Roundup: Talking About History

Bill Moyers Show: Tom Paine, American hero

BILL MOYERS: He was the master wordsmith of the American Revolution. His ideas are embedded deep in our DNA. "These are the times that try men's souls," he wrote, and patriots of every rank responded — farmers, blacksmiths, merchants and aristocrats. Thomas Paine lived a life of adventure, stirred radical sentiments on two continents, knew Washington and Jefferson, Lafayette and Napoleon. But he died broke, scorned and alone, here in New York City two hundred years ago this week.

David Nasaw: A search for American identity after the Civil War led to a surge of machismo and bloodlust

[Review of: Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 by Jackson Lears, Harper, 448 pages, $27.99.] ... The cornerstone of Lears' history is what he identifies in his introduction as "regenerative militarism," the pursuit of regeneration -- for the nation and the individual -- through violence. There were other instruments of revitalization but none as important. One might have thought that the bloodletting of the Civil War would have cured the nation o

Steven R. Ward: A History of Violence in Iran

[Steven R. Ward is a senior Middle East analyst for the U.S. government. He is the author of Immortal: A Military History of Iran and Its Armed Forces (Georgetown University Press, 2009).] On the eve of the centennial of Iran's first modern revolution, the country is experiencing the latest in a series of popular eruptions against an oppressive government. It was 100 years ago this month that Iranian freedom fighters were marching on Tehran to depose an autocrat they could no longer

Ann Gibbons: Ötzi Finders Hit Pay Dirt, and Scientists Fret

When I visit researchers in the field, they always bristle when writers compare their search for fossils or antiquities to treasure hunting. Few modern researchers ever profit personally from their discoveries, and in fact they often tell local people that fossils and mummies are worthless in monetary terms. “If you start buying and selling fossils, it will ruin our work,” says paleoanthropologist Elwyn Simons of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who has spent decades uncovering early p

Tim Rutten: The fascinating story of Henry Ford's venture to build an American utopia in the Brazilian rain forest

... By the late 1920s, [Henry] Ford was feeling many kinds of pressure: Socially, America was closing in on him. The long boom was tottering toward the abyss of 1929; his various social experiments were increasingly rejected, including a plan that in many respects anticipated the Tennessee Valley Authority; at the same time, an Anglo-Dutch attempt to monopolize the production of rubber in Southeast Asia seemed to directly threaten Ford Motor's future. The Southeast Asian plantation

Elliott J. Gorn: The Meanings of Depression-Era Culture

[Elliott J. Gorn is a professor of history and American civilization at Brown University. He is author of Dillinger's Wild Ride: The Year That Made America's Public Enemy Number One, published this month by Oxford University Press.] ... There are major differences between the calamities that became apparent in 1929 and in 2008. After the stock-market crash that ended the 1920s, the economy had more than three years to stagnate, as President Herbert Hoover and Congress did what Repub

Alexei Bayer: Russia, Captives of History

[Alexei Bayer, a native Muscovite, is a New York-based economist.] While in Central Europe, I got a sense of how much work awaits the Commission to Combat Attempts to Falsify History to the Detriment of Russia's Interests, which President Dmitry Medvedev set up in May. In Budapest, a Hungarian friend kept pointing out bullet holes and shrapnel scars where Soviet tanks fired on apartment buildings in 1956. Then, in Lithuania, I visited two museums. The first, Stalin's World near the

Thomas Childers: A Father’s Day meditation on the invisible costs of war - and their family legacy

[Thomas Childers is the Sheldon and Lucy Hackney Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. His latest book is “Soldier from the War Returning: The Greatest Generation’s Troubled Homecoming from World War II” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). ] My father Tom Childers and Willis Allen, my best friend Gary’s father, were veterans of the Second World War, prototypes of what we have come to call “the Greatest Generation.” Raised in modest circumstances during the Great Depressio

The New Nixon Blog: John Dean's Appearance at the Nixon Library

Join Frank Gannon, Robert Nedelkoff, Bob Bostock, and others as they weigh in on John Dean's recent visit to the Nixon Presidential Library and the re-issue of his 30-year old book Blind Ambition. #### Jonathan Movroydis: Blind Ambition Not Absolutely Accurate In his Wednesday lecture at the Nixon Presidential Library, disgraced and former Nixon White House Counsel John Dean devoted a portion of his time to address his lawsuit against the authors of

Maurice Isserman: Michael Harrington, Warrior on Poverty

[Maurice Isserman is a professor of history at Hamilton College and the author of “The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington.”] If there is a heaven, and it has a place for virtuous skeptics, I imagine Michael Harrington is looking down, amused by the recent cover of Newsweek proclaiming, “We Are All Socialists Now,” not to mention Newt Gingrich’s lament that the United States is seeing “European socialism transplanted to Washington.” Back in the 1960s, Harrington had some

Masha Lipman: Russia, Again Evading History

[Masha Lipman, editor of the Carnegie Moscow Center's Pro et Contra journal, writes a monthly column for The Post.] The Russian government has intensified its attempts to perfect the nation's past. The Defense Ministry posted an academic article on its Web site arguing that Hitler's territorial claims on Poland were "moderate" and "can hardly be referred to as unsubstantiated." After Poland rejected these claims, seeking "to gain a great power status,"

William Anthony Hay: Conservatism's got a real history

[Mr. Hay, a historian at Mississippi State University, is the author of "The Whig Revival, 1808-1830." ] ... Richard Hofstadter and other thinkers in the postwar years saw conservatism as a morally compromised project in which vested interests played on populist fears to thwart progressive reforms. Lionel Trilling dismissed conservative thinking as "irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas." His Harvard contemporary Louis Hartz loftily claimed that

Edwin Black: Are Jews Arabs?

Your observation [complaining about my use of the word"Arab" to refer to Jews living in the Middle East] is understandable. But my statement was correct especially in historical context. Some explanation may help. The term"Arab" derives from the word which described a person who dwelled in the Arabian Peninsula. For centuries, these people were almost entirely non-agrarian marauders and

Scott Saul: Off Camera ... Civil Rights in the North

[Scott Saul, an associate professor of English and American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties. He is writing a critical biography of Richard Pryor. ] The year 1943 seemed, to contemporary observers, "1776 for the Negro"--a revolutionary time in which the promises of full citizenship for African-Americans were finally to be redeemed. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had desegregated the

Harold Hyman: TIANANMEN, TWENTY YEARS HENCE: WHAT FRANCE HAS FORGOTTEN

[Harold Hyman is a Franco-American journalist, based in Paris, specializing in foreign affairs and cultural diplomacy. He works for BFM TV.] The student protesters at Tiananmen Square in 1989 felt that two nations in the world were beacons for their cause: the United States and France. That was a time when, arguably, the the People's Republic of China was not yet a daunting behemoth, and when Chinese civil society was still adolescent and the parental authority still benign. Confuc

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Illuminating and Misleading Takes on China 20 Years Since Tiananmen

I've already had my chance, via both print and online pieces, to offer my thoughts about the protests that erupted in scores of Chinese cities twenty years ago, the June 4th Massacre that crushed that upheaval, and how China has changed in the last twenty years. Meanwhile, though this is my first Tiananmen-themed piece for the Huffington Post

Jared Farmer: Extralocal History

[Remarks to the Society of American Historians upon accepting the 2009 Francis Parkman Prize, 17 April 2009, New York City, for the book On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Harvard University Press, 2008).] What a pleasure to be here tonight among people who care about the craft of history! I feel honored to share this award with such a distinguished list of writers. Most meaningfully to me, the register of past winners includes my mentor, Richard White. R

Fred Kaplan: 1959 I swear, it really is the year everything changed.

I have a new book out called 1959: The Year Everything Changed, which I suppose puts me in the ranks of authors lampooned in a story in the June 16 New York Times about books with "titles that make extravagant, impossible declarations." The piece pokes particular fun at titles with "exorbitant claims" about "things that changed the world"—and still more at writers who "claim to have found the single year that changed the world." Times reporter

Robert W. Cherny: Graft and Oil ... How Teapot Dome Became the Greatest Political Scandal of its Time

[Robert W. Cherny is professor of history at San Francisco State University. He is the author of several books and articles on American politics, 1865-1940, including American Politics in the Gilded Age, 1868-1900; A Righteous Cause: The Life of William Jennings Bryan; and San Francisco, 1865-1932, with William Issel. He is also co-author of two textbooks: Making America and Competing Visions: A History of California.] In the 1920s, Teapot Dome became synonymous with government corr

Mary Beth Norton: The Years of Magical Thinking: Explaining the Salem Witchcraft Crisis

[Mary Beth Norton is the Mary Donlan Alger Professor of History at Cornell University. She is the author of Founding Mothers & Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society, and In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692.] Most Americans’ knowledge of the seventeenth century comes from semi-mythical events such as the First Thanksgiving at Plymouth, Pocahontas purportedly saving Captain John Smith from execution in early Virginia, and Salem witchcraf