Roundup: Talking About History

Eric Alterman: When reviewers don't know what they're talking about

In Sunday's NYTBR, the diplomat Richard Holbrooke writes effusively of journalist Michael Dobbs' new book on the Cuban missile crisis, here. I'll say this for Dobbs. He is a lucky man. He gets a front-page review from a famous man in the most influential space there is. Still, while Holbrooke is a smart fellow, and as expert as anyone alive on the practice

Heidi Holland: Young Mugabe ... The making of a despot

[Heidi Holland is the author of Dinner with Mugabe published by Penguin.] Robert Mugabe has been cut off from his feelings ever since his carpenter father abandoned the family when Robert was a shy 10-year-old. Had his mother, Bona, been emotionally robust, he might have weathered the crushing abandonment. But she was fanatically religious, having arrived at the Catholic mission station near Harare, where Mugabe and his siblings grew up, with hopes of becoming a nun. Al

Arthur Herman: Why Iraq Was Inevitable

[Arthur Herman, who has taught history at George Mason University and Georgetown University, is the author most recently of "Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age".] According to an April 2008 poll in U.S. News & World Report, fully 61 percent of American historians agree that George W. Bush is the worst President in our history. Some of these scholars cite the President’s position on the environment, or on taxes, or on the

Christopher Hitchens: Revisionists say that World War II was unnecessary. They're wrong.

Is there any one shared principle or assumption on which our political consensus rests, any value judgment on which we are all essentially agreed? Apart from abstractions such as a general belief in democracy, one would probably get the widest measure of agreement for the proposition that the second world war was a"good war" and one well worth fighting. And if we possess one indelible image of political immorality and cowardice, it is surely the dismal tap-tap-tap of Neville Chamberlain's umbrel

Andrew Roberts: History will say that we misunderstood George W Bush

[Andrew Roberts is a Brisitsh conservative, author, and historian. ] As he leaves the White House at the end of his second term, the President has a poll rating of only 23 per cent, and is widely disliked and even despised. His foreign policy has been judged a failure, especially in view of the long, painful, costly war that he declared, which is still not over. History may place President Bush in a far better light than he currently enjoys He

James Mann: The Bush who emerges from his China diary

[James Mann is author-in-residence at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. His books include The China Fantasy and About Face: A History of America's Curious Relationship With China, From Nixon to Clinton.] While visiting his family in Asia after he graduated from Harvard Business School mor than three decades ago, George W. Bush discovered the joys of Chinese dentistry "George got his tooth fixed the day he left for 60 cents

William Safire: Praises new bio of John Mitchell

“The Strong Man,” by James Rosen, subtitled “John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate” (Doubleday, $35), is the most revealing and insightful book I’ve read about that era. Profoundly researched for 20 years by a reporter scrupulous about source notes, it is both a sympathetic and an unsparing character study of a complex historic figure previously portrayed as the caricature of a villain. I knew the dour Mitchell almost “in full” and can attest to this being a Pulitzer-quality biography.

Tony Platt: The history of American Eugenics is being rewritten

The 1942 U.S. Supreme Court case of Skinner v. Oklahoma is remembered for protecting “the right to have offspring,” and by implication the right not to have offspring. Skinner, according to Victoria Nourse, the author of an important new book on American eugenics, typically “sits in the shadow of the abortion and gay marriage debates.” “In Reckless Hands: Skinner v. Oklahoma and the Near-Triumph of American Eugenics” demonstrates that Skinner also opens a window into a little-known

Philip P. Arnold: Confronting the Legacy of Native American Boarding Schools

[Philip Arnold is Associate Professor of Indigenous Religions at Syracuse University.] Last February, Syracuse University hosted a screening of the 2007 film UNREPENTANT: Kevin Annett and Canada's Genocide and a public conversation with Kevin Annett. Reverend Annett started his first ministry for the United Church of Canada (UCC) on Vancouver Island in the 1980s. He immediately noticed that in spite of the large Native American population in the community, none of them attended hi

Olivia Judson: Darwinmania!

[Olivia Judson, an evolutionary biologist, is the author of “Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex,” which was made into a three-part television program. Ms. Judson has been a reporter for The Economist and has written for a number of other publications, including Nature, The Financial Times, The Atlantic and Natural History. She is a research fellow in biology at Imperial College London.] The party is about to begin.

Editorial in the Independent: The tragic legacy of President Bush

It gets an outing on every visit of an American president to these shores. And yesterday's appearance of President George Bush in London, stopping by on his farewell tour of Europe, was no different. Both Gordon Brown and Mr Bush paid tribute to the "special" relationship between our two nations. The "special relationship" is a concept that cuts little ice with hard-headed diplomats on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet it was once more than a platitude. While the d

Terence Samuel: Bush's Misplaced Regrets

[Terence Samuel is a Prospect senior correspondent. His weekly TAP Online column appears on Fridays.] George W. Bush has been running around Europe misting up and emoting about how much he regrets talking and acting like the warmonger he's proven to be. "I think that in retrospect I could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric," he told The Times of London. Well, yes; he could have. But tone-deafness has been a defining characteristic of this admin

Evan Thomas: The Mythology of Munich

[Evan Thomas is a journalist, author, and the Assistant Managing Editor for Newsweek.] If you were making the movie, the scene might go something like this: It is late May 1940. France is collapsing and the Nazis are pushing the British Expeditionary Force into the English Channel. Britain stands alone against Hitler's mighty onslaught. In London the War Cabinet has gathered to consider a peace feeler: if Britain agrees to stop fighting, Hitler will allow the British to keep most of

Ana Carrigan: Colombia's guerrillas: between past and future

[Ana Carrigan is the author of The Palace of Justice: A Colombian Tragedy (Four Walls Eight Windows). Her reports from Colombia have appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Nation, the Irish Times, In These Times and the Guardian. She is currently writing a book of Colombian memoirs.] On 26 March 2008, in a remote camp somewhere in the central range of the Colombian Andes, an old guerrilla leader died. The news took two months to reach the outside world. When it did so

John Taylor: The media are ignoring the new biography of John Mitchell

[Mr. Taylor is the executive director of the Nixon Library.] Seventeen years in the writing, the product of 250 interviews and his painstaking study of records no other journalist or historian has ever seen (or evidently asked to see), James Rosen’s just-published The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (Doubleday), which brims with new information about Watergate, ought to be the political junkie event of the season. Before a crowd of 70 at the Nixon Library this

Jerome Groopman: The Genetic History Of The Jews, And What It Says About Jews Today

... [David B.] Goldstein rightly reiterates the caveat that he made at the beginning of [his] book [Jacob's Legacy: A Genetic View of Jewish History]. "In general, genetic history has been successful only in contexts where nongenetic sources of information--for example, texts, oral history, or archaeology--specify mutually exclusive possibilities.... Working without such external information, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to tell a coherent story about the history of a populatio

Daniel Walker Howe: Honest Abe .. Lincoln and Moral Character

[Daniel Walker Howe is Rhodes Professor of American History Emeritus at Oxford University and Professor of History Emeritus at UCLA. His books include What Hath God Wrought (2008 Pulitzer Prize winner) and Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. This essay is based on his presentation at the FPRI Wachman Center's May 17-18, 2008 history institute on America in the Civil War Era, held at and co-sponsored by Carthage College, Wisconsin. ]

Stephen Kinzer: It is now clear that Robert Kennedy's assassination 40 years ago was in fact an eminently political act

Decades must often pass before shattering historic events can be truly understood. So it is with the assassination of senator Robert Kennedy, which stunned the world 40 years ago this month. The killer, Sirhan Sirhan, seemed at the time to fit the pattern of the wild-eyed lunatic that is often associated with political assassins. James Reston, the eminent New York Times columnist, called the murder "a wholly irrational act". Most Americans saw it that way. Onl

Charles D. Weisselberg: Happy Birthday Miranda

[Charles D. Weisselberg is Professor of Law at Boalt Hall and Faculty Co-Chair, Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice .] Forty-two years ago today, the United States Supreme Court issued its decision in Miranda v. Arizona, perhaps the Court’s most recognized criminal procedure ruling of all time. The 5-4 decision was authored by Chief Justice Earl Warren. The five justices in the majority hoped that the procedures set forth in the decision would enable suspects in the stationhouse to

Bradford Plumer: The Divided States of America

After the first-ever televised presidential debate between Vice President Richard Nixon and Sen. John F. Kennedy in 1960, a survey in Philadelphia famously found that TV viewers deemed Kennedy the winner, while radio listeners favored Nixon. In reality, the poll in question was shoddy and unreliable (even if Nixon’s sweaty, unshaven mug had looked gruesome on the small screen). But that didn’t matter to Nixon. The lesson he gleaned from defeat that year was that optics were everything, that he h