Roundup: Talking About History

Ancestors Who Built the White House

by Pearl Duncan

African-American ancestors were deprived as slaves, but African slaves, working alongside other Americans, built America. 

Edward Rothstein interviews Charles McGrath about Lincoln

Q. Americans hear about Lincoln from the time they start school - or even before. In your recent reading, what have you learned about him that you didn’t know before? A. When reading about Lincoln, the surprise I get isn’t at learning something about him I didn’t know before — there’s too much of that for it to be much of a surprise — but at learning to pay attention to him in a different way. An example: for a while, about 40 years ago, as part of a culture-wide attempt to demythol

Max Holland: Why no one should believe the confessions of this LBJ advance man

On October 28, Bloomsbury USA published Brothers in Arms, Gus Russo’s second book on the Kennedy assassination, co-authored with Stephen Molton. The book came well-blurbed, with Diane McWhorter, Joe Califano, and Daniel Schorr singing words of praise. Bloomsbury’s press release boasted that Brothers in Arms contained “explosive new information” about the role of Castro’s Cuba in the assassination. One of the specific disclosures was advertised as coming from “deathbed intervie

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Red Shanghai, Blue Shanghai

[Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is a Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford University Press, 1991), China’s Brave New World (Indiana University Press, 2007), and the just-published Global Shanghai: 1850-2010: A History in Fragments (Routledge, 2008). The Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies and co-founder of “The China Beat,” an online magazine, his reviews and commentaries have appeared in New Left Review,

CNN: History of environmental movement full of twists, turns

It was one of the most surreal images in American history: A river, so fouled with industrial waste that it caught fire and burned. In June 1969, Cleveland's Cuyahoga River become the poster child for the birth of the modern American environmental movement. No matter that this was at least the tenth time the Cuyahoga had ignited. The times, they were a-changing, and a burning river confirmed what many already believed: The environment was changing, too. Rachel Carson's book,"Sil

Simon Heffer: John Milton was a poet and a freedom fighter

[Simon Heffer is a British journalist and writer.] One of the most dangerous things a great artist can do is to compose one work by which he is always remembered, to the detriment of all else he has done. Who can list the accomplishments of Leonardo beyond the Mona Lisa? How many can name the creations of Pugin beyond the interior of the House of Lords? Or cite the many masterpieces Holst wrote besides The Planets? We all know that John Milton, born 400 years ago yester

Trevor Phillips: Winston Churchill knew the value of our liberty

[Trevor Phillips is chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission.] As we mark the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights today, I want to take a small liberty and say something about one of the UN's founders – Winston Churchill. I believe Churchill would have raised a glass of Pol Roger both to the anniversary and the judges who ruled last week that the records of two men, both innocent, should not be retained on our national DNA database.

Matthias Küntzel: 'Islamophobia' or 'Truthophobia'?

[Mr. Küntzel is author of "Jihad and Jew Hatred" (Telos Press, 2007). Belinda Cooper translated this essay from the German.] At a time when Jew haters in the Islamic world have become more assertive than ever, Berlin's Center for Research on Anti-Semitism is concentrating on a different group: the "new enemies of Islam." Who exactly belongs to this category is not clear from the center's latest publication, the "Yearbook for Research on Anti-Sem

Anne Applebaum: Russia's Usable Past--A strange journey into the historical archives.

[HNN Editor: In this piece the author discusses Jonathan Brent's new book about the Yale project: Yale University Press's publication of scholarly books based on Soviet archives.] ... Although he discusses some of the academic issues that lay at the heart of the Yale project, the point of Inside the Stalin Archives is somewhat different: Brent is less interested in what his series meant for Western academics and more interested in explaining the strange atmosphere of post-Soviet

Robert McHenry: That book about the Great Books

A fellow by the name of Alex Beem* has written a book about the Great Books idea, the idea that there are identifiably great books that form the core of Western civilization and that these books ought to form also the core, or at least a substantial part, of higher education. His book is called

L Gordon Crovitz: Lessons From the Great Books Generation

Those who wonder about digital media shortening our attention spans usually fret about businesspeople glued to BlackBerrys or students multitasking through homework. For another measure of how our society has changed, consider this new-product launch from April 15, 1952: The scene is glitzier than Steve Jobs releasing the latest iProduct: a black-tie gala in the Jade Room of New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, attended by Rockefellers, Vanderbilts and a representative of the queen of

Warren Kozak: The story of World War II varies by country

[Mr. Kozak is the author of the forthcoming book, "LeMay: The Life and Wars of Curtis LeMay," to be published next May by Regnery.] On Dec. 7, 1941, 353 Japanese planes launched from six aircraft carriers destroyed most of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. That morning, 2,402 American servicemen were killed. Until Sept. 11, 2001, this was the highest number of casualties in an attack on the United States. But 67 years and three generations later,

Jim Burnett: Did the Great Depression Save the Yorktown Battlefield?

I don't know of anyone who is happy about the current economic situation, but while we're waiting for a turn-around, here's a question to ponder: Can a bad economy ever be good for parks? In at least one case, the answer seems to be"yes," because the Great Depression played a key role in saving the Yorktown Battlefield from private development. Back in the mid-1920s, prosperous Americans were becoming increasingly interested in leisure activities, and good train service, a gro

Mike Wade: 'Do not forget role of Scots in slave trade'

[Mike Wade writes for the Times.] In the bar of an Edinburgh hotel, Geoff Palmer is hooting with laughter. After decades toiling away in the drinks industry, that most masculine of trades, he is amazed to find he is suddenly something of a ladies' man. A year ago, he gave a lecture on Scotland and the Caribbean slave trade to 2,000 women from the Church of Scotland Guild. They were enraptured; now wherever he goes, a tweedy woman will be ready to accost and tell him ho

Juan Cole: Did a Dry Weather Cycle allow the Islamic Empire to Supplant the Byzantines?

Robert Roy Britt of Live Science reports on the research of a team led by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor John Valley that shows increased dryness in the Eastern Mediterranean between 100 and 700 of the Common Era (CE), with dramatic dips in rainfall in 100 CE and 400 CE. It raises questions about whether climate is somehow implicated in the decline of the Roman Empire (traditionally considered to have fallen in 476 CE) and the weakening of the Byzantine Empire in the 600s-700s CE.

Geoffrey Robertson: The diamond anniversary of a golden law

[Geoffrey Robertson QC is the author of 'Crimes Against Humanity' (Penguin) and a distinguished jurist member of the UN's Internal Justice Council.] Sixty years ago this week, on December 10, 1948, Eleanor Roosevelt unveiled a document she described as "the International Magna Carta for Mankind". This was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, an imperishable statement of the elemental liberties that all individuals should enjoy, irrespective of the kind of government

Joe Gandelman: The "New" Richard Nixon Tapes: A Bad Reputation Deserved

The American press and American public - with the exception of some steadfast loyalists - now have Nixon to kick some more. And for good reason. The release of some 200 hours of Nixon White House recordings is going to provide a treasure chest of inside glimpses into the man who helped usher in the politics of polarization and who helped dismember 1950s-early-1960s consensus politics - a trend that many hope will be reversed with the new, presumably more post-p

Sam Stein: Rove Defends Bush ... He's Not Worst President of Past 50 Years

George W. Bush is the worst United States president of the last fifty years. In the liberal bastion of New York City's Upper West Side, this rendering of presidential disrepute is generally considered a ghastly understatement. The last fifty years? one resident asked the Huffington Post. How about our nation's history? Why limit it to the United States? And yet, with this crowd as a backdrop, the proposition of Bush's terribleness was debated on Tuesday night. Spicing u

Chris Patten: Three cheers for historical debate, right or wrong

[Chris Patten is a former European Union commissioner for external relations, chairman of the British Conservative Party, and was the last British governor of Hong Kong.] I recently took part in a public debate with Paul Keating, Australia's former prime minister. He is an interesting man, a genuine intellectual driven by his inner demons both to flay those who pay insufficient credit to his transformational role in Australian politics and to expose what he regards as waffle and myt

Jerry Bower: Lessons From A Capitalist Thanksgiving

[Mr. Bowyer is chief economist of BenchMark Financial Network and a CNBC contributor.] It's astonishing and a little horrifying that America's elites know so little about their country's history. Case in point: Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute. Jared is an influential left-ish economic polemicist and a sometime adviser to Barack Obama on economic affairs. I've debated with Jared dozens of times over the past several years, but what happened this week was especially d