Roundup: Talking About History

Beverly Gage: Was Warren Harding Our First Black President?

[Beverly Gage teaches modern U.S. history at Yale University.] Will Americans vote for a black president? If the notorious historian William Estabrook Chancellor was right, we already did. In the early 1920s, Chancellor helped assemble a controversial biographical portrait accusing President Warren Harding of covering up his family’s “colored” past. According to the family tree Chancellor created, Harding was actually the great-grandson of a black woman. Under the one-drop rule of A

Taylor Branch: The Last Wish of Martin Luther King

[Taylor Branch is the author, most recently, of “At Canaan’s Edge,” the third volume in his history of the modern civil rights era. This article was adapted from a speech he gave on Monday at the National Cathedral.] FORTY years ago on March 31, at the National Cathedral, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered what would be his last Sunday sermon, on his way back to Memphis. That same night in 1968, President Johnson shocked the world by announcing that he would not seek re-e

David McNeill: Why the Japanese Will Not Be Seeing a Film About Yasukuni

[David McNeill writes regularly for a number of publications including the Irish Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He is a Japan Focus coordinator.] Neo-nationalists have shut down a Chinese-directed movie about Japan’s controversial war memorial Yasukuni, the latest in a string of incidents threatening freedom of expression in Japan. Its name translates as “peaceful country,” millions have silently prayed there for an end to wars, and for much of the

Andrew Wilson: China’s Early Encounters with the West: A History in Reverse

[Andrew Wilson is professor of strategy and policy at the U.S. Naval War College. He is the author of numerous articles on Chinese military history and seapower, Sun Tzu’s Art of War, and the Chinese diaspora, and the author or editor of The Chinese Overseas: Ambition and Identity, Chinese Merchant Elites in Colonial Manila, 1885-1916, and The Chinese in the Caribbean. This essay is based on his presentation at the FPRI Wachman Cente

Fred Siegel: The American Left has a long history of utopianism

[Fred Siegel is a contributing editor of City Journal and a professor of history at the Cooper Union for Science and Art.] In 1969, the Theater for Ideas organized a symposium to discuss whether acting should be “theater or therapy.” The event was prompted in part by the antics of the Living Theater, which had become famous for asking members of the audience to shed their clothes onstage along with the cast. In an emblematic moment, the distinguished critic Robert Brustein, one of t

James Piereson: The New Deal turns 75 as the United States faces another credit crisis requiring government measures to restore confidence

[James Piereson, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is the author of Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism (Encounter Books).] It was 75 years ago, on March 4, 1933, that Franklin Delano Roosevelt appeared on the steps of the Capitol to take the presidential oath, declaring in his inaugural address that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" and promising "direct, vigorous action&q

Walter Laqueur: Disraelia ... A Counterfactual History, 1848-2008

[Walter Laqueur has written more than twenty books, translated into as many languages. He was a co-founder and editor of the Journal of Contemporary History in London and The Washington Quarterly. ]HNN Editor: In this lengthy piece, excerpted here, Professor Laqueur wonders what might have happened if the Jews had established a homeland in Palestine in the mid-19th century, as some suggested should occur to solve "the Jewish question": What to do with Europe's Jewish po

Teaching 9/11 and the War on Terrorism

PRESIDENTIAL LEADERSHIP IN TIMES OF CRISIS David Eisenhower opened the conference by observing that historical parallels for this new war are inexact: unlike World War II, to which President Bush often compares it, a striking feature of the war on terror is that we are not mobilized in any way that affects us directly. Nor is it like Vietnam, to which others often compare it. That war was fought with draftees, in an area not of vital interest to the U.S. But like the Cold War, which wa

Tom Stoppard: 1968 ... The year of the posturing rebel

In 1968 I was living the good life with my first wife and first baby in our first house on the swell of my first play and was beginning to be noted by my peers as someone who was politically dubious. It was to be some years before a well known left-wing director, asked to typify a “Royal Court play”, replied that it was a play not written by Tom Stoppard, but I was already conscious of a feeling in myself which detached me from the prevailing spirit of rebellion when bliss was it i

Ron Rosenbaum: Welcome to the Hotel Hiroshima

[Ron Rosenbaum is the author of The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler.] ... We checked in to a metaphoric Hotel Hiroshima—"we" as a culture—on Aug. 6, 1945, when the 16-kiloton atomic weapon detonated about 800 meters over a hospital here. (The hospital wasn't the ostensible target; a nearby bridge was, but needless to say, the hospital and all those in it were vaporized.) Nearly 100,000 people died instantly or within hours from the original blast and the firestorms

Greg Gaut: Rewriting the history of the end of the Cold War

[Greg Gaut teaches Russian and European history at St. Mary’s University of Minnesota in Winona.] We fight each war twice — once in real life, and a second time with words, as contending forces try to mold our collective memory of the conflict. The Vietnam War, for example, ended decades ago, and today the United States enjoys friendly relations with the communist government of Vietnam. But Americans still battle over the meaning of the war and what lessons it teaches. The same is t

Deborah Lipstadt: Boston's Musuem of Fine Arts ... A Horrible Comparison

[Ms. Lipstadt is Dorot professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies and director of the Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University.] Geoff Edgers, writing in The Boston Globe, reports that Boston's Museum of Fine Arts [MFA] and an Aust

David Kaiser: Documents show that Oswald, the mob, anti-Castro Cubans, and right-wing groups really did conspire to kill the president

[David Kaiser, a historian, is a professor at the Naval War College. His books include American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War (Harvard University Press, 2000). This essay is adapted from his The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy, to be published this month by Harvard University Press, copyright 2008 by David Kaiser.] Sometime in the last week of September or the first few days of October 1963, three men knocked at the door of Silvia

Jack Pitney: Nixon's record on race relations was pretty good

Senator Obama’s Philadelphia speech has prompted a New York Times article on how politicians talk about race. It includes an attack on President Nixon:Race did not disappear entirely from presidential campaigns; it went under cover. It lay buried in code phrases like “crime in the streets,” “states’ rights,” and “welfare mothers.” Michael Klarman, a professor at the University of Virgi

Rick Perlstein: Excerpt from his new book, Nixonland

[Mr. Perlstein is the author of Before the Storm. Nixonland, the sequel, will be published in May.] Democrats started straggling into Miami Beach the second week in July, 1972. One of them was Robert Redf

Adolph Reed Jr.: Race and the New Deal Coalition

[Adolph Reed Jr. is a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania.] The triumph of Reaganism in the 1980s, and the attendant demise of the New Deal coalition that had formed under Roosevelt and consolidated in the postwar years, prompted a wave of reflection and debate among leftists, liberals and Democratic ideologues. The perception that Reagan's victory had resulted substantially from the defection of suburban white middle- and/or working-class, particularly

Symposium: Radical Son: The Ten Year Anniversary

The year 1997 marked the tenth anniversary of the publication of David Horowtiz’s autobiography Radical Son. Upon its publication, the memoir was immediately recognized as the most important literary memoir by anyone from the 60s generation. Radical Son has earned a place among the best in the genre of ex-revolutionary literature, a company that includes Chambers’ Witness, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and George Orwell’s Animal Farm. The author’s achievement prompted George Gilder to call

Carl Byker: Was Jackson a vicious person for holding slaves or just a product of his time?

[Carl Byker is the producer of "Andrew Jackson: Good, Evil and the Presidency."] After his pastor came under attack last week and before his historic speech on Tuesday, Barack Obama put his finger on the crux of the issue: "We've got a tragic history when it comes to race in this country," he said. "We've got a lot of pent-up anger and bitterness and misunderstanding." Recently, I spent most of a year in one of the places where such emotion

Thomas Madden: The Lost of Tomb of Jesus — one year later

[Thomas F. Madden is Professor of History and Director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Saint Louis University. His newest book, Empires of Trust: How RomeAmerica is Building–A New World (Dutton), will be released in July.] A year ago the Discovery Channel delivered a cheery Easter message to America’s Christians: Jesus is dead – and we found his tomb. After much fanfare and hype, The Lost Tomb of Jesus aired on March 4, 2007 to an audience of 4.1 million

Jerry Bower: When He rose, empires fell

[Jerry Bowyer is the chief economist of Benchmark Financial Network.] I wonder if the people sitting in churches this week understand how very much Jesus of Nazareth’s last week of life was driven by clashes pertaining to wealth and poverty, freedom and tyranny. Probably not. Theologians generally don't study history. Historians usually don’t study theology, and neither study economics. Here’s what happened: For over half of a millennium, Israel had been passed from em