Roundup: Talking About History

Gene Healy: Activist and warrior president dominate historians’ polls

[Gene Healy is a vice president at the Cato Institute and author of The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power (Cato 2008). www.cato.org.] As he prepared to head back to the ranch, President George W. Bush embarked on a sort of "Legacy Tour," granting numerous interviews. Asked how his presidency will be remembered, Bush typically insisted that "history" will be the judge. He’s right

Cornelia Rabitz: On Holocaust Day, Europe Needs a Common Memory

About 1 million people from around the world visit the Auschwitz memorial each year to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. It's a significant number of people, who still come to the museum to get an idea of living and dying in this former antechamber of hell -- and to learn from history. Memorial officials recently rang sounded an alarm, saying that the buildings are in danger of collapsing and that a lot of money is needed for their restoration. Germany reacted quickly and said

Tom Sutcliffe: Will time ease the pain of the Holocaust?

[Tom Sutcliffe writes for the Independent.] When, I wonder, will the Holocaust no longer hurt? Today, Holocaust Memorial Day, might not be thought to be the most tactful date on which to put this question – which assumes, in its phrasing, that such a state of affairs will eventually come about. Today, after all, is dedicated to postponing such a state of affairs, a day which exists because of the belief that remembering (and hurting) shouldn't have an expiry date. So I

Cornelia Rabitz: On Holocaust Day, Europe Needs a Common Memory

[Cornelia Rabitz covers culture for DW-RADIO.] About 1 million people from around the world visit the Auschwitz memorial each year to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. It's a significant number of people, who still come to the museum to get an idea of living and dying in this former antechamber of hell -- and to learn from history. Memorial officials recently rang sounded an alarm, saying that the buildings are in danger of collapsing and that a lot of money is

Lawrence Repeta: Aso Revelations on Wartime POW Labor Highlight the Need for a Real National Archive in Japan

[Lawrence Repeta is a professor at Omiya Law School in Japan, a director of Information Clearinghouse Japan, and a Japan Focus associate. He is presently serving as Garvey Schubert Barer Professor of Asian Law at the University of Washington in the United States.] Prime Minister Aso Taro’s admission that his family company employed prisoner-of-war labor during the final months of World War II may one day be seen as a milestone in Japan’s struggle to contend with its own national hi

Dan Payne: The national hero dividing Germans

[Dan Payne is a BBC correspondent.] If you are getting off a train while on your way to meet a contact in an historic part of Stuttgart, it is a good idea not to graze your right hand against a door hinge so hard that you lose most of the skin from your middle knuckle. I know, because this is just what happened as I was struggling to reach an appointment with Christopher Dowe. Luckily, he was very understanding when we met, and even helped to dress the wo

Alonzo Hamby: The Hundred Days ... What Worked, What Didn't, What Never Happened

The phrase "hundred days" came to mind so easily in 1933 because it already had been used to refer to the period after Napoleon's triumphal return from Elba. Alas, that ended with Waterloo. Franklin Roosevelt's hundred days still appear to many scholars a triumph of presidential leadership, but the end result was not much better. We all know that the New Deal did not end the Great Depression in the United States; it was an ambitious mixture of failure and accomplishment. One way to app

John Garnaut: Learning to forget Tiananmen

[John Garnaut is a Beijing based reporter.] It is minus 12 degrees on a Beijing dawn and a line of 32 soldiers raise their bayonets to a rising red flag. Perhaps a thousand pilgrims have gathered to express their national pride at Tiananmen Square, the sacred heart of Communist China. Ahead is the Gate of Heavenly Peace, from where Mao proclaimed the new People's government about 60 years ago. Behind lies the Monument of the People's Heroes and a mausoleum for Mao's emb

Ivan Eland: From Van Buren to Bush, a better way to rank US presidents

We need a new way to rank presidents.

Donald Ritchie: Who Moved the Inauguration? Dispelling an Urban Legend

[Donald Ritchie, author of Reporting from Washington: The History of the Washington Press Corps, Our Constitution, and The Congress of the United States: A Student Companion, looks at how the Presidential Inauguration moved from the East Front of the Capitol to the West Front. Ritchie, who has been Associate Historian of the United States Senate for more than three decades, reveals that it was not Reagan’s decision.] When Barack Obama took the oath as President of the United States

Dominic Sandbrook: After the revolution (Iran)

[Dominic Sandbrook is a British historian and writer.] On the first day of February 1979, an Air France plane landed at Tehran Airport. It was carrying an elderly Islamic cleric from Iran’s rural hinterland who had not been in his native land for 15 years. As he stepped down from the plane, dressed entirely in black, supported by a French flight officer, a thousand waiting admirers began to chant his name: Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini. As a Mercedes van carried him towards

Francis X. Clines: The unsettling ghosts of America past on the Mall

There are unsettling ghosts of America past all about the National Mall. Hundreds of thousands of people will gather there Tuesday for the inauguration of the nation’s first African-American president. Three blocks from where Barack Obama takes the oath, there was once the Saint Charles Hotel, a popular accommodation on Pennsylvania Avenue before emancipation ruined business for slave traders. It proudly advertised that down below its first-rate restaurant, guests could avail themselves of six,

John McWhorter : Why Juneteenth's Not My Thing

[John McWhorter is a columnist for the New York Sun and author of"Losing the Race." He is a culture and politics Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.] Sure, black people need to celebrate winning their freedom, but is this really the right day for the picnic? I am John Hamilton McWhorter, the fifth. The first John Hamilton McWhorter was a slave. This Thursday is Juneteenth, when I might be inclined to celebrate the emancipation of John Hamilton McWhorter, the first. O

Ted Widmer: What all fifty-four inaugural addresses, taken as one long book, tell us about American history

[Ted Widmer directs the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. He is a contributing editor of the THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR.] By tradition, January 20 is the feast day of Saint Fabian, a third-century pope who was appointed in a most unusual way. Before 236, he was a simple layperson, leading an utterly obscure life, even by third-century standards. That year, Fabian came to Rome and found himself unexpectedly in the middle of a crowd choosing the successor to Pope Anteros, recen

David Garrow: An Unfinished Dream

[Garrow, a senior fellow at Homerton College, University of Cambridge, is the author of "Bearing the Cross," a Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of King. He is researching a prepresidential biography of Barack Obama.] Very few people remember the first speech that Martin Luther King Jr. gave from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. It wasn't "I Have a Dream," and it took place more than six years before the famous 1963 March on Washington. The date was

The Daily Beast: An oral history of the last plane rides of presidents leaving town

From Reagan’s tears to Jimmy Carter’s hostage power plays, the final flight Bush will take tomorrow is an occasion that inspires tall tales, Champagne toasts, and, occasionally, looting. An oral history of the last five final flights. When George W. Bush steps aboard Air Force One on Tuesday, beginning the journey back to Texas, his presidency will officially be in the past tense. But during those few hours in the sky—the last ride of the leader of the free world—strange things tend

David Greenberg: The Riddle of Herbert Hoover

[David Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers and author of three books of political history, has written the "History Lesson" column since 1998.] In 1932, the parents of a 4-year-old went to court to change his legal name. Christened Herbert Hoover Jones in 1928, when the commerce secretary and Republican presidential nominee was a national hero, the boy deserved relief, said his parents, from "the chagrin and mortification which he is sufferi

Anthony Lewis: MLK's Dream

[Mr. Lewis is the former NYT columnist.] Barack Obama’s election as president had a thousand fathers in the long history of the struggle against American racism. But three events stand out as decisive in creating the possibility of an African-American president. The first, in 1863, was Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which promised freedom but was followed by a century of harsh discrimination. The second was the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Boa

Peter Kupfer: Jacob Riis, First Generation Immigrant

[Peter Kupfer is a former editor on the National / Foreign desk at The San Francisco Chronicle. ] As the son of an African immigrant prepares to assume the highest office in the land, Tom Buk-Swienty’s portrait of muckraking journalist and reformer Jacob Riis is both instructive and inspiring. Through his ground-breaking articles, lectures, books and — most famously — photographs, Riis exposed the abysmal living conditions suffered by tens of thousands of immigrants in New York in t

100 Years Ago: William Howard Taft's Disgraceful Inaugural Address

What may well have been the most disgraceful inaugural address of any president--which, by sheer coincidence, happened to have been delivered one hundred years ago--was William Howard Taft's 1909 speech, much of which concerned race relations. The key paragraph was his claim that the federal government was powerless to intervene in the South to protect black voting rights"so long as the statutes of the States meet the test of [the Fifteenth] amendment and are not otherwise in conflict