Roundup: Talking About History

Andrew Ferguson: If our 16th president were alive today, chances are he wouldn't be Barack Obama

[Andrew Ferguson, a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is the author of Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe's America.] Mario Cuomo has written one book (Why Lincoln Matters) and edited another (Lincoln on Democracy) dedicated to the proposition that Abraham Lincoln is a lot like Mario Cuomo. But he recently revised his view. Lincoln is actually a lot like Barack Obama. Cuomo listed the similarities in an op-ed that appeared in Newsday on Inauguration Day. "Obama

Susan Jacoby: Alger Hiss -- a case for our time

[Susan Jacoby is the author, most recently, of "Alger Hiss and the Battle for History."] Fifty-eight years ago today, Alger Hiss -- the defendant in an emblematic Cold War prosecution once called "the trial of the century" -- began serving a federal prison sentence for perjury. Until his death in 1996, Hiss maintained that he had never been a Communist or a spy and had been framed by the U.S. government. When I told my 86-year-old mother that I was

Yehudit Keshet: Neve Gordon's contribution to the Middle East debate

The Israel-Palestine conflict has generated a plethora of literature ranging from personal accounts to precise recordings of abuses and misuses of power, policies and human rights, and from historical surveys to a host of solutions and counter solutions for ending the occupation and/or achieving ‘peace’. In this library of anguish relatively few works provide a theoretical framework for understanding the overall processes of Israeli domination over Palestinians and their land. The focus tends to

Jack Niedenthal: The world's debt to Bikini

Bikini Atoll, a small necklace of islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, is a miraculous place. Unfortunately, the only people who can truly understand how beautiful it is are those who have been there. In January, the Republic of the Marshall Islands and the Bikini Atoll local government submitted an 83-page application to UNESCO to make Bikini a world heritage site. The application seeks to ensure that humanity will remember for all time the devastation unleashed by the most powerful weap

Wendy Doniger: The Battle over Hindu History

[PROFESSOR OF THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO’S DIVINITY SCHOOL. Doniger’s research and teaching center on Hinduism and mythology. Her courses in Hinduism cover mythology, literature, law, gender and ecology.] For years, some Hindus have argued that the 16th century mosque called the Babri Masjid (after the Mughal emperor Babur) was built over a temple commemorating the birthplace of Rama (an avatar of the god Vishnu) in Ayodhya (the city where, according to the anci

Myron Magnet : Alexander Hamilton, Modern America’s Founding Father

We New Yorkers imagine our city’s history begins in earnest with the Gilded Age and the Great Migration that brought many of our forebears sailing under the Statue of Liberty’s torch to supercharge a nascent metropolis with a jolt of new energy. But this summer, when a handful of square-bearded, antique-garbed Pennsylvania German Baptists jacked a yellow clapboard house up over a Harlem church and wheeled it around the corner to a new site in St. Nicholas Park, we recalled that more than a centu

George Bittlingmayer and Thomas Hazlett: FDR's Conservative 100 Days

[Mr. Bittlingmayer is professor of finance at the University of Kansas. Mr. Hazlett is professor of law and economics at George Mason University.] The Obama administration's opening policy sprint -- massive deficits and bailouts, with sweeping health-care and education reform, plus cap and trade to come -- has been likened by the president himself to Franklin D. Roosevelt's famous first 100 days. But FDR did not launch his New Deal with a program that roiled financial m

Max Hastings: Terrifying, chaotic and bloody... but D-Day was one of the greatest chapters in our history (UK)

[Max Hastings is a former editor of the Daily Telegraph and the London Evening Standard.] Anniversaries are mingled festivals and wakes. In family life, we enjoy celebrating children's birthdays, and learn progressively to dislike our own. As for national history, nowadays we make little of events that once echoed proudly through every schoolroom and church in the land. There was October 21, Trafalgar Day in 1805, and June 18, the day of Waterloo in 1815.

Eric Rauchway: Just what was Herbert Croly's legacy?

A while back I was fortunate enough to go to a very pleasant conference at a very pleasant place on the centennial of Herbert Croly’s Promise of American Life. It was for me an unusually thought-provoking conference. I’m putting my paper from it here so I don’t lose it. About a hundred years ago, Herbert Croly told the readers of his Promise of American Life that the titular promise would be fulfilled if the United States could realize democratic ideals by substantially dimini

Jonathan Clayton: John Paul’s 1990 speech ‘sentenced millions to die’

[Jonathan Clayton is The Times’s Africa correspondent.] On a balmy late afternoon in September 1990, John Paul II visited the small town of Mwanza, in northern Tanzania, and gave a speech that many believe set the tone for the Aids crisis in Africa. Battered by conflicts and poverty, those inside the packed church and the huge crowds gathered outside hung on to every word. In particular, the Pope could give answers to this strange “slimming” disease that had seemingly

Stephen Moore: That '70s Horror Show

[Stephen Moore is a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board.] Many economists have been warning that the policies of the last few years under the Bush administration followed by the coming economic populism of Barack Obama will lead the U.S. back into a 1930s-style Great Depression. That group includes my friend and coauthor Arthur Laffer. I wouldn't go so far. Our current constellation of policies—bailouts, a weak dollar, rising tax rates, windfall profit taxes, bloated e

Radhika Desai: The Inadvertence of Benedict Anderson ... Engaging Imagined Communities

[Radhika Desai is Professor of Political Studies at the Department of Political Studies, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. She is the author of Slouching Towards Ayodhya: From Congress to Hindutva in Indian Politics (2004), Intellectuals and Socialism: ‘Social Democrats’ and the Labour Party (1994) and numerous articles in Economic and Political Weekly, New Left Review, Third World Quarterly and other journals and edited collections on parties, culture, political economy and nationalism.

Claudia Gazzini: Assessing Italy’s Grande Gesto to Libya

[Claudia Gazzini is a Ph.D. candidate at Oxford University.] Under a tent in Benghazi on August 30, 2008, Silvio Berlusconi bowed symbolically before the son of ‘Umar al-Mukhtar, hero of the Libyan resistance to Italian colonial rule. “It is my duty to express to you, in the name of the Italian people, our regret and apologies for the deep wounds that we have caused you,” said the Italian premier.[1] Eastern Libya was the site of the bulk of the armed resistance to the Italian occup

Gregory McNamee: The Potato: A Blessing—and Otherwise—for St. Patrick’s Day and Beyond

As an American of Irish ancestry, I harbor mixed feelings about the potato. It is an essential foodstuff, of course, and, properly cooked, it can be delicious. Still, it was indirectly responsible for the cruel diaspora that nearly emptied the mother country of its people and sent them off to all corners of the world, where, as onetime

Brenda Wineapple: Sallow, Queer, Sagacious ... Lincoln Through the Ages

[Brenda Wineapple's most recent book is White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Knopf), a finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for biography.] It was "interesting," said Gertrude Stein of the Civil War, although she was far more intrigued by General Grant than Abraham Lincoln, whom she virtually ignored. She's the only one, so it seems, especially now with the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth, duly touted by committe

Steve Coates: Myths of Vesuvius

In Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s popular 19th-century novel “The Last Days of Pompeii,” a scrumptious multicourse dinner of the stereotypically Roman sort is served in the superbly appointed house of the hero, Glaucus. With its peristyle garden, luxurious furnishings, nimble attendants and anatrium filled with paintings that “would scarcely disgrace a Raphael,”Glaucus’ Campanian bachelor pad might serve as “a model at this day for the house of ‘a single man in Mayfair,’ ” Bulwer- Lytton wrote.

William Safire: Did Hoover use "depression" as euphemism?

Word has been bruited about that President Herbert Hoover used the word depression after the market crash of 1929 as a euphemism to avoid the more alarming panic. That does not check out. His earliest use of the word that the historian George Nash, author of a three-volume biography of Hoover, can find is in a speech in Colorado in 1928, near the end of his presidential campaign: “If you will study the consumption of meat, dairy products and fruit during the great depression and unemployment of

Ervand Abrahamian: Why the Islamic Republic Has Survived

[Ervand Abrahamian is a CUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of History, Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is author of A History of Modern Iran.] Obituaries for the Islamic Republic of Iran appeared even before it was born. In the hectic months of 1979—before the Islamic Republic had been officially declared—many Iranians as well as foreigners, academics as well as journalists, participants as well as observers, conservatives as

Times of London Editorial: The teaching of history, as it unfolds, should be a higher priority in schools

Edward Gibbon once said: “I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know no way of judging of the future but by the past.” It is a lesson that the British nation needs to learn again. In a recent report on the teaching of history in schools, Ofsted pointed out that, too often, British children had no clear sense of chronology and no vantage point on historical change. For too long, the idea of a story unfolding in real time has given way

Mary Chapin: Alice Paul a fitting figure to remember during Women’s History Month

[Mary Chapin lives in New Hartford. She wrote and produced the first play written about Alice Paul and the quest for women’s rights. It was performed July 16, 1998, in Seneca Falls by members of the League of Women Voters and later that year at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute and Utica College. Two years ago, it was presented by the New Hartford Players at Utica Monday Nite.] Women’s History Month, celebrated in March, could easily recognize a number of women, but Alice P