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: Spiegel Online (1-17-13)
Ronen Bergman is an Israeli journalist and security policy analyst.
"You are part of the anti-Semitic propaganda yourself, and you don't even know it. You don't speak German and you don't understand the nuances of the text, yet you sign it as one of the authors."
This allegation was hurled at me by Melody Sucharewicz, a communications and strategy consultant in Israel and Germany. I myself am the son of two Holocaust survivors who lost their entire families in the war, and I tried to defend myself against what I thought was a false accusation, but to no avail.
The attack had been triggered by an investigative report published by SPIEGEL last June addressing the German-Israeli cooperation in the building of submarines for the Israeli navy and compiled over several months by a team of journalists that included me. The report revealed that these submarines can carry nuclear missiles that would serve as Israel's second-strike capability in the event of a...
SOURCE: Daily Beast (1-14-13)
Howard W. French is the author of A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa and Disappearing Shanghai. He is completing a forthcoming book about China and Africa, titled Haphazard Empire. He teaches at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
When Rwandan-backed rebels recently took Goma, the biggest city in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Paul Kagame had every reason to think the world would give him a pass. That, after all, has been the pattern for years.
Frequently lauded by people such as Bono, Tony Blair, and Pastor Rick, the Rwandan president enjoys some extraordinary backing in the West—support that is particularly remarkable given his alleged hand in ongoing regional conflicts believed to have killed more than 5 million people since the mid-’90s.
On the aid and awards circuit, Kagame is known as the man who led Rwanda from the ashes of the...
SOURCE: National Interest (1-17-13)
Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, and the recently published A Matter of Principle.
With mounting incredulity and alarm — like, I am sure, many readers — I have watched the exhumation, by Oliver Stone, Peter Kuznick, and other members of a leftist claque of revisionist historians and pseudo-historians, of the putrefied historic corpse of Vice President Henry Agard Wallace. Wallace was the eccentric and impressionable son of the agriculture secretary who served under Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, and Wallace himself held the same...
SOURCE: Foreign Policy (1-17-13)
Robert Zaretsky is professor of history at the Honors College, University of Houston. His most recent books are Albert Camus: Elements of a Life and France and Its Empire Since 1870 (with Alice Conklin and Sarah Fishman).
Words, if not history, are repeating themselves in France. Following the French government's dispatch of planes and troops last week to Mali, whose government is besieged by Islamist rebels, a particular phrase -- l'union sacrée -- has been resurrected. Forged nearly a century ago, those two words nevertheless cast light on the future of France's current military intervention.
When President François Hollande announced last Friday that he had ordered the Mali operation, leading politicians quickly hailed his decision. "Sacred union" immediately became the phrase du jour of the French media. The conservative paper Le Figaro...
SOURCE: Foreign Affairs (1-2-13)
Charles Walton is Associate Professor of History at Yale University.
Before there were blockbuster films, there were blockbuster books. Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, published in 1862, was one of them. Thanks to a market-savvy publisher, this monument of French romanticism, which was serialized in ten installments, became an immediate bestseller across Europe and North America. Demand was so great that other authors, notably Gustave Flaubert, postponed the publications of their own books to avoid being outshined. On days when new installments went on sale in Paris, police were called in to stop impatient crowds from storming the bookstores. Some high-minded critics, not unlike those who spurn sensational Hollywood films today, found the hype distasteful. Edwin Percy Whipple, in a review for The Atlantic, referred to “the system of puffing” surrounding the book’s release in terms...
SOURCE: National Review (1-11-13)
Mr. Rosen is the chief Washington correspondent of Fox News and the author of The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate.
Either by design or through incompetence, the Obama administration’s war on terror has become indefinable. In fact, to the degree that there are identifiable policies, they seem either internally contradictory or at odds with other administration policies.
THE INHERITED PROTOCOLS
What is the current Obama position on the so-called Bush-era war-on-terror protocols? Are they still useful in stopping terrorists, irrelevant, toxic, or sort of all three? The administration has never given us an explanation of its attitude toward the continued operation of Guantanamo Bay, the use of military tribunals, the exact status of renditions, the use...
SOURCE: National Review (1-11-13)
John Fund is a national-affairs columnist for NRO.
January 9 marked what would have been Richard Nixon’s 100th birthday and reignited an old debate among conservatives. Some view him as an underappreciated statesman who is a victim of a liberal double standard. Conrad Black proclaimed in a 2011piece on NRO that Nixon was “halfway to Mount Rushmore.” I have a more negative take: I believe that Richard Nixon governed more as a liberal than anything else, and that the Watergate scandal set back the cause of conservatism. From our failure to control runaway spending to restrictions on campaign finance, we are still dealing with the repercussions of his mistakes.
There is clear evidence that Nixon didn’t really like or trust conservatives, even if he hired a bunch of them. Rather, he used them and freely abandoned their principles when convenient. In a 1983 interview, he told historian Joan Hoff...
SOURCE: Weekly Standard (12-31-12)
Max Boot is the author of "Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present."
Everyone still remembers T. E. Lawrence, if only because of David Lean’s magnificent movie Lawrence of Arabia and Lawrence’s own literary masterpiece, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Yet far fewer remember Lawrence’s distant cousin, the British Army officer Orde Wingate, who was in many ways his World War II counterpart—not least in his eccentricity, his pungent writing style, his flair for publicity, and his tragic, premature death. A partial exception is to be found in Israel, where he is still remembered asHayedid (the Friend) for his Zionist sympathies. But Wingate remains little known in the United States or even in Burma, the land whose freedom he gave his life for. Last summer while visiting Myanmar, as the country is now known, I asked several well-educated Burmese if they were familiar with Wingate. I drew...
SOURCE: WaPo (1-11-13)
Barbara A. Perry is a senior fellow in the presidential oral history program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. Its interviews are available online.
Legislative horse-trading on Inauguration Day
I had several meetings with the Georgia [congressional] delegation, either private breakfasts at the White House or even before I went to the inauguration. We had a tacit understanding that if I really needed them on an issue of importance that I would let them know directly and they would make every effort to support me, even though it was damaging for them at home. But if I didn’t really need them, they would vote in accordance with what they thought was best for them and their own constituents.
— President Jimmy Carter on his 1977 inauguration...
SOURCE: Washington Monthly (1-1-13)
Taylor Branch and Haley Sweetland Edwards collaborated on this article. Branch is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who first wrote for the Washington Monthly in 1969. His new book, "The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement," is being published in January 2013. Haley Sweetland Edwards is an editor of the Washington Monthly.
In October 1961, Martin Luther King Jr. and President John F. Kennedy took an after-lunch stroll through the elegant hallways of the White House residence. Their meeting that day was not official: it was not in the White House’s appointment book, and King had not been formally invited to discuss any sort of business. It was instead a guarded and rather stilted introduction for leaders of professed goodwill, in a political climate that remained extremely sensitive about race.
When the men passed the Lincoln Bedroom on their tour, King noticed the...
SOURCE: Washington Monthly (1-1-13)
Douglas A. Blackmon is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II." He teaches at the University of Virginia's Miller Center and is a contributing editor at the Washington Post. Find more images, documents, and a link to the documentary based on "Slavery by Another Name," which will be rebroadcast on PBS on February 22, at www.slaverybyanothername.com.
On July 31, 1903, a letter addressed to President Theodore Roosevelt arrived at the White House. It had been mailed from the town of Bainbridge, Georgia, the prosperous seat of a cotton county perched on the Florida state line.
The sender was a barely literate African American woman named Carrie Kinsey. With little punctuation and few capital letters, she penned the bare facts of the abduction of her fourteen-year-old brother, James Robinson, who a year earlier had...
SOURCE: Washington Monthly (1-1-13)
Douglas A. Blackmon is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II." He teaches at the University of Virginia's Miller Center and is a contributing editor at the Washington Post. Find more images, documents, and a link to the documentary based on "Slavery by Another Name," which will be rebroadcast on PBS on February 22, at www.slaverybyanothername.com.
On July 31, 1903, a letter addressed to President Theodore Roosevelt arrived at the White House. It had been mailed from the town of Bainbridge, Georgia, the prosperous seat of a cotton county perched on the Florida state line.
The sender was a barely literate African American woman named Carrie Kinsey. With little punctuation and few capital letters, she penned the bare facts of the abduction of her fourteen-year-old brother, James Robinson, who a year earlier had...
SOURCE: Washington Monthly (1-1-13)
Nicholas Lemann, a Washington Monthly contributing editor, is dean of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and the author of "Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War."
Children in elementary school often come home with the idea that the purpose of the Civil War was to end slavery—but if that were true, then why did it take Abraham Lincoln so long to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, and why was it less than universally popular in the Union states? If you see the movie Lincoln, you get a much fuller picture of the contingency of emancipation, and of the difficulty of passing the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished slavery completely—but why didn’t Lincoln and the Congress think to address at the same time the obvious question of what status the freed slaves would have after that? After Lincoln’s assassination, Congress and the state governments settled that matter...
SOURCE: The Root (1-14-13)
Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research at Harvard University. He is also the editor-in-chief of The Root.
(The Root) -- Amazing Fact About the Negro No. 14: Were slaves actually eaten by dogs, as was shown in the film Django Unchained? Also, was it unusual for slaves to ride horses -- and were they really forced to fight each other to the death?
One of the scholar's favorite spectator sports when it comes to our version of film "criticism" is the gleeful search for historical inaccuracies in Hollywood feature films. Pursued with enough intensity and zeal, this sort of Monday morning quarterbacking can be a veritable blood sport, which is no idle metaphor when reflecting on Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained. The film contains one of the...
SOURCE: WSJ (1-10-13)
Mr. Radosh is a columnist for PJ Media and an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute. He is the co-author of "Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War" (Yale University Press, 2001).
For many years, the American left has combed the past for history lessons that will aid their effort to move the United States toward European-style social democracy, if not a full-fledged socialist utopia. The most successful leftist intellectual in that enterprise was the late Howard Zinn, whose books—such as "A People's History of the United States," first published in 1980—have sold millions of copies and are still used by high schools and colleges nationwide. Zinn believed that by emphasizing the struggles of working people, women and people of color against their supposed oppressors, his work could mobilize a new generation to carry on the fight of yesterday's radical heroes.
That search for a usable past has been taken up in a new form by filmmaker Oliver...
SOURCE: NYT Disunion Blog (1-10-13)
Rick Beard, an independent historian, is senior adviser for the Pennsylvania Civil War 150 Committee and volunteer coordinator of the Civil War Sesquicentennial for the American Association for State and Local History.
On Jan. 10, 1863, a military tribunal of nine Union generals found Maj. Gen. Fitz John Porter guilty of two charges stemming from his actions at the Second Battle of Manassas the previous August. Eleven days later, Porter was dismissed from the Army and “forever disqualified from holding any office or trust or profit under the Government of the United States.” After signing the order cashiering Porter, President Lincoln remarked, “In any other country but this, the man would have been shot.” His uncharacteristically harsh assessment reveals the controversy and political machinations that surrounded Porter’s court martial as well as the lingering drama accompanying the recent removal of his friend and patron, George McClellan, from command of the Union...
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (1-9-13)
Peter Foster is the Telegraph's US Editor based in Washington DC.
When Abraham Lincoln breathed his last on the morning of Easter Saturday 1865, at 7.22am, his friend, the war secretary Edwin M Stanton, stood before the roomful of mourners who had gathered in a vigil at his bedside and declared: "Now he belongs to the ages."
People tend to say these portentous kinds of things about departing US presidents, especially if they have just been assassinated, but in the case of "Honest" Abe Lincoln, those words turned out to be truly prophetic. From the moment of his death, right up to the present day when Steven Spielberg’s new film Lincoln has packed out cinemas across America and looks likely to pick up a pile of awards, the 16th president of the United States has been lionised and loved like no other.
The sanctification of Lincoln’s memory began almost immediately. That Easter Sunday in 1865, according to the Lincoln historian Jennifer L Weber...
SOURCE: Guardian (UK) (1-10-13)
US columnist Michael A Cohen is author of Live from the Campaign Trail: The Greatest Presidential Campaign Speeches of the 20th Century and How They Shaped Modern America.
This week saw the 100th birthday of America's 37th president, Richard Milhous Nixon.
With the benefit of hindsight, Nixon has one of the most remarkable political legacies of any figure in modern American history – winner of four national elections (as president and vice-presidential), on a presidential ballot every year but one from 1952 to 1972, and one of the most dominating political personalities of the second half of the 20th century.
Here was the man who "went to China", spurred détente with the Soviets, signed into law the establishment of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), took America off the gold standard and ended the ...
SOURCE: PJ Media (1-6-13)
Ron Radosh is a PJ Media columnist and Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute.
I did not plan to write again about Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick’s Untold History of the United States, their Showtime documentary series and accompanying book. Three things, however, have prompted me to once again address the series and its continuing distortions and lies.
First: in the January 10 issue of The New York Review of Books, the publisher of Stone and Kuznick’s book — Gallery Books — took out a full page ad proclaiming the companion volume to the TV series an “Instant New York Times Bestseller,” although when I searched the paper’s list I could not find it anywhere, even in their extended list of non-fiction bestsellers.
The ad reproduces blurbs by a group of major U.S. historians — many of them leftists — but includes some mainstream and well-known scholars. Lloyd Gardner of Rutgers University calls their book one...
SOURCE: The Atlantic (1-9-13)
Mark Nuckols is a professor of law and business at the Moscow State University Higher School of Business and at the Russian Academy of National Economy.
Naomi Wolf has for many years now been claiming that a fascist coup in America is imminent. Most recently in The Guardian she alleged, with no substantiation, that the U.S. government and big American banks are conspiring to impose a "totally integrated corporate-state repression of dissent." Many of her arguments rely on what she styles as rigorous historical research and analysis of current events. But if you compare her characterizations of the historical sources and current news accounts that she cites with the sources themselves, it is possible to discern a pattern of egregious misstatements and errors in her political writing.
Skeptics have been raising serious questions about her books...
