Roundup: Talking About History

Eric Rauchway: In Defense of the New Deal

[Mr. Rauchway is a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, and the author of Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America.] Ronald Reagan liked to see himself in the parable of an optimistic boy who, facing a room full of manure, happily set to digging: “With this much manure around, I know there’s

Kara Rogers: Beyond Darwin ... Eugenics, Social Darwinism, and the Social Theory of the Natural Selection of Humans

[Kara Rogers is Britannica’s life sciences editor. She holds a Ph.D. in pharmacology and toxicology from the University of Arizona, where her research focused on understanding the role of antioxidants in mitochondria. Rogers has written for various publications on topics ranging from current medical research and eugenics to parasitic and vector-borne diseases.] Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection and concept of the “struggle for existence,” presented in his On the Origin of

Eric Arnesen: The continuing relevance of black history

[Eric Arnesen is a professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author of "Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality."] A week ago—just 12 days after the historic inauguration of Barack Obama—the country began its annual commemoration of Black History Month. Typically, the month is marked by specific public rituals: Public television airs documentaries on the African-American experience; schoolchildren read book

Robert Fisk: Iran ... A nation still haunted by its bloody past

[Robert Fisk writes for the Independent.] All revolutions, I suppose, have a symbol. In Chekhov's Cherry Orchard, it's the sound of a distant chain snapping, like that of a bucket in a mineshaft. In France, it was the sans culottes. Maybe in Iran, it was the discovery an American colleague of mine made when he ventured up to the Iranian-Soviet border. He found one of America's old listening posts still operating, with tired Iranian revolutionaries still staring listless

Andrew Rawnsley: The greatest moral failure of Tony Blair's premiership

[Andrew Rawnsley is the The Observer's award-winning Chief Political Commentator as well as being a best-selling author and critically-acclaimed broadcaster.] Tony Blair was "appalled" when it was first revealed, some five years ago, that Iraqi prisoners were being tortured in Abu Ghraib. "Nobody underestimates how wrong this is or how wrong this will seem to be," said the then prime minister. His brother in arms George W Bush claimed to feel "d

Angus McDowall: Iran, 30 Years On ... Was it worth it?

[Angus McDowall was a foreign correspondent in Tehran from 2003 to 2007.] When Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Tehran, Hamid Reza Jalaiepour knew exactly what to do. A student activist, he had spent spells in the Shah's prisons for handing out revolutionary pamphlets and organising his classmates to protest against the authorities. Alongside 1,500 comrades, he now headed to the airport determined to join a guard of honour to protect the returning cleric from counter-revolutionaries.

Dean Baker: The New Deal Worked

[Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. He is a frequent guest on National Public Radio, Marketplace, CNN, CNBC and other news programs. ] If the Washington Post had a science section it would be filled with accounts of creationism and the latest thoughts from the Flat Earth Society. This is the only conclusion that one can get from reading its treatment of economics in the Outlook section. Readers may recall the memo

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Black History Month. Meh.

I think people who want to get rid of Black History Month are only slightly less annoying than people who complain about Kwanzaa. Yes, it's true--Bob Johnson and Michael Jordan weren't what Carter G. Woodson had in mind. But the true mark of a movement's success is its descent into hackery. Black people don't get to pick and chose what aspects of America we want to integrate into. We have to take it all. White people who complain that there is no "White History Month," much in the way

Michael Bazyler: Japan Should Follow the International Trend and Face Its History of World War II Forced Labor

[Michael J. Bazyler is Professor of Law and The"1939" Club Law Scholar in Holocaust and Human Rights Studies at Chapman University School of Law in Orange, California.Bazyler is a leading authority on the use of American and European courts to redress genocide and other historical wrongs. His book on the subject, Holocaust Justice: The Battle for Restitution in America’s Courts (New York University Press, 2003; soft cover, 2005), was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court and reviewed in the Harvard La

Con Coughlin: Iran will not unclench its fist, Mr President

[Con Coughlin is a British author and journalist.] The heirs to Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic revolution have much to celebrate as they prepare to mark next week’s 30th anniversary of the fall of the Shah of Iran’s detested regime. The last nails were hammered into the Pahlavi dynasty’s coffin on the morning of 11 February 1979 when the makeshift government that the Shah had set up under his reluctant prime minister, Shapour Bakhtiar, finally collapsed. The

Sigrid Rausing: Russia - A country with no memory

[Sigrid Rausing is a publisher and philanthropist.] I remember St Petersburg in 1991. There were people sitting on the pavement, feet wrapped in rags, selling dismal mementoes from depleted Soviet homes, or piles of rusty nails, a few fish laid out on newspaper. It was like the aftermath of war. It is not so long ago. No wonder that the economic growth of the Putin era has made him popular in his own country. The new Russians were really only interested in material gain

Michael Ross: The End of Black History Month

[Michael E. Ross is an online journalist, producer and media consultant. He is a regular contributor to the Root.] In the Obama era, what's the rationale for separating black history from American history? When author and history professor Carter G. Woodson created what would become Black History Month in February 1926, America's black citizens were on the outside looking in, spectators to the great American drama, subjected to a repression of aspiration and identity so severe

Wilfred M. McClay: Lincoln the Great ... Though He Didn’t Look That Way at the Time

[Wilfred M. McClay is SunTrust Chair of Excellence in Humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and author of The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America. He is a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and has been a member of the National Council on the Humanities since 2002.] The American Civil War and the enigmatic man whose election in 1860 precipitated it hold an inexhaustible interest for us. Thousands of volumes on both

Will Bunch: How Republicans created the myth of Ronald Reagan

Editor's note: This excerpt from "Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future" is reprinted by permission of Free Press The myth of Ronald Reagan was already looming in the spring of 1997 — when a highly popular President Bill Clinton was launching his second-term, pre-Monica Lewinsky, and the Republican brand seemed at low ebb. But what neoconservative activist Grover Norquist and his allies proposed that spring was virtuall

Steve Jones: Can we please forget about Charles Darwin?

[Steve Jones is professor of genetics at University College London. His new book, 'Darwin's Island'.] Happy birthday to Charles Darwin, 200 years old next month, and to his most famous tome, The Origin of Species, which will soon will clock up a century and a half. The Grand Darwin Pageant creaks onwards, with an exhibition in the Natural History Museum, a festival in Cambridge and, the ultimate accolade, not just a David Attenborough documentary but four by Melvyn Bragg (and, yes,

Jonathan Lyons: The Crusades are Over ... The West needs to Engage with the Muslims

[Jonathan Lyons is author of The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization, just released by Bloomsbury Press. A former Reuters correspondent and editor, he is completing his PhD in sociology of religion at Monash University, in Melbourne, Australia, and teaching at George Mason University, in Fairfax, Va. Details of the book, including an image gallery and notes on the leading figures, can be found here.]

Deborah Lipstadt: The lies and obfuscations of Bishop Williamson

[Ms. Lipstadt is Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University and author of History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving.] [The following provides links to various articles and sources which explicitly expose the lies and obfuscations of Holocaust denier Bishop Williamson. We hope they are helpful to you. My profound thanks to Dan Leshem and Maureen McLaughlin for helping prepare this material.]1. Williamson says: “I believe there were no

Greg Wilsbacher: The value of newsreel libraries

[Greg Wilsbacher is director of the Newsfilm Library and curator of the Fox Movietone News Collection at the University of South Carolina.] ... American newsreels have been treated rather dismissively by most historians. If they are remembered, they are regarded as a collection of staged, somewhat hokey stunts featuring a seemingly endless series of animal stories, dance crazes, and posing politicians. On occasion, the newsreel cameramen would get lucky and catch a dirigible explodi

Russell Baker: FDR ... A Revolutionary President

Few expected very much of Franklin Roosevelt on Inauguration Day in 1933. Like Barack Obama seventy-six years later, he was succeeding a failed Republican president, and Americans had voted for change. What that change might be Roosevelt never clearly said, probably because he himself didn't know. Herbert Hoover, the departing president, had left behind an economic cataclysm. Since the 1929 stock market crash the economy had been spiraling inexorably downward for more than three yea

Steve Jones: Darwin's brilliant ideas evolved far beyond the origin of species

[Steve Jones is Professor of Genetics at University College London. His new book is Darwin's Island.] Anniversaries are the last refuge of the journalist and 2009 is no exception. Happy 40th, then, to the Moon landings, felice quattro centesimo compleanno to Galileo's telescope, and glücklich vier Hundertstel Geburtstag to Kepler and his laws of planetary motion. One birthday boy gets two slices of cake, for Charles Darwin is 200 this year and his best-known book is 50 years younger