Roundup: Talking About History

Eric Muller: A Troubling Partial Rehabilitation of Korematsu v. United States

[Eric Muller, UNC Law School.] A s I noted yesterday, Stephen Griffin complained at Balkinization about what he labeled the"alternate reality conventional wisdom" on the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans that Jack Goldsmith and Curt Bradley present in their new casebook on foreign affairs law. As Gri

Max Holland and Tara Marie Egan: How LBJ learned that RFK wasn't trying to slander the Warren Commission

Last October, when the Lyndon B. Johnson Library released a new batch of recordings, one of the most revealing conversations went literally unnoticed. Yet the 13½ minute conversation between President Johnson and Justice Abe Fortas on January 11, 1967—”the day after LBJ had delivered his third œState of the Union address to Congress—”underscores one of the most astonishing insights ever to come from the once-secret tapes. At the outset, in error, Lynd

Eric Foner: The shadow of Iraq falls on Civil War studies

[Eric Foner, a member of The Nation's editorial board, is DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University and author, most recently, of Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction.] One of the most arresting lectures I have ever heard at a historians' convention was delivered four years ago by Drew Gilpin Faust at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association. Taking as her starting point Robert E. Lee's possibly apocryphal remark, "It is w

David Neiwert: Jonah Goldberg's Bizarro History

[David Neiwert is a freelance writer based in Seattle and the editor of the blog Orcinus. A National Press Club award winner for his reportage on the radical right, he is also the author of three books, most recently Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community.] The public understanding of World War II history and its precedents has suffered in recent years from the depredations of revisionist historians -- the David Irvings and David Bowmans of the field

C. W. Hayford: Zhou Enlai and The Chinese Omelette

[Mr. Hayford is Visiting Professor, Department of History, Northwestern University.] The lively and informed blog, Jottings from the Granite Studio, January 8 has a well turned piece “This date in history: The Death of Zhou Enlai.” The piece shows that Zhou was a consummate statesman, one who perhaps snookered Nixon and Kissinger, who had a reputation for countering Mao’s e

Edward Lazarus: Two Important Supreme Court Anniversaries for 2008

[Edward Lazarus, a FindLaw columnist, writes about, practices, and teaches law in Los Angeles. A former federal prosecutor, he is the author of two books -- most recently, Closed Chambers: The Rise, Fall, and Future of the Modern Supreme Court .] The turning of a New Year goes hand in hand with a new set of anniversaries to be recalled and reflected upon. Supreme Court history will yield a number of these, including, in 2008, the 50th Anniversary of Trop v. Dulles and Cooper v. Aaro

Anneli Rufus: Blame It All on the '70s?

[Anneli Rufus is the author of several books, including Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto.] If the left and right agree on almost nothing else, we agree at least on this: America's in terrible shape. Such shocking shape that -- how did we come to this? -- it might not actually survive. And there our dialogue dissolves. The things about America you diagnose as lethal are the very things your megachurch-belonging cousin with the rifle rack in his truck prays might save its li

Max Rodenbeck: How Muslims redrew the map of ancient civilization

[Max Rodenbeck is the Middle East correspondent for The Economist.] Few events in history have had so swift, profound and far-reaching an impact as the arrival of Islam. Within a mere 15 years of the Prophet Muhammad’s death, in A.D. 632, his desert followers had conquered all the centers of ancient Near Eastern civilization. They had erased a great and enduring regional power, Persia; reduced its brilliant rival, Byzantium, to a rump state; and carved from their territories an empi

Josiah Bunting III: College students unlearn U.S. history as they are in school longer

[Josiah Bunting III, president of the H. Frank Guggenheim Foundation and superintendent emeritus of the Virginia Military Institute, serves as chairman of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute's National Civic Literacy Board.] Now that the season of holly and mistletoe and submitting college applications has arrived, high school seniors and their parents might want to consider how much students are really likely to learn at the university in which they will enroll next fall.

Bob Herbert: We're still reeling from 1968

... One of the astonishing things about 1968 was how quickly each shocking, consciousness-altering event succeeded the last, leaving no time for people to reorient themselves. The mind-boggling occurrences seemed to come out of nowhere, like the Viet Cong who set off a depth charge beneath the Johnson presidency with the Tet offensive at the end of January. When Walter Cronkite learned of the coordinated wave of attacks throughout South Vietnam by the Cong and North Vietnamese regul

Rick Perlstein: Harry Dent ... The Southern Strategist

In the small Southern town that produced Harry Dent, the future Nixon White House political aide, Dent’s great-uncle John (The Baptist) Prickett edited the newspaper. One day, an outraged reader called Prickett a “Republican S.O.B.” Prickett, who like everyone else in South Carolina was a Democrat, laid him flat with a punch. The baffled reader, upon recovering, asked what was the matter with calling him an S.O.B. “But you called me a Republican S.O.B.,” Prickett answered — and thereby hangs the

Shahid Mahmood: The Dream that was Benazir Bhutto

[Shahid Mahmood grew up in Pakistan. He was the editorial cartoonist for the national newspaper in Pakistan, Dawn. His work has appeared in numerous International publications. Shahid's work was viewed by world leaders at the 1997 APEC Conference, enjoyed by John F. Kennedy Jr., and managed to continuously enrage Benazir Bhutto. Shahid is internationally syndicated with the New York Times Syndicate and has work archived at the Museum of Contemporary History in Paris. His web page is: ht

Kenneth Jackson: The Flushing Remonstrance

[Kenneth T. Jackson, a professor of history at Columbia, is the editor in chief of The Encyclopedia of New York City.] THREE hundred and fifty years ago today, religious freedom was born on this continent. Yes, 350 years. Religious tolerance did not begin with the Bill of Rights or with Jefferson’s Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom in 1786. With due respect to Roger Williams and his early experiment with “liberty of conscience” in Rhode Island, this republic really owes its endu

Earl Ofari Hutchinson: More Than Historical Stupidity in Ron Paul's Slavery Crack

[Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is The Latino Challenge to Black America: Towards a Conversation between African-Americans and Hispanics (Middle Passage Press and Hispanic Economics New York).] No shot GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul tossed out yet another juicy zinger this time on "Meet the Press" when he said that Lincoln was a bad guy for fighting the civil war. Paul's solution: simply shell out some cash, buy the slaves, and

Eric Foner: Why we should be celebrating the abolition of the slave trade in the US

[Eric Foner is a professor of history at Columbia University.] WE Americans live in a society awash in historical celebrations. The last few years have witnessed commemorations of the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase (2003) and the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II (2005). Looming on the horizon are the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth (2009) and the sesquicentennial of the outbreak of the Civil War (2011). But one significant milestone has gone strangely unno

Tim Giago: The Lakota will Never Forget Wounded Knee 1890

[Tim Giago is a member of the Oglala Lakota Tribe. He was born on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota on July 12, 1934. Giago was the founder of the Lakota Times in 1981. The newspaper withstood firebombs, had its windows shot out with shotguns on three separate occasions.] I wonder if Tom Brokaw knew what was happening on the nine Indian reservations in his home state of South Dakota in 1968. I seriously doubt it. On December 29, 1968, as they have done for many

Thomas Sugrue: Reflections on Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative

[Thomas Sugrue, Kahn Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of a history of civil rights in 20th-century America, due in 2008.] ... Among historians and pundits, it is a cliché that the American New Right emerged in reaction to the excesses of 1960s leftists and the liberal politicians who enabled them. Liberalism unravelled when student protesters rallied for Ho Chi Minh, Black Power radicals put whitey ‘up against the wall, motherfucker!’,

Laura Miller: Did Emerson and the American transcendentalists transform society or merely sow the seeds of American individualism?

Transcendentalism is the best-known American-bred philosophy, despite the fact that most well-educated Americans have no clear idea what it is. This haziness is nothing new -- even in Transcendentalism's heyday in the mid-19th century, people complained that it was hard to get a handle on. Was it even a philosophy at all, or just a crackpot religion? Hard to say, partly because Transcendentalism's leaders were notorious for writing and talking in lofty abstractions; the Boston Post complai

Rumiko Nishino: The Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace: Its Role in Public Education

[Nishino Rumiko is Director, Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace, Tokyo.] [Japan Focus Editor:] This is the second article of a three part series introducing historical museums in Japan and their role in public education on issues of war, peace, war crimes and reconciliation. The first article is Takashi Yoshida’s “

NYT Editorial: Slavery's Place in the Capitol

The Capitol’s mammoth new visitors’ center is a work in progress bedeviled by cost overruns and mounting delay. The $621 million project is not expected to be ready for tourists until next fall. But the House and Senate have set an encouraging standard, emphasizing the center’s educational mission by naming the main welcoming chamber Emancipation Hall. This honors long-forgotten African-American slaves forced to help build the original Capitol in the 18th and 19th centuries. This is