Roundup: Talking About History

John McAdams: Debunking JFK conspiracy claims made by David Kaiser

[John McAdams is an associate professor of political science at Marquette University and webmaster of the Kennedy Assassination Home Page. He received his doctorate from Harvard University in 1981.] At first glance, David Kaiser’s book [The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press)] promises to be one of the more sensible volumes on the JFK assassination. Published by an esteemed press, it is written by a reputable, experienced

Jill Lepore: Fake memoirs, factual fictions, and the history of history

What makes a book a history? In the eighteenth century, novelists called their books “histories,” smack on the title page. No one was more brash about this than Henry Fielding, who, in his 1749 “History of Tom Jones, a Foundling,” included a chapter called “Of Those Who Lawfully May, and of Those Who May Not Write Such Histories as This.” Fielding insisted that what flowed from his pen was “true history”; fiction was what historians wrote. “I shall not look on myself as accountable

John Allemang: Sam the sham ... The myth of Champlain

When Samuel de Champlain – the Father of Canada, as the grade-school teachers used to say – had to sell the Cardinal de Richelieu on sticking with the floundering colony of Quebec, he dangled the lure of a trade bonanza before France's all-powerful backroom boy. “These fresh discoveries,” he wrote in The Vo yages to Western New France, Called Canada (1632), “have led to the project of forming there these colonies, which, though at first of little account, nevertheless, in course of

John Reader: The Fungus That Conquered Europe, Led to the Irish Migration, Started in the US

[John Reader is the author, most recently, of the forthcoming “Propitious Esculent: The Potato in World History.”] ... Americans may think of the disease that destroyed Ireland’s potato crops, late blight, as a European phenomenon, but its devastations actually started with them. The origin of the fungal organism responsible, Phytophthora infestans, has been traced to a valley in the highlands of central Mexico, and the first recorded instances of the disease are in the United State

Ted Widmer: It's time to remember the French arrived before the British in what became New England

[Ted Widmer directs the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, and is the author of a forthcoming book, "Ark of the Liberties: America and the World." An exhibit curated by the JCB, "Champlain's America: New England and New France," will run at the Boston Public Library from March 13 to May 31.] NEW ENGLANDERS GROW up imbibing certain creation myths, most of which relate to how unbelievably historic we are. It all started here, and entire businesses -- th

Christopher Hitchens: The 2,000-Year-Old Panic (Re: Anti-Semitism)

A sour old joke from prewar Germany has two elderly Jews sitting in a Berlin park, with one of them reading a Yiddish paper and the other one scanning the pages of Der Stürmer. The latter Jew is laughing. This proves too much for the former Jew, who says: “It’s not enough you read that Nazi rag, but you find it funny?” “Look,” replies the other. “If I read your paper, what do I see? Jews deported, Jews assaulted, Jews insulted, Jewish property confiscated. But I read Der Stürmer, and there’s fin

Jonah Goldberg: Response to Michael Tomasky critique of "Liberal Fascism"

[Goldberg is an editor at large at National Review Online and the author of Liberal Fascism.] Michael Tomasky, reviewing my book, Liberal Fascism, in TheNew Republic, has performed a useful service. He combines every strategy the book’s critics have used to dismiss it. He runs down the supermarket aisles of the Left

Sam Wineburg and Chauncey Monte-Sano: The Changing Pantheon of American Heroes

[Sam Wineburg is professor of education and of history (by courtesy) at Stanford University, and Chauncey Monte-Sano is an assistant professor of education at the University of Maryland.] ... Have changes in curriculum materials [through the decades] made a dent in popular historical consciousness? Whom do contemporary American schoolchildren define as the people who "made history"? Do today's youth envision a pantheon of "famous Americans" still defined by the t

Steven Waldman: What Did the Founders Believe About Church and State?

[Steven Waldman is Editor-in-Chief, President and co-founder of Beliefnet. Before starting Beliefnet, he was National Editor of US News & World Report, National Correspondent for Newsweek in the Washington bureau and editor of the Washington Monthly. He is the author of Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America.] Many of you commented that the Founders’ religious beliefs did not determine their approach to separation of church and state

David Palmer: Can the U.S. and Japan Confront Forced Labor and Atomic Bombing?

[David Palmer is Senior Lecturer in American Studies, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia. He currently is writing a comparative history of Japanese and American shipyard workers during the era of the Pacific War based on personal interviews he conducted in the 1980s (U.S.) and 2000s (Japan). He also is translating the poetry of Hiroshima hibakusha poet Fukagawa Munetoshi. He is the author of

Frank Gannon: An Addition to the Watergate Bookshelf

There’s a piece by David Stout in today’s New York Times about In Nixon’s Web: A Year in the Crosshairs of Watergate — a book by Pat Gray, published posthumously last week by Times books. L. Patrick Gray III died in 2005 at the age of eighty-eight. His manuscript was completed by his son Ed. I will withhold extended comment and analysis until I have had a chance to read the book, but Mr. Stout’s article provokes a few thoughts. I only had the privilege of meeting Pat Gr

Tom Alderman: Email Is Changing the Way We Communicate and Historians Are Worried

[Tom Alderman is a 30-year veteran media analyst, trainer and founder of MediaPrep, a national media training and presentation skills coaching firm. ] Email is the workhorse of modern communications at work and at home. Yes, we still use letters -- mostly for bills and other unrelenting official forms. Office memos are morphing into CYA missives for the files. At home, we no longer write personal letters except the warm greetings in our annual holiday cards. Email, and it's offsprin

Peter Feinman: Save local history by educating youth

[The writer is on staff at the Institute of History, Archaeology and Education in Purchase. The institute is a nonprofit organization "dedicated to expanding the knowledge and appreciation of human cultures from ancient times to the present through an array of student, teacher, and public programs and activities," according to its Web site.] Over the past few weeks, several events had made clear the challenges facing communities to maintain their individual identity. The b

Edward Ball: The Bush Family's Slaveholding Past

[Edward Ball is the author of Slaves in the Family and, most recently, The Genetic Strand.] The image most people have of slavery involves a cotton plantation with a big white house, a black village where 300 people live in cabins and a cruel overseer in the wings. This was not the model followed by the ancestors of President George W. Bush when, 175 years ago, they enslaved about 30 people on the shores of the upper Chesapeake. It is an apt time to contemplate the link

Scott Carlson: On Jane Jacobs's legacy

In his 1962 New Yorker review of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the architecture critic Lewis Mumford credited Jane Jacobs for her much-needed criticism of so-called urban renewal, which was reducing whole sections of cities to "gargantuan nonentities," as he put it. But other than that, he generally found her book simplistic and fraught with factual errors. Jacobs — who had no urban-planning background, or even a college degree — aimed her criticisms at New York, which s

Adrian Karatnycky: Russians try to forget some of Stalin's crimes

[Mr. Karatnycky is a senior scholar at the Atlantic Council of the U.S.] Today marks 55 years since the death of Joseph Stalin. But in Russia, his terrible legacy will receive scant attention and will not be subject to repudiation by those at the apex of power. This is because, under Vladimir Putin, official assessments of Stalin and the Soviet past have become rooted in amorality and studied ambivalence, not the unequivocal condemnations that characterized the Yeltsin years. As Mr.

David Greenberg: The relationship of the neoconservative movement to Bush's foreign policy

Not long ago the term "neoconservative" seemed ripe for retirement. The label was originally applied in the 1960s and 1970s to the ex-liberals (themselves ex-socialists) who turned halfway to the right after becoming disenchanted with the Great Society, left-wing politics, and the Democrats' post-Vietnam isolationism. Under Ronald Reagan, however, the neocons kept moving right and joined in a broad right-wing consensus, and by the 1990s it became hard to tell them apart from other Repu

Fred Siegel: William F. Buckley’s Unmaking of a Mayor

[Fred Siegel is a contributing editor of City Journal and a professor of history at the Cooper Union for Science and Art.] William F. Buckley’s 1965 New York mayoral campaign is perhaps best remembered for a memorable quip: asked what he would do if he won, the Conservative Party candidate responded with a bemused smile, “Demand a recount.” Buckley, a man of Tory manners and radical principles, ran as an intellectual provocateur. But his campaign against Democrat Abe Beame and the e

Michael Tomasky: What to make of Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism"?

Re: Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning By Jonah Goldberg In graduate school I had a professor, a famous Marxist, who devoted a significant portion of a lecture to the subject of artifacts. He was, of course, a historical materialist, and so he was trying to get us--his jejune and perhaps incurably indoctrinated charges who took capitalist existence at face value--to understand that ordinary things, everyday objects, we

John Taylor: So Nixon and Clinton are to be lumped together?

In January Sen. Obama was ridiculed by Sen. Clinton for saying that Ronald Reagan had a transformational effect on America. Nixonites and Clintonistas have a beef as well. The full Obama quote, as repeated by William Safire:Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path b