THE NEW History Phenomenon - the flourishing of history in the media since the late Nineties - now has its own history. Professor David Cannadine of the Institute of Historical Research has collected a group of 11 historians and media folk who - with one signal exception - have written interesting and illuminating essays on diverse aspects of this recent cultural and intellectual revolution.

In a thoughtful introduction, Cannadine advances a number of explanations himself, including the advent of the anti-historical New Labour government, the Millennium, the end of the British Empire when Hong Kong's lease expired, the demographic explosion of history graduates, the IT revolution and even the Golden Jubilee and the death of the Queen Mother.

My own theory, that history is being taught too cursorily in schools, leaving people with an unslaked thirst for it in later life, also gets an airing. We're the only country in Europe to allow children to opt out of history at 14, which is a national disgrace.

Senior practitioners in the media-history industry, such as Simon Schama (who focuses on the problems with television history), Melvyn Bragg (on how he made his The Adventure of English series), David Puttnam (on how history fares in Hollywood) and Max Hastings (on academics' love-hate relationship with journalists), have written insightful, thought-provoking and occasionally amusing short pieces - the book is only 166 pages long - based on their experience in the profession.

Sir Ian Kershaw, the biographer of Hitler and the historical consultant for the Bafta-winning BBC2 series"The Nazis: A Warning from History", believes that the sheer power of the medium gives television history the force it wields today."A few seconds of TV coverage can convey a message more movingly and starkly than acres of print," he writes, and with many more historians at British universities than in the 1970s much more history finds its way on to our screens.

For John Tusa, the former managing director of the World Service, it is the political relevance of television history that keeps ever-increasing numbers of us tuned in. Yet despite"the utility of history" for modern-day politics, he pessimistically records how"All the same attitudes, the identical prejudices and, of course, the same mistakes are repeated despite the available lessons of history...."

Ian Buruma, in the New Yorker (June 14-21, 2004):

In the course of a distinguished academic career at the University of London and at Princeton, Bernard Lewis has never been afraid to dip his scholarly hands in the muck of current affairs. A mentor to Henry (Scoop) Jackson in the early nineteen-seventies, and a friend to several Israeli Prime Ministers, Lewis has been especially sought after in Washington since September 11th. Karl Rove invited him to speak at the White House. Richard Perle and Dick Cheney are among his admirers. Lewis has championed his friend Ahmad Chalabi for a leading role in Iraq. And his best-selling book “What Went Wrong?,” about the decline of Muslim civilization, is regarded in some circles as a kind of handbook in the war against Islamist terrorism. Lewis, in short, is a thoroughly political don, and if anyone can be said to have provided the intellectual muscle for recent United States policy toward the Middle East it would have to be him.

Lewis’s latest book, “From Babel to Dragomans” (Oxford; $28), collects essays written over the past half century, on topics ranging from medieval interpreters (dragomans) and Jews in ancient Persia to what to do with Saddam Hussein. Yet, for a man who inspired the neoconservative firebrands, some of Lewis’s ideas are surprisingly cautious. In 1957, he argued that the West should take as little action as possible in the Middle East, since “we of the West . . . should beware of proposing solutions that, however good, are discredited by the very fact of our having suggested them.” In 1991, he wrote about the “age-old autocratic traditions” in the Arab world, and warned that there is “no guarantee” that efforts to democratize “will succeed, and even if they do, after how long and at what price.” As late as 2002, in an interview with the Jerusalem Post, he struck yet another note of prudence. “Democracy is dangerous anywhere,” he said. “We talk sometimes as if democracy were the natural human condition, as if any deviation from it is a crime to be punished or a disease to be cured. That is not true. Democracy, or what we call democracy nowadays, is the parochial custom of the English-speaking peoples for the conduct of their public affairs, which may or may not be suitable for others.”

This is not exactly the stuff that excites readers of the Weekly Standard, or the hotter heads in the Pentagon. There is, however, another Bernard Lewis to be found in this book, a more strident figure who believes not only that the United States was too soft during the Vietnam War but that Middle Eastern dictatorships must be overthrown with force. Negotiating with the ayatollahs of Iran, and with other anti-American autocrats, is useless: “As with the Axis and the Soviet Union, real peace will come only with their defeat or, preferably, collapse, and their replacement by governments that have been chosen and can be dismissed by their people.” As for the immediate consequences of turning such ideals into policies, Lewis, particularly in his more recent writings, is oddly insouciant. He said in 2001 that public opinion in Iraq and Iran was so pro-American that both peoples would rejoice if the United States Army liberated them. A year later, he repeated the message that “if we succeed in overthrowing the regimes of what President Bush has rightly called the ‘Axis of Evil,’ the scenes of rejoicing in their cities would even exceed those that followed the liberation of Kabul.” Most Iraqis did cheer the demise of their tyrant, but Lewis could have offered some words of warning about what might follow the celebrations.

Nor was the fastidious scholar of Middle Eastern subtleties much in evidence when Lewis glibly used the attack on the World Trade Center to advocate a war on Saddam Hussein. In an article written days after the attack, he suggested that seeing the United States go to war with Saddam would be “the dearest wish” of other Arab regimes. Of course, the feelings of most Arab leaders were a little more complicated than that; and the chaos created by the American intervention is now causing almost universal alarm....

Jacob Heilbrunn, an editorial writer for the Los Angeles Times, in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (June 14, 2004):

It's no secret that the Bush administration has a fetish for secrecy. Whether it's keeping the records of Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force concealed or denying the 9-11 commission key documents, the administration regularly displays disdain for open government.

But does that contempt extend even to the office of the national archivist?

The left apparently believes it does, and that's why President Bush's nomination of Allen Weinstein -- author of the definitive biography of Alger Hiss, "Perjury" -- for the post of national archivist has triggered a furor.

"The American people need a better custodian of their history," The Nation magazine editorialized. The Society of American Archivists and the Organization of American Historians are questioning Weinstein's credentials. American Universityhistorian Anna Nelson told The Washington Post, "This is pretty sneaky."

Actually, it isn't. Far from being an unsuitable candidate, Weinstein is vastly more qualified for the job than the current archivist, former Kansas Gov. John Carlin. Weinstein brings a long record of first-rate scholarship and experience running Washington-based organizations, including the Center for Democracy, which helped push for election reform around the world.

But that's not sufficient for his enemies on the left. Instead, Weinstein has become a target for scholars who despise Bush and for those who continue to insist that Hiss was never a spy for the Soviet Union and want payback.

To undermine Weinstein's credentials, adversaries have confected a series of charges of sloppy scholarship. Beginning with Victor Navasky, publisher of The Nation, critics have cited Weinstein's reluctance to open his files on the Hiss case.

Although Weinstein has kept his files closed on the advice of his attorneys for fear of continual frivolous lawsuits by Hiss partisans -- including one he settled out of court in 1979 to avoid a protracted battle -- he has never been reflexively hostile to showing his files to serious scholars. He opened the files in the 1990s to New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus, then an unknown writer working on a biography of Hiss' accuser, Whittaker Chambers. If Weinstein were a compulsively secretive scholar, he would not have done so.

Weinstein's foes also decry his reliance on secret Soviet documents for his 1999 book, "The Haunted Wood" -- documents that were not made available to other scholars. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, University of California-Irvine professor Jon Wiener complained that "Weinstein's publisher, Random House, paid approximately $100,000 to an organization of retired KGB agents to gain exclusive access to the documents for its authors -- something widely regarded as a violation of research ethics."

Please. The pious indignation is touching, but Weinstein and his co-author, former KGB operative Alexander Vassiliev, had zero chance of obtaining the documents unless they complied with the Russian foreign service intelligence archive's onerous restrictions on access. As Mark Kramer, director of Harvard's project on the Cold War, told me in an e-mail, "Weinstein had absolutely no say in the matter."

When his book originally appeared in 1978, Weinstein, then a young scholar at Smith College who had initially hoped to prove Hiss' innocence but revised his view after studying thousands of documents, was seen as the real traitor. He had questioned one of the unassailable verities of the left -- that Hiss, who spent 44 months in a federal penitentiary, was a victim of an anti-communist witch hunt.

Today, no respectable scholar believes this fairy tale. The revelations from the Soviet archives have overwhelmingly confirmed that Weinstein had it right....

HNN blogger Tom Bruscino (June 8, 2004):

With Memorial Day and the 60th Anniversary of D-Day over the last two weekends, attention has once again turned toward military history. The rush of book reviews of World War II has once again brought to the fore an issue that deserves closer scrutiny: the ongoing and offhand evisceration of the work of Stephen Ambrose by some professional book reviewers.

In Washington Post Book World, book reviewer Jonathan Yardley, begins his review of Matthew Parker’s new study of the Battle of Monte Cassino with this line:"Those who have been persuaded by Tom Brokaw, Stephen Ambrose, Hollywood screenwriters and other facile popularizers to a romantic, sentimental view of World War II as the"good war" fought by"the greatest generation" are advised to spend a few hours with Matthew Parker's grim depiction of the six-month battle in 1943-44 to gain control of Monte Cassino in central Italy." Yardley is not alone. Atlantic Monthly book review editor Benjamin Schwarz began his October 2003 review of Paul Fussell’s The Boys’ Crusade with,"In this superb, tough-minded, and impressionistic introduction to the experiences of the U.S. infantry in northwest Europe from D-Day to Germany's surrender, Paul Fussell confronts the sanctimonious"military romanticism" of Messrs. Ambrose, Brokaw, and Spielberg,"which, if not implying that war is really good for you, does suggest that it contains desirable elements--pride, companionship, and the consciousness of virtue enforced by deadly weapons.""

Mercifully, both Yardley and Schwarz avoid Ambrose’s plagiarism, so we can perhaps save that debate for another time. We can also debate the merits of the book The Greatest Generation (although I don’t know why) and the movie Saving Private Ryan (much more useful) later. But grouping broadly the work of a distinguished scholar and first-rate historian like Ambrose with the books of journalist Tom Brokaw and movies of filmmaker Steven Spielberg is ridiculous on its face. Although Ambrose served as a consultant on Private Ryan and a producer of the miniseries based on his book Band of Brothers, there is no comparison of his lifetime of research, training, and experience in the historical profession with the work of Brokaw and Spielberg. Such comparisons are done solely to dismiss his arguments as amateurish and superficial. Yardley's and Schwarz's real issue with Ambrose is when they call him a facile popularizer and sanctimonious military romantic. So let's look at those charges.

Here 2001 review by Schwarz of Ambrose's World War II book for children The Good Fight is interesting. Schwarz criticizes Ambrose for"retroactively impos[ing] an elevated meaning on the American side of the war." Like almost anyone, Schwarz has little problem with praising American infantrymen for being tough and brave. But he takes especial issue with Ambrose"insisting on a sentimental and high-minded explanation of what those men believed they were fighting for." Schwarz writes:

“Ambrose, if not Brokaw, has read too much military history not to acknowledge plainly--as he wrote in a passage in Citizen Soldiers which contradicts the thrust of the rest of the book--that, according to the vast literature that assesses the motivation of U.S. fighters in World War II, “there is agreement that patriotism or any other form of idealism had little if anything to do with it.” “The GIs fought because they had to,” he continued. “What held them together was not country and flag, but unit cohesion.” In the same book Ambrose papered over this difficulty by informing his readers that although the GIs fought for “decency and democracy,” “they just didn't talk or write about it”. How, then, does he know? Rather than rely on what these men did write and say repeatedly during the war (which boils down to the reasonable, even courageously clear-eyed, but hardly righteous formula of kill or be killed, fight the war to end it so that we can go home), Ambrose draws on reminiscences and interviews and at least one “beer-drinking bull session” with a small number of veterans forty-five years after the fact--hardly the most reliable testimony."

Furthermore, Citizen Soldiers was a study of the combat experience in Europe from the perspective of soldiers and junior officers, not an argumentative book about enlistment or combat motivation. Ambrose was just providing his informed impression that though the men did not talk about it, they had a deep-down belief that they were fighting for a just cause. As someone who has also read thousands of World War II interviews, oral histories, questionnaires, and memoirs I happen to think Ambrose was correct. See Peter Kindsvatter’s 2003 study of soldiers in the twentieth century American Soldiers on this question. All that said, Schwarz is still right to question Ambrose’s impressionistic conclusion for not providing evidence. The problem is making the jump from that criticism to dismissing him for sanctimoniously romanticizing war.

I suspect Yardley’s and Schwarz’s problem with Ambrose stems from elsewhere. One line from Yardley’s review is instructive:"Certainly World War II was necessary, and the cause for which the Allies fought was just, but there was nothing pretty about it." I’m not sure Ambrose would disagree with that sentence, but he might ask Yardley to define “pretty.” Fighting a necessary war for a just cause seems to me to be one of the more beautiful things humans can do. But if he means that the actual fighting was bloody and messy and terrible, then I suggest that reading Citizen Soldiers or D-Day or Band of Brothers, or even this interview will lead to exactly the same conclusion.

In the eyes of Yardley and Schwarz, Ambrose’s great sin was in concluding that the necessity of the war and the justness of America’s cause was far more important than the ugliness of the fighting. How dare he call it “the good war” without the irony of someone like Studs Terkel (in the title to his disorganized and overrated oral history of the war). Schwarz says as much in the concluding sentences to his review:"...the great problem with Ambrose's books--especially this one--is that they fail to treat history as tragic, ironic, paradoxical, and ambiguous. If readers are old enough to study an event that involved the deaths of more than 60 million people, they are old enough to learn that one studies history not to simplify issues but to illuminate their complexities."

Yet oftentimes 'illuminating complexities' is just a cover for muddled thinking. For all its complexities, there are some simple issues we should keep in mind about World War II. In the grandest sense, the tragedy would have been the United States and its Allies losing the war. There is nothing ironic, paradoxical, or ambiguous about the fact that the world would have been a far worse place had the Allies lost. All of the details of the war must be dealt with in light of that truth, as Stephen Ambrose came to understand over the course of his career. If in the eyes of Jonathan Yardley and Benjamin Schwarz or any others that view makes him a facile popularizer or sanctimonious military romantic, then I humbly suggest they need to reexamine their own understanding of irony, paradox, and ambiguity when it comes to the Second World War.

Dale McCartney, in Left Hook (May 2004):

On Thursday the 25th of March, the first of the 4-day annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, Howard Zinn was honoured with an evening spot as a plenary speaker. He spoke on “The Uses of History,” clearly a topic that he is uniquely positioned to discuss. There is an irony in a professional association of historians inviting a speaker who has spent a significant portion of his career hectoring other professional historians for their failure to engage with politics in any meaningful manner. Regardless of the irony, the topic is a perfect choice for such a speaker. Not only has Zinn established himself as a legend because of his activism among historians, he is the author of the bible of radical American history – A People's History of the United States . A People's History has occasioned considerable comment ever since its publication in 1980, and with his appearance in Boston this weekend, a new collection of critiques has appeared.

The most prominent of these recent reviews was published in the online winter 2004 edition of Dissent magazine (www.dissentmagazine.org). Michael Kazin, himself a prominent labour historian, lashes out at Zinn and his masterwork, deriding it as “bad history, albeit gilded with virtuous intentions.” Kazin reads Zinn's work as “better suited to a conspiracy-monger's website than a work of scholarship.” His complaints come fast and furious, but they seem to boil down to one complaint formulated in two different ways. Kazin finds Zinn's work reductionist – that is, he complains that Zinn oversimplifies American history both politically and historically. A People's History , in Kazin's view, is a “painful narrative about ordinary folks who keep struggling to achieve equality, democracy and a tolerant society, yet somehow are always defeated by a tiny band of rulers whose wiles match their greed.” For Kazin, this sort of narrative fails to account for the historical uniqueness of figures like George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, and doesn't do justice to the differing motivations of activists and rebels of the past. Kazin's head-shaking goes so far that he laments the book's enormous sales, suggesting that it has contributed to keeping “the left just where it is: on the margins of American political life.”

Kazin's review itself oversimplifies the issue, as a careful reading of Zinn's work reveals that he offers a considerably nuanced vision of his subjects. Importantly, and this is the reason for Zinn's success, his subjects are the “ordinary folks,” and not the Washingtons and Jeffersons of American history. Zinn's work is not academic history, although Zinn clearly has the breadth of knowledge only possible through a life of study. Instead, the book is a chronicle of ordinary folks, for ordinary folks. Kazin is right to suggest that Zinn has written a political document, as well as an historical one – where he's wrong is in assuming that these are not compatible. Kazin calls the book a polemic, and it's an accurate description. Zinn is not neglecting a more objective perspective on American history; he's rejecting it in favor of an openly political stance that reclaims the history of oppressed peoples, regardless of race or gender. His popularity is testament to both the appeal of such a reading of American history, and the desperate thirst of working class people, people of colour, women and the many other victims of modern society's ravages for a history in which they are at the centre. I would go so far as to argue that not only has Kazin underestimated the importance of this role for Zinn's book, but that the academic tradition of objectivity (read: liberalism that favors white men) has played a key role in marginalizing oppressed peoples and derailing social movements. Zinn's work is an important corrective to this destructive tradition in historical writing.