Roundup: Talking About History

Brian Latell: Was Castro involved in JFK's death?

[Brian Latell is a senior research associate and adjunct professor at the University of Miami. A career Latin America specialist for the CIA and National Intelligence Council, he served as National Intelligence Officer for Latin America from 1990-1994. He is the author of After Fidel.] Fidel Castro looms large in fewer than a dozen books among the hundreds written about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Two of them are the work of irrepressible conspiracy theorist and researche

Tom Palaima: The first modern terrorist

[Tom Palaima is Dickson Centennial Professor of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches seminars on the human response to war and violence.] ... In The Dynamite Club, Yale historian John Merriman describes the historical setting and background of what he argues is the first modern act of true terrorism. At 9:01 on the evening of Feb. 12, 1894, 21-year-old French anarchist Émile Henry, who earned his baccalauréat in science from the Sorbonne in 1888, threw a d

Robert Shaffer: Misleading Analogies and Historical Thinking: Iraq War as a case study

[Robert Shaffer is associate professor of history at Shippensburg University.] Students come into our history classes well versed in the mantra that “those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it,” that history is “useful” in teaching lessons for today. Whether they truly believe this idea is a separate question, and many of us devote a lot of energy trying to make our lectures, discussion questions, and reading assignments “relevant” to the present. But the quest for “releva

Nazenin Ansari: Remembering Iran's revolution

[Nazenin Ansari is diplomatic editor of Kayhan (London), a weekly Persian-language newspaper, and president of the Foreign Press Association.] Life for me as I had come to understand it ended on 15 November 1977. Standing next to a group of young elementary school children from one of Washington DC's inner-city schools on the Ellipse facing the South Lawn of the White House, I was one of a thousand greeting the visit of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi and his Queen to the United States.

A N Wilson: She's hailed as this country's saviour. So why, 30 years on, do the Left still hate Maggie so?

[A N Wilson writes for the Daily Mail.] Want to know what Britain would be like if ruled by extreme Left-wingers? Then you would only have had to visit Liverpool while Derek Hatton was deputy leader of Liverpool City Council in the early Eighties. He was expelled from the Labour Party as a member of Militant Tendency, but not before turning Liverpool, once the proud port of the mightiest empire in the world, into a bankrupted, slum-ridden, crimeridden dump.

Simon Heffer: Charles Darwin reminds us not to squander the great legacy of the Victorians

[Simon Heffer is associate editor at the Telegraph.] On the Origin of Species remains a stunning intellectual achievement. It widened the boundaries of knowledge and changed society and the world. Yet there are also less obvious, but perhaps more instinctive, reasons for remembering Darwin. We still live in a society that was in large part made by the Victorians. We may affect to despise them, ridicule them, even condemn them. We certainly misunderstand them. Part of t

John Tosh: Why history matters

[Mr. Tosh is the author of: Why History Matters (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). John He is Professor of History at Roehampton University, London. He is the author of The Pursuit of History, a standard introduction to the discipline (4th edn, Longman, 2006). His advocacy of the social relevance of history is reflected not only in Why History Matters, but in his specialist research on the history of masculinities in modern Britain, notably in A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Vic

Thomas Craughwell : #9: Deport Blacks to Santo Domingo (The 10 Worst Decisions by U.S. Presidents)

[Thomas Craughwell is the author of, with M. William Phelps, Failures of the Presidents: from the Whiskey Rebellion and War of 1812 to the Bay of Pigs and War in Iraq.] The evening after New Year’s Day, 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant wrapped himself in his winter cloak, strode out of the White House, and walked across Lafayette Square, alone, to call on Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. Sumner had first come to Congress in 1851; now, 19 years later, he was not only one of t

Julia Ioffe: The surprisingly shallow influence of Deep Throat

Last month, far from his old D.C. stomping grounds, a very old W. Mark Felt, Sr., died quietly in Santa Rosa, California. The press, who had known him as the dashing, silver-haired spook dubbed Deep Throat, portrayed this as a major event, the passing of one of the late 20th century's most influential figures. The New York Times remembered him as the man who "helped bring down President Richard M. Nixon by resisting the Watergate cover-up and becoming Deep Throat, the most famous anonymous

Thomas Craughwell : #10: The Whiskey Rebellion (The 10 Worst Decisions by U.S. Presidents)

[Thomas Craughwell is the author of, with M. William Phelps, Failures of the Presidents: from the Whiskey Rebellion and War of 1812 to the Bay of Pigs and War in Iraq.] In 1790 the federal government was saddled with an $80 million debt, the cost of America’s war for independence from Great Britain. It was a staggering sum; President George Washington’s secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, insisted that the only way to pay off the liability was to raise taxes. Thomas Jeffe

Eric Foner: Our Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln has always provided a lens through which Americans examine themselves. He has been described as a consummate moralist and a shrewd political operator, a lifelong foe of slavery and an inveterate racist. Politicians from conservatives to communists, civil rights activists to segregationists, have claimed him as their own. With the approach of the bicentennial of his birth, the past few years have seen an outpouring of books on Lincoln of every size, shape and description. His psyc

Nothing to Fear: Adam Cohen on “FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America”

... We’re joined now by Adam Cohen. He’s an assistant editorial page editor for the New York Times and author of a new book called Nothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America. This is his first interview since the book’s publication. Welcome to Democracy Now! ADAM COHEN: Thank you, Amy. AMY GOODMAN: It’s great to have you with us. Well, you say in this book it’s not just FDR himself. ADAM COHEN: That’s r

Sean McMeekin: The staggering thievery of Lenin and the Bolsheviks

Since 2006, visitors to the NeueGalerie, the boutique museum of German and Austrian art in New York City, have had the chance to view one of Gustav Klimt’s most celebrated paintings—his seductive, gold-spangled portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. For the 70 years before that, however, you would have had to go to Vienna’s Austrian Gallery to see Klimt’s masterpiece. That’s because the painting, along with four other Klimts the Bloch-Bauer family owns, was stolen by the Nazis after the Anschluss, and r

Andrew Buncombe: After 90 years, the victims of Amritsar are being recognised as martyrs

[Andrew Buncombe is The Independent's Asia correspondent.] On a sweltering afternoon 90 years ago in April, a squad of Gurkha and Baluchi troops under the command of British officers marched into an enclosed park in the city of Amritsar and levelled their weapons. The park was densely crowded and there was only one way in and out. The officer in charge – General Reginald Dyer, whose name will forever be cloaked in infamy – then gave the order to fire. Within 10 minutes

Peter Walker: Back to 1694 ... Britain at the birth of the Bank of England

[Peter Walker has been a reporter for guardian.co.uk since late 2006.] A country paying a heavy financial price for war in foreign lands, while at home people complain about duties on wine and beer and indulge their love for tea… Britain in 1694, the year the Bank of England was formed, might sound familiar, but it was an utterly different place. It was overwhelmingly agricultural, and the population was less than 6 million – an estimate, as the modern census did not b

Jill Lepore: Have inaugural addresses been getting worse?

Barack Obama has been studying up, reading Abraham Lincoln’s speeches, raising everyone’s expectations for what just might be the most eagerly awaited Inaugural Address ever. Presidential eloquence doesn’t get much better than the argument of Lincoln’s first inaugural and the poetry of his second. Reading Lincoln left James Garfield nearly speechless. Garfield undertook to read the Inaugural Addresses of every President who preceded him. “Those of the past except Lincoln’s, are dreary reading,”

Deborah Lipstadt: Should there be laws against Holocaust denial?

The French intellectual, Bernard-Henri Levi, has a intriguing piece in The New Republic calling for institutions of laws against genocide denial. He refers in the main to Holocaust and the Armenian genocide.His article is prompted, in part, by the recent online petition of 200 Turkish writers, academics, and intellectuals apologizing for the massacre. According to

Jacob Heilbrunn: Hitler's private library

In November 1915, a German corporal in the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment left his billet in a two-story farmhouse near Fournes, not far behind the front lines in northern France, and walked into town. Instead of enjoying the traditional soldiers' comforts of visiting a brothel or purchasing cigarettes and schnapps, he spent four marks to buy a slender book about Berlin's cultural treasures. Referred to as"the artist" by his fellow message runners, he was a figure of amusement to

Sarah Wildman: Paper Love ... Inside the Holocaust Archives-Letters From a Lost Love

The box of letters from my grandfather Karl was a revelation. At Karl's funeral, my father's eulogy began with the words of French Gen. Ferdinand Foch:"Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent. I attack." This was my grandfather—everything, regardless of reality, was always"wonderful." True story: Lacking the correct papers, fleeing Austria, my grandfather arrived in Hamburg, Germany, to board a ship armed only with a set of lies.

J.R. Dunn: Candy-coating the Holocaust

The "Angel at the Fence" story has been proven to be a hoax, and that's a good thing. It's not a good thing because two aged and troubled people have suffered the humiliation of being exposed as liars. It's not a good thing because the publishers, agents, and producers, not to mention Oprah, have been exposed as foolish and credulous -- though that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's a good thing because "Angel at the Fence", if it had been published