Roundup: Talking About History

Johann Hari: The dark side of Andrew Roberts

[Johann Hari is a British journalist and columnist for The Independent.] What does it say about Britain that today we merrily laud a historian who celebrates the most murderous acts of the British Empire – and even says women and children who died in our concentration camps were killed by their own stupidity? Andrew Roberts is routinely described in the British press as a talented historian with a penchant for partying. They affectionately describe how the 46-year-old

David H Young: The Art of Appeasment

[David H Young is a Washington-based analyst who blogs at www.justwars.org.] In the early stages of the Cuban missile crisis in the early 1960s, Adlai Stevenson, United States president John F Kennedy's notoriously dovish United Nations ambassador, suggested that Washington offer Moscow a non-confrontational trade to stave off a nuclear exchange: we withdraw our missiles from Turkey, and the Soviets withdraw their missile components from Cuba.

Andrew Rice: A professor, a genocide, and NBC's quest for a prime-time hit.

One Monday last December, a stranger presented himself at the office of Sanford Ungar, the president of Goucher College, located in a suburb of Baltimore. He introduced himself as Charlie Ebersol, a television producer. A handsome, affable, and royally confident young man--he was sometimes pictured in the gossip pages with his girlfriend, the tennis star Maria Sharapova--Ebersol explained his visit by saying he was doing research for a new prime-time show on NBC. Beyond that, he was cryptic, Ung

Miriam Pawel: The study of history demands nuanced thinking

[Pawel is the author of the forthcoming book 'The Union of Their Dreams — Power, Hope and Struggle in Cesar Chavez's Farm Worker Movement.'] Cesar Chavez was not a saint. He was, at times, a stubborn authoritarian bully, a fanatical control freak, a wily fighter who manufactured enemies and scapegoats, a mystical vegetarian who healed with his hands, and a union president who wanted his members to value sacrifice above higher wages. He was also a brilliant, inspirationa

Thomas D. Fallace: Did the Social Studies Really Replace History in American Secondary Schools?

[THOMAS D. FALLACE is an assistant professor of education at the University of Mary Washington and a lecturer at the University of Virginia.] In recent years, it has become conventional wisdom among many historians to blame the emergence of the social studies for the demise of history in American secondary schools. This interpretation has not only become the default explanation in the academic discourse, but it has also had an influential effect on educational policy. Historians’ di

Karen Long: Susan M. Schweik's "The Ugly Law" exposes obscure law of discrimination

Consider the smiling young man in white tie and cap, whose photo appeared in a 1916 report by the"Committee on Cripples of the Welfare Federation of Cleveland." His name is not recorded, but Cleveland's ugly law, banning"diseased, maimed and deformed persons" from appearing in public, cost him his job. Don't see the problem? Look closer -- the vendor has clubbed hands and feet. "Although it [the law] seems rather hard," the report states,"he appreciated the meaning of it, but c

Edwin Black: Original Mideast Peace Plan Recognized Jewish State in Return for Arab Nation in Syria

[Edwin Black is the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of IBM and the Holocaust. This article is adapted from Banking on Baghdad: Inside Iraq's 7,000-Year History of War, Profit, and Conflict (Dialog Press).]

Andrew Roberts: Frozen to death by the Fuhrer

[In an extract from his new book, historian Andrew Roberts shows how Hitler's troops were fatally ill-equipped for the 1941 invasion of Russia in 1941.] The Russians have a saying that there is no such thing as cold weather, only the wrong kind of clothing. Prior to Operation Barbarossa, the Nazis could have been certain that their invasion of Russia, which began on June 22, 1941, was in for a very cold winter. It was a matter of simple statistical analysis, the kind at which

William Safire: The Cold War’s Hot Kitchen

EXACTLY one-half century ago, one of the great confrontational moments of the cold war seized the world’s attention: Nikita Khrushchev, bombastic anti-capitalist leader of the Soviet Union, and Richard Nixon, vice president of the United States with the reputation of a hard-line anti-communist, came to rhetorical grips in the model kitchen of the “typical American house” at the 1959 American exhibition at Sokolniki Park in Moscow. I was in that kitchen, not because I then had anythi

James Rodgers: Russia acts against 'false' history

[James Rodgers was formerly the BBC's Moscow correspondent.] President Dmitry Medvedev recently announced the setting up of a commission to counter the falsification of history. He said this was becoming increasingly "severe, evil, and aggressive". "This is absolute poppycock," says Robert Service, professor of Russian History at Oxford University. "History is all about argument. There is no absolute historical truth about anything big in histo

Michael A. Cohen: The Powell Doctrine's Enduring Relevance

[Michael A. Cohen is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation, where he runs the Privatization of Foreign Policy Initiative.] Once upon a time, there was a grand and influential foreign policy doctrine. It was based on some traditional notions about U.S. statecraft that placed severe constraints on when America went to war. It asserted that when the United States used military force, it must do so in overwhelming fashion and only in the service of vital national intere

Frank Gannon: Historians And Partisans

The Nixon Library has just released some 30,000 pages of new presidential records and 150 new tapes from January and February 1973.   Among the many subjects covered are the end of the war in Vietnam.  The New York Times, Politico, and the Los Angeles Times all turned to Ken Hughes, of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, for explanation and explication. &nb

Porsche and Volkswagen's Nazi Roots

Both Volkswagen and Porsche had close connections with the Third Reich. It was Ferdinand Porsche who designed the"people's car," the legendary VW Beetle, in 1934. Adolf Hitler was so taken with the engineer he declared him"brilliant." Without Ferdinand Porsche, neither automotive giant Volkswagen nor luxury marque Porsche would exist today. The man who would have a huge influence on German car-making was born in Bohemia in 1875 and completed his apprenticeship in his father's mechan

What Students Need To Know About America’s Wars, Part 2— 1920–Present: A History Institute for Teachers

On May 2-3, 2009, FPRI’s Wachman Center selected 40 teachers from across the country for a weekend of discussion on teaching America’s Wars. The Institute was cosponsored and hosted by the Cantigny First Division Foundation at its First Division Museum in Wheaton, Illinois. See www.fpri.org/education/americaswars2 for videofiles, texts of lectures, and classroom lessons. For materials from Part 1, see:

Ralph Engleman: Walter Cronkite and Fred Friendly

[Ralph Engelman is the author of Friendlyvision: Fred Friendly and the Rise and Fall of Television Journalism.] Walter Cronkite’s recent death prompted thoughts about the complex relationship between the great anchor and Fred Friendly. The mixed feelings were very apparent when I interviewed Cronkite in 1999 for Friendlyvision, my biography of Friendly. For one thing, their relationships with Edward R. Murrow differed. Friendly virtually deified Murrow, who was his hero

Tessa Morris-Suzuki: Museums and the Contested Memory of the Korean War

[Tessa Morris-Suzuki is Professor of Japanese History, Convenor of the Division of Pacific and Asian History in the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University, and a Japan Focus associate. Her most recent book is Exodus to North Korea: Shadows from Japan's Cold War. She wrote this article for The Asia-Pacific Journal. ] On 27 May 2009, the government of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, North Korea) provoked worldwide alarm and protest by announci

Christopher Hitchens: A Sense of Historical Irony ... Leszek Kolakowski, 1927-2009

[Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, now out in paperback.] It was distinctly eerie to learn of the death of professor Leszek Kolakowski just 15 minutes before entering a room in which I was to give a short lecture on his influence. But it was also rather inspiring to be in a country that made the passing of a public intellectual into the front-page headline of every national daily paper the followi

Adrian Berry: The real giant leap for mankind

[Adrian Berry was science correspondent of The Daily Telegraph from 1977 until 1996 and on stepping down from that position he became the paper's consulting editor (science).] I was sitting in a press room the size of a football field at Nasa headquarters in Houston, Texas, watching a grainy black and white television screen that would show Neil Armstrong climbing down a ladder to step on to the Moon. The spaceship Eagle had landed, with its huge legs standing securely on the lunar

George Jonas: Assassination ... A Brief History

[George Jonas is author of Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team, which was adapted for the film Munich.] Opponents couldn't make political hay out of former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's withholding (if he did) from congressional scrutiny secret CIA programs to assassinate high-ranking al Qaeda operatives, if people had no qualms about targeted killing. But they do. Governments can bomb faceless troops of enemy conscripts with impunity, but are question

Tom Wolfe: One Giant Leap to Nowhere

WELL, let’s see now ... That was a small step for Neil Armstrong, a giant leap for mankind and a real knee in the groin for NASA. The American space program, the greatest, grandest, most Promethean — O.K. if I add “godlike”? — quest in the history of the world, died in infancy at 10:56 p.m. New York time on July 20, 1969, the moment the foot of Apollo 11’s Commander Armstrong touched the surface of the Moon. It was no ordinary dead-and-be-done-with-it death. It was full