Roundup: Talking About History

Jacob Weisberg: Bush Reads History Narcissistically

[Mr. Weisberg is the editor in chief of Slate. His book is February's HNN Book of the Month.] [George W.] Bush is not a historical ignoramus. Contrary to what many assume, he does have an appetite for books, which has grown larger during his White House years. If we take his own claims seriously, re

Ben Johnson: William F. Buckley Jr., RIP

[Ben Johnson is Managing Editor of FrontPage Magazine and author of the book 57 Varieties of Radical Causes: Teresa Heinz Kerry's Charitable Giving.] Aloise Buckley Heath once reminisced that, when her brother set out to establish National Review in the mid-1950s, “Our most deeply buried fear was that Gerald L.K. Smith was the only other conservative in America.” Fifty years later, William F. Buckley Jr.’s “weekly journal of opinion” (now bi-weekly) reaches more than 150,000 subscri

Glenn Greenwald: The "father of modern conservatism"

... The political right excels at using the deaths of its political leaders to sanctify its ideas. The intense, weeklong canonization of Ronald Reagan following his death was the template for that exploitation, and the same process with Buckley is already well under way. Today's conservatives will celebrate Buckley as an icon of modern conservatism, the epitome of their belief system. But this ritual will obscure a deeper truth: Buckley bears little resemblance to the modern-day, Bush-era

Rick Perlstein: Why William F. Buckley Was My Role Model

William F. Buckley was my friend. I'm hard on conservatives. I get harder on them just about every day. I call them "con men." I do so without apology. And I cannot deny that William F. Buckley said and did many things over the course of his career that were disgusting as well. I've written about some of them. But this is not the time to go into all that. My friend just passed away at the age of 82. He was a good and decent man. He knew exactly what my politics were about—

Jeremi Suri: Richard Nixon's Secret Plan to Bring Peace to Vietnam by Threatening to Use Nukes

[Jeremi Suri (suri@wisc.edu), a history professor at the University of Wisconsin, is the author of Henry Kissinger and the American Century.] On the morning of October 27, 1969, a squadron of 18 B-52s — massive bombers with eight turbo engines and 185-foot wingspans — began racing from the western US toward the eastern border of the Soviet Union. The pilots flew for 18 hours without rest, hurtling toward their targets at more than 500 miles per hou

John Taylor: Nixon didn't need to hear Goldwater's warning to know it was time to go

[Mr. Taylor is executive director of the Nixon Foundation.] In “No One Dares Tell [Hillary] It’s Over,” Robert Novak perpetuates the myth that Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater had to “bell the cat” by visiting the White House, with other congressional leaders, to “inform [Nixon]..he must resign the Presidency.” On Sunday, Aug. 4, 1974, the Pre

Joe Enge: American history textbooks are too liberal

[Mr. Enge is a member of the Carson City School Board. He formerly taught history at Carson High School, Carson City, Nevada.] Liberal historical myths and misrepresentations are hobbling America to face the dangers of the 21st century. The relationship of the past in framing perspectives of the present to determine the future has never been clearer. At the same time, public schools in our country continue to turn students off to history as a subject, leave them with erroneous and negati

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Jabotinsky, Weizmann, and the roots of the most contentious communal struggle on earth today

[Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s books include The Controversy of Zion: Jewish nationalism, the Jewish state, and the unresolved Jewish dilemma, which won an American National Jewish Book Award in 1996, and The Strange Death of Tory England, 2005.] In her last, powerful little book, The Question of Zion (reviewed in the TLS, April 21, 2006), Jacqueline Rose perceptively observed that, “while Israel barely leaves the front page of the daily papers, Zionism itself is hardly ever talked about”.

Diana Muir: Who really said it? ... “A Land without a People for a People without a Land”

[Diana Muir is the author of Reflections in Bullough’s Pond: Economy and Ecosystem in New England (University Press of New England, 2000).] “A land without a people for a people without a land” is one of the most oft-cited phrases in the literature of Zionism—and perhaps also the most problematic. Anti-Zionists cite the phrase as a perfect encapsulation of the fundamental injustice of Zionism: that early Zionists believed Palestine was uninhabited,1 that they denied—and continue to

William Grimes: Separating the Mythology From the Raw Politics of a Senate Campaign

One hundred and fifty years on, the Lincoln-Douglas debates enjoy the dubious status of myth. The specific circumstances and local passions that shaped them have long been forgotten, and subsequent events — the rise of Lincoln as a towering national figure and the Civil War — make it almost mandatory to read the debates as an ominous prologue or an intellectual dress rehearsal for national tragedy. In his searching and illuminating “Lincoln and Douglas” the eminent Lincoln historian

Krissy Clark: Why didn't it matter in Lincoln's day that he shared his bed with a man?

[Krissy Clark: Western Editor/Reporter for Weekend America/American Public Media.] First, a note about gaydar. You know, radar that detects "gay-ness." The word gaydar, of course, didn't exist back in Abraham Lincoln's time. But if it had, and the facts of Lincoln's life had blipped across its screen, those facts would not have gone unnoticed. Fact number one, explains historian Jean Baker: Lincoln's relationship with Joshua Speed, a shop keeper from Springfi

Mark W. Hendrickson: Ranking (and Timing) the Presidents

[Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson is a faculty member, economist, and contributing scholar with the Center for Vision and Values at Grove City College.] Are you excited about Presidents’ Day? Neither am I. It’s hard to think of a less inspiring, more perfunctory “holiday.” To most Americans, its only significance is that the banks and post offices are closed on a mid-winter Monday. Yawn. One of the few ritual observances marking Presidents’ Day is the publication of historians’

Mark M. Smith: The tactility of Abraham Lincoln

[Mark M. Smith is a professor of history at the University of South Carolina at Columbia and author of Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History, to be published this month by the University of California Press/Berg Publishers.] To say that Abraham Lincoln is one of America's most iconographic presidents is to say something important about the way we sense him. As an icon, we see him, visualize him, process him through the eye — and with good reas

Tim Rowse : Australia’s apology .. the shadow on the sun

[Tim Rowse is senior research fellow in the history program at Australian National University (ANU). His books include (with Murray Goot) Divided Nation? Indigenous Affairs and the Imagined Public (Melbourne University Press, 2007)] Wednesday 13 February 2008 was a day heavy with both historical symbolism and political tension in Australia. That day, the Australian government apologised [1] to "the stolen generations", those children of Aboriginal descent who were removed

William Hogeland: Our Founding Lame Duck

[William Hogeland is the author of “The Whiskey Rebellion.”] HISTORIANS have often noted that George Washington not only began but also did much to define the American presidency. He imprinted on the office a sense of competence and integrity that can make later presidents, even successful ones, seem to fall short. Then to top it off, he left the job voluntarily. No law required him to step down, and running against him would have been impossible. Retiring after two terms, Washingto

Bryan Appleyard: Reassessing the Seventies

Louis de Bernières’s new novel, A Partisan’s Daughter, is set in the 1970s. Its hero has a car, a “shit-brown Allegro”. The Austin Allegro was a horror, expelled from the death throes of British mass car production. Everything about it was bad, including, in this case, the colour. The moment it is mentioned in the novel, the reader knows exactly what it means – that there was something horribly wrong with the 1970s. For the contemporary historian Dominic Sandbrook, John le Carré’s n

John Roughan: Stolen generations story a distortion of history

[John Roughan is a columnist.] When you see history being written you realise how much of it is mere legend. Australia hasn't got a particularly exciting history. Once you've read past the convicts it becomes quiet and constitutional. The closest they came to a civil convulsion was a goldfields rebellion by drunken Irish miners, much celebrated today at the "Eureka Stockade", that lasted all of a Sunday morning in 1853. They have noth

Oliver Kamm: An open letter to the editors of Media Lens - finis

[ABOUT KAMM: I am an author, columnist and banker. I write regularly for The Times, and have written also for The Guardian, Prospect, The New Republic, Index on Censorship and The Jewish Chronicle. I am an advisory editor of Democratiya. My book Anti-Totalitarianism: The Left-wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy was published in 2005. I was a contributor to Britain's Bomb: What Next?, edited by Brian Wicker and General Sir Hugh Beach, in 2006. I have worked at the Bank of England, HSBC

Stephen McGinty: It's time we gave Scotland's history its proper place

IT IS time to blow the dust off an old subject: Scottish History. Or, why we don't know what we should know. Two years ago I wrote a column arguing that BBC Scotland should invest a sum of £2 million – or one tenth of the annual budget of the new BBC Gaelic channel – on a major landmark series that told the history of Scotland. Sure, we've had Professor Simon Schama swagger his way through a 15-part history of Britain for BBC2 and David Starkey rummage through the bed linen of the monarch

Diana Muir Appelbaum and Paul S. Appelbaum: Genetics and the Jewish identity

[Diana Muir Appelbaum is the author of Reflections in Bullough's Pond: Economy and Ecosystem in New England (University Press of New England, 2000), and is working on a book on nationalism. Paul S. Appelbaum is the Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Psychiatry, Medicine and Law at Columbia University, and writes about the ethics of genetic testing and research.] The Book of Exodus specifies that the male descendants of Aaron, the brother of Moses, should constitute the Jewish priesth