Roundup: Talking About History

Adam Freedman: Independence, British-Style

[Adam Freedman, the host of the Legal Lad podcast at quickanddirtytips.com, is a lawyer.] Tomorrow night, as you watch the fireworks, don’t forget to raise a toast to George III. After all, it was the annual celebration of that king’s birthday on June 4 that gave Americans the habit of summer “illuminations.” After 1776, the ritual was cleverly rebranded to commemorate the republic’s birthday, just one month later. That was just one example of the founders’ uncanny abil

Kathleen DuVal: Life, Liberty and Benign Monarchy?

[DuVal is an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina, is the author of “The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent” and a forthcoming book on the American Revolution on the Gulf Coast.] From the perspective of 2009, democracy in the United States is a great success. This makes it is easy to imagine that the march to democracy was the only path — that there is a clear line from the Declaration of Independence to the presidency of

Carl M. Cannon: Frederick Douglass' July 4 Challenge Answered by Obama's Election

[Carl M. Cannon is the senior Washington correspondent for PoliticsDaily.com.] Martin Luther King Jr., in his famous 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech on the National Mall, memorably described the Declaration of Independence as a "promissory note" that had guaranteed freedom to Americans of every color. Redeeming that note required a bloody Civil War. Redeeming it fully required a Second American Revolution -- the civil rights movement. A century and a ha

Peggy Noonan: The Making of American History

[Peggy Noonan is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal and the best selling author of seven books on American politics, history and culture.] Monday, July 1, was heavy and hot, and a full-scale summer storm passed through the city late in the morning. John Dickinson of Pennsylvania rose to speak. He knew he was endangering the respect in which he was broadly held, his "popularity," but he once again counseled caution: Slow down, separation from Britain is "premature

Duncan Currie: Whose Reagan Is It, Anyway?

[Duncan Currie is managing editor of The American. Prior to joining the magazine in September 2007, he spent more than three years writing for The Weekly Standard. He has been a “Publius” fellow at the Claremont Institute and a Phillips Foundation journalism fellow. His essays have been featured in a number of publications, including The National Review. (Courtesy, The Journal of American Enterprise Institute).] Ramesh has a smart piece in the latest NR on the right and wrong lesso

Mara Lazda: Fascism Past and Present, West and East

Roger Griffin, Werner Loh, Andreas Umland, eds. Fascism Past and Present, West and East: An International Debate on Concepts and Cases in the Comparative Study of the Extreme Right. Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag, 2006. Reviewed by Mara Lazda (Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts) Fascism Past and Present, West and East invites readers to take part in an international debate with thirty-one German- and English-speaking experts on fascism. On the surface, some

Doug Ireland: Queer studies matter

[Doug Ireland is a veteran political reporter covering both sides of the Atlantic. He is currently the U.S. correspondent and columnist for the French political‑investigative weekly Bakchich, and international affairs editor for Gay City News, New York City's largest LGBT weekly newspaper.] Sad to say, much of what comes out of university gay studies programs these days is altogether too precious, artificial and written in an academic jargon that is indigestible to most LGBT

David Silbey: The First Rough Draft of History [Boxers, June 30, 1900]

[David Silbey teaches history at a small American university that is, technically, in an extremely eastern part of the American West.] Journalism is famously the “first rough draft of history” an

David A Andelman: Versailles, 1919-2009: a new world order’s legacy

[David A Andelman is the editor of World Policy Journal and the author of A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today (Wiley, 2007) ] The real roots of many major recent and current political events - the convulsions surrounding Iran's Islamic regime, the bloody troubles in neighbouring Iraq, the ethnic cleansing and mass murders in the Balkans, even numerous wars and uprisings from Palestine to Indochina - lie in a ceremony that occurred ninety years ago. This was

Timothy Snyder: Holocaust ... The Ignored Reality

[Timothy Snyder is Professor of History at Yale. His most recent book is The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke. He is at work on Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, which will be published in October 2010. This text is based on a lecture delivered on May 9, 2009, in Vilnius at the 22nd annual Eurozine conference. (July 2009)] Though Europe thrives, its writers and politicians are preoccupied with death. The mass killings of European civilians during the 1

John McMillian: Today's Reverberations From the 60s

[John McMillian teaches in the Harvard College Writing Program. He is writing two books, Tom Paine's Children: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media (forthcoming, Oxford University Press) and Beatles vs. Stones: The History of a Legendary Rivalry (forthcoming, Free Press).] It remains to be seen whether Barack Obama will help the United States finally transcend the divisive culture wars that have beleaguered the country since the 1960s. But by some accounts

Bill Kauffman: The 'little red schoolhouse' of legend, whatever its flaws, made more sense than the warehouse-schools of today

[Mr. Kauffman's most recent books are "Ain't My America" (Holt) and "Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet: The Life of Luther Martin" (ISI). ] Tacked to my wall is a lithograph of the famous Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington. For many years, it graced my mother's one-room schoolhouse in Lime Rock, N.Y. Antiquarian relic or enduringly relevant image? The same question may be asked of the "little red schoolhouse" itself, whose reality and legend

Eboo Patel: When Muslims Saved Jews

"As Muslims we welcomed them all. We welcomed them with bread, salt, and our hearts." We hear many accounts of what happened during the Holocaust. The atrocities committed; the times and places in which unspeakable acts against humankind occurred; the millions of lives stolen too soon. But the story told above by Nazlie Alla, whose Albanian Muslim family sheltered Jews from Greece, Slovakia, and Germany, is less well known. It's hard to imagine th

Christian Caryl: 1979 ... The Great Backlash

[Christian Caryl is a contributing editor of Newsweek.] If you want to understand the surge of politicized religion, post-communist globalization, and laissez-faire economics that has defined our modern era, forget 1968. Forget even 1989. It's 1979 that's the most important year of all. A remarkable chapter in international affairs—and intellectual history—began that year, and it had the strangest group of authors imaginable. It was in 1979 that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khome

Sean Wilentz: Abe Lincoln, Politician

[Mr. Wilentz is a historian at Princeton.] ... Lincoln has never lacked for critics, ranging from pro-Confederates on the Right to black nationalists on the Left. Yet he has inspired far more approval and even adoration than animosity among historians--including one admiring line of argument that can accommodate even his unsavory attack on Pierce in 1852. That interpretation runs roughly as follows. For most of his adult life, Lincoln was an enormously ambitious and partisan Whig Pa

Michael Ballard: Deep in Mississippi’s piney woods, Confederate deserters fought a different sort of war

The idea is beguiling: a ­region in the South during the Civil War where the inhabitants, disgusted by slavery and unwilling to support the Confederate cause, take up arms as Union loyalists. Better still, for storytelling purposes, would be a charismatic leader who organizes the resistance. Such is the legend of what became known as the “Free State of Jones,” a county deep in Mississippi’s piney woods. The area was one of many pockets in the state where dissatisfaction with the Con

Lloyd Billingsley: Gay-geography ... A Textbook Case

SACRAMENTO – On May 11, the California senate voted 22-15 to pass SB 1437, by Santa Monica Democrat Sheila Kuehl, "an act to amend Sections 51500, 51501, and 60044 of the Education Code, relating to prohibited instruction." The bill prohibits the adoption of textbooks or other instructional materials that "contain any matter that reflects adversely," on persons because of their race or ethnicity, gender, disability, nationality, sexual orientation, and religion.

Doug Ireland: A Truly Queer History

[A complete collection of the Gay Liberation Front’s newspaper, ComeOut!, has just been posted on the excellent OutHistory website, founded by pioneering gay historian Jonathan Ned Katz, at outhistory.org/wiki/Come_Out%21_Magazine%2C_1969-1972 along with a collection of the original police reports on the Stonewall riot. Tommy Avicolli Mecca’s web site is at avicollimecca.com/

Fred Sargeant: It was the second night at Stonewall that pointed the way to gay liberation

[Fred Sargeant is a retired lieutenant from the Stamford, Conn., police department.] I WAS 19 years old when I met Craig Rodwell. He was 26. It was just after Thanksgiving in 1967, shortly after he’d opened the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop on Mercer Street near the New York University campus. One day in the shop — considered to be the first literary gay bookstore — the beat cop stopped by to tell us we needed to pay him off each week. Craig told him we wouldn’t pay; a

Lucian K. Truscott IV: The Real Mob at Stonewall

[Lucian K. Truscott IV, the author of “Dress Gray,” is writing an online novel, “General Bongo’s War.”] ... A prominent Stonewall myth holds that the riots were an uprising by the gay community against decades of oppression. This would be true if the “gay community” consisted of Stonewall patrons. The bar’s regulars, though, were mostly teenagers from Queens, Long Island and New Jersey, with a few young drag queens and homeless youths who squatted in abandoned tenements on the Lower