Roundup: Talking About History

Doug Ireland: Pioneers With Pens

[Doug Ireland is a journalist and blogger. He is the U.S. correspondent for the French political-investigative weekly Bakchich, and he is also the Contributing Editor for International Affairs of Gay City News, the largest LGBT weekly newspaper in New York City and in the U.S.] The very first homosexual publication to have appeared with any regularity in the US was Vice Versa, which surfaced in Los Angeles in June 1947. It was produced by a secretary at RKO Studios who called hersel

Richard J. Cross III: Rethinking Richard Nixon

[Richard J. Cross III was press secretary and speechwriter for former Maryland Governor Bob Ehrlich.] In February, America celebrated the bicentennial of its most revered president, Abraham Lincoln. Its most controversial president - Richard M. Nixon - resigned 35 years ago today. Richard Nixon fascinates me. This began when his old nemesis Alger Hiss visited one of my classes at the Johns Hopkins University, and grew when I worked for former Rep. Helen Bentley, once a

Paul Smalera: A history of African-American-Targeted Advertising

[Paul Smalera has written for Condé Nast Portfolio, The New York Times and The New York Observer among others. He blogs at true/slant.] In "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man," Henry Louis Gates writes, that many black Americans think that "the soft drink Tropical Fantasy is manufactured by the Ku Klux Klan and contains a special ingredient designed to sterilize black men." He then demolishes this and other conspiracy theories while recalling America's troub

Jon Pareles: The Enduring Appeal of Woodstock

Baby boomers won’t let go of the Woodstock Festival. Why should we? It’s one of the few defining events of the late 1960s that had a clear happy ending. On Aug. 15 to 17, 1969, hundreds of thousands of people, me among them, gathered in a lovely natural amphitheater in Bethel (not Woodstock), N.Y. We listened to some of the best rock musicians of the era, enjoyed other legal and illegal pleasures, endured rain and mud and exhaustion and hunger pangs, felt like a giant community and

Stanley Kutler: 35 Years After Nixon

[Stanley Kutler is the author The Wars of Watergate (Norton), Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes (Free Press), The American Inquisition: Cold War Political Trials (Hill & Wang), and numerous other books and articles.] President Richard Nixon resigned on Aug. 9, 1974, in the wake of the Watergate scandal and the revelations of his “abuses of power” and obstruction of justice. For his involvement in criminal activities, Nixon earned his unique epitaph: an unindicted co-conspirato

Greg Mitchell: The Day After Hiroshima: When the Atomic "Cover-Up" Began, 64 Years Ago

[Greg Mitchell is co-author, with Robert Jay Lifton, of "Hiroshima in America." His latest book is "Why Obama Won." He is editor of Editor & Publisher and has written about the atomic bombings since 1982. ] Yesterday, I explored the decades-long suppression of film footage of the the full effects of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 64 years ago this week. But that censorship and cover-up of the full impact, and ramifications, of the new weap

Joshua Muravchik: After The Fall... 1989, Twenty Years On

[Joshua Muravchik is a fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. His most recent book is The Next Founders: Voices of Democracy in the Middle East.] Nineteen eighty-nine was a most extraordinary year. There are other years that are imprinted on historic memory, but most of them were occasions for horrible events (1917 or 1939) or disappointing ones (1789 or 1848) or the conclusions of great tragedies (1648 or 1945). The year 1989 was that rare

Eric Michael Johnson: Intimidating the Soviets: A Hiroshima Anniversary Memorial

On August 6, 1945 the United States dropped "Little Boy," the first of only two nuclear bombs ever used in warfare, on the Japanese civilians at Hiroshima. In an instant an estimated 140,000 people were either incinerated or suffered an agonizing death that lasted several days. The standard mythology is that President Truman dropped the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki (three days later on August 9) in order to avoid having to send half a million American soliders to their deaths in a g

Greg Mitchell: The great Hiroshima cover-up

[Greg Mitchell is the editor of E&P and co-author of "Hiroshima in America." His latest book is "Why Obama Won."] In the weeks following the atomic attacks on Japan 64 years ago, and then for decades afterward, the United States engaged in airtight suppression of all film shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings. This included footage shot by U.S. military crews and Japanese newsreel teams. In addition, for many years, all but a handful of newspaper

Jan Puhl: Who Deserves Credit for the 1989 Revolution?

[Jan Puhl writes for Spiegel Online.] The rundown headquarters of the Solidarity (Solidarnosc) trade union in Gdansk makes it hard to imagine that this was where a crucial turning point in world history has its roots. Two wall fragments are on display in front of the entrance. One is from Berlin, and the other is part of the masonry wall that once surrounded the city's Lenin Shipyards. It is the same wall that a young Lech Walesa -- a troublemaker who stood his ground a

Warren Kozak: The Hiroshima Rorschach Test

[Mr. Kozak is the author of "LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay" (Regnery, 2009).] On this day 64 years ago, an American B-29 named the Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb over the city of Hiroshima. We know that as many as 80,000 Japanese died instantly. We know the city was pulverized, and we know that an estimated 100,000 additional people died later from radiation poisoning. We also are aware that the Hiroshima bomb, and the Nagasaki bomb dropped three days

Tom Engelhardt: As another August 6th approaches

As another August 6th approaches, let me tell you a little story about Hiroshima and me: As a young man, I was probably not completely atypical in having the Bomb (the 1950s was a great time for capitalizing what was important) on my brain, and not just while I was ducking under my school desk as sirens howled their nuclear warnings outside. Like many people my age, I dreamed about the bomb, too. I could, in those nightmares

Frida Berrigan: The horror of Hiroshima lives on

[Frida Berrigan, a senior program associate at the New America Foundation's Arms and Security Initiative, is the eldest daughter of peace activists Liz McAlister and Philip Berrigan. The two met during the Vietnam War, founded the Jonah House community in the early 1970s and spent 11 years of their marriage separated by prison sentences stemming from their anti-nuclear and peace activities. Phil Berrigan died in 2002 at the age of 79.]I can't help myself. I still think it's worth br

Gordon Corera: How vital were Cold War spies?

[Gordon Corera is the BBC's Security Correspondent.] Along with nuclear weapons, spies were the emblems of the conflict. But while the tales of adventure, betrayal and mole hunts have proved a source of rich inspiration for thriller writers, did they actually make a difference to the outcome? Did intelligence make the Cold War hotter or colder? It is difficult to know the answer. "There were secrets that were important to

Steven Hahn: A Rebellious Take on African-American History

[Steven Hahn is a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. His book The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom, based on the Nathan I. Huggins Lectures delivered at Harvard University, was published by Harvard University Press in March.] As most scholars know, one book leads to another. Questions unanswered beg for more work. When I was finishing A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South From Slavery to the Great Migration (Harvard

Lawrence S. Wittner: Press on, for a nuclear-free world

[Lawrence S. Wittner teaches history at the University at Albany and is the author of"Confronting the Bomb."] This might seem like a strange time to write of a world without nuclear weapons. Sixty-four years after the U.S. atomic bombing of Japan -- when it became clear that nuclear war portended planetary doom -- the old game of nuclear muscle-flexing persists. Thousands of nuclear weapons remain in existence, about 95 percent of them in the arsenals of the United Stat

Robert F. Turner: How the Vietnam War Started

[Robert F. Turner has taught undergraduate and graduate seminars on the Vietnam War at the University of Virginia for many years. He wrote the 1975 book "Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development." He served twice in Vietnam as an Army officer.] Today marks the 45th anniversary of a 1964 attack by North Vietnamese P-4 torpedo boats upon the American destroyer USS Maddox in international waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. The incident remains shrouded by confusion and mi

John Lundberg: Britain's Poet Laureate Remembers The Great War

[John Lundberg has been writing and teaching poetry for the last ten years. He is a recent Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University who holds an MFA from the University of Virginia. His awards include a Henry Hoynes Fellowship and a Breadloaf Writer's Conference work-study award for 2003 and 2004. His publications include Poetry, VQR, Southern Review, New England Review, and ThreePenny Review.] Carol Ann Duffy, Britain's new poet laureate, published a poem last week to commemor

David Silbey: Our splendid little war

[David Silbey teaches history at a small American university that is, technically, in an extremely eastern part of the American West.] Matt Yglesias notes a Ross Douthat column that invokes one of William McKinley’s splendid little wars, this one in the Philippines. He points out that the military and naval counterinsurgency effort in the Philippines worked, but then wonders if an

Orlando Patterson: Our Cherished Paradoxes

[Re: A Tolerable Anarchy: Rebels, Reactionaries, and the Making of American Freedom by Jedediah Purdy, Alfred A. Knopf, 294 pages, $23.95.] Freedom in America has been the subject of several lines of scholarship. Philosophers attempt to derive freedom's true meaning, intellectual historians examine what eminent minds have argued about it, and social historians study continuities and variations in its meanings and practices, while linguists decipher the ways of framing freedom in th