[Garry Wills is Professor of History Emeritus at Northwestern. His most recent book, What Jesus Meant, was published in 2006.]

I did not think he would lose me so soon—sooner than Bill Clinton did. Like many people, I was deeply invested in the success of our first African-American president. I had written op-ed pieces and articles to support him in The New York Times and The New York Review of Books. My wife and I had maxed out in donations for him. Our children had been ardent for his cause.

Others I respect have given up on him before now. I can see why. His backtracking on the treatment of torture (and photographs of torture), his hesitations to give up on rendition, on detentions, on military commissions, and on signing statements, are disheartening continuations of George W. Bush’s heritage. But I kept hoping that he was using these concessions to buy leeway for his most important position, for the ground on which his presidential bid was predicated.

There was only one thing that brought him to the attention of the nation as a future president. It was opposition to the Iraq war. None of his serious rivals for the Democratic nomination had that credential—not Hillary Clinton, not Joseph Biden, not John Edwards. It set him apart. He put in clarion terms the truth about that war—that it was a dumb war, that it went after an enemy where he was not hiding, that it had no indigenous base of support, that it had no sensible goal and no foreseeable cutoff point.

He said that he would not oppose war in general, but dumb wars. On that basis, we went for him. And now he betrays us. Although he talked of a larger commitment to Afghanistan during his campaign, he has now officially adopted his very own war, one with all the disqualifications that he attacked in the Iraq engagement. This war too is a dumb one. It has even less indigenous props than Iraq did.

Iraq at least had a functioning government (though a tyrannical one). The Afghanistan government that replaced the Taliban is not only corrupt but ineffectual. The country is riven by tribal war, Islamic militancy, and warlordism, and fueled by a drug economy —interrupting the drug industry will destabilize what order there is and increase hostility to us.

We have been in Afghanistan for eight years, earning hatred as occupiers, and after this record for longevity in American wars we will be there for still more years earning even more hatred. It gives us not another Iraq but another Vietnam, with wobbly rulers and an alien culture.

Although Obama says he plans to begin withdrawal from Afghanistan in July 2011, he will meanwhile be sending there not only soldiers but the contract employees that cling about us now like camp followers, corrupt adjuncts in perpetuity. Obama did not mention these plagues that now equal the number of military personnel we dispatch. We are sending off thousands of people to take and give bribes to drug dealers in Afghanistan.

If we had wanted Bush’s wars, and contractors, and corruption, we could have voted for John McCain. At least we would have seen our foe facing us, not felt him at our back, as now we do. The Republicans are given a great boon by this new war. They can use its cost to say that domestic needs are too expensive to be met—health care, education, infrastructure. They can say that military recruitments from the poor make job creation unnecessary. They can call it Obama’s war when it is really theirs. They can attack it and support it at the same time, with equal advantage.

I cannot vote for any Republican. But Obama will not get another penny from me, or another word of praise, after this betrayal. And in all this I know that my disappointment does not matter. What really matters are the lives of the young men and women he is sending off to senseless deaths.

Yosef Haim Yerushalmi, a groundbreaking and wide-ranging scholar of Jewish history whose meditation on the tension between collective memory of a people and the more prosaic factual record of the past influenced a generation of thinkers, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 77 and lived in Manhattan.

The cause was emphysema, said his wife, Ophra Yerushalmi, a concert pianist.

An elegant writer and mesmerizing raconteur, Dr. Yerushalmi earned his reputation as one of his generation’s foremost Jewish historians by plumbing eclectic subjects like the history of the Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal in the 1490s, messianism, the intellectual history of modern German Jewry and Freud’s relationship with his religion. In 1982, Dr. Yerushalmi, then the Salo Wittmayer Baron professor of Jewish history, culture and society at Columbia University, published perhaps his most influential work, “Zachor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory,” a slim volume whose title bore the Hebrew imperative “Remember!”...

Turkey's internationally-acclaimed historian Prof. Kemal Karpat has received Turkish parliament's honorary award.

Turkish Parliament Speaker Mehmet Ali Sahin presented the award to Karpat at ceremony in the Turkish capital, Ankara, on Wednesday.

"I have never worked to get a prize and never have never thought I would get one someday. My only goal has been to discover my own people and to tell about them," Karpat said.

Kemal Karpat is a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Istanbul, his masters degree from the University of Washington and his PhD from New York University. He has previously worked for the UN Economics and Social Council and taught at Montana State University and New York University.

As an independent researcher, Stein Tonnesson challenges the existing conceptions of the Indochina war by elucidating the forces at work preceding the war’s breakout in 1946.

Referring to French and English documents, Tonnesson sourced materials for his book from some translated Vietnamese texts on Vietnam in 1946 as well as from the memoirs of the famous Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap. He visited the Vietnam Revolutionary Museum and the Ho Chi Minh Museum to see objects from the war on display there and learn about the patriotism of Vietnamese people.

The book gives readers access to new and intriguing information that the author discovered by delving deeply into formerly classified French, English and US military documents.

Tonnesson expressed his wish to have “Vietnam 1946” translated into Vietnamese to present it to Vietnamese researchers and readers.

On a windy Tuesday evening in November, a student crowd filled the 1,200-plus-capacity Irvine Auditorium on the Penn campus.

They'd come to catch the crème of hip-hop's past (Run-DMC's Darryl McDaniels) and present (Lupe Fiasco) in person and watch footage of John Legend, Bruce Springsteen and Eddie Vedder performing protest songs.

The message: Change isn't a marketing term Barack Obama made up. America's victories of diversity and innovation came not from presidents or governments but from grassroots social movements: from the people.

That's long been the view of Howard Zinn, 87, professor emeritus in the Boston University Political Science Department, historian, writer, and civil-liberties and antiwar activist. Now his books A People's History of the United States and Voices of a People's History have been turned into the provocative TV special The People Speak, of which Penn students were seeing snippets at the Nov. 17 screening. (The show debuts Sunday at 8 p.m. on the History Channel.)

Zinn was executive producer along with Josh Brolin and Matt Damon. Those Hollywood names-above-the-title appear on-screen too, performing dramatic speeches that make up Voices. They're joined by other stars.

Viggo Mortensen reads from farmer Plough Jogger's words leading up to Shays' Rebellion of 1786. Morgan Freeman performs a letter from Frederick Douglass ("The Meaning of July 4th for the Negro," published July 5, 1852) as if he'd written it himself. In the film clips Fiasco and McDaniels read smart and weary words from sons of slaves and antiwar 1960s teens with furious potency...

Stanley Karnow, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and longtime foreign correspondent, is trying to think of a good title for a planned memoir.

One candidate: "Interesting Times."

"You know what the Chinese curse is? `May you live in interesting times,'" he says.

Interesting times: covering the war in Vietnam, from the first Americans killed, in 1959; traveling to China for President Richard M. Nixon's 1972 visit; Karnow's friendship with Corazon Aquino, who in the 1980s became president of the Philippines and an international heroine.

For now, he has settled on "Out of Asia" as a title, a tribute to a book he admires, Isak Dinesen's "Out of Africa," and a concise summary for the author of one of the defining texts on the Vietnam War, and a Pulitzer winner in 1990 for "In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines."

Karnow has not published a book since "Paris in the Fifties," a memoir that came out in 1997. The silence was unplanned. He tried writing a history of Asians in the United States, but decided that an Asian was more suited for the job. He attempted a book on Jewish humor, "a marvelous book," but never advanced beyond an outline.

He also had personal reasons. His wife, Annette, became ill with cancer and Karnow spent the last few years caring for her. Annette Karnow, an artist and diplomat, died in July.

So at age 84, Stanley Karnow, whose round, sad eyes brighten when he tells a favorite story, has been going through papers and writing on a computer in his cellar, a place he calls "Santa's Workshop."

"Working on the book is my therapy," he says.

As I am typing this, I am five hours and 25 minutes into a 15+ hour trip on a slow train to Baltimore. I'm en route to D.C. to interview sociologist and author Dr. James Loewen for my documentary film, A Past, Denied: The Invisible History of Slavery in Canada. This interview is two years in the making. In late 2007 when I originally conceived the idea to make a feature documentary on how Canada's over 200 years of institutionalized slavery of indigenous and African people is constantly escaping mention in our history books, James Loewen was one of the very first names that entered my head for interview candidates. His book, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (1995) was one of the biggest inspirations for me to start thinking about making documentaries in the first place -- an inspiration possibly rivaled only by Errol Morris' (2004) documentary film, The Fog of War.

Lies My Teacher Told Me is the result of Loewen's research into the 12 most popular history textbooks used in American schools (circa 1996). He explores the common threads of what/who is given coverage, how much coverage is given, and in what lights that coverage is made. He also looks into what is conspicuously absent, what is biased, and, finally, what is flat out false. More than myth-busting, Loewen examines the far-reaching social consequences of the history of teaching practices, a history that he finds has served more as jingoistic propaganda than scholarly discourse. At its heart, this book (and the follow-up Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sights Get Wrong) is about why the way in which history is disseminated matters; and how society could benefit from a curriculum that is unafraid to look deeply into the dark side of Canada's past as opposed to the feel-good bits. (Both Lies My Teacher Told Me and Lies Across America as well as Loewen's Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism are required reading, especially for those in the US. Get your hands on them now or turn in your "progressive" card.)

Loewen demonstrates how the bland, celebratory versions of history found throughout the pages of various Canadian textbooks serve as a form of boosterism catering specifically to a white, middle- and upper-class audience. In essence, stories about white people written by and for white people. Page after page, Europeans are exalted for their great achievements while non-Europeans, if mentioned at all, are painted as people in need of European help. This feel-good bias doesn't feel right, however, and worse, it goes beyond the classroom, visible in pop culture and everyday discussions about historical events.

The film and television equivalent of this form of boosterism comes in the Hollywood archetype of the white savior -- a white, typically middle- or upper-class, usually male and almost exclusively heterosexual character through whom the life of a person of color (or persons of color) is dramatically improved. The basic formula goes like this: through the white protagonist's selfless deeds the helpless, downtrodden victim of circumstance is rescued from the cycle of poverty and violence, changing both their lives forever. One gains new opportunities that would otherwise never be afforded to them, while the other gains redemption and a well-deserved personal sense of piety. Most importantly, the white audience gets to feel good about themselves.

White Man's Burden: The Movie

One problem with white savior films is that they perpetuate the archaic paradigm of the white man's burden. They tell stories of white people going outside of their privilege to help people of color who ultimately can't or won't help themselves. Whether it's Uncle Sam bringing "civility, education and religion" to the Philippines or Clint Eastwood teaching his young Hmong neighbor how to be a "real man," it's the same old story being played out again and again. It's been colonialism's best justification since Manifest Destiny in real life, as well as the template plot for movies like To Kill a Mockingbird, Finding Forrester, Gran Torino, Freedom Writers, The Blind Side...

Another problem with stories focusing on white heroes is that the reality of people of color working hard to improve their communities goes largely ignored. Just like the selective telling of history in textbooks, the audiences of white savior films walk away with the message that it is only white people that are doing anything to change things for the better. While there are films telling the stories of some of these individuals striving to improve the lives of the underprivileged, they are a disproportionate exception. For every Lean On Me (1989) there are at least three or four Dangerous Minds, a film which also exemplifies yet another issue.

"Destroyers and usurpers, curse them."

The movie Dangerous Minds (1995), which purports to be based on a true story, stars Michelle Pfieffer as a LouAnne Johnson, a white English teacher who tries to help her inner-city high school students learn an appreciation for poetry through the lyrics of Bob Dylan. The "based on a true story" isn't entirely dishonest. There really was a woman named LouAnne Johnson who used musical lyricism to connect with her underfunded inner-city high school students; in fact, it was her book, My Posse Don't Do Homework (1993) that was the inspiration for the film. The betrayal in the movie adaptation is that the real LouAnne Johnson was Latina and used rap music.

The filmmakers had a profound opportunity to tell the story of a non-white person inspiring a group of inner-city Black and Latino students, who had been otherwise written off, to become engaged with their own destiny. Instead, they chose to usurp LouAnne Johnson, while the movie tirelessly extols the virtues of being white.

(And if that doesn't churn your stomach just a little bit, wait until next summer's release about the true story of the Black Panther's Free Breakfast for School Children Program, starring Tom Cruise. (I'm kidding))

What are students supposed to make of such history? What is an audience supposed to make of such movies? The constant message is that white people shape the world; non-white people are passive participants merely benefiting from those efforts. White people are the only ones with the faculty to improve anyone's situation; non-whites are unorganized, hapless people, doomed until saved by the good will of their white saviors. Moreover, the white protagonist is usually the only character to have any depth or character development, while non-white supporting characters are foils to the white protagonist, and largely without history. The million-dollar film budget question is, why are white people the only ones deserving of inspiration?

The fact that none of these movies even mention, much less try to really address, the issue of systemic racism, is an appalling failure. The tragedy of over-crowded and under-funded inner city classrooms is never explained. It's never explained why these under privileged people are under-privileged to begin with. The situation is presented without any nuance, save for the givenness of white privilege.

White savior movies, like their history text counterparts, are designed to reinforce and perpetuate white privilege. White audiences get to walk away from these films feeling good about being white, and they are never prompted to empathize with supporting non-white characters. Furthermore, white audience members are never confronted with their own privilege or internalized racism. They are let completely off the hook for their own roles and responsibilities in the perpetuation of a racist power structure.

Since more whites than non-whites are shown throughout our pop culture as the people effecting change, the lesson inferred is that these individual cases we see in movies and on TV are the rule, when they are really the exception. This leads to a false sense of racial justice in the minds of all audience members. Just as the election of Barack Obama led some white Americans to actually believe that the West was entering a "post-racial" state [*insert bellowing gut laugh here*], white savior films give white audience members the notion that they don't have to do anything about racism themselves because, look, there are plenty of examples of white people out there doing good!

Back to the history question, Loewen deftly points out that "the Eurocentric history in our textbooks amounts to psychotherapy for whites." To run with this simile, I would liken these white savior films to psychotherapy for whites with a bonus happy ending. But like the history behind them, there is much therapy needed to right the normalization of whiteness, which is plainly wrong.

On Sunday, December 13, at 8 PM Eastern and Pacific / 7 PM Central, THE PEOPLE SPEAK -- the long awaited documentary film inspired by Howard Zinn's books A People's History of the United States and, with Anthony Arnove, Voices of a People's History of the United States -- will air on History.

Tune in!

More details are at http://www.history.com/peoplespeak

ABOUT THE PEOPLE SPEAK

Using dramatic and musical performances of the letters, diaries and speeches of everyday Americans, the documentary feature film THE PEOPLE SPEAK gives voice to those who spoke up for social change throughout U.S. history, forging a nation from the bottom up with their insistence on equality and justice.

Narrated by acclaimed historian Howard Zinn and based on his best-selling books, A People's History of the United States and, with Anthony Arnove, Voices of a People's History, THE PEOPLE SPEAK illustrates the relevance of these passionate historical moments to our society today and reminds us never to take liberty for granted.

THE PEOPLE SPEAK is produced by Matt Damon, Josh Brolin, Chris Moore, Anthony Arnove, and Howard Zinn, co-directed by Moore, Arnove and Zinn, and features dramatic and musical performances by Allison Moorer, Benjamin Bratt, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Chris Robinson, Christina Kirk, Danny Glover, Darryl "DMC" McDaniels, David Strathairn, Don Cheadle, Eddie Vedder, Harris Yulin, Jasmine Guy, John Legend, Josh Brolin, Kathleen Chalfant, Kerry Washington, Lupe Fiasco, Marisa Tomei, Martín Espada, Matt Damon, Michael Ealy, Mike O'Malley, Morgan Freeman, Q'orianka Kilcher, Reg E. Cathey, Rich Robinson, Rosario Dawson, Sandra Oh, Staceyann Chin, and Viggo Mortensen.

Buy the SOUNDTRACK, featuring new songs from THE PEOPLE SPEAK by Allison Moorer, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Eddie Vedder, Exene Cervenka, Jackson Browne, John Doe, John Legend, Lupe Fiasco, P!nk, Randy Newman, Rich Robinson, and Taj Mahal.
http://www.peopleshistory.us/news/people-speak-soundtrack-CD-on-Verve

A two-disc special DVD set of THE PEOPLE SPEAK will be out in January! More details soon at:
http://www.thepeoplespeak.com

NEW AND UPDATED edition of a source book for THE PEOPLE SPEAK just released:
Voices of a People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove
http://www.sevenstories.com/book/?GCOI=58322100808900

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MORE INFORMATION

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MONTPELIER - In Arlington, church bells rang throughout the day on Dec. 2, 1859, and for one hour in Peacham, starting at 11 a.m., as abolitionist John Brown was hanged in a field in far-off Charles Town, Va.

"We don't know the full extent of the hanging in Vermont. We do know in Arlington, (Almera Hawley Canfield) was firmly opposed to slavery, and had her grandsons ring the bells in the Episcopal church all day long," said Civil War historian and preservationist Howard Coffin. "One of the grandsons (later) said he couldn't go into Arlington without hearing that long, long tolling."

And in Peacham, Coffin said, abolitionist Leonard Johnson rang the bell at the Congregationalist church as the execution took place...

... It's clear that Coffin also is a fan of Brown, who is a controversial figure because unlike pacifist abolitionists, he promoted armed insurrections that, in the case of a Kansas campaign in 1856, left five pro-slavery people dead. Brown was hanged after an ultimately failed attempt to seize a federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Va., (now West Virginia) that left seven dead.

"The day he's hanged, he leaves a note to his jailer saying he believes 'that the crimes of this guilty land will not be purged away but with blood.' He predicts the war," Coffin said. And historians generally believe the hanging of Brown prompted the South to begin setting up militias, inevitably leading to the U.S. Civil War...

... What Coffin only discovered six weeks ago, however, was that Brown made a visit to Cavendish in 1857, probably in hopes of securing some of the $20,000 the Vermont Legislature had approved to support anti-slavery settlements in Kansas. Although Vermont's governor at that time, Ryland Fletcher, was a devout abolitionist, he turned down Brown's request for some of the money at the Cavendish meeting.

Coffin tripped across a newspaper recounting of the visit in a microfilmed copy of the Rutland Herald from May 7, 1869.

The writer, who is not identified, described how Brown's physical appearance on that visit differed from the bearded photographs taken around the time of the Harpers Ferry raid...

In November 1979, Mike Baker was working on building shrimp boats. It was while working on a boat when someone yelled to him that he needed to call home become someone from the Army was calling him about a job.

“Hard to believe that was 30 years ago,” Baker mused in his Sparkman Center Office. “Thirty years… Wow.”

The “job” was to work at the then Missile Command’s History Office as the command’s archivist. It was a job and an office that he would never leave.

Baker was born and raised in Americus, Ga. He completed his undergraduate work at the University of Georgia and his graduate work at Florida State. He was hired by Mary Cagle, the command historian, on Dec. 10, 1979.

“What few people today, if anyone, remembers about Mary Cagle is that she worked for the contractors that built (what was then) Huntsville Arsenal in 1941,” Baker said. “So I guess you could say that my office is the only office on Redstone Arsenal that has a direct connection to the establishment of Redstone Arsenal almost 70 years ago.”...

Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) was an influential historian, minor Victorian politician and the author of India's legal code. His educational reforms in India are largely the reason English is the tongue that unites the subcontinent today. His greatest literary legacy was the "History of England From the Accession of James II," which established the Whig or "progressive" view of history. In all, a life of influence in many spheres, and generally for the good.

To judge by Robert E. Sullivan's "Macaulay: The Tragedy of Power," one might well conclude that Macaulay was a hypocritical monster who smoothed the way for Nazi and Soviet genocide. The inescapable conclusion, after reading Mr. Sullivan, is that Macaulay, far from deserving his resting place in Westminster Abbey, ought to be disinterred and flung into a plague pit. With loathing dripping from almost every page, the book paints a portrait of Macaulay that is entirely removed from the generally rosy picture we currently have of him. But is it backed up by evidence?

"Thomas Babington Macaulay succeeded in crafting an intricate and winning public face that often belied him," Mr. Sullivan states early on. "He became a prominent spokesman for abolishing slavery in the British Empire who lacked any taste for the cause, a forceful theoretician and practitioner of reforming Whig politics who was a Machiavellian realist, a soaring parliamentary orator who avoided debate, a self-declared Christian who was a committed skeptic and a masterly secularizer of English history and culture, and a stern public moralist in love with his two youngest sisters." A complete fraud, in other words, and incestuous to boot!

This is quite the gravest series of accusations—especially the last one—ever made against a Victorian public figure, and I must admit to reading on avidly to discover Mr. Sullivan's support for so severe an assault. I prepared myself for a series of titillating revelations—maybe from a cache of freshly uncovered secret diaries?—about one of 19th-century England's more respected public figures. No such luck...

Architectural historian Martin Wachadlo served two decades in the U.S. Navy before a Victorian beauty on West Avenue caught his eye. Simple and unassuming, well-designed and solidly built, his old house became a life project — much like his obsession with architecture.

At age 47, Wachadlo is considered an expert on Buffalo's stock of old buildings — compiling neighborhood surveys, researching historic districts, drafting National Register nominations. With an advanced degree in architecture, Wachadlo is a preservationist at heart — but he's also a realist.

PeopleTalk: To what lengths would you go to save a building?

Martin Wachadlo: Would I do anything radical like chain myself to the bulldozer? No, because there is so much treasure here that I think it is important to try and save as much as we can, especially really important buildings like the Guaranty or the Delaware Avenue Baptist Church, but you can't save everything. We're not the city we were. We were the eighth largest and now we're heading for 50.

PT: What new-build in town catches your eye?

MW: The Erie County Public Safety Building [just north of ECC campus on Elm Street downtown] is an interesting design. It's got the dramatic outward sloping entry pavilion. The handling of materials was well-done, but there just is not a lot of good new design going on in Buffalo.

PT: Tell me about a hidden treasure.

MW: Delaware Avenue Baptist Church is probably the most unknown space in the city. The church was completed in 1895. The interior is spectacular, an almost unaltered composition by J&R Lamb, who were the chief competitors of the Tiffany Company in the decoration of churches 100 years ago. Because J&R Lamb did not make jewelry and lamps, you haven't heard about them...