Madeleine Stern was a renowned antiquarian book dealer, but her most important discovery was not a book at all. It was a series of lurid stories, all published in gaudy popular journals, all written under a pseudonym, all by New England’s fresh and hearty Louisa May Alcott.

During her lifetime, the last vestiges of Victorianism gave way to modernism, to pop, to postmodernism. Cars replaced horses. Television, computers, cellphones, the Internet all came to conquer the world she grew up in. She traveled to Europe just before World War II and after. Revolutions came, and revolutions went. But Stern barely registered these changes, for she was creating her own revolution.

Stern invented herself. She was the Gatsby of pedants. A fervent but utterly apolitical feminist in a world where feminists were bluestockings and then bra burners; a devoted scholar with a thriving business in a world where scholars were either academics or independently wealthy gentlemen; an innovative and revered entrepreneur in the leather-armchair world of gentlemen antiquarian book dealers; unmarried in a world where women were wives, Stern lived in a universe in which it was not possible to live the way she wanted to. She simply ignored that impossibility, created her own universe and, in a small but exquisite way, changed the world....

As I pulled out of Tucson listening to an audiobook of Jared Diamond’s “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,” the first of a procession of blue-and-yellow billboards pointed the way to Arizona’s strangest roadside attraction, “The Thing?”

The come-ons were slicker and brighter than those I remembered from childhood trips out West. But the destination was the same: a curio store and gas station just off the highway at a remote whistle stop called Dragoon, Ariz.

Dragoon is also home to an archaeological research center, the Amerind Foundation, where a group of archaeologists, cultural anthropologists and historians converged in the fall for a seminar, “Choices and Fates of Human Societies.”

What the scientists held in common was a suspicion that in writing his two best-selling sagas of civilization — the other is “Guns, Germs and Steel” — Dr. Diamond washed over the details that make cultures unique to assemble a grand unified theory of history.

“A big-picture man,” one participant called him. For anthropologists, who spend their lives reveling in minutiae — the specifics and contradictions of human culture — the words are not necessarily a compliment.

“Everybody knows that the beauty of Diamond is that it’s simple,” said Patricia A. McAnany, an archaeologist at Boston University who organized the meeting with her colleague Norman Yoffee of the University of Michigan. “It’s accessible intellectually without having to really turn the wattage up too much.”...

A great historian died last Tuesday in McLean, Virginia, after an eight-year battle with pancreatic cancer, at the age of 60. Bill Strauss was both a college classmate of mine (although I did not meet him until our 25th reunion) and for some years a close friend. I have already expressed many personal feelings about his death on www.fourthturning.com, the web site he and his collaborator Neil Howe created in 1997, and on my own historyunfolding.com. Today I want to talk about their work and, sadly, what it tells me about the state of the historical profession.

Strauss and Howe wrote two major works of American history: Generations, The History of America’s Future(1991) and The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy (1996). I reviewed the latter book for the Boston Globe and posted the review yesterday on historyunfolding.com. As they explained to me many years ago, when they began Generations, they simply wanted to identify the various generations in American history and talk about their contributions to American life. In the midst of their research, however, they had an extraordinary epiphany. It began, Bill once told me, when they noticed the similarity between two sets of the generations to which they were giving names: the Republicans (Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Marshall), Compromisers (Clay, Webster, Buchanan) and Transcendentals (Garrison, Jefferson Davis, Sumner and Lincoln), on the one hand, and the GIs (JFK, Nixon, Reagan), Silents (John McCain, Colin Powell, Michael Dukakis) and Boomers (Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Grover Norquist) on the other. Pursuing that lead, they discovered, and elaborated, a recurring 80-year pattern of generations and eras in American history. (My review, linked above, summarizes it.) More importantly, they predicted, first in Generations and more definitely in The Fourth Turning, that the United States would by 2010 or so at the latest find itself in the midst of a national crisis comparable to the civil war or the Great Depression and Second World War. Influenced by them, I repeated that warning at the end of my own American Tragedy, published in early 2000, and virtually everything that has happened since has confirmed, to me, that they were right.

In my opinion, those books were the most truly original and valuable historical works produced by the Boom generation (born 1943-1960 according to their definition, which is based on life experience rather than simple demographics.) Only amateurs, I am sorry to say, could have written it. Strauss had a law degree and a masters in public policy (and was also a founder of the comedy troop the Capitol Steps), and Howe had (perhaps wisely) quit graduate school before finishing his dissertation. They read widely to write their books, but were not deterred, as almost any professional would be, by the enormity of what they were trying to do. Their analyses are often impressionistic, and, like most Boomers, they could be quite dogmatic. They insisted on strict chronological boundaries between generations, and I have always felt that some of those boundaries were probably wrong. These are the kinds of rough edges that could eventually be smoothed out by more research and analysis, and they do not, for me, detract from the brilliance of their achievement. When I started reading Generations I disagreed with many things, but I was too excited to get a good night’s sleep for the better part of a week. Their books changed the way I viewed the world, and history, permanently, and many things that had puzzled me suddenly became clear.

Their reception both in the mainstream media and in academia has been disappointing. My own review was, I think, the only one they ever got that really understood what they were doing. Meanwhile, only two professional historians, as far as I know, have ever discussed their work at all. One is David Krein, an historian of 19th-century Britain, now retired, who wrote a fine article in The Journal of the Historical Society showing quantitatively that generational difference was a better predictor of voting behavior than party difference in the House of Commons during the 1840s. The other, of course, is myself. Strauss and Howe’s analysis of the GI (or “greatest”) generation found its way into American Tragedy, and helped explain a great deal about the way in which the veterans of the Second World War had assumed that they could replay it in Southeast Asia in the midst of a completely different era. More recently, I published an article in the journal the Monist, “Neither Marxist nor Whig: The Great Atlantic Crises, 1774-1962,” which showed how the theory could be applied across the whole Atlantic world, and not merely to the United States, with very striking results.

I have also found the theory to be a very powerful teaching tool. In 1998 I started an elective, “Generations in Film,” at the Naval War College, using movies, as well as one of their books, to look at the differences among generations in various different contexts from the 1930s to the present. It has been a consistent hit, and two alumni have arranged for me to speak about it elsewhere subsequently. Last year, as a visiting professor at Williams College, I got to try the course there, and the results were extraordinarily gratifying. Students love it because it allows them to place their generational archetype (Strauss and Howe identified four recurring ones) within other periods of history, and to understand more about the differences between them and their parents and grandparents. Unfortunately, it seems quite likely that that will be the only time such a course is given at an American college or university.

I also tried, and eventually succeeded, in convening a conference panel on the subject. I originally proposed it to the AHA in, I believe, 1998. Between them the four panelists (including Strauss and Howe) had written about 15 books, but the AHA refused the panel, claiming paradoxically that it was striving for a variety of topics. That was the last straw in my long and difficult relationship with that body, and I quit. But the Historical Association did host the panel in 2004, and it was quite successful. (Neil Howe presented a paper along with David Krein and myself, and Anne Rose commented. Bill Strauss was getting over a cancer treatment and could not make it.)

The Strauss-Howe books are, in my opinion, a sad commentary on the state of the historical profession—because no professional would ever even have attempted them. It would be difficult indeed to find a working professional historian with the kind of knowledge they showed of the whole sweep of American history going back to colonial times, and it would be impossible to find one, I think, who would dare to look for, and succeed in finding, the 80-year pattern. Professional historians are trained to lock themselves within narrow specialties, and those who break those rules pay a heavy price. I, like Strauss and Howe, have always felt that some historians should try to use the information that accumulates year after year in monographs to draw more profound conclusions. When in 1977—after my first year of teaching—I made that argument in a departmental retreat, a senior faculty member asked me if we should return to the days of “Frisky Merriman” at Harvard, who concluded his western civilization course by holding out his watch chain, letting the watch swing like a pendulum, and explaining that it represented the regular alternation of liberty and authority. That of course got a laugh, but I commented to another junior faculty member at a break that in my opinion, accumulated research should indeed allow us to do what Merriman did—only better. I eventually tried to do just that in Politics and War: European Conflict from Philip II to Hitler—a book that immediately became a main selection of the History Book Club, but which my fellow professionals have almost completely ignored. Yet I am not sorry to have spent the better part of a decade uncovering four different patterns of European conflict extending across four centuries of history. As Strauss and Howe also proved, broader patterns are there to be discovered if we take the time and show the enterprise to look for them.

Strauss and Howe discovered that their ideas have considerable resonance in the business and political worlds, where dollars and votes can depend on a proper understanding of different generations. Al Gore read Generations and I feel pretty sure that Karl Rove looked at The Fourth Turning at some point or another. A few secondary school teachers also use their ideas, and a few hundred amateurs debate them on the web site they established. My article in The Monist shows how they could be used to teach the modern history of the Atlantic World. I do not, however, see how their ideas will ever catch on at all widely in contemporary academia, where professionalization and ideology have left no room for truly original and far-ranging thought. My thanks go out to them, not only for letting me see the world and its history in a new way, but for proving that such work can still be done. Younger generations, I am sure, will read them with pleasure and profit in years to come.

[Cemil Aydin is a specialist on the intellectual and political history of decolonization and anti-Westernism, especially with respect to Japan and the Ottoman Empire.]

Michael Penn: I'd like to begin by asking you how it is that you became interested in studying prewar and wartime Japanese scholarship on the Islamic world as well as the broader topic of anti-Westernism in Asia.

Cemil Aydin: In my graduate school education, I was initially interested in doing a global-comparative history of Ottoman and Japanese modernization. Like all Ph.D. students, my choice of a research topic emerged out of intensive readings for the Ph.D. examinations, conversations with professors and historiographical controversies. Well, after taking several classes with Akira Iriye, John Dower, Albert Craig, Herbert Bix and Andrew Gordon, I did have a general sense of the field. It was during this process, while reading Prof. Selcuk Esenbel's first articles on Abdurresid Ibrahim and Japan's links with Muslim Pan-Asianists, and an article by Harry Harootunian on the "Japanese Revolt against the West," that I first encountered Okawa Shumei's writings on the Muslim world. I remember being puzzled by the fact that one of Japan's leading Pan-Asianists was also the founder of Islamic Studies in that country. This exciting reading process coincided with the controversies on Pan-Asianism and historical memory provoked by a Japanese revisionist movie on Tojo Hideki and the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal called Pride. In the end, I decided to write a thesis on Okawa Shumei's Pan-Asianism, which allowed me to discuss two controversial issues, namely the roots of anti-Westernism and the complex relationship between Pan-Asianism and imperialism.

I completed my thesis just a year after September 11 while there was much scholarly and non-scholarly interest in the questions of anti-Westernism. As someone who worked on Japanese critiques of the West, I became very concerned about a particular view, highly influential in American foreign policy, which explained Muslim critiques of the West as an eternal conflict between Islam and Christendom. According to this theory of "What Went Wrong," Muslims were unique in their discontent with the international order and Western powers because they could simply not accept seeing Christians being more powerful and prosperous than themselves. Of course, you can imagine the policy implications of such an analysis. Students of Japan know well that rejection of the Western hegemony or modernity was a powerful theme in Japanese intellectual history, even though Japan had nothing to do with the Islamic tradition. Through comparison of anti-Western ideas of Pan-Asianism in Japan and Pan-Islamism in the Middle East, I tried to show that anti-Westernism is a complex, yet modern, phenomenon that is neither a religious conservative reaction to Western universalism nor a natural response to imperialism.

Michael Penn: Can you give us a general idea of how significant Japan's wartime scholarship on Islam really was? Broadly speaking, why does it deserve our attention today?

Cemil Aydin: To start with, there was an impressive boom of scholarship on the Muslim world in wartime Japan, which is not well-known today. More importantly, this scholarship was surprisingly sympathetic to Muslim societies, at times displaying identification between Japanese and Muslims as fellow Asians and Easterners with shared problems.

Understanding the characteristics and achievements of this scholarship is important in several ways: It gives us a unique perspective on the relationship between empires and knowledge if we compare Japanese scholarship with European scholarship on the Muslim world. Wartime-era Japanese scholars of Islam were not free from imperial projects and interests, and their work was framed by broader imperial needs and discourses. Yet, even when we recognize the complicity of area studies scholarship with imperial interests, there is another question: Did the fact that Japan was a non-white and non-Christian empire make any difference in Japanese Orientalist scholarship on the Muslim world? Looking at books and magazines published by Japanese scholars from 1937 to 1945, I realized that there are significant differences in comparison with Western Orientalism: a Pan-Asian discourse of civilization was shaping a stronger interest in modern Muslim nationalism against Western colonialism, and in some ways, Japanese scholars were more successful in their predictions and analysis of contemporary Muslim modernism. For example, while European scholars saw modernizing reforms in Turkey during the 1920s as a betrayal of Islam, Japanese scholars perceived them as necessary steps for the revival of the Muslim world -- something similar to what the Meiji reforms did for Japan. Moreover, Japanese scholars of Islam had a clear agenda of overcoming Eurocentric biases and prejudices about Islam in their writings. In fact, in the heyday of Japanese imperial culture, they developed an almost internationalist vision of introducing the Japanese public to the unfamiliar world of Islam. Some were very critical of the Japanese public's ignorance of Islam at a time when they were claiming to be the leader or elder brother of Asia.

Michael Penn: How would you assess the wartime Japanese scholarship in comparison with Japanese scholarship on the Islamic world today?

Cemil Aydin: There is, of course, a certain rupture, or a conscious break between the postwar and prewar scholarly interests on the Muslim world. For example, Professor Itagaki Yuzo, one of the leading names of postwar scholarship, is a very different person than Okawa Shumei. Many of the new scholars of Islam either had graduate training in America, or have been to Muslim countries for their education. This was not true for prewar scholars of Islam. The community of Islam scholars in Japan, at least in major universities, is a diverse group of people with a strong tradition of self-reflection about their discipline, especially in relation to Orientalism.

Nevertheless, I can think of one aspect of continuity from prewar scholarship to contemporary discourses on the Muslim world -- an implicit legacy of a kind of Pan-Asian identity. As a result, both the left and right in Japan (whatever these political ideologies entail in the Japanese context) are generally sympathetic to modern Muslim thought. This is a big contrast to Europe and America where scholars on the right see Muslim nationalism and Islamic movements as an enemy of the West. There is a staunchly anti-Muslim right wing or Christian fundamentalist rhetoric in America, and a small minority group of scholars feed them with academic analysis. No matter what intellectuals think of Japanese ignorance of the Islamic world, I cannot think of such a hostile rhetoric existing in Japan.

Michael Penn: In your article, you argue that the wartime scholarship surpassed what might be expected by research institutes whose funding and establishment relied deeply on military and colonial interests. Can you explain this?

Cemil Aydin: This is perhaps similar to contemporary America. A lot of Islamic studies research is funded and underwritten by governmental interest in the Islamic world. It is almost impossible to escape the framework of American imperial involvement as the indirect motivation behind these funding organizations. For example, the Carnegie Foundation in New York has a major initiative where every year they pick almost twenty scholars of Islam and support their research for two years. Does that mean that every scholar working in America today is serving the American empire in the Middle East? The fact that neo-con supporters of Bush policies blame the Middle Eastern Studies Association (MESA) for being extreme leftist, anti-American, pro-Arab and pro-Muslim indicates that knowledge production and empire processes are not that simple. This also does not mean that progressive members of Middle East or Islamic studies scholarship in America are free from the needs and interests of an American hegemony in the Middle East, even when American scholars of Islam are overall very critical of American foreign policy in the Middle East.

The situation of Japanese scholars on Islam was similarly complex. There clearly were some left-inclining or liberal scholars among Japanese scholars working in Islamic studies from 1937 to 1945. After all, Takeuchi Yoshimi, a leading left voice in postwar Japan, was also a young scholar of Islam during that time. Hence, academically sophisticated members of the Islamic studies community mostly did what they were already doing in terms of their research and publication. One can still read them today with interest and learn something from that work. There were also many articles and pamphlets, mostly motivated by a short term imperial agenda, that do not seem to have much value today.

Michael Penn: You note that Okawa Shumei at one point identified Islam as more part of "Western civilization" than "Eastern civilization," but then seemed to backtrack and not follow through on his own insight. Why did Japanese scholars seem to have such difficulty deciding whether Islam was "East" or "West"?

Cemil Aydin: Okawa Shumei's writings provide good examples of the contradictions between serious scholarly thinking on the role of Muslim societies in world history, and dominant Pan-Asianist views. According to the dominant Pan-Asianist perception of the world, the Muslim world was mainly in Asia, although it had parts beyond Asia. One should be aware of the fact that Europe, the West, the Islamic World, Asia were all geopolitical terms, assumed to be in competitive power relations, and their reality was rarely questioned, even by non-Asianists. We do know that different branches of European Orientalism gave these geographical imaginations an historical and cultural content. More importantly, most of the Realist international relations or world politics literature also took these entities as basic units of analysis and prescription. For example, a book by an American white supremacist and Harvard Ph.D. in international history, Lothrop Stoddard, titled The World of Islam, became well read in its Arabic and Ottoman translations. It is primarily about the Islam-West relationship in world politics at the end of World War I. Stoddard's book was one among hundreds of books in the first quarter of the twentieth century that conceptualized a domain of Islamic World as a reality, despite the stark diversity and disconnectedness in this imagined unity. Okawa Shumei read and used that book in his research as well. Pan-Asianism relied on this geopolitical thinking.

On the other hand, Orientalist literature produced enough knowledge on history, literature and religion to challenge these basic assumptions. Japanese scholars of Islam could actually read the products of European Orientalism to challenge the basic premises of Orientalism. Okawa was instrumental in establishing one of the best library collections on Islam and the Muslim world during the 1930s, especially by buying all the published materials in these fields in European languages. He was himself a good researcher, and in his book published in 1942 he does note that categorizing Islam as an Eastern, non-Hellenistic civilization, as the Other of the West, is a fallacy, because in many ways, Islam is a Western religion, much closer to European civilization than to Far Eastern civilizaation. He notes this with some delight, because challenging the Eurocentric prejudices of Islam in European writings was one of the main agendas of Japanese scholarship.

Okawa does not address the paradox that, in one place, he talks about Muslims as fellow Asians, with whom Japan must have solidarity against the West, and in another place he emphasizes that Islam is a Western religion, closer to Christianity than to Buddhism. For him and many others of his generation, the geopolitical meanings of the Islamic World, Asia and Europe were a reality not to be challenged by fine historical and scholarly insights into world history and comparative religions.

Michael Penn: I presume that the Japanese military authorities briefly became interested in Islam because they viewed it as a sort of anti-Western warrior religion that they could utilize to challenge British power and for other purposes in China?

Cemil Aydin: They indeed had such beliefs and at some point they devised fantasy-driven policies based on the assumptions that Muslims were very anti-Western and always sympathetic to Japan -- and one should not forget that some of these images of Muslims being violent and anti-Western were coming from Europeans. Professor Selcuk Esenbel has written in detail about the Japanese military's "Islam policy" in her American Historical Review article a couple of years ago. As she also noted, it was not unique to the Japanese Empire that they were planning to use a geopolitical entity, religion or ethnic group against other rival empires. Actually, both the German Empire and later Italian Empire had plans to use so called "Muslim rage against the West" for their own purposes, and thus became interested in Pan-Islamism. The policy impact of these stereotypes about Muslims is still worth investigating. During the revolutionary acts of violence against British rule in India around 1907, for example, Orientalist-ethnologists at the German foreign ministry assumed and argued that this was the Muslim revolt and rage, although actual violent acts were being committed mostly by Hindu nationalists. Somehow, violent Hindu revolutionaries did not fit into German notions of the Orient.

Japanese military authorities were aware of what other empires were doing, and in one Islam policy pamphlet they did note the history of "Islam policy" by the German and Italian Empires. But then, they argued that Japan would be more successful in gaining Muslim support because it had no negative history in the Muslim world, and Muslims had sympathized with Japan since the Russo-Japanese War. In reality, Japanese efforts to gain the support of Chinese Muslims against Chinese nationalism did not produce any results. Indeed, there was significant support among Chinese Muslims for both the nationalists and the Communists in China against Japanese imperialism. More importantly, there was no single Muslim world to warrant such an Islam policy.

There was also a more anti-colonial "liberation" discourse in Japanese policies on Islam, one that emphasized Japan's mission to liberate Asia, including subjugated Muslims. This is again a highly common imperial strategy, Think about how many times Muslims were liberated by the Western Empires such as Britain, France and America: Saving Arab Muslims from the Turkish oppression, liberating Muslim women from the domination of fundamentalist men, or minorities from majority Sunni yoke, and even bringing secularism to save moderate Muslims from theocratic rule. Somehow, being an anti-imperialist empire was not a peculiarity of Japan. All empires played the game of emancipation.

Michael Penn: It's ironic that today the negative image of Islam in Japan is chiefly associated with its perceived connections with violence and terrorism while in the late 1930s, the anti-Western struggle of some Muslims was regarded by many Japanese as the most attractive feature of the West Asian region. This seems to tell us more about Japan than Islam, wouldn't you say?

Cemil Aydin: You are right. Violence and terrorism can have positive meanings when they are seen as a temporary means for a noble goal. Hence, "jihad" against colonialism—Western colonialism—did not seem bad for Japanese observers. At one point, liberal members of the Islamic studies community, such as Okubo Koji, described Japan's Greater East Asia as a Holy War (sometimes translated as "jihad") against unjust European hegemony in Asia.

It is interesting that Japanese scholars often emphasized that seeing Islam as a "religion of jihad" is a product of European Orientalist biases, and that the Japanese should see Islam as a religion of love given the strength of the Sufi tradition within Islam. In fact, Okawa Shumei corrected himself in this regard. In his earlier writings, Okawa, like Kita Ikki, referred to the principle of "Koran ka, ken ka" (Either the Quran or the Sword) as a common pattern of the spread of Islam. You either accept Islam or you face the military might of the Muslims. In fact, Kita Ikki saw this as a good thing. However, in his later scholarly writings, Okawa emphasized that Islam actually spread peacefully through merchants and scholars, not through military conquest, and the Japanese phrase "Koran Ka, ken ka" was a sheer internalization of Christian polemics against Islam.

In his postwar reflection on his Islamic Studies days, Takeuchi Yoshimi makes a very wise comment on this. He says that Islam, like Christianity, can neither be a religion of the sword nor a religion of love. Yet, Japanese scholars felt the need to emphasize the love aspect against European Orientalist discourses.

Michael Penn: At the end of the Pacific War, the Japanese scholarship on Islam quickly disappeared from public consciousness and most of the scholars moved on to other subjects. Why did Islamic studies in Japan collapse so completely in the 1950s and 1960s?

Cemil Aydin: Once the Japanese Empire ended, most of the infrastructure for Islamic studies scholarship was lost. Who would care about area studies in a time when the Japanese nation was stripped of its empire and facing the challenge of recovery and rebuilding. It was also practically impossible to revive anything during the 1950s. For example, the biggest Islamic Studies library in Tokyo burned down during the aerial bombing. Some other books were taken to the US during the occupation and never returned. There was also a new mood of "Leaving Asia" and "Joining the West" among Japanese intellectuals. In fact, Takeuchi Yoshimi noted the negative results of this loss. While being critical of the imperial complicities of prewar Islam scholarship, Takeuchi underlined the fact that this scholarship had also made positive contributions such as introducing an unfamiliar world civilization to Japan, contributing to an understanding of world history and globalization beyond Eurocentric narratives, and a necessary sympathy for Third World nationalisms.

Some members of the prewar Islamic Studies establishment continued doing research. The most famous of them was Izutsu Toshihiko, who was still young at the end of the war, became a well-known international authority on the Quran and Sufism. The very fact that the Islamic Studies community in Japan has grown rapidly since the 1970s, after Japan became a great economic power, is also highly interesting, and must have something to do with the earlier efforts.

Michael Penn: I have just finished reading your excellent book on anti-Westernism. It seems that in many ways, the "global moment" of the Russo-Japanese War can be seen as the highpoint of genuine affection between Japan and the Islamic world. Why did that moment pass so quickly? Today, it is almost completely forgotten.

Cemil Aydin: The 1905 Japanese victory became a turning point in the history of decolonization beyond the Japanese Empire's intentions and actions. After all, 1905 was a war between two Empires (Russia and Japan) through the involvement of a third empire, the British. But the turn of the 20th century imperial world order was so closely linked to the legitimacy of race ideologies and notions of White-Christian superiority that Japan's victory shattered these legitimacy discourses. After 1905, all major anti-colonial nationalists, whether in the Muslim world or beyond, could use the Japanese example in their arguments and mobilization efforts. Admiration for Japan was related to intellectual contestation over rising nationalism throughout Asia. The global moment of the Russo-Japanese War lasted about a decade while anti-colonial nationalism was utilizing a Pan-Asian discourse. During this decade, the Japanese Empire did not support any anti-colonial national movement, nor did it have to. In fact, Japanese authorities expelled some of the Vietnamese students and Indian nationalists who came to Japan to learn from them. After World War I, due to the Bolshevik Revolution and Wilsonian ideals, Japan's role as a metaphor in anti-colonial thought decreased. Thus, during the late 1930s, when Japanese propaganda referred back to 1905 as a moment of their leadership in Asia, they no longer had a broad audience. It may be forgotten now, but before World War II, the Japanese education system taught all Japanese children about the admiration of Turks, Arabs or Indians for their nation. That became a somewhat unhealthy, narcissist reference.

Michael Penn: One final question, a hot potato. Your book suggests that anti-Westernism before 1945 was not really a conservative reaction or a retreat into some kind of primordial identity, but rather a reflection of the crisis of legitimacy affecting the European-based international order as a whole. In 2007, should we view the global spread of anti-Americanism in a similar way? In other words, is the loss of legitimacy of the American-dominated international order the primary factor that gives rise to anti-Americanism today?

Cemil Aydin: I think this parallel exists, though a lot has changed from the late 19th to the late 20th century. The basic argument of anti-Americanism today -- that American imperialism is violating the universal values that the imagined and highly-stereotyped West proclaims -- is similar to the colonial era anti-Westernism that posited that European imperialism contradicted all the Enlightenment ideals the West was preaching to the rest of the world. In other words, in both cases, anti-Westernism and anti-Americanism, there are claims of unequal and unjust power relations in an unstable world. I should also note that the anti-Westernism of the last century has complex intellectual lineages, relying on the critiques of modernity in the West, and an authentic civilization discourse formulated to challenge the European discourse of racial and religious superiority. Today's anti-Americanism has roots in Cold War-era European thought. Yet, the legitimacy crisis of a single global international order is still the main reason behind the current anti-Americanism.

***

Cemil Aydin was recently profiled by History News Network as a "Top Young Historian."

Cemil Aydin is the author of The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought , Columbia University, New York, 2007. Recent publications include "Beyond Eurocentrism? Japan's Islamic Studies during the Era of the Greater East Asia War (1937-1945)," in Renee Worringer, ed., Princeton Papers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Volume XIV: The Islamic Middle East and Japan: Perceptions, Aspirations, and the Birth of Intra-Asian Modernity, January 2007.


Michael Penn is Executive Director of the Shingetsu Institute for the Study of Japanese-Islamic Relations and a Japan Focus Associate.

This is a slightly abbreviated version of an interview conducted by Michael Penn for the Shingetsu Newsletter published by the Shingetsu Institute for the Study of Japanese-Islamic Relations

The founding director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian spent more than $250,000 in institution funds over the past four years on first-class transportation and plush lodging in hotels around the world, including more than a dozen trips to Paris.

In that time, W. Richard West Jr. was away from Washington traveling for 576 days on trips that included speaking engagements, fundraising and work for other nonprofit groups, according to a review of travel vouchers for West's trips obtained by The Washington Post.

West's travel often took him far from American Indian culture: Auckland and Wellington, New Zealand; Athens; Bali, Indonesia; Sydney and Brisbane; London; Singapore; Florence, Rome and Venice; Paris; Gothenburg, Sweden; Seville, Spain; Seoul; Vienna; and Zagreb, Croatia.

TePaske, 77, died December 1. A veteran of the U.S. Army TePaske, was a leading scholar of Spanish colonial America. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Duke University in 1953 and 1959 and joined the Duke faculty in 1967.

His 1982 book The Royal Treasuries of the Spanish Empire in America (co-written with Herbert Klein) was a an elaborate study of the economy and society of the region.

He is survived by his wife, Neomi; daughters, Susan TePaske-King and Marianna Daly; and brother, Robert TePaske.
A memorial service will be held at a later date.

The Havana City Historian Office received the Reina Sofia International Award in the category of Cultural Heritage Preservation and Restoration. Her Majesty Queen Sofia of Spain presented city historian Eusebio Leal Spengler with the prize in Madrid on December 19th.

The prize, granted annually for the rehabilitation and restoration of historic centers, was a unanimous decision of the jury which, Leal said, was motivated by the social undertaking in the revitalization of the Cuban capital's historical center known as Old Havana.

In the historian's words, "the award is actually a tribute to the people of Old Havana and the entire city of Havana, who have undertaken the restoration works in a social effort that, while not being perfect, expresses the best of our society."

Spanish police were this week examining a recording of a speech by revisionist historian David Irving, condemned by a British High Court judge as a Holocaust denier, after the Jewish community failed to have him banned from speaking in Barcelona.

Under Spanish law, justifying genocide or inciting racism and xenophobia can carry a sentence of up to three years. Police were authorised by a judge to examine Irving’s words to see if he had broken the law in his speech at a bookshop last Saturday.

According to agency reports, he told his audience of about 20 that there was no proof that Hitler was aware of the Holocaust. But, he said, there was no doubt that the Nazis killed “two or three million” Jews.

During his speech, about 100 people protested outside the bookshop which was guarded by police.

Dahliah Levinsohn, secretary of the Federation of Jewish communities in Spain, said: “The Federation asked the High Court to cancel Irving’s talk, as we thought there could be acts of incitement to racism and antisemitism.

“Although it [the court] did not cancel the conference, Catalan police were present and the court issued them with an official order to enter and record the talk.

“He [Irving] was very careful not to negate the Holocaust, precisely because the Catalan police were there. Now the police will analyse the talk and see if something comes up.” In 2006 Irving was sentenced by an Austrian court to three years in prison for Holocaust denial but was released after serving one-third of his sentence.

Just in time for the season of presidential politics, UC Riverside Professor of History Catherine Allgor is featured during a major PBS documentary on the life and legacy of the nation’s seventh president, Andrew Jackson.

“Andrew Jackson: Good, Evil and the Presidency” will first air Wednesday, Jan. 2 on PBS at 9 p.m. (Check local listings for other air dates.) The program, narrated by Emmy Award-winning actor Martin Sheen, brings to life one of the most divisive presidents in our history. It features re-enactments, lithographs, letters and the insights of distinguished scholars, including Allgor, who is the author of “Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington City Help Build a City and a Government” as well as a biography of Dolley Madison.

Professor Allgor flew to Nashville in March for her interview. "I've seen a preview and they did an excellent job explaining why he was so popular and so reviled at the same time," Allgor said. "And he is still a problem for modern Americans. On one hand, he ushered in an age of political democracy; on the other, he did nothing to stop slavery and presided over one of America's great tragedies--the Trail of Tears."

The first president with a nickname, "Old Hickory" was born in a log cabin and rose to serve eight years in the White House. Jackson had strong opinions and equally strong opposition. He was the first president to open the doors of the White House to blue-collar Americans, and he shook up the world of Washington, DC, with his "common-man" methods and ideals, but also oversaw one of the most controversial events in American history: the forced removal of Indian tribes, including the Cherokees, from their homes.

"Is he a president we should celebrate or a president we should apologize for?” asked Carl Byker, the film's producer, writer and co-director. "But of all the presidents whom Americans have had conflicting feelings about, the one who's been simultaneously adored and reviled with the most intensity is Andrew Jackson."

This presidential biography includes insights from other distinguished scholars, including lead advisor Dan Feller, professor of history and editor/director of The Papers of Andrew Jackson, University of Tennessee; Kathryn Braund, professor at Auburn University; Daniel Walker Howe, professor emeritus at UCLA Department of History; John Larson, professor of history at Purdue University; and Benny Smith, oral historian, Cherokee Nation, and many others.

The documentary will include a DVD-ROM created especially for educators and a comprehensive Web site that includes in-depth information about the history of Andrew Jackson. The Web site, available in early January on pbs.org, will chronicle Jackson's life, from his early years as an ambitious young officer in the war of 1812 to his hard-fought rise to become the seventh president of the United States. The site also will feature profiles of prominent individuals of the Jacksonian era, maps, image galleries and an interactive timeline.
Funding for the documentary came from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Ahmanson Foundation, Public Television Viewers, PBS and Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Southeast Texas' most faithful chronicler has entered the history he long made a passion of recording.

W.T. Block, dubbed by a colleague "the dean of Southeast Texas history," died Saturday. He was 87.

Block dedicated his life to researching and recording the region's history, said Robert Schaadt, director/archivist of the Sam Houston Regional Library and Research Center in Liberty.

"Mr. Block, he wrote more Southeast Texas history than anybody, beginning to end," Schaadt said. "His record will probably never be surpassed."

Author of many books, some published and some not, Block will long be remembered for three in particular, Schaadt said: "A History of Jefferson County, Texas From Wilderness to Reconstruction," "East Texas Mill Towns and Ghost Towns" and "Sour Lake, Texas: From Mud Baths to Millionaires."

Dear Colleagues,

Amnesty International is campaigning for two human rights activists in Haiti: Wilson Mesilien, who received death threats in late November, and Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine, who was kidnapped last August. Both are coordinators of the 30 September Foundation and probably targeted because they pressed for an end to impunity for past abuses and reparation for victims of the 1991-94 military regime and for the victims of the transitional government of 2004-6. I hope that you can send the recommended urgent appeals immediately. Please remember to write in your professional capacity. Thank you.

With best wishes,

Antoon De Baets
(Network of Concerned Historians)

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL URGENT ACTION

18 December 2007

UA 336/07: Fear for safety / Possible “disappearance”

HAITI

Wilson Mesilien (m), aged 39, human rights activist, interim coordinator of the Fondasyon Trant Septanm (30 September Foundation),

Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine (m), aged 54, political and human rights activist, former coordinator of the Fondasyon Trant Septanm


The life of Wilson Mesilien, the interim coordinator of Fondasyon Trant Septanm (30 September Foundation), may be at risk due to his continued work in defending the rights of the victims of the 1991-1994 military coup. Amnesty International is even more concerned for his safety as the former coordinator of the Fondasyon, Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine, was kidnapped on 12 August and his whereabouts are still unknown.
Over the last few weeks, Wilson Mesilien has been receiving threatening telephone calls. Early in the afternoon of 26 November, two unknown individuals tried to intercept him as he rode his motorcycle in Boul. des Industries, North of Port-au-Prince. Wilson Mesilien was on his way home after attending an appeal court hearing for Fr. Gerard Jean-Juste, a former prisoner of conscience who is still facing criminal charges.
Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine has not been seen since 12 August, after he had left the company of a delegation of human rights activists visiting Haiti. The car he was driving was found abandoned near the neighborhood Delmas 18. Days before his abduction, Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine had announced his intention to stand as Senator in the elections initially scheduled for December 2007 under the banner of the Fanmi Lavalas Party. There are fears that he may have been abducted by people connected with the former military because of his continued activism in denouncing past human rights violations during the 1991-1994 military government and in gathering signatures to amend the Constitution in order to eliminate all provisions for the existence of a Haitian army.
Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine’s abduction was reportedly made to look like a kidnapping for ransom. His family were contacted by his alleged abductors on 14 August and asked to pay a ransom of US$ 300,000 for his release. However there has been no further contact from the abductors.
Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine is a psychologist and has been involved for several years as a grass-roots community organizer, mainly working with children. During the last presidency of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, he was appointed General Coordinator of the National Office on Migration. He left Haiti into exile during the transitional government and returned in February 2006.


BACKGROUND INFORMATION:

Wilson Mesilien is one of the founding members of Fondasyon Trant Septanm along with Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine. The Fondasyon was named after the date of the military coup, 30 September 1991 during which President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted. At least 3,000 persons were killed during the military regime between 1991 -1994. Ever since its creation in 1996, the Fondasyon members carry out weekly marches in central Port-au-Prince and several other Haitian towns to press for an end to impunity for past abuses and reparation for victims of the 1991-1994 military coup and for the victims of the transitional government of 2004-2006. The Fondasyon also campaigns for the total abolition of the Haitian army through a reform of the Constitution by gathering signatures during a tour of a photo-exhibition of victims of past human rights abuses.


RECOMMENDED ACTION: Please send appeals to arrive as quickly as possible:

**expressing concern for the safety of Wilson Mesilien and of Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine who has not been seen since 12 August;
**urging the authorities to double their efforts to locate Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine;
**calling for the authorities to ensure Wilson Mesilien’s protection in accordance with his wishes;
**calling for a full, prompt and impartial investigation into the “disappearance” of Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine and the threats received by Wilson Mesilien, to make the result public and to bring those responsible to justice;
**reminding the authorities that the UN Declaration on the Rights and Responsibility of Individuals, Groups and Organs of Society to Promote and Protect Universally Recognized Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms recognizes the legitimacy of the activities of human rights defenders and their right to carry out their activities without any restrictions or fear of reprisals.


APPEALS TO:

Minister of Justice and Public Security
**Monsieur Rene Magloire
**Ministre de la Justice et de la Securite Publique,
**19 Avenue Charles Sumner,
**Port-au-Prince, HAITI (W.I.)
**Fax: 011 509 245 0474
**(The fax may not be in service at all times, but please keep trying.)
**Salutation: Monsieur le Ministre/Dear Minister

General Director of the Haiti National Police
**Mario Andresol
**Directeur General de la Police Nationale d’Haiti
**Grand Quartier General de la Police
**12 rue Oscar Pacot,
**Port-au-Prince, Haiti (W.I.)
**Fax: 011 509 245 7374
**Salutation: Monsieur le Directeur General/Dear Mr Andresol


COPIES TO:

Human rights organization
**c/o Fondasyon Trant Septanm
**No. 3, 2eme impasse Lavaud , Boite Postale 19042
**Port-au-Prince, Haiti (W.I.)

Ambassador H.E. Raymond A. Joseph
**Embassy of the Republic of Haiti
**2311 Massachusetts Ave., NW
**Washington DC 20008
**Fax: 1 202 745 7215
**Email: embassy@haiti.org


PLEASE SEND APPEALS IMMEDIATELY.

Check with the Network of Concerned Historians if sending appeals after 29 January 2008.

Amnesty International is a worldwide grassroots movement that promotes and defends human rights. This Urgent Action may be reposted if kept intact, including contact information and stop action date (if applicable). Thank you for your help with this appeal.

I see the Ralph Nader documentary is being broadcast on PBS tonight. To be honest, I've never actually seen the thing. When it was screened at Sundance two years ago, it was about four hours long and when I got there, I did not think I could stand it, so I went back to my hotel room for two hours and came in for only the presidential races part. I used to admire what Ralph Nader had done for the country during his career as a consumer advocate, but I no longer do. One of the great mistakes liberals made in the 1970s was to try to win in the courts what they could not win at the ballot box -- thereby allowing their democratic muscles and instincts atrophy and helping to inspire a right-wing backlash against which they were defenseless -- and which now controls those same courts -- and Nader was the leader in this misbegotten movement.

As a presidential candidate, he's been an undeniable catastrophe. What I want to say about the film -- at least the parts that I've seen -- is that I made a big mistake when I allowed its makers to come to my apartment to interview me. They never told me they were Naderites and I -- stupidly -- did not realize that they had an ulterior motive in making the film. In my view, the movie is dishonest in two respects. In the first, when they interviewed me, they kept repeating the same silly points over and over again after I had already answered them. This had the effect of pissing me off, purposely, I'm guessing -- and getting me to look all angry and intemperate -- and gave them the footage they wanted (which is why they use it in the trailer). But that's my problem. The problem with the film -- and why I'm convinced it is largely a propaganda exercise for unrepentant Naderites who prefer a Bush presidency to a Gore one -- is that it only gives the illusion of listening to Nader's critics. Todd Gitlin and myself are given a sentence or two to make each of the many cases against Nader, and then some pro-Nader "expert" is offered an unlimited amount of time to brush us off. This happens over and over and is, as the saying goes, no accident. The point is not screen time, as the filmmakers dishonestly pretended when responding to me on HuffPo. It is intellectual honesty, and that is something that is sadly lacking in this film. Then again, how could it be otherwise with any Nader defender after we've seen seven years' fruit of their Leninist agenda?*

*After the film came out, Nader confused me by buying 1,200 copies of What Liberal Media? and distributing them to every student and faculty member of the Medill School of Journalism. He sent me a mimeographed note saying something like "What do you think of that, Eric?" I think the same thing I thought of the Iraq war, the destruction of the environment, legalized torture, domestic spying, the attack on the Constitution, on choice, on sex education, on science, etc. ... "Thanks, Ralph."