Roundup: Talking About History

Ofri Ilany: Haaretz in 1932 ... Hitler makes better impression than expected

The date is January 28, 1932. Haaretz' correspondent in Berlin, Gershon Savitt, reports from the courthouse. In the defendant's chair is Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi party, who is facing a libel suit filed by his former friend, Walter Stennes. A year before his appointment as chancellor of Germany, Hitler is still not very well known to Haaretz's readers. In the article, "Hitler up close and personal," he emerges as an exotic figure, somewhat peculiar. "I mus

Zahava Scherz: A sister I never knew delivers an eternal Holocaust message

As the child of Polish Jews who had survived the terrors of World War II, I was always aware of the Holocaust — but at a distance. Then, when I was 14 years old, I came across a red photo album, hidden in my parents' home outside Tel Aviv. The photographs in the album were from that dark time. They showed my father Yaacov Laskier's family, all of whom had been exterminated in the Holocaust. All I had known previously was that before the war, my father and his four brothers and four

Louis Bayard: Flagging America's racial divide

It was nothing more than a minor skirmish, to hear many of the parties tell it. Beautiful spring day ... couple hundred high-school kids massing outside City Hall ... a few tempers flare ... what's the big deal? After all, in that spring of '76, tempers were flaring all across Boston. Two years earlier, U.S. District Judge Arthur Garrity had ordered the city to desegregate its schools through busing, and now kids from mostly black Roxbury were being forced to share classrooms with k

Sam Wineburg: A new survey upends the conventional wisdom about who counts in American history

[Sam Wineburg is a professor of education and history at Stanford University.] Let's begin with a brief exercise. Who are the most famous Americans in history, excluding presidents and first ladies? Go ahead—list your top ten. I can wait. A colleague and I recently put this question to 2,000 11th and 12th graders from all 50 states, curious to see whether they would name (as a great many educators had predicted) the likes of Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Tupac Shakur, 5

Mark Selden: Japanese and American War Atrocities, Historical Memory and Reconciliation

[Mark Selden is a coordinator of Japan Focus and a research associate in the East Asia Program at Cornell University.] The controversies that continue to swirl around the Nanjing Massacre, the military comfort women, Unit 731 and other Japanese military atrocities rooted in colonialism and the Asia Pacific War are critical not only to understanding the dynamics of war, peace, and terror in the long twentieth century. They are also vital for understanding war memory and denial, with

Blogger: Teaching labor history is difficult

Most of us have (unfortunately) taken history courses that didn’t cohere around any narrative or set of arguments. Now that I’ve started teaching, I realize that even doing it poorly is much harder than it looks. Often I don’t see inadequacies in my lessons till I’m standing in front of my class and realize that I’m actually boring myself. I watch the students stop taking notes, fidget, and nod off as I ask myself, “Why am I telling them this? What’s the point?” One such moment occu

Paul Auster: Why I went crazy in 1968

[Paul Auster is the author of the forthcoming “Man in the Dark.”] IT was the year of years, the year of craziness, the year of fire, blood and death. I had just turned 21, and I was as crazy as everyone else. There were half a million American soldiers in Vietnam, Martin Luther King had just been assassinated, cities were burning across America, and the world seemed headed for an apocalyptic breakdown. Being crazy struck me as a perfectly sane response to t

Jason Webster: What Islam did for Europe

Until very recently, suggestions that western civilisation owed much to Islam were rejected out of hand. "Europe", according to the orthodox model, was born out of a marriage of classical and Judaeo-Christian cultures. The missing element in this formula - the Islamic component - was ignored. During the first half of the 20th century a number of Arabists challenged this view, but their opinions made little popular headway. Today, however, thanks largely to the current friction between

Sean Wilentz: The end of the age of Reagan

[Sean Wilentz is the author of The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008, which will appear in May.] ... What some experts envisaged, only three years ago, as a permanent Republican majority now looks like an illusion. The Democrats, despite their internecine battles over the presidency, remain in a potentially strong position and ought to win substantial majorities in both the House and Senate. Having claimed his party's nomination, John McCain must persuade many on the right that hi

Ronald Kessler: The Real Joe McCarthy

[Mr. Kessler, a former Wall Street Journal and Washington Post reporter, is chief Washington correspondent of Newsmax.com and the author of "The Terrorist Watch: Inside the Desperate Race to Stop the Next Attack" (Crown Forum, 2007).] Fifty-four years ago today, Sen. Joseph McCarthy started his televised hearings on alleged Soviet spies and communists in the Army. The spectacle grabbed the country's attention for the next two months. By the end of the McCarthy

Richard D. Kahlenberg: Ocean Hill-Brownsville, 40 Years Later

[Richard D. Kahlenberg is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and author of Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy (Columbia University Press, 2007).] They were the pink slips that helped change American liberalism. Forty years ago — on May 9, 1968 — the local school board in Brooklyn's black ghetto of Ocean Hill-Brownsville sent telegrams to 19 unionized educators, informing them that their employment in the distri

Max Holland: Anatomy of a JFK Conspiracy Book by a Reputable Academic

[Mr. Holland, author of The Kennedy Assassination Tapes (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), is completing a history of the Warren Commission for Knopf.]David Kaiser: Response to Max Holland & John McAdams David Kaiser’s The Road to Dallas, as John McAdams’s revi

William J. Astore: How I Learned to Start Worrying and Loathe the Bomb

[William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), has taught at the Air Force Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School. He now teaches at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. He is the author of Hindenburg: Icon of German Militarism (Potomac Press, 2005) among other works. He may be reached at wastore@pct.edu.] It took more than four years just to excavate and construct that mountain redoubt outside of Colorado Springs, that Cold War

Roger Cohen: Race and American Memory

... For nations to confront their failings is arduous. It involves what Germans, experts in this field, call Geschichtspolitik, or “the politics of history.” It demands the passage from the personal to the universal, from individual memory to memorial. Yet there is as yet in the United States no adequate memorial to the ravages of race. The King Center is a fine institution. But it’s a modest museum, like others scattered through the country that deal with aspects of the nation’s mo

David A. Bell: What hinders historians from discovering the strangeness of the past?

Given how fiercely cultural conservatives defend the importance of a single "Western canon," it is more than a little ironic that different parts of the West have such different versions of it. True, the canon everywhere tends to start with the same Greeks and Romans, but thereafter, things get trickier. Consider, for instance, what competing accounts of "Western" philosophy and literature say about the 19th century. Where the French highlight Auguste Comte and Victor Hugo, t

David R. Stokes: The Preacher King ... His Last Year

[Mr. Stokes is the senior pastor of Fair Oaks Church in Fairfax, VA.] Attending a national conference on preaching here in the Washington, D.C. area this past week, I noted many references to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as the recently past 40th anniversary of his tragic assassination was referred to by speaker after speaker. King was certainly a giant in our history, a man of thought and action remembered as someone who had the courage of his convictions. Dr. King was a

Donald Ritchie: The National Press Club, at 100

[Donald Ritchie, author of Reporting from Washington: The History of the Washington Press Corps, Our Constitution, and The Congress of the United States: A Student Companion, has been Associate Historian of the United States Senate for mo

Kinue Tokudome: The Bataan Death March and the 66-Year Struggle for Justice

[Kinue Tokudome is a Japanese writer. She has contributed articles to Japan Focus on the Japanese military comfort women and on US POWs.] April 9, 2008 marks the 66th anniversary of the fall of Bataan which resulted in the largest surrender by the United States Army in its history. Over 77,000 American and Filipino troops were to become victims of one of the most brutal episodes in the Pacific War—the Bataan Death March. The March: Beginning of the Ordeal

The Tragedy of Bataan, a forgotten battle

[Tenney, a resident of Carlsbad, is a survivor of the Bataan Death March and three-and-a-half years as a Japanese prisoner of war.] On April 9, 1942, Gen. Douglas MacArthur's Armed Forces in the Far East was forced to surrender Bataan to the Japanese, this in spite of his orders of April 3 demanding that no surrender be considered and, if ultimately necessary, to “charge the enemy. Make one last stand.” He likened the situation to Gen. George Custer's last stand at Little Bighorn in

Michael Robertson: Reading Whitman Religiously

[Michael Robertson is a professor of English at the College of New Jersey and author of Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples, just published by Princeton University Press.] In December 1890, the elderly Walt Whitman received in the mail an unusual Christmas greeting from his admirer William Sloane Kennedy, a Harvard Divinity School dropout turned journalist. "Do you suppose a thousand years from now people will be celebrating the birth of Walt Whitman as they are now the bir