s entry into both World Wars was largely led by conservatives. Senator Robert A. Taft, the standard-bearer of postwar conservatism, opposed war unless the United States itself was attacked. Even Bismarck, after he had fought and won the three wars he needed to unify Germany, was staunchly antiwar. He once described preventive war, like the one America is being pressured to wage on Iran, as “committing suicide for fear of being killed.”
     
    Conservatives’ detestation of the war has no “...
    Tuesday, November 6, 2012 - 12:00
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    Eric Alterman: The Cuban Missile Crisis: Thirteen Days... and Fifty Years

    SOURCE: ()

    Eric Alterman is a Distinguished Professor of English, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and Professor of Journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. He is also "The Liberal Media" columnist for The Nation and a fellow of The Nation Institute, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC, where he writes and edits the "Think Again" column, a senior fellow (since 1985) at the World Policy Institute. Alterman is also a regular columnist for Moment magazine and a regular contributor to The Daily Beast

    In my 2004 book, When Presidents Lie, I coined the term “post-truth presidency.” I borrowed it, in part, from the now late ex–Watergate felon Charles Colson, who in 2002 condemned America’s “post-truth society,” in which “even the man on the street sees little wrong with lying.” The great irony of this observation lay in the fact that...
    Friday, November 2, 2012 - 13:00
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    Jon Wiener: Remembering the Berlin Wall

    SOURCE: The Nation (10-30-12)

    This article is adapted from How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey Across America, published in October. Copyright ©2012 by the Regents of the University of California. It is excerpted here with the permission of the author, a professor of history at UC Irvine.

    For Republicans today, Ronald Reagan provides the gold standard of political virtue. In their view, perhaps his greatest achievement was “winning” the cold war—the icon for which is the Berlin Wall. Pieces of the Wall are on display in a surprising number of American locations, from the low-down (a Las Vegas casino men’s room) to the more upscale (the Microsoft Art Collection in Redmond, Washington). More than forty places in the United States display sections of the Wall, according to Wikipedia . Taken together, these commemorations tell us something about how Reagan, and the cold war, are being remembered—and forgotten.

    Of course the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California,...
    Friday, November 2, 2012 - 12:55
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