Mark Adomanis maintains The Russia Hand at Forbes.

As a recovering movement conservative, I have (or would at least like to think I have) a sharp eye for its flaws -- for detecting those instances in which it is simply unable to deal with the truth and thus resorts to prevarication, misdirection, or simple dishonesty.

Victor Davis Hanson is one of the highest profile and most widely-read conservative commentators -- his basic shtick is to compare America’s imperial adventure du jour to those of the Greeks or the Romans. There then follows a bunch of very confused historical comparisons that invariably come to the conclusion that the answer to the present difficulty is more military force, more invasions, more bombing, and more "American leadership." Hanson has, as of late, also made a name for himself with hackneyed attacks on Obama’s Keynesianism and the generally left-wing, socialist, and nasty way in which the president manages the economy.

But I’m not going to attempt to refute Hanson’s entire opus; many other more capable and entertaining writers have already done that. No, what I want to do is to point out a single instance of almost unbelievable factual sloppiness which marred one of his recent posts at National Review. Finally reacting to the riots in Britain, after writing 3 separate blog posts and an article, Hanson wrote:

It is fascinating to see how postmodern Western societies react to wide-scale rioting, looting, and thuggery aimed at innocents. In Britain, politicians contemplate the use of water cannons as if they were nuclear weapons; and here the mayor of Philadelphia calls on rappers to appeal to youth to help ease the flash-mobbing that has a clear racial component to it (is the attorney general’s Civil Rights Division investigating?). His appeal is perhaps understandable, but many of the themes of rap music — violence against the police, racial chauvinism, and nihilism—may well be some of the cultural catalysts behind the flash violence, though to suggest as much would be seen as more racist than the racist profiling used by the flash beaters. All these incidents are symptomatic of a general breakdown and loss of confidence in Western society. Such urban violence was of course a constant in 19th- and 20th-century Europe and America, but now it is deeply embedded within modern sociology and no longer seen quite as criminality.

Now it just so happens that I hail from Philadelphia and that I have actual read a number of articles on the shameful and appalling episodes of "flash mob" violence. If one read Hanson’s post and knew nothing else about what has recently transpired, one would inevitably come away with the conclusion that the city’s mayor was a weak-willed coward, a milquetoast so bereft of leadership that his only answer to the problem of rampaging youths was to appeal to rappers. In other words, you would think that Michael Nutter was a prime example of the rottenness and corruption of contemporary liberalism, and perfectly emblematic of its failure and of the broader “loss of confidence in Western society.”...

On Aug. 6, the United States marks the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing’s mixed legacy. The leader of our democracy purposefully executed civilians on a mass scale. Yet the bombing also ended the deadliest conflict in human history.

In recent years, however, a new interpretation of events has emerged. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa - a highly respected historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara - has marshaled compelling evidence that it was the Soviet entry into the Pacific conflict, not Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that forced Japan’s surrender. His interpretation could force a new accounting of the moral meaning of the atomic attack. It also raises provocative questions about nuclear deterrence, a foundation stone of military strategy in the postwar period. And it suggests that we could be headed towards an utterly different understanding of how, and why, the Second World War came to its conclusion.

“Hasegawa has changed my mind,” says Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Making of the Atomic Bomb.” “The Japanese decision to surrender was not driven by the two bombings.”

President Truman’s decision to go nuclear has long been a source of controversy. Many, of course, have argued that attacking civilians can never be justified. Then, in the 1960s, a “revisionist school” of historians suggested that Japan was in fact close to surrendering before Hiroshima - that the bombing was not necessary, and that Truman gave the go-ahead primarily to intimidate the Soviet Union with our new power....

PROF MICHAEL RICHTER: MICHAEL RICHTER, who has died aged 68, was a former professor of medieval history at the University of Konstanz, Germany, having previously spent 15 years teaching at University College Dublin.

He is best known for his groundbreaking book, Medieval Ireland: the enduring tradition (1988). Whereas Irish history had traditionally been depicted either in isolation or in the manner by which it was influenced by outside forces, especially England, Richter adopted a different approach.

First, his study encompassed a longer time span than previous works and paid more attention to the early medieval period. Secondly, he placed less emphasis on political and military history than on general social and cultural aspects. As a result, his interpretation of medieval Ireland is one in which social and cultural norms dating from pre-historic times in Ireland are seen to survive right through to the Middle Ages....

Area residents and scholars gathered Saturday to learn about military history and its place in today's society at the first Central Texas Military Symposium.

More than 25 professors, retired military members and historians presented papers on and discussed topics such as military history in colleges, warfare in the 19th century and personalities in history.

The program, which was held at Central Texas College, was sponsored by the University of North Texas Military History Center and the Texas A&M University-Central Texas Department of History and Political Science.

Jerry W. Jones, assistant professor of history at TAMU-CT, said he and some UNT colleagues came up with the idea for the symposium in March.

"It's really something that happened through spontaneous combustion," Jones said, adding the symposium allowed attendees to learn from various scholars and experts.

Michael Leggiere, deputy directory of the Military History Center, said the symposium not only taught attendees about military history but gave students an opportunity to gain professional experience....

Wealthy anonymous donors in the United States, a group of historians, archaeologists and concerned citizens are working to preserve what's left of the infamous slave castle on Bunce Island near Sierra Leone in Africa. The area is a crucial site in remembering America's slave trade in the 18th and 19th centuries. Philanthropists now want to build a museum that explores the island's role in the transatlantic slave trade.

LOS ANGELES. CA (Catholic Online) - Bunce Island now is but a tiny scrap of land on West Africa's Atlantic coast. At one point, however it was the notorious site for hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children who were stolen from their homes and sold into slavery, many of them bound for the rice plantations of Georgia or South Carolina.

Bunce Island, along with it's notorious "slave castle," is overgrown by jungle, and only gets a handful of tourists every year. The ruins of the castle is smothered by vines and eroded by the 13 feet of rain that fall every year in Sierra Leone.

"It's the most important historic site in Africa for the United States," Joseph Opala told the Christian Science Monitor. An American historian and the director of the U.S. branch of the Bunce Island Coalition, Opala's organization that is working to preserve the island....

Roger Hahn, emeritus professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, and a leader in shaping the academic field of the history of science, died unexpectedly on May 30 in New York City. He was 79.

Now widely recognized as a significant field of study, the history of science was an emerging discipline when Hahn, in 1953, was among the first students to graduate from Harvard College with majors in both science (physics) and history. 

Through his studies in Paris at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, as a Fulbright Scholar, and then at Cornell University, where he earned his Ph.D., Hahn developed a keen interest in the relationship between science and society. 

Moving away from the established approach of teaching scientific development as a series of isolated chronological discoveries, Hahn pursued an integrated view of the development of scientific ideas and institutions as reflective of the socio-political, philosophical, human and other dimensions of their times....

William R. Ferris, keynote speaker for the Seventh Annual Clarksville Writers’ Conference authors’ reception and banquet, held at Clarksville Country Club on Thursday night, is as close to being a rock star as you can get in the world of Southern culture and its study.

Although now the Senior Associate Director of the Center for the Study of the American South, professor of history, and adjunct professor in the Curriculum in Folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he was formerly the chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) beginning in 1997 when he was appointed by President William Jefferson Clinton.'

From 1972 to 1979, he was an associate professor in the American and Afro-American Studies Programs at Yale University. During his tenure at Yale, Ferris co-founded the Center for Southern Folklore in Mississippi, and was its director from 1972 to 1984. Ferris returned to the South, and, from 1979 to 1997, he was the founding director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and a professor of anthropology at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. While there, he established several annual conferences, including Oxford Conference for the Book, the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, and conferences on Elvis Presley, civil rights and the law, and civil rights and media among other cultural programs. In 2002, Ferris was a Visiting Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars....

Richard DeLos Wells, 63, of Kahuku, a professor of art, art history and American studies at Brigham Young University-Hawaii, died in Kahuku on July 26. He was born in Idaho Falls, Idaho. He is survived by wife Wendy I., son Todd R., daughters Charmaine M. Wells-Gurr and Rebecca J. Wells, mother Bonnie L. Pedersen-Wells, brothers Larry and Gary, sister Maralyn Wells-Whitney and seven grandchildren. No services. No flowers. Donations suggested to pancreatic cancer research or the Hawaii Arts Council.

Here are some things that former students and friends have said about Richard Wells gathered from facebook comments.

Ed Gonzalez said, "He was a strength and a mentor to me in my studies at BYUH and words alone cannot convey the impact he made on me. My heartfelt condolences to all his family. Really a special, unique and amazing person who I will never forget"...

A new book containing statements from a cellmate of missing Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg proves that Russian officials deliberately withheld information about the fate of the man credited with saving thousands of Jews from the Holocaust, researchers allege.

“They've been caught red handed,” historian Susanne Berger told The Local of the Russian actions.

“This ranks as one of the most significant findings in the Raoul Wallenberg case in the last 50 years.”

The new accusations of Russian deception regarding what happened to Wallenberg come following the publication of a new book, “Secrets of the Third Reich Diplomacy,” which contains interrogation transcripts from several German diplomats imprisoned by the Soviet Union following World War II, including Willy Rödel, who was Wallenberg's long-term cellmate in Moscow's Lefortovo prison from 1945-1947.

The book was published earlier this year by archivists of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB)— the successor to the KGB.

Historian Vadim Birstein, a Russian-born researcher now based in the United States, who along with Berger served on the 1991 Swedish-Russian Working Group tasked with looking into Wallenberg's disappearance, came across the book while researching SMERSH, the Soviet military counterintelligence active during the second part of World War II....