Roundup: Talking About History

James Carroll: Why is the Catholic Church praising clergy who were killed during the Spanish Civil War?

[James Carroll's column appears regularly in The Boston Globe.] So the Spanish cardinal says to the young King Juan Carlos, "Your Highness, there is good news and there is bad news." The king naturally asks for the good news first. The cardinal answers, "Generalissimo Franco is dead." The king is pleased to hear it. "What's the bad news?" he asks. "The bad news is — you have to tell him." The assumption in 1975, the year of Franci

Ron Neumunz: Self-discovery in the mysteries of the past

[Ron Neumunz is an American living in London working in the hedge fund industry.] We are all out there, at different times and on different days, always looking. It's a search for information, it's a search for family, and, in the end, a search for self. We know all the Web sites, like ArmyAirforces.com and b24proboards, and a handful of others. We use them to reach out, ask questions, exchange information and hunt again for more information. One is looking

Gregory McNamee: Christmas, Cash, and Commodities

[Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor for Encyclopædia Britannica, for which he writes regularly on world geography, culture, and other topics. He is also literary critic for the Hollywood Reporter and a regular contributor to many other publications.] Thanksgiving puts a smile on the face of cranberry farmers, poultry farmers, sweet-potato farmers, and bookies.

Stephen Brown: "Show Trial" legalist who sent Czech dissident Milada Horakova to the gallows in 1950 gets eight years

[Stephen Brown is a columnist for Frontpagemag.com. Email him at alsolzh@hotmail.com.] “Suffocate the bitch.” It was June 27, 1950, when these savage words were spoken to a hangman behind the thick, grim walls of Prague’s Pankrac Prison in communist Czechoslovakia. The unfortunate soul the executioner was instructed to make suffer as much as possible before her death that day was Czech national heroine and anti-communist disside

Edward Renehan: Strange Bedfellows: Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt and the Woodhull/Claflins

[Mr. Renehan is the author of Commodore: The Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (Basic/Perseus, 2007) and other books including Dark Genius of Wall Street, The Kennedys at War, The Lion's Pride, The Secret Six, and John Burroughs: An American Naturalist. He lives in Rhode Island. Find his blog at http:/renehan.typepad.com.] During September of 1868, barely a month after the death of his wife Sophia, 74-year-old mogul Cornelius Vanderbilt made the acqua

Isabella Ginor & Gideon Remez: Why Getting to the Bottom of the Story About the 6-Day War Isn't Easy

[The writers are based in Jerusalem.] Six months ago - on May 16 - The Jerusalem Post featured a report about our book Foxbats over Dimona: The Soviets' Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War. Our book challenged the almost universal consensus on the origins and conduct of the conflict that has shaped the Middle East ever since. We demonstrated that the crisis and war of May-June 1967 were deliberately instigated by the USSR, which jointly with Egypt and Syria planned to pro

Samuel W. Rushay, Jr.: An Archivist's Reflections on His Work with the White House Tapes

[Samuel W. Rushay, Jr., is supervisory archivist with the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, where he also worked from 1993 to 1997. From 1997 to 2007, he was an archivist and subject matter expert at the Nixon Presidential Materials Staff at the National Archives at College Park, Maryland. A Columbus, Ohio, native, he holds a doctorate in U.S. history from Ohio University.] Earlier this year, on July 11, 2007, the privately run Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California, was t

Leon Aron: 20 Years after Glasnost

[Leon Aron, resident scholar and director of Russian studies at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of "Russia's Revolution: Essays 1989-2006."] Twenty years after Mikhail Gorbachev initiated glasnost, it is clear that, like every fateful "tipping point" in human history, the change has furnished enough material for scholars to plumb for many years. It may be too early to appreciate what glasnost has contributed, its depth, its passions and, yes, eve

John Sotos: Abraham Lincoln ... Did he have a rare disease (MEN 2B)?

President Lincoln's health has long fascinated medical historians, and now a California doctor has come up with a new theory after exhaustive research that, he argues, explains all of Lincoln's known features and symptoms. He concludes Lincoln had a rare genetic cancer syndrome that might have killed him within six months had he not been assassinated. Read more of the story: Is Lincoln Earliest Recorded Case of Rare Disease? (The Post, Nov. 26) Join Washington Post staff writer Davi

Gorman Beauchamp: Today's tendency to make amends for the crimes of history raises the question: where do we stop?

[Gorman Beauchamp, associate professor of humanities at the University of Michigan, is the author of a book on Jack London and essays on subjects ranging from Shakespeare to science fiction.] We live amid a veritable tsunami of apology. The Catholic Church, which, of course, has much to apologize for, has, of late, offered mea culpas to Galileo, the Jews, the gypsies, Jan Hus, whom it burned at the stake in 1415, even to Constantinople (now Istanbul) for its sacking 800 years ago by

Viktor Yushchenko: What Stalin did to Ukranians 75 years ago was genocide

[Mr. Yushchenko is Ukraine's president.] Seventy-five years ago the Ukrainian people fell victim to a crime of unimaginable horror. Usually referred to in the West as the Great Famine or the Terror Famine, it is known to Ukrainians as the Holodomor. It was a state-organized program of mass starvation that in 1932-33 killed an estimated seven million to 10 million Ukrainians, including up to a third of the nation's children. With grotesque understatement the Soviet authorities dismis

James R. Russell: Ideology over Integrity in Academe

[James R. Russell is Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies, Harvard University.] Is this Columbia University? A professor of anthropology calls for a million Mogadishus, a professor of Arabic and Islamic Science tells a girl she isn't a Semite because her eyes are green, and a professor of Persian hails the destruction of the World Trade Center as the castrating of a double phallus. The most recent tenured addition to this rogues' gallery is to be an anthropologist, the principal t

James Piereson: The Culture of Conspiracy

[Mr. Piereson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of "Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism" (Encounter Books, 2007).] This week is the anniversary of the tragic day in 1963 when John F. Kennedy was assassinated on the streets of Dallas. Looking back, we can see that Kennedy's death marked a turning point, when the political consensus of the time gave way to the confrontational polit

Mary Beard: Should we believe the story about the discovery of the Romulus and Remus cave?

[Mary Beard is a wickedly subversive commentator on both the modern and the ancient world. She is a professor in classics at Cambridge and classics editor of the TLS.] There’s lots in the news this morning about Italian archaeologists having found the very cave where “according to legend” the famous wolf suckled the abandoned twins – Romulu

Adam Holland: Oregon "Peace" Group to Mark Kristallnacht with Holocaust Denial Conference

Here's another story concerning what appears to be a trend: purported"peace activists" promoting Holocaust denial and anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. In this case, a University of Oregon peace organization called Pacifica Forum, which was founded and is led by a retired professor and a retired administrator from that university, is marking Kristallnacht with two days of speeches and conferences this weekend conducted by Mark Weber direc

Williamson Murray: War and the West

[Williamson Murray is Professor Emeritus at The Ohio State University and co-author of The Iraq War: A Military History (Harvard, 2003). This essay is based on his address at FPRI’s History Institute for Teachers, “Teaching Military History, Why and How,” held at the First Division Museum in Wheaton, Illinois and co-sponsored by the Cantigny First Division Foundation. Core support for the History Institute is provided by The Annenberg Foundation; support for this weekend conference was provided

Deborah Lipstadt: Dropping the Holocaust from textbooks: A stupid rumor persists with a change of continent

A couple of months ago there was a rumor floating around about the UK [as in United Kingdom... you will see shortly why I mention the obvious] dropping the teaching of the Holocaust from its curriculum It was completely false and was scotched by many people, including then Chancellor Gordon Brown. Well, proving that nothing absurd ever disappears [hence the persistence of antisemitism], the rumor is back, except now it is about the University of Kentucky [UK, get it??].

Andrew Santella: The war on Christmas spreads to Thanksgiving

Anyone who has ever had to listen to foodies argue over which wine pairs best with turkey knows that Thanksgiving can inspire vehement—and tiresome—disagreement. But of all the questions connected with our celebration of Thanksgiving, none provokes as much heat as the debate over religion's place at the table. A few years ago, some Christians began to sound the alarm about a "war on Christmas," alleging that schools, courts, and local governments were transforming a sacred

Sukhdev Sandhu: Black Britain ... A Photographic History

There was a time, not so long ago, when the idea of a photographic history of black Britain would have seemed an absurd proposition. What would be its contents? A picture of the Jamaican passengers disembarking from the SS Empire Windrush in 1948; a few Picture Post covers advertising shock-horror features about high birth rates among impoverished immigrants; riotous inner-city youths on the streets of Brixton and Toxteth; and then, perhaps, a few celebratory shots of Daley Thompson atop an Olym

Martin van Creveld: War and Technology (Teaching Military History)

[Martin van Creveld is Professor, Institute of Arts and Letters, Hebrew University and author of Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton (Cambridge, 2004). This essay is based on his address at FPRI’s History Institute for Teachers, “Teaching Military History: Why and How,” held at the First Division Museum in Wheaton, IL and co-sponsored by the Cantigny First Division Foundation. Core support for the History Institute is provided by The Annenberg Foundation; support for this weekend