Roundup: Talking About History

David Blight: Why the 150th anniversary of the Civil War looks more promising than the 100th

[David W. Blight is a professor of American history at Yale University. Among his books is Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Harvard University Press, 2001), winner of the Bancroft Prize for excellence in American history.] In 1961-65, the centennial commemoration of the Civil War was a political and historical debacle. Fraught, to say the least, by cold-war nationalism, racism among its leadership as well as the general populace, an enduring hold of the Lost Cause

Todd Gitlin: I.F. Stone, Journalist -- and Spy?

[Todd Gitlin is a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University and the author of Letters to a Young Activist. He is currently working with Liel Leibovitz on a book about chosen peoples.] ... [D.D. Guttenplan's scrupulous, spirited biography [ American Radical: The Life and Times of I. F. Stone] is plainly a labor of love. Rightly, Guttenplan views Stone as a radical who happened to be a journalist and who thought that the mission of journalism was to nudge the arc of

Donald Ritchie: How the New York Times (and Almost Everyone Else) Missed the Watergate Scandal

[Donald Ritchie, author of Reporting from Washington: The History of the Washington Press Corps, Our Constitution, and The Congress of the United States: A

Johann Hari: The Ghosts of the Empire Are Returning to Haunt Britain - and the U.S.

[Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent.] In a few weeks, a group of quiet, dignified elderly men and women will arrive in London to explain how the forces of the British state crushed their testicles or breasts with plyers. It was part of a deliberate policy of breaking a civilian population who we regarded as "baboons", "barbarians" and "terrorists." They will come bearing the story of how Britain invaded a country, stole its land, and imprisoned

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Tiananmen at Twenty

[Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a professor of history at UC, Irvine, is a co-founder of The China Beat (a group blog) and the author, most recently, of the forthcoming China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know.] In April and May of 1989, people around the world were inspired by the protests in Tiananmen Square, then horrified when the June 4 massacre turned Beijing streets into urban killing fields. China has changed enormously in the twenty years since then, but the Communist Pa

Anton Espira: Missing Link ... Too much about Ida

[Dr. Anton Espira is a young research zoologist based in Kuala Lumpur. He holds a Ph.D. from Oxford University in Tropical Ecology and writes on science, culture and politics. Dr. Espira last wrote The Evolution of Charles Darwin's Reputation for Culturekiosque.com . ] A scientific career is a dreary affair, offering little opportunity for social recognition. Some fields, though, offer more chances of redemption than others, engendering the occasional superstar scientist or blockbus

Sarah Ruden: Beyond the Myth of Mandela

[Sarah Ruden was born and raised in rural Ohio and educated at the University of Michigan, Harvard and Johns Hopkins. She has lived and worked in Africa for 10 years, and her fifth book, a translation of Vergil's Aeneid, was recently published by Yale University Press.] In the December 2008 edition of Harpers magazine, the South African poet in exile Breyten Breytenbach published a 90th-birthday letter to the former President, Nelson Mandela. The letter is replete with despair, grie

Jonathan Mirsky: The Long Shadow of Tiananmen

[Jonathan Mirsky is a journalist and a historian of China who lives in London.] The Tiananmen Square killings of 4 June 1989, 20 years ago, remain the most deadly events in the People's Republic of China since the death of Mao in 1976. Merely mentioning them can lead to arrest and detention. More than a dark shadow, the Tiananmen nightmare still hovers over the country. Here are the essential details of what is officially still called "the incident" or "t

Vladimir Ryzhkov: The Kremlin's War on History

[Vladimir Ryzhkov, a State Duma deputy from 1993 to 2007, hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy.] The Kremlin opened a new front against its "internal and external enemies" on May 19, when President Dmitry Medvedev created a presidential commission "for counteracting attempts to falsify history to the detriment of Russia's interests." The 28-member commission includes Kremlin-friendly conservatives such as State Duma deputies and United Russia members Konsta

Ian Buruma: The ghosts of Tiananmen

[A new edition of Ian Buruma’s “Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing” (Atlantic) is published on 1st June.] Ten years after the Tiananmen massacre of 1989 I wrote a book, Bad Elements, about the fate of the protesters, dissidents and free-spirited Chinese who had wanted to change their country. Much had changed in those ten years, and even more has changed since. New buildings, ever taller, ever bigger, have made cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing virtua

Robert Skidelsky: We Can Still Learn from Thatcher

[Robert Skidelsky, a member of the British House of Lords, is Professor emeritus of political economy at Warwick University, author of a prize-winning biography of the economist John Maynard Keynes, and a board member of the Moscow School of Political Studies.] Thirty years ago this month, Margaret Thatcher came to power. Although precipitated by local conditions, the Thatcher (or more broadly the Thatcher-Reagan) revolution became an instantly recognizable global brand for a set of

Barron H. Lerner: The secret history of Jewish quotas in medicine

[Dr. Barron H. Lerner teaches medicine and public health at Columbia University Medical Center.] As a Jewish physician practicing medicine in 2009, I hardly ever pay attention to my religious affiliation. But in the years before World War II, at my institution and at other medical schools, Judaism was very much on people’s minds. Informal quotas limited the numbers of Jewish medical students and physicians. Within hospital walls, some non-Jewish physicians

Garry Wills: Lincoln's Black History

Abraham Lincoln was born into a racist family, in a racist region of our country, during a racist era of our history. It would have been amazing if he had not begun his life as a racist. Piety toward his memory suppressed that fact for generations. Most of us wanted Lincoln to be free of racism, and we read the evidence to arrive at that conclusion. No one wanted that more than blacks. Henry Louis Gates, the Harvard professor, notes [in Lincoln on Race and Slavery] that blacks—from Booker T. Was

William Fitzhugh: What If History Students Were Given the Acclaim of Athletes?

[Mr. Fitzhugh is the founder of The Concord Review.] Imagine that somewhere in the United States there is a Horace Mann High School, with a student who is a first-rate softball pitcher. Let us further imagine that although she set a new record for strikeouts for the school and the district, she was never written up in the local paper. Let us suppose that even when she broke the state record for batters retired she received no recognition from the major newspapers or other media in t

Fred Siegel: H.G. Wells ... The Godfather of American Liberalism

Modern American liberalism, as it emerged in the 1920s, was animated by a revolt against the masses. Liberal thinkers accused the great unwashed of smothering creative individuals in a blanket of materialist, spiritually empty cultural conformity. The liberal project was, so to speak, to refound America by replacing its business civilization—a “dictatorship of the middle class,” as Vernon Parrington put it—with a new, more highly evolved leadership. But along with the ideal of the spontaneous, c

James Marson: Russia and Ukraine Battle Over Their Shared History

[Marson is a freelance writer living and writing in and about East Europe.] Fresh from their conflict over gas in January, Ukraine and Russia are again in the midst of a heated battle — this time about the countries' shared Soviet past. As Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko this week lamented that Ukraine had become "a hostage in the fight between two totalitarian regimes — fascist and communist" and called for Soviet-era symbols around the country to be torn down, his

Drew Gilpin Faust: Death and the American Civil War

[Ms. Faust is the president of Harvard and the author of This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, from which the following is excerpted.] Mortality defines the human condition. “We all have our dead–we all have our Graves,” a Confederate Episcopal bishop observed in an 1862 sermon. Every era, he explained, must confront “like miseries”; every age must search for “like consolation.” Yet death has its discontinuities as well. Men and women approach death in ways

Timothy Burke: What’s Distinctive About Africanist Historiography?

[Professor Burke teaches at Swathmore.] Swarthmore has an elaborate system of Honors seminars. The basic premise of the system is that third and fourth year students participating in the system take four small, intensely focused double-credit seminars, three in a major subject, one in a minor subject. At the end of their time at Swarthmore, they take written and oral examinations in these subjects designed and given by experts in the field who are not faculty at Swarthmore.

Susan Blum: Should China Copy the West on Academic Integrity?

[Susan D. Blum is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of the recent works Lies that Bind: Chinese Truth, Other Truths (Rowman and Littlefield 2007) and My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture (Cornell University Press 2009).]In recent years, articles have appeared

Rick Atkinson: Ten Things Every American Student Should Know About Our Army in World War II

[Rick Atkinson is author of The Army and Dawn and The Day of Battle, and is currently at work on the third volume in his trilogy on the role of the U.S. military in the liberation of Europe in World War II. He joined the Washington Post, from which he is now on book leave, in 1983, where he has served as reporter, foreign correspondent, and editor. He has won the Pulitzer Prize three times.]The U.S. Army in World War II is obviously a big subject. It