Roundup: Talking About History

Julian Humphrys: Richard III’s last battle

[Julian Humphrys is Development Officer for the Battlefields Trust. He is the author of Clash of Arms: Twelve English Battles (English Heritage, 2007) and a regular contributor to BBC History Magazine.] I think it’s fair to say that, with the probable exceptions of Hastings and Culloden, Bosworth is the best-known battle to have taken place on British soil. While it wasn’t actually the last battle of the Wars of the Roses – that took place two years later near Newark - its effects w

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Churchill was not against appeasement

[Geoffrey Wheatcroft's books include 'The Strange Death of Tory England' and 'Yo, Blair!' He is writing a book on Churchill's reputation and legacy.] Seventy years ago today Neville Chamberlain gave his famous broadcast telling the nation that we were at war, before Parliament met in emergency session that Sunday morning. Among those who spoke was the newly-appointed First Lord of the Admiralty, in one of the shortest and finest speeches of his life, one of the least known – and mos

Dan Fletcher: A brief history of the Lightbulb

Across Europe, it's just about lights out for the humble incandescent bulb. The European Union began phasing out incandescents on Sept. 1, banning stores from buying new stock. (See the best inventions of all-time.) It's all part of an effort to drive consumers toward a better bulb: Compact fluorescent lamps (CFL) that burn as much as 10 times longer while consuming less than a third of the electricity as incandescents. At as much as $10 each, CFL bulbs are more expensi

Andrew Leonard: The paleolibertarian war on Herbert Hoover

The paleolibertarians have never been Herbert Hoover fans. Listen to Murray Rothbard, the godfather of paleolibertarianism -- an economist who hated not only the New Deal and desperately yearned for a return to the gold standard, but also wanted to abolish the Federal Reserve, the Social Security Act, the income tax, the Internal Revenue Service, and even the Federal Judiciary Act of 1789. From"The Myth of Herbert Hoover:" In all previous depressions, the Federal government

Claire B. Potter (AKA: Tenured Radical): Plagiarist Barbie?

[Claire Bond Potter is Professor of History and American Studies at Wesleyan University, Middletown Connecticut. She writes the blog Tenured Radical.] Readers of this blog will recall that the release of the Johnny Depp flick Public Enemies brought up bad memories of having had my book mined for research and argument by another author, repackaged and sold as a work of mass-market nonfic

Rami G. Khouri: Libya's Four Lost Decades

[Rami G. Khouri is published twice-weekly by The Daily Star.] If there is a moment, a place, a person, and a legacy that come together to bring sadness to all Arabs, they are upon us this week in the 40th anniversary of the September 1, 1969 revolution that brought Moammar Gadhafi to power. There is nothing to celebrate today in Libya, other than a colossal waste of that country’s human and natural resources over four decades. This is also a day of calamity for the mod

Shaun Walker: Russia and Poland clash over who was to blame for the war

[Shaun Walker is Moscow correspondent for the Independent.] World leaders and war veterans gathered in the Polish city of Gdansk yesterday to mark 70 years since the outbreak of the Second World War. But while European leaders were mourning the destruction of Poland following the invasion of both Nazi and Soviet armies, Russia used the occasion to deny any responsibility for starting the war and to accuse Poland of harbouring secret plans in the 1930s to destroy the Sov

Klaus Wiegrefe: How Appeasement Failed to Stop Hitler

[Klaus Wiegrefe is a journalist at Spiegel.] A few days after returning from Vienna, Hitler, beaming with joy, told Goebbels "Czechoslovakia is next." Goebbels noted in his diary: "The Führer is wonderful. A true genius." To Goebbels and Hitler, European dominance seemed within their grasp. Eighteen months later, they would take the final step into World War II. Hitler met with Konrad Henlein, leader of the Sudeten German Party. In 1919

Bob Graham: World War II's first victim

As the rays of early evening sun lingered over the giant wooden mast that protruded through the pine forest, two cars passed through the gates of the German radio station and stopped outside the three-storey transmission building. In the following minutes, seven SS officers posing as Polish partisans, would carry out a simple act that would leave one man dead on the station steps – and provide Adolf Hitler with the excuse to invade Poland, plunging the world into six dark years of c

Editorial in the Independent: Russia must one day confess its part in Poland's misfortune

Seventy years ago today, Adolf Hitler's armies streamed across the western border of Poland, plunging Europe into that six-year-long cataclysm known as the Second World War. These years would see the virtual extermination of European Jewry in concentration camps, the names of which have passed into history as places of almost unimaginable suffering. Indeed, the scale of Jewish martyrdom in the war has no equal, for almost 80 per cent of the 7 million Jews living in Europe had peris

Dr. Wilmer Leon: "The Dream" Remains a Vision

[Dr. Wilmer Leon is the producer/host of the nationally broadcast call-in talk radio program "On With Leon" and a Teaching Associate in the Department of Political Science at Howard University in Washington, DC. Go to www.wilmerleon.com or email wjl3us@yahoo.com.] On August 28, 1963, during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps of th

Andrew Roberts : Second World War: Why Britian delayed declaration of war

[Historian Andrew Roberts' latest book, Masters and Commanders, was published in the U.K. in September. His previous books include Napoleon and Wellington, Hitler and Churchill, and A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900. Roberts is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Arts.] At 04.45am on Friday 1 September, German forces activated Plan White, which had been formulated that June by the German Army High Command, the Oberkommando des Heer

James Ridgeway: Mother Jones: The Secret History of Hurricane Katrina

[James Ridgeway is a senior correspondent at Mother Jones.]There was nothing natural about the disaster that befell New Orleans in Katrina’s aftermath. Confronted with images of corpses floating in the blackened floodwaters or baking in the sun on abandoned highways, there aren’t too many people left who see what happened following Hurricane Katrina as a purely “natural” disaster. The dominant narratives that have emerged, in the four years since the storm, are of

Norman Davies: We must not forget the real causes of World War II

[Norman Davies is a Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge. His Europe at War: No Simple Victory is published by Pan-Macmillan (UK) and by Penguin Books (US).] One might have thought that 70 years was time enough to work out what really happened in 1939. It isn't the case. Misunderstandings and misinformation abound. The British media is all geared up to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the declaration of war on Thursday 3 September. Once again, we shall hear Neville Chamb

William Rees-Mogg: Does appeasement look so bad, 70 years on?

[William Rees-Mogg has had a distinguished career with The Times and The Sunday Times. He was Deputy Editor of The Sunday Times before becoming Editor of The Times in 1967, a position he held until 1981.] It is 70 years since war broke out in 1939, but historic questions remain. “Appeasement” is still a dirty word, but so is “war-monger”. President Bush repeatedly used the memory of Winston Churchill in 1940 to justify his wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Revisionist historians questio

Andrew Roberts: Why did the allies delay declaring war on Germany?

[Andrew Roberts's latest book is 'The Storm of War'.] At 04.45am on Friday 1 September, German forces activated Plan White, which had been formulated that June by the German Army High Command, the Oberkommando des Heeres. On either side of a relatively weak and stationary centre, two powerful wings of the Wehrmacht would envelop Poland, crush its armed forces and capture Warsaw. Army Group North, under Colonel-General Fedor von Bock, would smash through the Polish Corridor, take Da

Daniel Hannan: Lorca's skeleton speaks of a new Spain

[Daniel Hannan is a writer and journalist, and has been Conservative MEP for South East England since 1999. He has written eight books on European policy, speaks French and Spanish and is author of The Plan: Twelve months to renew Britain.] ... Shortly after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, when he was exactly my age, Lorca was shot by Nationalist sympathisers in Granada, and his body thrown into a mass grave. The reasons for his assassination have never been fully explained.

Andrew Leonard: Herbert Hoover: The working man's hero

[Andrew Leonard is a senior staff writer for Salon.] I did not need a cup of coffee to wake up this morning -- I just checked my e-mail, and saw the subject header:"Hoover's pro-labor stance helped cause Great Depression, UCLA economist says." Without reading the message, I knew instantly who the economist must be -- Lee Ohanian, a tireless Great Depression/New Deal revisionist whose work is oft-cited by Amity Shlaes, the author of"The Forgotten Man: A New History o

Peggy Noonan: The Reagans and the Kennedys

It was the summer of 1985, a year after the second Reagan landslide, and there was a particular speech coming up that was important to the president and first lady. It was a fund-raiser for the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, which at the time was relatively new and the only presidential library that didn’t have an endowment. The event was at Ted Kennedy’s house. The senator had asked the Reagans to help out. The families had struck up a friendship a few years before; in 1981 the Reagans

Julius Purcell: The Memory That Will Not Die, Exhuming the Spanish Civil War

[Julius Purcell writes on Spanish visual arts and culture for the Financial Times. He lives in Barcelona.] History to the defeated May say Alas but cannot help or pardon. —W.H. Auden, “Spain, 1937” Auden’s anthem to the doomed Spanish Republic, his somber warning, has rarely been more relevant. Last September Spain’s homegrown “super-judge” Baltasar Garzón—best-known for hi