Roundup: Talking About History

Gordon Taylor: What Obama should do about the resolution to commemorate the Armenian genocide

[Mr. Taylor is a former teacher in Turkey and the author of Fever and Thirst: An American Doctor Among the Tribes of Kurdistan. Academy Chicago Publishers, 2005.] Talking heads agree: Barack Obama will be tested soon after taking office. One of his lesser problems--thorny enough, however, to become a major issue--is the nonbinding resolution, pending in Congress seemingly forever, which officially labels as gen

Jennifer Lind: Why do apologies for history sometimes work and sometimes don't?

[Jennifer Lind is Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. Her work has been published in International Security, Atlantic, and Foreign Policy. This essay is based on her book Sorry States: Apologies in International Politics (Cornell University Press, Sept. 2008).] Apologies are not only the domain of scandal-ridden politicians and CEOs; they have become a staple of international politics. States routinely offer or seek apologies for past atrocities. Many analysts ar

Michael Radu: Playing games with history

[Michael Radu, Ph.D., is Co-Chair of FPRI’s Center on Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Homeland Security. His most recent book is The War on Terrorism: 21st-Century Perspectives (ed., with Stephen Gale and Harvey Sicherman, Transaction, 2008); his Europe’s Ghost: Tolerance, Jihadism and Their Consequences is forthcoming from Encounter Press.] In 1984, George Orwell wrote that those who control the past control the future, and politicians have known this for a long time. The instrume

Bret Stephens: 'Tolerance' Is Not the Lesson of Kristallnacht

Sunday was the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass. With some notable exceptions, Europe has opted to mark the occasion by missing its point. "We must not be silent," said German Chancellor Angela Merkel at a memorial ceremony in Berlin's renovated Rykestrasse synagogue, one of the few that was not burned down that night by the Nazis -- though 2,200 others were, as crowds of German or Austrian citizens looked on. "There can be no tolerance, fo

Kenneth T. Jackson: "From These Honored Dead:" Memorial Day and Veterans Day in American History

[Director, Herbert H. Lehman Center for American History and Jacques. Barzun Professor of History and the Social Sciences, Columbia University] No one, before or since, has spoken as eloquently as President Lincoln on the debt that a grateful nation owes to young men who lose their lives in battle while fighting under its flag. As the wartime leader promised, "from these honored dead we take increased devotion to the cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.&

Alexander Watson: A Holiday to End All Wars

[Alexander Watson is a research fellow at Cambridge University and the author of “Enduring the Great War.”] TODAY is the 90th anniversary of the armistice that ended the First World War, and it will be commemorated very differently on each side of the Atlantic and across the borders of Europe. It’s a reminder that not all “victors” experience wars in the same way, and that their citizens can have almost as much difficulty as those of the vanquished states in coping with the collecti

Deborah Lipstadt: The Mormons are at it Again ... Posthumous conversions of Holocaust victims

Years ago I went with Ernie Michel, an Auschwitz survivor, to meet with Sen. Orrin Hatch. Hatch had stepped in to tell Michel that the Mormon church would not continue converting Holocaust victims who had died in camps. [The reason I was there was because Hatch had said that he wanted to pass a Congressional resolution affirming that the Holocaust happened as a response to deniers. I had told Michel, when I learned of this, that I did not think it was a good idea. "We don't ha

Max Holland & Kenneth R. Scearce: 11 Seconds in Dallas Redux ... Filmed Evidence

In March 2007, the inaugural issue of Washington Decoded posited a radical new description of the shooting sequence in Dealey Plaza. “11 Seconds in Dallas, Not Six” argued that the Zapruder film did not capture in full the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy. Rather, the iconic movie recorded an assassination that had already commenced. Lee Harvey Oswald’s errant first shot was fired about 1.4 seconds before Abe Zapruder started his camera, or just after the president’s li

Eric Rauchway: Stop lying about Roosevelt’s record

Oh for pity’s sake. Some real news outlet needs to publish a nice short piece on conservative falsehoods about the New Deal. Amity Shlaes’s Liberty League retread has got a new lease of life, thanks to the Daily Show of all outlets (Jon Stewart, you should be ashamed) and now in the Wall Street Journal’s

Editorial in the Telegraph: Remember those who fought in the Great War

It is hard to think of an event since the Reformation that changed the civilised world so much as the Great War, in which the guns fell silent 90 years ago today. Almost every aspect of the world in which we now live was shaped by that conflict. It can be seen as only the first act in a drama that lasted until 1945: but the world after the Versailles Treaty, that saw the rise of Nazism and the Axis, was made by the concatenation of events that started in Sarajevo in June 1914.

Herbert Bix: Japan's Top Soldier Reignites Conflict Over the Past

[Herbert Bix, author of Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, which won the Pulitzer Prize, teaches at Binghamton University, New York, and writes on issues of war and empire. He is a Japan Focus associate. He told Japan Focus: "I wish to thank Gavan McCormack and Mark Selden for sending materials used in this essay."] On October 31, 2008, General Tamogami Toshio, Japan’s Air Self-Defense Force [ASDF] Chief of Staff was abruptly dismissed from his post in the Defense Mi

Laurence Rees: The whitewashing of Stalin

A few months ago, when I was visiting one of our leading universities, I happened to see a poster prominently displayed in one of the students' halls of residence. It was of Joseph Stalin. Perhaps it was meant as a kind of ironic reference to something. Perhaps it was simply covering a damp patch on the wall. But, in any event, no one seemed to take much notice of it. But imagine if instead of a picture of Stalin, there had been a picture of that other horrendous tyrant

Dan Todman: How we remember them: the 1914-18 war today

[Dan Todman is senior lecturer in history at Queen Mary College, University of London. He is the author of The Great War: Myth and Memory (Hambledon, 2005).] The annual commemoration of the fallen in the world wars and small wars Britain has been involved in takes place on the nearest Sunday to "Remembrance Day", 11 November. On that day i

Alex Beam: Bush the worst president? Contrary to popular belief...

[Eric Foner et al. may think Bush is the worst president ever, but not everyone agrees, argues Beam in this column.] ... Renegade academic and New York Times blogger Stanley Fish thinks differently. Last month he posted a persuasive essay on George Bush, "The Comeback Kid," arguing that within a year of his leaving office, "George W. Bush will be a popular public figure, regarded with affection and a little nostalgia even by those who . . . thought he was the worst pr

Michael Ashcroft: Why we must honour Bomber Command

April 26, 1944 - 20,000 feet above Germany. The Lancaster was returning from a successful bombing mission. But all was not well. An attack by a German fighter aircraft had caused serious damage, and a fire had started on the starboard wing. Home was many miles away. The Lancaster's flight engineer, Sergeant Norman Jackson, was wounded in the attack. Yet, he responded to the emergency by volunteering to do something which, quite simply, defies belief. It was bitterly col

James Buchan: When Keynes went to America

[James Buchan's latest novel is "The Gate of Air", published by the MacLehose Press.] The night the Mount Washington Hotel opened in 1902, its builder, the New Hampshire coal and railroad magnate Joseph Stickney, raised a glass to “the damn fool who built this white elephant”. With its octagonal towers and 300 yards of wooden verandah, its 234 rooms each with its own bath, its telephone and mail system, and its interminable corridors, set in endless New Hampshire wildernes

Robin Scott-Elliot: Band of brothers ... A tale of war, loss and remembrance on the killing fields of France

The sunken road that rises from Hardecourt-aux-Bois up to Montauban in the Somme valley curves gently through brown fields before starting its climb towards the ridge, its destination the crossroads that lie on the edge of the upper village. At its beginning, the road dips low enough to hide a man, and it was here, on 25 March 1918, that 36-year-old Bertie Anderson began the final hour of his life. William Herbert Anderson was an acting lieutenant colonel, the novice commander of th

Alexander Rose: Who Put the Rifle into the National Rifle Association?

[Born in the United States, Alexander Rose was raised in Australia and Britain. A military historian and former journalist, he is the author of Washington's Spies: The Story of America's First Spy Ring, and his writing has appeared in the New York Observer, the Washington Post, Studies in Intelligence, and many other publications. His website is www.alexrose.com. His latest book is American Rifle: A Biography (FSB, 2008).] Why is the National Ri

William Hogeland: Public history should make us think

In East Berlin, the Memorial to the Victims of Fascism and Militarism was a big attraction. Soviet-bloc tourists mobbed it, and by the mid-1980s visitors also included jittery NATO-country citizens on day-pass jaunts over the famous wall. Built as the New Guard House of Friedrich Wilhelm III, the Memorial had neoclassical, Doric-style columns under a low-peaked pediment. Within its echoing dimness, a clear prismatic block, Soviet-moderne, fragmented an eternal flame. The draw was th

Paul Oestreicher: The legacy of Kristallnacht

[Canon Dr Paul Oestreicher is a former chair of Amnesty International UK.] Berliners went wild that day, 19 years ago. The impossible had happened. The Wall had come down. It was November 9 1989. I wasn't there. But I was there on that same date in 1938, 70 years ago. Germans went wild on that day, too. They let loose an orgy of destruction. The synagogues were set ablaze. Jewish shops were smashed up and pillaged. Jewish men were rounded up, beaten up, some to death, many sent to c