Roundup: Talking About History

James Buchan: Ayatollah Khomeini's funeral

[James Buchan was a Financial Times correspondent in the Middle East and is the author most recently of “The Gate of Air: a Ghost Story”.] The unarmed city crowd first emerged as a force in Iranian politics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in protests against the growing influence of European commerce and, later, in the struggle for constitutional government in Iran. Cruelly suppressed under the two Pahlavi shahs, the crowd returned to the political stage during the revolu

Adam Kirsch: Some revolutions fail when the enlightened misread the national mood

Certain years in history carry a nearly sacred halo, so deeply are they associated with the idea of democratic revolution. Say 1848, and you summon up the springtime of nations, the rise of barricades in Paris and Frankfurt and Venice; say 1989, and it’s the Velvet Revolution, the collapse of Communism in East Berlin and Prague and Warsaw. Few people have such fond memories of the years between 1905 and 1915, which we more commonly associate with the various crises leading up to the First World

Robert Kuhn and Thomas Thiel: The Prehistory of Adidas and Puma

During World War II, industries big and small all over Germany became part of Hitler's massive war machine. The change even affected the predecessor of footwear legends Adidas and Puma, which -- oddly enough -- manufactured Germany's version of the bazooka. When the starting shot rang out, the athletes surged forward. Jesse Owens dug his spikes deep into the racing track of Berlin's Olympic Stadium -- and the best sprinter of his day dominated the 100 meters race to win a gold medal

Richard Reeves: How Kennedy Won the House and Lost the South

It happened to John F. Kennedy just days into his presidency. It will happen to President Obama, too. Probably it already has. The bad news was delivered to Kennedy at breakfast with Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, Democrat of Texas, who said: “Mr. President, I don’t believe we have the votes …” The new president, a former member of the House, was shocked. Even presidents believe what they read in the papers, and the conventional wisdom in 1961 was that “Mister Sam” c

Jonathan Chait: Quit lying about FDR

A generation ago, the total dismissal of the New Deal remained a marginal sentiment in American politics. Ronald Reagan boasted of having voted for Franklin Roosevelt. Neoconservatives long maintained that American liberalism had gone wrong only in the 1960s. Now, decades after Democrats grew tired of accusing Republicans of emulating Herbert Hoover, Republicans have begun sounding ... well, exactly like Herbert Hoover. When President Obama recently met with House Republicans, the eighty-two-yea

Edwin Black: American Corporate Complicity Created Undeniable Nazi Nexus

[Edwin Black is the New York Times best selling investigative author of IBM and the Holocaust, and his just released book, Nazi Nexus: America's Corporate Connections to Hitler's Holocaust (Dialog Press 2009), which can be see at www.nazinexus.com.] Adolf Hitler was c

Philip Hensher: The legend of Arthur must leave no legacy

[Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Exeter, Philip Hensher was among Granta 20 Best of Young British Novelists in 2003.] In 1972, during one of a long series of skirmishes between the National Union of Mineworkers and Conservative governments, a Communist leader of the South Wales miners, Dai Francis, trying to organise flying pickets, had a call from Arthur Scargill. According to Francis's son Hywel, Scargill said: "Look, Dai, we need pickets up a

James Mann: Did Reagan Try to Convert Gorbachev?

[James Mann is the author of several books, including "Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet." He is author-in-residence at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.] It was the question that preoccupied President Ronald Reagan: Was Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev a religious believer? Reagan held a series of summits with Gorbachev from 1985 to 1988, and as their meetings proceeded, Reagan sometimes speculated to his aides that Gorbachev'

David A. Hounshell: Innovation and the Growth of the American Economy

[David A. Hounshell is the David M. Roderick Professor of Technology and Social Change at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the author of From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932 (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1984) and co-author of Science and Corporate Strategy: Dupont R&D, 1902-1980 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988). This essay is based on his presentation at “Teaching the History of Innovation,” a two-day history institute for teachers held October 18-19, 2008. The Institute was hoste

Mackubin Thomas Owens: Abraham Lincoln ... Leadership in Wartime

[Mackubin T. Owens is a Senior Fellow of FPRI, editor of Orbis, and Associate Dean of Academics for Electives and Directed Research and Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island. This E-Note is based on his longer monograph on this subject, Abraham Lincoln: Leadership and Democratic Statesmanship in Wartime.] In his study of Abraham Lincoln’s wartime leadership, Tried by War (2008), historian James McPherson notes that the amount of

Ritchie Robertson: Was Hitler a bookworm?

[Ritchie Robertson edited A History of Austrian Literature 1918–2000, 2006, and the Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann, 2002. He teaches at St John’s College, Oxford.] We think of Hitler as ranting rather than reading. But August Kubizek and Rudolf Häusler, who shared lodgings with him in pre-war Vienna and post-war Munich, recall him as immersed in books. A surviving list of books Hitler borrowed from the National Socialist Institute in Munich between 1919 and 1921 includes not onl

Bill Steigerwald: Who really belongs on Mount Rushmore?

No matter what party partisans say, no American president is perfect -- to say the least. But when historians get around to ranking our greatest presidents, the top spots invariably go to the usual titans -- Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and the Roosevelts, Teddy and Franklin. Ivan Eland, a senior fellow at The Independent Institute (independent.org) and an expert on defense issues, begs to differ with the standard consensus -- by about 180 degrees. In his

Theodore Dalrymple: The Persistence of Ideology

[Theodore Dalrymple, a physician, is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His new book is Not with a Bang but a Whimper.] In 1960, the sociologist Daniel Bell published The End of Ideology, in which he argued that ideology—understood in the sense of a coherent, single-minded philosophical outlook or system of abstractions intended as much as a lever to change society as a description to explain it—was dead, at least in th

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

[Myron Magnet is City Journal’s editor-at-large and was its editor from 1994 through 2006. He is the author of The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties’ Legacy to the Underclass and a recipient of the National Humanities Medal.] 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 sum

Gavan McCormack: Korea’s Embattled Truth and Reconciliation Commission

[Gavan McCormack, emeritus professor at Australian National University, is a coordinator at Japan Focus. His most recent book is Client State: Japan in America’s Embrace.] For the countries of Northeast Asia to construct a future Northeast Asian community, or commonwealth, along something like European lines, a shared vision of the future is necessary, and for that they must first arrive at a shared understanding of the past. The turbulent 20th century of colonialism, war, and liber

Conrad Black: Roosevelt revisionists

[onrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom and Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full.] ... The key to evaluating Roosevelt’s performance at combating the Depression is the statistical treatment of many millions of unemployed engaged in his massive workfare programs, which were called “internal improvements” in Jackson's time, and are called “infrastructure” now. The government hired about 60 percent of the unemployed in public-works and conservation proj

John Lukacs: Human knowledge is personal and participant–placing us at the center of the universe

[John Lukacs is the author of more than 25 books including Last Rites.] Un mauvais quart d’heure, the French say, of those painful 15 minutes when a son must tell his father that he failed in school or that he stole, or when a man thinks he now must tell his woman that he will leave her. They have to tell the truth: a truth. Now, near the end of my career as a historian, I have a truth to tell. So, for 15 minutes, please bear with me. Iwas still very young

Debate: Is the Historic Case Marbury v. Madison All It's Cracked Up To Be?

From: Cliff Sloan To: Akhil Reed Amar, Dahlia Lithwick, Eric Posner, and Kenji Yoshino Akhil, Eric, Kenji, and Dahlia— Thanks for joining me in this discussion on The Great Decision, my new book (written with David McKean).... Marbury is the bedrock of our constitutional law. The Supreme Court has invoked it in moments of national crisis and constitutional greatness—for example, in enforcing Brown v. Board of Education against defiance in Little Rock

Steven Lomazow: Racism in American Magazines

[Steven Lomazow, M.D. is a New Jersey neurologist and for over three decades he has been an avid collector of American ephemera.] I read today that the mayor of Los Alamedos, California resigned after sending a tasteless and inappropriate image in an e-mail to his friends and supporters. Of course, this immediately raised the issue in my"magazine history" mind of racism in America as reflected in its periodicals.The present-day world is

Michael Shermer: A Skeptic's Take on the Public Misunderstanding of Darwin

[Dr. Michael Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine (www.skeptic.com), the Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, the host of the Skeptics Distinguished Science Lecture Series at Caltech, and Adjunct Professor of Economics at Claremont Graduate University. ] On July 2, 1866, Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, wrote to Charles Darwin to lament how he had