Roundup: Talking About History

Source: Times (UK)
April 13, 2009

Tristram Hunt: What have the Germans ever done for us..?

[Tristram Hunt's biography of Engels, The Frock-coated Communist, is published by Penguin on May 1.] What could be more British than Handel's Messiah, Holbein's portraits of Henry VIII or a traditional Christmas Day? With museums, concert halls and opera houses commemorating the 250th anniversary of Georg Friedrich Handel's death on April 14, 1759, this seems the right moment to remember the signal contribution of German culture to British identity. An appreciation all too often obl

Source: Investor's Business Daily
April 9, 2009

Editorial in Investor's Business Daily: Reagan's Legacy ... Our 25-Year Boom

Let's go back to 1982, in many ways the bleakest year since the Depression. The economy had emerged severely damaged by the stagflation of the 1970s. Americans' confidence, both in government and in the economy, had reached a low ebb in 1980. Many felt our best years lay behind us. On the nations' campuses and even in some of its boardrooms, people were talking about capitalism as a failed system. Some advocated a "third way" between socialism and capitalism,

Source: Media Beat
April 9, 2009

Norman Solomon: Getting a Death Grip on Memory

[Norman Solomon’s latest books are “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death” and “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State.” For information, go to: www.normansolomon.com] A headline in the New York Times announced a few days ago: “Brain Researchers Open Door to Editing Memory.” This news ran above the fold on the front page. “Suppose scientists could erase certain memor

Source: Slate
April 9, 2009

Larry W. Hurtado: Why Was Jesus Crucified?

[Larry W. Hurtado is head of the School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh. His recent books are The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins, How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God? and Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity.] A central statement in traditional Christian creeds is that Jesus was crucified"under Pontius Pilate." But the majority of Christians have only the vaguest sense what the phrase represents, and most non-Christians

Source: Nation
April 8, 2009

Thomas J. Sugrue: The Hundred Days War ... Histories of the New Deal

[Thomas J. Sugrue, the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of The Origins of the Urban Crisis and, most recently, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Unfinished Struggle for Racial Equality in the North.] During Barack Obama's first hundred days, history has provided pundits and politicians with a grab bag of analogies. Obama himself has invoked Abraham Lincoln and put him on a pedestal. I'm not speaking figuratively: a b

Source: New Republic
April 2, 2009

Adam Kirsch: Did the Armenian genocide have its own Primo Levi?

[Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor at The New Republic. This article originally appeared in Nextbook.] A week before Germany's invasion of Poland, Hitler reportedly urged his generals to slaughter civilians--Slavs and Jews, the two most hated groups in Nazi ideology--without mercy. "After all," he flippantly asked, "who remembers the Armenians?" In fact, the attempted genocide of the Armenians by the Turks during the First World War was very well documented, a

Source: Slate
April 8, 2009

Michael Lukas: A Skeptic's Guide to Passover

[Michael Lukas is a writer currently finishing up a novel about the end of the Ottoman Empire. He lives in Berkeley, Calif.] For thousands of years, skeptics and believers alike have debated whether the events described in the Passover story—the parting of the Red Sea, the 10 plagues, and the burning bush—actually took place. Roman Jewish historian Josephus Flavius speculated that the parting of the Red Sea "might be of God's will or of natural origin. Let everyone believe at h

Source: American Conservative
April 6, 2009

Sean Scallon: Carter Conservatism

[Sean Scallon is an author and journalist living in Arkansaw, Wisconsin.] Jimmy Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence” speech, delivered from the Oval Office on July 15, 1979, has long been a symbol of Democratic defeat—and defeatism. Republican politicians from presidents on down have used it to tar Democrats as the party of “malaise,” a word that Carter himself never uttered in the address. Rarely has a speech so backfired. Yet what if the text, obscured by recriminations,

Source: "Jackson list" (Mr. Barrett is writing a biography of Justice Jackson) Click here to download a PDF that includes images of the Lantz and Jackson-Frankfurter letters.
April 7, 2009

John Q. Barrett: How NOT to win an appointment to the Supreme Court

[Professor John Q. Barrett, St. John’s University School of Law.] President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose first four years in the White House brought no opportunity to appoint a Supreme Court Justice, made five appointments to the Court during his second term: · in 1937, Senator Hugo L. Black (D.-AL); · in 1938, Solicitor General Stanley F. Reed; · in 1939, Harvard Law School Professor Felix Frankfurter; ·

Source: Slate
April 6, 2009

Christopher Hitchens: Telling the Truth About the Armenian Genocide

[Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the Roger S. Mertz media fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, California. ] Even before President Barack Obama set off on his visit to Turkey this week, there were the usual voices urging him to dilute the principled position that he has so far taken on the Armenian genocide. April is the month in which the Armenian diaspora commemorates the bloody initiation, in 1915, of the Ottoman Empire's campaign to erase its Arm

Source: Japan Times
April 5, 2009

Gwynne Dyer: NATO at 60 faces growing pains that could threaten its survival

[Gwynne Dyer is a London-based journalist.] The questions that nobody will ask out loud about the North Atlantic Treaty Organization: How much is enough? How many new members can NATO afford to take on? If Georgia had already been a member last August, would NATO have gone to war with Russia in its defense? And how far beyond Europe should it try to operate? When U.S. President Barack Obama asks NATO countries to send more troops to Afghanistan, few member

Source: Foreign Policy
April 6, 2009

Christian Caryl: Think Again ... Japan's Lost Decade

[Christian Caryl is a Newsweek contributing editor and correspondent at large.] "Japan's Economy Collapsed in the 1990s." Not exactly. Decades of extraordinarily high growth in postwar Japan culminated in a huge asset price bubble that reached its peak in 1989. When the bubble finally popped in 1990, wiping out billions of dollars in accumulated wealth, the country's growth rates turned anemic. Between 1990 and 2003 Japan dipped into and out of recession. Desp

Source: NYT
April 4, 2009

Michael Slackman: For Egypt, Promise of 1979 Peace Still Unfulfilled

[Michael Slackman is New York Times correspondent.] In the past week, Egypt marked the historic 30-year anniversary of its peace treaty with Israel without any public celebration and only the barest public mention. It is not surprising, really, that there was no cheering here. The timing could hardly have been worse, with memories still fresh of the Israeli offensive in Gaza. But mention of the anniversary also served as a reminder of promises unfulfilled.

Source: New Republic
April 15, 2009

Michael Crowley: Will Obama renege on his campaign promise to recognize the Armenian genocide?

... Obama is the first American president elected after explicitly promising to invoke the dreaded G-word. And, thus, a trip designed to defuse tension between the United States and the Muslim world will have the small matter of genocide culpability hanging over it like a foul odor. As a candidate, Obama was perfectly clear. "The facts are undeniable," he said in a January 2008 statement. He called the massacre not an allegation or matter of opinion--many Turks maintain th

Source: Asia Pacific Journal
April 4, 2009

Sean L. Malloy: Four Days in May ... Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb

[Sean L. Malloy is an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Merced and the author of Atomic Tragedy: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Bomb Against Japan. This is a revised and expanded version of a chapter of Atomic Tragedy. Reprinted material from “The Ordeal of Henry L. Stimson,” in Atomic Tragedy: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Bomb against Japan,” by Sean L. Malloy. Copyright © 2008 by Cornell University. Used by permission of th

Source: Special to HNN
April 6, 2009

Kimit Muston: The Bridge at Lodi

[A freelance writer, for six years KAMuston wrote a weekly column for the Los Angeles Daily News and has been published by the Los Angeles Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Oklahoma Oklahomian, and the San Francisco Chronicle. He is a regular contributor to the web site Daily Kos and Politico.com, and now lives in Indiana.] I begin with the event, as described by John Cabot. “The line wheeled instantly into a dense and solid column, crowding the street with its i

Source: Independent (UK)
April 6, 2009

Robert Fisk: Will Obama honour pledge on genocide of Armenians?

[Robert Fisk is an English journalist and author.] It's all supposed to be about campaign promises. Didn't Barack Obama promise to deliver an address from a "Muslim capital" in his first 100 days? It's got to be in a safe, moderate country, of course, but where better than Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's secular/Islamist nation of Turkey, whose rulers talk to Syria as well as Israel, Iran as well as Iraq? But when the Obama cavalcade turned up in the heart of the old Ottoman Empir

Source: WSJ
April 4, 2009

Adam Schiff: Time to Recognize the Armenian Genocide

[Mr. Schiff is a Democratic member of the U.S. Congress from California.] When President Barack Obama visits Turkey tomorrow, millions of Americans hope that he will fulfill a campaign promise by preparing the Turkish government for official American recognition of the Armenian genocide of 1915-23. No American president since World War II has come into office with a stronger understanding of the facts about this terrible chapter in history. And no president has a greate

Source: Foreign Policy in Focus
March 26, 2009

John Feffer: On Trial 60 Years Later (re: Tokyo War Crimes Trial)

[John Feffer is co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus.] The deliberations that took place in Tokyo after World War II, which led to 25 guilty verdicts and the execution of seven Japanese, helped shape the international law around war crimes. The arguments made in the proceedings against Slobodan Milosevic and the instigators of the Rwanda genocide, as well as the recent indictment of the International Criminal Court against Sudanese leader Omar Hassan al-Bashir, can be

Source: Huffington Post (Blog)
April 3, 2009

Ellis Cose: Rwanda 15 Years After Genocide

[Ellis Cose is executive producer, host and writer for AGAINST THE ODDS, a multimedia documentary series that debuts on public radio stations this April 2009 with four hour-long radio documentaries. Public Radio International (PRI) is the distributor.] Next week will mark the 15th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda. It was on April 6, 1994, shortly after 9 p.m., that the plane carrying Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana went down in flames. Habyarimana , President Cyprian Ntay