Roundup: Talking About History

Brad Wilmouth: Bush Volunteered for Vietnam, CBS's Mapes Knowingly Omitted from Story

[Brad Wilmouth is a news analyst at the Media Research Center] On Tuesday, FNC's The O'Reilly Factor hosted FNC analyst Bernard Goldberg as the former CBS News correspondent highlighted a story recently posted on his Web site, BernardGoldberg.com, in which he complains of how little mainstream media attention was given to the fact that former President George W. Bush had volunteered to go to Vietnam as part of his service in the Texas Air National Guard, but that he was turned down because ot

Mark Medish: When Thief Stole From Thief

[Mark Medish is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.] Vladimir Putin plans to be in Poland on Sept. 1 to mark the 70th anniversary of the start of World War II, a visit that could go a long way toward reducing renewed tensions over Europe’s troubled history. As the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, observed, the Russian prime minister’s presence in Gdansk “would be a breakthrough in our evaluation and reevaluation of historical events.

Jerald S. Auerbach: Remembering the Hebron Massacre

[Mr. Auerbach, a professor of history at Wellesley College, is the author of "Hebron Jews: Memory and Conflict in the Land of Israel," published in July by Roman & Littlefield.] No theme is more deeply embedded in Jewish history than exile and return. The biblical exodus from Egypt to the promised land, the return from Babylonian exile, and, most recently, the establishment of the state of Israel all affirmed the enduring determination of the Jewish people to return t

Andrew Leonard: The panic of 1857

By way of Brad DeLong, an illuminating short post on the Panic of 1857 by Ari Kelman at The Edge of the West blog. How bad was it? Commodity prices plummeted, factories shut their doors, railroads declared bankruptcy, hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs, and land prices deflated. As the economy ground to a halt, immigration dropped in 1858 to its lowest level in more than a decade.

Matt Phillips Interviews Historian Charles Geistt: Financial Historian on The Dow as 'Cultural Icon'

[Charles Geisst is a professor of finance at Manhattan College. His new book, “Collateral Damaged: The Marketing of Consumer Debt to America,” was recently published by Bloomberg Press.] Wall Street without the Dow?It seems to be a possibility. We know Dow Jones & Co Inc. has been sounding out potential buyers for the company’s stock-market indexing business. The Journal’s story contains this tantalizing bit:"A new owner might have the option to renam

Robert Gellately: Remembering the Nazi-Soviet Pact After Seventy Years

[Robert Gellately's latest book is Lenin, Stalin and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe (Knopf and Vintage). He teaches history at Florida State University.] The first annual European-wide commemoration of the"the victims of Stalinism and Nazism" took place on August 23. The resolution to hold this event was passed recently by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), a fifty-six-nation body, which includes the United States and

John Prados: 'A Tale of Obsessive Secrecy,' On the Newly-Declassified CIA Histories on Vietnam

[John Prados is an analyst of national security based in Washington, DC. Prados holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and focuses on presidential power, international relations, intelligence and military affairs. He is a senior fellow and project director with the National Security Archive, leading both the Archive’s Iraq Documentation Project and its parallel effort on Vietnam.] Before addressing the substance in the new CIA histories it will be useful to pause and consider what t

John Prados: The CIA's Vietnam Story

[John Prados is an analyst of national security based in Washington, DC. Prados holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and focuses on presidential power, international relations, intelligence and military affairs. He is a senior fellow and project director with the National Security Archive, leading both the Archive’s Iraq Documentation Project and its parallel effort on Vietnam.] The Central Intelligence Agency's Vietnam war history actually begins in 1950, when agency officers mov

Steven Miller: Wanda Rame, TV's 'Woman on the Beat,' Broke Newsroom Barriers

She was an experienced broadcaster when she took a job as one of the nation's first female local news anchors in 1959, yet Wanda Ramey was billed as KPIX-TV in San Francisco's "Girl on the Beat." Ms. Ramey, who died Aug. 15 at the age of 85, had been on the air for more than a decade by the time "Noon News" had its debut. She specialized in reporting from the scene at a time when newscasts were conducted mostly from the studio. She rode along on a night police pa

Robert McHenry: The First Oil Well (150th Anniversary of the Birth of the Oil Industry)

[Robert McHenry is a former editor-in-chief of Encyclopaedia Britannica and author of How to Know.] Tomorrow, August 27, will see a gala celebration in the little town of Titusville, Pennsylvania. Titusville is in the northwest part of the state, just southeast of Erie. There, 150 years ago, occurred one of those epochal events whose significance far exceeded anything imagined by those immediately involved. First, there was George Bissell. He was a New Hampshire lad and

Adam Clymer: Teddy's Idealism

[Adam Clymer is a former chief Washington correspondent of the New York Times and author of Edward M. Kennedy: A Biography.]Though Ted Kennedy will mostly be remembered for his work on domestic issues, his contributions to human rights around the globe are unmatched. Ted Kennedy’s greatest contributions—affecting hundreds of millions of Americans—were on domestic issues such as health, education, labor, and civil rights. But with the exception of his opposition to

Charles Laurence: Ted Kennedy ... The Senator of Sleaze

[Charles Laurence has written articles published in MailOnline and The Daily Telegraph.] Senator Edward 'Ted' Kennedy stood for sleaze. Bloated and drunken, he used his standing in the Kennedy clan to chase vulnerable women - which brought his dream of reaching the White House to a shameful end. He was the youngest of the four Kennedy brothers, and by far the longest lived. Incredibly, he was in line to inherit his brother John F. Kennedy's legendary p

Catherine Merridale: Stalin's Ghost in Russia

[Catherine Merridale is professor of Contemporary History at Queen Mary University in London.] The rebirth of history in Russia began at least two years before the European turning point of 1989. It was Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, or openness, launched in 1986, that encouraged the tentative debates, discussions that were sponsored initially by the Kremlin itself. As a graduate student in Moscow University’s Faculty of History in 1986 I watched the process unfolding and I

Michael Goldfarb: Americans and the lessons of Europe's history with terrorism

[Michael Goldfarb serves as a GlobalPost Correspondent in the United Kingdom.] The Scottish Parliament was recalled from its summer holidays Monday for an emergency debate on the government's decision to release convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi on "compassionate grounds." The dying 57-year-old returned home to a hero's welcome in Libya. The expressions of outrage from the United States, first from the families of the victims and then by Pre

Janet Daley: How the Kennedys changed America

[Janet Daley is a columnist for The Sunday Telegraph.] So it's over. The Kennedy era, in which the political consciousness of most of my American generation was born, ends with a lingering illness and quiet mourning, so unlike the violent deaths of Ted Kennedy's elder – and greater – political brothers. However much the youngest sibling may be lionised in the coming days, it was John and Robert Kennedy whose lives truly electrified American politics and whose assassin

Michael Tomasky: Ted Kennedy made the US a better place

[Michael Tomasky is a columnist, journalist and author. He is currently the editor in chief of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas and Editor of Guardian America as well as a contributing editor for The American Prospect.] One would be hard pressed to argue that Ted Kennedy's death was a more bitter pill for the country than the deaths of his brothers before him – John, the young president whose assassination gave Americans a hard warning about the violent age they were about to enter, or

Barbara Crossette: Abdullah Abdullah's Unmentioned History

[Barbara Crossette, United Nations correspondent for The Nation, is a former New York Times correspondent and bureau chief in Asia and at the UN.] Abdullah Abdullah, the most powerful challenger to Hamid Karzai in the presidential elections in Afghanistan, argues on his campaign website that "there can be no greater priority than regaining the trust of the Afghan people," a trust he now claims is being squandered again in voter fraud by his rivals. While the

Gordon Taylor: Life and Death in the Perkins Family, 1834 - 1852 (Persia)

The piece that follows was written for the Journal of Assyrian Academic Studies. The readers of that journal, small as it is, would know immediately the name of Justin Perkins. Justin Perkins, D.D., was a pioneer American missionary in Iran, then still known as Persia. For the Nestorian Christians (now called Assyrians) of Urmia and the mountains of Hakkari, in Turkey (the snow-flecked mountains in the above photograph), he made a revolution, working with nativ

Dick Howard: What is a Revolution? Reflections on the Significance of 1989/90

... In order to understand the significance of the ruptures of 1989, I want to put them into a broader historical context that began with the American and the French revolutions (themselves part of a wider movement that R.R. Palmer described in his classical study as The Age of Democratic Revolution). But the political possibilities opened by this emerging democratic revolution were not realized in either case, and still less elsewhere. Instead, the next two centuries were marked by the succe

Jason Horowitz: The Ballad of Josh, Jef and Howard

In 1998, Josh Isay recruited his best friend and fellow Capitol Hill operative, Howard Wolfson, to return to their native New York and work on the long-shot U.S. Senate campaign of his boss, Representative Chuck Schumer. Around the same time, Jefrey Pollock, then a 27-year-old Philadelphia transplant who tried to mask his pubescent appearance with phony glasses, crunched poll numbers for an attorney general candidate, Eliot Spitzer, a virtual unknown who had suffered a pummeling in a primary fou