Roundup: Talking About History

Source: Independent (UK)
August 18, 2009

Alistair Horne: The case for Henry Kissinger

[Alistair Horne's book, Kissinger's Year: 1973, is published later this month.] There is a widespread view among the liberal intelligentsia to the effect that Henry Kissinger, US National Security Advisor from 1969 to 1975 and Secretary of State from 1973 to 1977, was a bad man. That may even be an understatement. In this fashionable consensus, he is not just a bad man: he is a war criminal. His alleged crimes are numerous: the bombing of North Vietnam and Cambodia; c

Source: Britannica Blog
August 17, 2009

Gregory McNamee: Remembering Woodstock: That Festival of Peace, Love, and Consumer Capitalism

[Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor for Encyclopædia Britannica, for which he writes regularly on world geography, culture, and other topics. An editor, publishing consultant, and photographer, he is also the author of 30 books, most recently Moveable Feasts: The History, Science, and Lore of Food (Praeger, 2006).] In the global economy of plastic and petrol, anyone can sell anything, no matter how useless. So goes the premise that has fueled capitalism for genera

Source: BoingBoing
August 17, 2009

Cory Doctorow: Campaign to get UK government to apologise for hounding Alan Turing to his death

Robbo sez, "Genius mathetician Alan Turing was arrested and convicted of 'gross indecency' because he was a homosexual. His brilliant career was destroyed, his service to his country was ignored and he was hounded throughout the rest of his life until his death by suicide. Time to clear his name and give him the honours so long overdue." John Graham-Cumming, a leading British computer expert who launched the campaign, said: "I think that Alan Turing hasn't been recog

Source: Spectator
August 13, 2009

James Bowman: Lesser Britain ... Is the "Great" in Britain lost for good?

[James Bowman is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, media essayist for the New Criterion, and The American Spectator's movie and culture critic. His new book, Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture, was recently published by Encounter Books.] Every so often for the last half-century or so, we have seen some American arriving, breathless and sweating, with the latest post from the old country. And his news is always the same. It is that Britain

Source: Asia Pacific Journal (This article was translated by William Underwood, an Asia-Pacific Journal coordinator and researcher on wartime forced labor.)
August 17, 2009

Fukubayashi Toru: Verifying Japan’s Use of Allied POWs Through Historical Records

Fukubayashi Toru is a visiting researcher at the Asia Pacific Research Institute, Osaka University of Economy and Law. He is also a co-representative of POW Research Network Japan. [The article below, from the June 2009 issue of SEKAI (World), was written before the mid-June visit to Japan by an Australian survivor of forced labor at Aso Mining and the British son of an Aso POW who died after the war. They retraced the trail of the POW experience in Fukuoka and Kobe before meeting

Source: Examiner.com
August 15, 2009

Ronnie Robertson: The Beatles at Shea Stadium

On August 13, 1965, the Beatles released their ninth American LP, Help! That same day, the group also landed in America for a month-long tour, which began two days later with the infamous August 15 performance at Shea Stadium in New York. 55,600 screaming fans (a number that broke attendance records at that time) mobbed the stadium that night for the Beatles’ twelve-song performance. After dropping from a helicopter into an armored Wells Fargo van, where John, Paul George, and Ring

Source: NYT
August 15, 2009

Danny Heitman; Marianne Moore and Ford, Poetry in Motion

[Danny Heitman, a columnist for The Baton Rouge Advocate, is the author of “A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House.”] IT seems that we’ve done just about everything to get the American auto industry out of the doldrums. We’ve forced bankruptcies. We’ve exchanged cash for clunkers. But have we tried poetry? The question is brought to mind by the story of Marianne Moore, the famous American writer, who served for a brief season as the Ford Motor Company’s u

Source: OpEdNews
August 14, 2009

Jean Saint-Vil: A Giant Step for Mankind Made in Haiti

[Jean Saint-Vil was born and raised in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and currently lives in Canada. He hosts two radio programs in Ottawa and has been featured as political analyst by Canadian radio and television as well as by Embassy Magazine, ZNet and Rogers Ottawa Television.] There was a time, not so long ago, when popes, kings and queens enriched themselves and built vast empires on the profits made with the sweat and blood of kidnapped men, women and children loaded on ships, stacke

Source: The Huffington Post
August 14, 2009

Paul Krassner: On the 40th Anniversary of Woodstock

[Paul Krassner's next book is Who's to Say What's Obscene: Politics, Culture and Comedy in America Today, with an introduction by Arianna Huffington and a foreword by Wavy Gravy, to be published by City Lights in July 2009.] Four decades ago, along with 499,999 others on a countercultural pilgrimage, I was headed for the Woodstock Festival of Music & Love. I was wearing my yellow leather fringe jacket for the first time. In one of the pockets there was a nice little stash

Source: Independent (UK)
August 14, 2009

David McKittrick: At last, Belfast dares to imagine life after the 30ft 'peace wall'

[David McKittrick is Ireland correspondent for the Independent.] Belfast's "Berlin wall", the mother of all the city's peacelines, exhibits no physical cracks as it stretches for hundreds of yards, keeping apart the Protestant Shankill and the Catholic Falls. It has stood for 40 years as a monument to division, a forceful declaration that Northern Ireland's conflicting nationalities cannot be trusted to live together. A mixture of concrete, metal and wire mesh

Source: Alamogordo Daily News
August 13, 2009

Michael Johnson: The Legacy of Billy the Kid

[Michael Johnson is Managing Editor of Alamogordo Daily News] Ask Drew Gomber about the question he's asked the most after his Western history presentations and he shudders, almost irritated by the question. "Did Billy the Kid really get killed and was he Brushy Bill Roberts?" Gomber said. "The answer is yes, he really got killed. Anyone who even looks at the record from a distance should know that." "The Lincoln County War originat

Source: Times (UK)
August 13, 2009

Roy Hattersley: The emergency measure that lasted 35 years

[Roy Hattersley is a British Labour Party politician, author and journalist. He served as Deputy Leader of the Labour Party from 1983 to 1992.] At a little after 1 o’clock on Friday, August 14, 1969, I was having lunch in a London restaurant when the formidable figure of General Sir Victor FitzGeorge-Balfour, Deputy Chief of the General Staff, appeared at the table and addressed me in tones of deep reproach. Did I not realise that a meeting would take place in Downing

Source: Newstatesman (UK)
August 13, 2009

Victor Sebestyen: How not to end a war in Afghanistan

[Victor Sebestyen is a journalist. His book, "Revolution 1989: the Fall of the Soviet Empire", is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson.] In May 1985, two months after Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he sent one of his cleverest generals to Kabul on an urgent, secret mission. The name of General Zaitsev is unlikely to be well known to today's Nato commanders, but perhaps it should be. Back then he was the Red Army's mos

Source: The Morning Delivery (personal blog of Bill Lucey)
August 11, 2009

Bill Lucey: How The N.Y Times Covered Woodstock During the Summer of 69'

[Bill Lucey spent years as a news researcher at a number of U.S. daily newspapers stretching back to the mid-1990s] This Saturday marks the 40 year anniversary of Woodstock, the musical extravaganza that touched off America’s``Cultural Revolution’’, coming as it did in the same year John Lennon recorded ``Give Peace a Chance’’, nearly a month after a race riot in York Pa. led to the shooting death of a black woman; and four months after U.S. troop levels had swelled to 543,400 durin

Source: PajamasMedia
August 10, 2009

Ronald Radosh: The Debate over Soviet Espionage

[Ronald Radosh, Prof. Emeritus of History at the City University of New York, is an Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute. ] I last wrote about the controversy over the book Spies some time ago. Now, once again, it is time to turn to the ongoing debate once more. It seems that it never ends, despite the belief of some people that questions like whether or not Alger Hiss was guilty is of interest only to people over 60. Of particular interest is the continued use of th

Source: The Atlantic
August 9, 2009

Robert D. Kaplan: Buddha's Savage Peace

[Robert D. Kaplan is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, in Washington, D.C.] Here, you are alone with your thoughts. Sri Lanka is in general a less panicky, less frantic, less intrusive version of India. Only rarely are you hassled. And Kandy, up in the hills, away from the crowded coastal highway, is a concentrated version of the country’s charms. Alas, when you fall in love with a place, you encou

Source: BBC
August 12, 2009

Imogen Foulkes: The Geneva Conventions at 60

[Imogen Foulkes is a BBC correspondent. The three existing Geneva Conventions, which relate to the immunity of medical personnel on the battlefield and the treatment of prisoners of war, were extensively revised in 1949. The fourth Geneva Convention, which stipulates that warring parties have an obligation to protect civilians, was added. The fourth convention in particular was born out of the horrors of the World War II - not just the appalling atrocity of

Source: The Jewish Daily Forward
August 11, 2009

Peter Ephross: Interview with Jewish Historian Avinoam J. Patt

[Avinoam J. Patt holds the Philip D. Feltman Chair in Modern Jewish History at the University of Hartford] In the aftermath of World War II, roughly 250,000 Jews — most of them Holocaust survivors — lived in displaced persons camps in Europe. Many of these people were attracted to Zionism, and about two-thirds of them eventually would move to British Mandate Palestine or to Israel. In his new book, “Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish Youth and Zionism in the Aftermath of the Holocaus

Source: Findlaw.com
August 7, 2009

John Dean: Looking for Great "Big History" Books

My late friend Ron Silver, the actor and political activist, once asked me a question that I have continued to think about ever since. On the afternoon of his last New Year's Eve, when he surprised me by coming to California, he wanted to know if I had found any great "big history" books. Diagnosed with a fatal form of esophageal cancer and having already lived beyond his physician's expectations, Ron was vi

Source: Moscow Times
August 11, 2009

Alexander Golts: One Big Lesson the Kremlin Hasn’t Learned

[Alexander Golts is deputy editor of the online newspaper Yezhednevny Zhurnal.] It has often been said that defeat is an excellent teacher. But this rarely applies to victory. Perhaps this is true because rather than teaching, victory tends to make the victor dizzy with success. Take, for example, Russia’s victories over Napoleon and Hitler, after which the army’s development and modernization was halted for 50 years. The post-World War II Soviet military strategy, which focused on