Roundup: Talking About History

Abraham Verghese: Was Lincoln Dying Before He Was Shot?

John Sotos is a physician well known in medical circles for his book, ZEBRA CARDS: AN AID TO OBSCURE DIAGNOSIS. We tell our medical students,"When you hear hoofbeats think horses, not zebras," or, common things occur commonly. But John has had a lifelong interest in rare diseases--zebras.  (He is also a medical consultant for the TV show HOUSE.)Recently, I heard John make the case in a lecture that A

Larry Kramer: Homo Sex in Colonial America

[Larry Kramer has been writing his The American People since 1978. His first draft, just completed, is some 4000 pages. He and his editor are now rolling up their sleeves.] No, there was no right word for it that you wanted to use for it if you were doing it. Buggery and sodomy connoted anal penetration and thus were, in many places, punishable by death.That does not mean that men did not know they were gay (to use today's word), know what to do with their cocks, know when they were

Cathy Young: Lessons of WW II

This past weekend marked 64 years since the surrender of Nazi Germany and the Allied victory in Europe in World War II (May 8, except in Russia and a few other former Soviet republics where it is commemorated on May 9). In the United States, this date generally receives little notice except on the major anniversaries; in Russia, Victory Day is the most important public holiday, celebrated with much pomp and circumstance. Yet in any country directly affected by World War II, that war holds a uniq

Editorial in Spiegel Online: Hitler's European Holocaust Helpers

He's been here before, in this country of perpetrators. He saw this country collapse. He was 25 at the time and his Christian name was Ivan, not John yet. Ivan Demjanjuk served as a guard in Flossenbürg concentration camp until shortly before the end of World War II. He had been transferred there from the SS death camp in Sobibor in present-day Poland. He was Ukrainian, and he was a Travniki, as the 5,000 men were called who helped Germany's Nazi regime commit the crime of the mill

Edwin Black: The Hostmen—The World’s First Fuel Cartel

[Edwin Black is the author of the award-winning Internal Combustion (Dialog Press 2008), and the Plan.]

Jay Parini: A survivor of the Armenian massacre turns trauma to testament

[Jay Parini is a novelist, poet, and professor of English at Middlebury College. His latest book, Why Poetry Matters, was published last year by Yale University Press.] ... Peter Balakian, a poet and professor of English at Colgate University, has written movingly about the Armenian genocide in Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir (Basic Books, 1997) and The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response (HarperCollins, 2003). In the latter, he focused on the genocide itself, o

Dahr Jamail: How Some Anthropologists Have Learned to Stop Worrying and Start Loving the Army

[Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist, is the author of "Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq," (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from occupied Iraq for eight months as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last four years.] Anthropologist Audrey Roberts works for Human Terrain System (HTS), a Pentagon program. Referring to the information produced by HTS scholars, she says, "If it's going to infor

Anne-Marie O'Connor: Payments and Apologies for Victims of Guatemala's Civil War

[O'Connor is a freelance writer who has contributed to the Los Angeles Times and the New York Magazine.] GUATEMALA CITY -- When army helicopters landed in his village in August 1982, Francisco Velasco was away in the cornfields with the men. Then they heard the screams. Velasco rushed back home and found his wife and two baby daughters dead. Velasco lost 16 relatives, including his mother and father, in the army's scorched-earth campaign against leftist guerrillas. Five

Richard M. Langworth: Obama, Churchill and Torture

[Langworth, a former bookseller, is (according to Wiki), the author of"A Connoisseur's Guide to the Books of Sir Winston Churchill and Winston Churchill by Himself. Langworth served as the President of The Churchill Centre in Washington, DC (1988-99) and has been Chairman of the Centre's Board of Trustees since 2000. He has been editor of the Churchill journal Finest Hour from 1982 to date. In 1998 he was created a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) by HM The Queen

Bao pu: What Really Happened at Tiananmen

[Mr. Bao is one of the translators and editors of "Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang," to be released by Simon & Schuster on May 19. ] Twenty years after Chinese troops crushed demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, new light has now been shed on the incident by the forthcoming memoirs of Zhao Ziyang. The former general secretary died in 2005, after living in forced seclusion for 16 years for supporting the pro-democracy movement. In those ye

Bao Pu: What Really Happened at Tiananmen

[Mr. Bao is one of the translators and editors of "Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang," to be released by Simon & Schuster on May 19.] Twenty years after Chinese troops crushed demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, new light has now been shed on the incident by the forthcoming memoirs of Zhao Ziyang. The former general secretary died in 2005, after living in forced seclusion for 16 years for supporting the pro-democracy movement. In those yea

Clifford Coonan: Revealed ... the inside story of the Tiananmen massacre

[Clifford Coonan is China correspondent for The Independent.] The secret memoirs of Zhao Ziyang, the Communist Party leader ousted for opposing the military crackdown on student protesters in Tiananmen Square, exploded into the open yesterday, four years after his death. Dictated during his years of house arrest and smuggled out on cassettes disguised as children's music or Peking opera, the book will be pored over for clues about the workings of the secretive group of

Tony Platt: The bones of Geronimo and Yale's Skull and Bones

[Tony Platt is Professor emeritus, California State University, Sacramento.] The Indian leader Goyathlay, popularly known as Geronimo, died in captivity and was buried at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 1909. This fact about his death is generally agreed upon. But the current location of his skull and where his remains should be buried are matters of a longtime and acrimonious dispute, and now a lawsuit that pits tribe against tribe, and the descendants of the man whom Teddy Roosevelt showe

Thomas S. Mullaney: The Chinese Typewriter

[Thomas S. Mullaney is Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese History at Stanford University. He is the author of Coming to Terms with the Chinese Nation (forthcoming from University of California Press) and is currently writing a global history of the Chinese typewriter. He can be reached at tsmullaney@stanford.edu] Propelled to international stardom by his multi-platinum single “U Can’t Touch This,” MC Hammer is perhaps not the first person one thinks of when studying Western stereotypes

Cathy Young: Lessons From World War II

[Cathy Young writes a weekly column for RealClearPolitics and is also a contributing editor at Reason magazine. She blogs at http://cathyyoung.wordpress.com/.] This past weekend marked 64 years since the surrender of Nazi Germany and the Allied victory in Europe in World War II (May 8, except in Russia and a few other former Soviet republics where it is commemorated on May 9). In the United States, this date generally receives little no

Joshua Wolf Shenk: What Makes Us Happy?

[Joshua Wolf Shenk, the director of the Rose O’Neill Literary House at Washington College, is the author of Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness. He can be reached at jw@shenk.net.] Is there a formula—some mix of love, work, and psychological adaptation—for a good life? For 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been examining this question, following 268 men who entered college in the late 1930s throu

Nick Danforth: Moving Beyond Black and White on the Armenian Genocide

It's time to ask what outside resolutions are doing to further the conversation in Turkey over recognizing the Armenian genocide. ### ... While no one would claim it is easy to discuss the fate of the Armenians openly in Turkey, the once formidable legal and social obstacles to doing so are gradually eroding. Until recently, challenging the official view of the 1915 killings was a sure way to end up in court. Now historians are debating what happened on television and c

Ronald and Allis Radosh: Why Truman recognized Israel

[Ronald Radosh is the distinguished historian and author of books includingThe Rosenberg File (with Joyce Milton), The Amerasia Spy Case, Spain Betrayed:The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War, and, most recently, with Allis Radosh, Red Star Over Hollywood. The Radoshes’ new book, available online and at bookstores today, is A Safe Haven: Harry S. Truman and The Founding of Israel] On May 14, we’ll be celebrating the sixty-first anniversary of President Harry S. Truman’s decision

AHA focuses on digital history

The theme of the May 2009 issue of Perspectives on History centers on how new media (web sites, wikis, Google, and more) intersect with history. AHA president Laurel Thatcher Ulrich begins this exploration with her article “Erasing History.” In it she explains how the “digit

Brian Hanrahan: Hungary's role in the 1989 revolutions

... Imre Pozsgay was a leading reformer in Hungary's Communist Party. He had fought his way up to the top of the party, and in 1989 was one of the handful of people who controlled it. He used his position to open up the Iron Curtain which separated Hungary from Austria. He also helped persuade the Communist Party to give up power voluntarily rather than be forced out as happened elsewhere. But were Hungarians grateful for the man who had brought free travel and free ele