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The American “Good War” vs. the German “Bad War”: World War II Memory Cultures

by Günter Bischof

In 1955 an Austrian member of Parliament shrewdly observed that the most significant developments in the international arena were "the Americanization of Germany and the Prussication ["Verrpeußung"] of America." Germany had tried to conquer Europe twice in the first half of the twentieth century and failed. After World War II a four-power occupation divided the country along Cold War ideological fault lines. In West Germany the Anglo-American pr

What We Really Need to Remember on Memorial Day

by Martin Halpern

This Memorial Day will see the opening of the National World War II Memorial to all those who made American participation in the victory over the Axis powers possible. It will honor the 405,000 Americans who died, the 671,000 who were wounded while serving, and the millions of others who participated in the military conflict and in the home front production and volunteer efforts that were a vital part of the struggle. The dedication of the new memorial will open a 100 day series of eve

Column: Of Rats and Men

by P. M. Carpenter

For some time, right-wing commentators have been watching troubled waters slop over the gunwale of our foundering ship of state. They are finally deserting. Their collective retreat to safety and sanity began like all nervous stampedes: just a few scurrying tails, rapidly swelling to a me-too swarm. The Iraq Mess was the last-straw cause of the abandonment effect. The left, of course, was stricken with fear and loathing immediately upon George W. Bush’s stumble into national polit

How We--You and Me--Missed the Story of the Taliban in the Years Leading Up to 9-11

by Irfan Khawaja

On May 2, the New York Times Magazine featured one of its perennially irritating human-interest interviews, in this case with Samuel P. Huntington, the Harvard political scientist, author of The Clash of Civilizations (1996), and most recently, a somewhat curmudgeonly critic of immigration (with special emphasis on and ire for Hispanic immigration). Interviews of this sort always appear on a single page early on in the Times Magazine, under the heading “Th

Do We Have to Get Our Hands Dirty to Win the War on Terrorism? And What Does that Mean, Exactly?

by Irfan Khawaja

Michael Ignatieff’s recent essay in the New York TimesMagazine--“Lesser Evils: What It Will Cost Us to Succeed in the War on Terror"--is a useful corrective to much of the conventional wisdom on fighting the war on terrorism. But useful as it is, the essay (I want to suggest) is marred by Ignatieff’s failure t

Do We Have to Get Our Hands Dirty to Win the War on Terrorism? And What Does that Mean, Exactly?

by Irfan Khawaja

Michael Ignatieff’s recent essay in the New York TimesMagazine--“Lesser Evils: What It Will Cost Us to Succeed in the War on Terror"--is a useful corrective to much of the conventional wisdom on fighting the war on terrorism. But useful as it is, the essay (I want to suggest) is marred by Ignatieff’s failure to q

Why Andrew Carnegie Would Feel Right at Home at Columbia During the Strike

by Jonathan Rees

“Whatever you think of Columbia University or our situation, the Homestead Strike this is not,” writes Kevin Murphy in response to an open letter to Columbia Provost Alan Brinkley that recently appeared on HNN. Now Murphy, a graduate student in history at Columbia, certainly has a better understanding of events on the ground there than I do. However, as a student of the Homes

Despite Brown We Are Re-Segregating Our Schools

by William C. Kashatus

Fifty years after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down desegregation in the landmark decision Brown v. Board of Education, America's schools and universities are struggling with the challenge of providing equal educational opportunity in an increasingly multi-cultural society. Ironically, re-segregation has become prevalent in some school districts while at the university level affirmative action programs, intended to produce greater educational opportunity for minorities, have l

Why Remembering the Names and Number of Dead in Iraq Matters

by Thomas G. Palaima

Two controversies in two days, and all about names and numbers. On Thursday, April 29, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, when asked about military casualties in Iraq, replied "It's approximately 500, of which-I can get the exact numbers-approximately 350 are combat deaths." The real figures at the time were 722 and 521. A spokesman later said, "He misspoke. That's all." He sure did. But why do numbers matter? Numbers matter because they are attached to nam

Column: The Wrong War, Again

by P. M. Carpenter

Six months before September 11, 2001, terrorism expert and future Mideast potentate L. Paul Bremer III said the Bush administration “seems to be paying no attention to the problem of terrorism.” It has “a window of opportunity” to understand and organize against the threat – not just “stagger along until there’s a major incident” – and “they’re not taking advantage of it.” (We await Senator Bill Frist’s call for a c

Will 2004 Be Like 1980?

by Robert E. Mutch

The Republican party wants the Federal Election Commission to crack down on Democratic "527" groups. Democrats formed the 527s, named for a section of the tax code, to get around the McCain-Feingold ban on soft money donations to party committees, and the GOP does not want them to get away with it. Back in November Republican national chairman Ed Gillespie wrote the campaign finance reform group Public Campaign to alert them to this "Democrat plan to subvert campaign finance laws.

Mother's Day, 2004, and We're at War Again

by Murray Polner

After the carnage of World War II the members of the now defunct Victory Chapter of American Gold Star Mothers in St. Petersburg, Florida, knew better than most what is was like to lose their sons, daughters and husbands in war. "We'd rather not talk about it," said Ceil Rindfuss whose son was killed in World War II. She told the St. Petersburg Times in 1960, "It's a terrible scar that never heals. We hope there will never be another war so no other m

The Democrats’ Wendell Willkie?

by John Moser

By the end of the 1930s the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt had lost a great deal of its luster. While the New Deal undeniably brought tangible benefits to millions of Americans, it had not delivered on its promise of economic recovery. Ten years after the Great Crash of 1929, nearly one worker in five was unemployed, despite the administration having racked up a series of budget deficits that were unprecedented in peacetime. Moreover, the president himself was caught in a dilemma—t

An Historian's Take on Outsourcing

by Robert E. Mutch

Economists of all political persuasions seem to agree that the debate over offshore outsourcing is about free trade vs. protectionism. Economics has never been my strong point, but economists seem to be missing the point. Shipping jobs overseas is only partly about trade. It's mostly about time travel, about globalization allowing American capital to return to the nineteenth century. In my unprofessional opinion, I thought trade and protectionism were about industries, that they

Why Powell Should Resign

by Stanley I. Kutler

Secretary of State Colin Powell is one of the most recognizable, and maybe the most well-liked figure across party lines, in the Bush administration. He has served his country long and well. Yet evidence mounts that he was (and remains) on the sidelines to advise and implement President Bush's major foreign activities, especially the Iraq war. Powell's reluctance to invade Iraq has been no secret. Bob Woodward's new book, Plan of Attack, has added new, attributable quotes. I

Liberalism and the Columbia Strike

by Alan Brinkley, Jesse Lemisch, Staughton Lynd, David Montgomery

This week graduate students at Columbia staged a strike to protest the university's refusal to negotiate with GSEU (Graduate Student Employees United). An election was held two years ago to decide whether to join the union. Columbia immediately referred the matter to the National Labor Relations Board before the votes were counted. Historian Alan Brinkley, now provost, has been the public face of the university during the str

Stop with the Hindsight ... Or Should We Rerun All Our Wars?

by Thomas Fleming

I am disturbed by the lack of thoroughness in the much publicized probe of who is to blame for the terrorist attack on 9/11/2001. Why stop with the current war? Why not go back and weigh in the balance the judgment of our leaders in the opening rounds of America's previous wars? Let's start with the American Revolution. John Adams frequently admitted he knew nothing about military matters. That did not stop him from being a principal player in perpetrati

Why the Ugly Rhetoric Against Gay Marriage Is Familiar to this Historian of Miscegenation

by Peggy Pascoe

We are in the midst of an attempt to ground a category of discrimination in the fundamental social bedrock of marriage law. I would argue that it is virtually impossible to understand the current debate over same-sex marriage without first understanding the history of American miscegenation laws and the long legal fight against them, if only because both supporters and opponents of same-sex marriage come to this debate, knowing or unknowingly, wielding rhetorical tools

The Story of Frank Carlucci

by Fran Shor

In the past few months there have been a rash of media reports on the Carlyle Group, a private equity investment group with billions of dollars of assets in the defense industry and a roster of directors and consultants which includes not only well-known Reagan and Bush appointees but also international figures like John Major, the former Prime Minister of Great Britain, and Fidel Ramos, the former President of the Philippines. The Chairman of the Carlyle Group, Frank Carlucci, was not only a fo

Did President Bush Mislead the Country ... Does It Matter?

by James P. Pfiffner

In his recent book and testimony Richard Clarke charged that before 9-11 the Bush administration did not pay enough attention to his warnings about the threat of terrorism from al Qaeda. But this charge has tended to overshadow Clarke's more important assertion that president Bush "has squandered the opportunity to eliminate al Qaeda and instead strengthened our enemies by going off on a completely unnecessary tangent, the invasion of Iraq." Clarke's line of reasoning raises the q