Roundup: Talking About History

Robert Fisk: The British should not forget the massive debt they owe the Irish

[Robert Fisk writes for the Independent.] I had almost forgotten what a shit Yeats could be. I don't mean his flirtation with Italian fascism, which Conor Cruise O'Brien first publicised; after all, Churchill was a bit enamoured of the younger Mussolini. And Yeats remains one of my favourite poets. No, what I am recalling – thanks to a wonderful book just published in Dublin – is his outrageous decision to expel the poetry of Wilfred Owen from the 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse.

Ron Rosenbaum: Everything You Need To Know About Hitler's "Missing" Testicle

Somebody make it stop. This incessant fixation on Hitler's sexuality, on his alleged perversity. I think it's fair to say that the very apex of cultural stupidity in our era is the compulsive conjunction of Hitler and sex. He was a "predatory" homosexual. He engaged in excretory practices with his underage half-niece. And, one of the most enduring, a myth I thought I had refuted once and for all but that now rears its head again: Hitler had only one testicle. Isn't it obvi

John G. West: My Plymouth Pilgrimage ... It was a worthwhile visit, despite the best efforts of the guardians of political correctness.

[John G. West is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and the author of Darwin Day in America.] There must be something deeply ingrained in the human psyche about going on pilgrimages, for when I had a chance last year to take my wife and two small children to visit New England after speaking at a conference, I jumped at the opportunity. What could be more worthwhile than showing my family the cradle of American liberty? I especially wanted to visit Plymouth, Mass

John Nichols: FDR's Legacy ... Giving Thanks, Offering Hope

[John Nichols is Washington correspondent for The Nation.] The surrender to corporate greed and Wall Street excess that is the legacy of the Bush-Cheney interregnum left Americans in a difficult spot this Thanksgiving. To a greater extent than at any moment since the days of the Great Depression, our Holiday celebrations are colored by uncertainty, even fear, about an economy that shows every sign of having been badly broken by the wrecking crew from Texas and the scav

Gregory Katz: Recently uncovered documents in the British archives reveal dark secrets from World War II ... One problem: they are forgeries

Nothing is as central to the way the British view themselves as the telling and retelling of their gallant fight against the Nazis. Perhaps the colossal figure of Winston Churchill is taken for granted now, his boozy final years remembered with an indulgent chuckle, his elitist views and nostalgia for Empire taken as a slight embarrassment. But no one pokes fun at the underlying tale: the bull's-eye accuracy of his ignored early warnings about Hitler's intent, the real-time impact of his oratory

Ira Stoll: The national holiday actually began at a dark hour during our war for independence. Here's the story.

[Mr. Stoll, formerly the managing editor of the New York Sun, is author of "Samuel Adams: A Life," published this month by Free Press.] When was the first Thanksgiving? Most of us think of the Pilgrims at Plymouth in 1621. But if the question is about the first national Thanksgiving holiday, the answer is that the tradition began at a lesser-known moment in 1777 in York, Pa. In July 1776, the American colonists declared independence from Britain. The months th

Kenneth C. Davis: French settlers bested the Mayflower Pilgrims

[Kenneth C. Davis is the author of “America’s Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation.”] TO commemorate the arrival of the first pilgrims to America’s shores, a June date would be far more appropriate, accompanied perhaps by coq au vin and a nice Bordeaux. After all, the first European arrivals seeking religious freedom in the “New World” were French. And they beat their English counterparts by 50 years. That Fren

Douglas Little: Why We Need Diplomatic History

[Douglas Little is a professor of history at Clark University and the author of American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East Since 1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2002), now published in a third revised edition.] When Gallup pollsters asked the American public in January 2000 to list the most important issues facing their country in the new millennium, the respondents relegated federal spending on the military to 20th place; the U.S. role in world affairs ti

Charles Homans: Last Secrets of the Bush Administration

n March 2001, U.S. Archivist John W. Carlin received a letter from Alberto Gonzales, then counsel to the newly inaugurated president George W. Bush. It concerned an important deadline that was looming—one that Bush owed to Richard Nixon. In 1974, Congress ordered a lockdown on all records kept by the Nixon White House, afraid that the outgoing president would try to wipe out the paper trail of his disastrous second term and chastened by the recent destruction of decades’ worth of FB

Humberto Fontova: New York Honors Che Guevara with a Statue

On Friday November 21st, while strolling through Central Park's Doris C. Freedman Plaza, Commentary Magazine's online editor Abe Greenwald noticed a statue and did a double take. "Is that...Che Guevara?" Indeed! There was no mistaking it: a statue of "El Che" by German artist, Christian Jankowski. Upon investigating the matter, Abe Greenwald learned that, "the sculpture is not intended to depict Che Guevara," but rather a street performer from Barcelona

Barton Gellman: Anatomy of a Vice Presidency

[Mr. Gellman is the author of Angler, the new biography of Vice President Cheney.] Let me just say to begin with that it is flattering and daunting, in more or less equal parts, to talk about my new book on Vice President Cheney with four of its published critics: Jacob Heilbrunn in the NYT Book Review, Steve Clemons in the American Conservative, David Greenberg in Slate and Spencer Ackerman on his Attackerman blog. Paul Mirengoff of Power Line, who critiqued excerpts of the book th

Charles A. Krause: 30 Years Later, Memories of Jonestown Evoke Guilt, Anger and Mistrust

Jackie Speier now represents California's 12th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives. The last time I saw her, 30 years ago, her bloody, bullet-riddled body lay in tall grass at the side of a jungle airstrip in Port Kaituma, Guyana. She had been gunned down by four assassins sent by the Rev. Jim Jones to kill congressman Leo J. Ryan -- and the rest of us who had accompanied him to investigate reports of violence, torture and sexual abuse in a place called Jones

John A. Farrell: Can anyone save some of the Civil War's most important battlefields?

In 1964, Michael Shaara, a frustrated writer of little-known fiction, took his wife and children on a road trip to the World's Fair in New York. On their way home, they stopped at Gettysburg National Military Park, where a fine statue of Robert E. Lee guards the western reach of the famous battlefield. The statue marks the area where, on July 3, 1863, Confederate Gen. George Pickett led some 13,000 men out from the shelter of the woods and up the long slope of Cemetery Ridge. Shaara

Avraham Burg: The deeper we are stuck in our Auschwitz past, the more difficult it becomes to be free of it

[Avraham Burg, former speaker of the Israeli parliament, is a businessman and author, most recently, of "The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From Its Ashes," published this month by Palgrave Macmillan.] Reporting from Nataf, Israel -- Even today, when economic storms are shaking markets around the world, posing a threat to the stability of entire countries and societies, Israel continues to conduct its business far from the turmoil, as if swimming in a private ocean of its

Max Hastings: Two Hundred Years of Foreign Engagement in Afghanistan

I told an American diplomat in Kabul last month that the British are unconvinced that US policy in Afghanistan makes sense, or that the present Afghan government is sustainable. “Given the record of British engagement in this region over the past two centuries,” the American responded irritably, “I do not think you people are well positioned to give anybody else lectures about how to do things here.” Touché. Even at the height of British imperialism, when Victorian proconsuls prided

Nick Turse: A My Lai a Month

[Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of Tomdispatch.com. He is the author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives and a forthcoming history of US war crimes in Vietnam, Kill Anything That Moves (both Metropolitan).] By the mid-1960s, the Mekong Delta, with its verdant paddies and canal-side hamlets, was the rice bowl of South Vietnam and home to nearly 6 million Vietnamese. It was also one of the most important revolutionary strongholds during the

Jonathan Kirsch: 5 Things You Didn't Know: The Inquisition

[Jonathan Kirsch is the author of The Grand Inquisitor's Manual: A History of Terror in the Name of God, published by Harper One and available on book shelves everywhere as of September 9, 2008.] Nowadays, we tend to make a parody of the Inquisition, as in the set-up line of a famous Monty Python sketch: "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!" But the Inquisition is no joke. An unbroken thread links the friar-inquisitors of the Holy Inquisition to more recent torturers a

Greg Sheridan: I come to hail chief, not bury him

[Greg Sheridan is Foreign editor at The Australian.] In 1963, South Vietnam's president Ngo Dinh Diem was assassinated in a military coup backed by the Americans, though they didn't back his murder. To cover the assassination, the slander was put out that Diem, a devout Catholic, had committed suicide. Santa was torn. He wanted to defend Diem and denounce the Americans for the most foolish thing they did in Vietnam. But with a federal election looming he worried that he might dimin

Robert McHenry: “Great Books” — Hah!

According to this review published the other day in the Wall Street Journal, a fellow named Alex Beam has written a book about the Great Books of the Western World, the 54-volume collection of major writings that

Suzan Mazur: Is Darwinism still valid? An interview with scientist Stuart Newman

[Suzan Mazur is the author of Altenberg 16: An Exposé of the Evolution Industry. Her interest in evolution began with a flight from Nairobi into Olduvai Gorge to interview the late paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey. Because of ideological struggles, the Kenyan-Tanzanian border was closed, and Leakey was the only reason authorities in Dar es Salaam agreed to give landing clearance. The meeting followed discovery by Leakey and her