Roundup: Talking About History

Justin Logan: It's Past Time to Bury the Hitler Analogy

If you live in the United States and want to start a war, the first step is to compare the foreign leader to Adolf Hitler. This technique was on display in a recent PBS NewsHour debate between Norman Podhoretz, a foreign policy adviser to Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani, and Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International. At least four times during the debate, Podhoretz likened the clerical regime in Tehran to the Nazis. He argued that there is a danger that Iran may"repl

David Blight: How He Came to Write ... A Slave No More

[David W. Blight is the director of Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition and a professor of American history. Among his books is Race and Reunion, which won the Frederick Douglass Prize, the Lincoln Prize, and the Bancroft Prize. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.]

Tom Brokaw: Boom! Voices of the Sixties

[Tom Brokaw is the author of four bestsellers: The Greatest Generation, The Greatest Generation Speaks, An Album of Memories, and A Long Way from Home. From 1976 to 1981 he anchored Today on NBC. He was the sole anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw from 1983 to 2004. www.boom-brokaw.com ] In 1962, I had an entry-level reporter's job at an Omaha television station. I had bargained to get a salary of one hundred dollar

Fujiwara Akira: The Nanking Atrocity ... An Interpretive Overview

This article is slightly adapted from a chapter by the late Fujiwara Akira, an emeritus professor at Hitotsubashi University until his death in 2003, which first appeared in Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, ed., The Nanking Atrocity 1937-38: Complicating the Picture (New York and London: Berghahn Books, 2007). Fujiwara wrote one of two introductory chapters to this volume about the Nanking Massacre, the seventieth anniversary of which will be observed in December. In this essay, Fujiwara p

Media Matters: Limbaugh joins other media in whitewashing Swift Boat Vets' falsehoods, claims "nobody has disproven anything they claimed"

Summary: On his radio show, Limbaugh claimed that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth"were right on the money, and nobody has disproven anything they claimed in any of their ads, statements, written commentaries, or anything of the sort." In fact, most of the allegations the Swift Boat Veterans made about Sen. John Kerry's Vietnam War service during the 2004 presidential campaign have been thoroughly discredited, often by official military records, but also by the Swift Boat accusers themselves, w

Dan Hurley: The dark side of America's frontier history

[Dan Hurley is the assistant vice president for history and research at the Cincinnati Museum Center. He is also the staff historian for Channel 12 News and the executive producer of Local 12 Newsmakers. Reach him at dhurley@cincymuseum.org.] No painting by a Cincinnati artist is more arresting than Henry Farny's "The Song of the Talking Wire." Owned by the Taft Museum of Art, downtown, the painting is on loan to t

Michael Knox Beran: The folly of Congress’s Lincoln Bicentennial Commission

[Michael Knox Beran is a contributing editor of City Journal. His book, Forge of Empires 1861-1871: Three Revolutionary Statesmen and the World They Made, has just been published by Free Press.] In 1859 Abraham Lincoln expressed the fear that the “principles of free government” in the United States would one day be supplanted by those of “classification, caste, and legitimacy.” Lincoln fought a civil war to stave off that threat; if he were alive today, he’d have to fig

David Brooks: Reagan victim of leftwing calumny

[HNN Editor: David Brooks is here taking on fellow NYT columnist Paul Krugman, who charges in his book, The Conscience of a Liberal, that Reagan began his campaign in 1980 near Philadelphia, Mississippi to signal to white Southerners that he was in sympathy with their feelings of deep disaffection.] Today, I’m going to write about a slur. It’s a distortion that’s been around for a while, but has spread like a weed over the past few months. It was concocted for partisan reasons: to

Roya Hakakian: Holocaust Denial and Tehran

[Ms. Hakakian is the author of "Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran" (Three Rivers Press, 2005), a memoir of growing up Jewish in Iran.] Dictatorships bear paradoxes. I came across a set of them 10 years ago, when I hosted a dinner for two female Iranian medical students who'd come to Yale Medical School on a rare academic exchange program. These impressive women had climbed to the top 10th percentile in a man's profession, in a man's count

Gary Younge: Thieves of Black History (Memphis)

[Gary Younge, the Alfred Knobler Journalism Fellow at The Nation Institute, is the New York correspondent for the Guardian and the author of No Place Like Home: A Black Briton's Journey Through the Deep South (Mississippi) and Stranger in a Strange Land: Travels in the Disunited States (New Press). He is also a contributor to The Notion.] If Beale Street could talk, as James Baldwin famously imagined, then somewhere around Memphis's South Fourth Street it would let out an agonizing

Alvaro Vargas Llosa: Who's Buried in Che's Tomb? Hint: Not Che. The Cuban government's most shameless con.

[ALAVARO VARGAS LLOSA, author of Liberty for Latin America, is the director of the Center on Global Prosperity at the Independent Institute.] Thousands of Cubans and foreigners have been flocking to a mausoleum in central Cuba to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Che Guevara's death. For 10 years, the Cuban government has been telling the world that the body inside the mausoleum is that of the famous guerrilla. It's a lie designed to bamboozle the population into wors

Eric Rauchway: Democrats should welcome the chance to blast Republicans for attacking FDR

[Mr. Rauchway is associate professor of history at the University of California, Davis, is the author of Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America.] This November 8 marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of Franklin Roosevelt's election as president of the United States. Chosen to resolve the worst non-military crisis in the nation's history, Roosevelt led the country through the Great Depression as well as its greatest military crisis since the Civil War. American

Oliver Kamm: Paul Tibbets and Enola Gay ... About those Obits

[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

Stefan Klemp: The role of the German postwar criminal justice system system in aiding the perpetrators of the Rechnitz massacre

[Stefan Klemp is a historian and journalist. He is author of the book "Nicht ermittelt. Polizeibataillone und die Nachkriegsjustiz" (2005), and is director of historical research in Germany for the Simon Wiesenthal Center. ] The murder of roughly 200 Jews in the night of March 24-25, 1945, in the eastern Austrian village of Rechnitz is now the subject of a heated debate, focussing on the question whether the murder occurred at a party thrown by a "Thyssen countess.&qu

Patrick Wright: Long before Churchill ... The surprising origins of the expression, "The Iron Curtain"

[Patrick Wright, Professor at the Institute for Cultural Analysis, Nottingham Trent University, is the author of Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War (Oxford U. Press, 2007).] When I started researching the Iron Curtain, I shared the widespread assumption that this symbolic device first descended into the world on 5 March 1946, when Winston Churchill went to the small town of Fulton in Missouri and, standing in a college gymnasium with President Truman at his side, gave the famous s

Michael Knox Beran: How Lincoln Saved the World

[Michael Knox Beran: The author is a contributing editor of City Journal. His book, Forge of Empires 1861–1871: Three Revolutionary Statesmen and the World They Made, is being published this month by Free Press.] In 1861, free institutions seemed poised to carry all before them. In Russia, Tsar Alexander II emancipated 22 million serfs. In Germany, lawmakers dedicated to free constitutional principles prepared to assert civilian control over Prussia’s feudal military caste. In America

Jillian Sim: Was Thomas Jefferson a Misogynist?

[Jillian Sim lives and writes in the desert Southwest.] Thomas Jefferson, third President and author of the Declaration of Independence, is, as the historian Joseph J. Ellis put it, the American Sphinx. He may be most puzzling of all in his relationships with women. Those women—from mother to wife and also to putative slave mistress—have remained over the centuries comfortably invisible in the public record, their presence flashing feebly only when their master allowed their contributions

Jules Crittenden: The Armenian Genocide Bill ... The Right Move At The Wrong Time

[Jules Crittenden is a Boston Herald editor and columnist who has reported on politics, crime, science, foreign affairs, and maritime and military matters in the United States, Asia, the Balkans and the Middle East.] ... The Armenians have been fighting for a very long time, often without friends, in a part of the world where it is sometimes necessary to choose one’s allies and one’s enemies according to the circumstances as they present themselves. Their experience has made them to

István Deák: The World War II Deciders

[István Deák is Seth Low Professor Emeritus at Columbia University and the author, most recently, of Essays on Hitler's Europe (University of Nebraska Press).] ... In a stimulating "Afterthoughts" chapter, Kershaw reflects on whether these ten decisions could have been avoided, or others been made instead. His answer is that there were barely any alternatives. It is a little surprising, perhaps, in a book that studies the free historical agency of political and military le

Daniel Walker Howe: The Second Coming of Christ in 1844

[The Oxford History of The United States series has won two Pulitzer Prizes, a Bancroft and a Parkman Prize. The newest addition, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848, by Daniel Walker Howe, looks at the period from the battle of New Orleans to the end of the Mexican-American War. Howe’s narrative history shows how drastically America changed in thirty years. Below Howe, Rhodes Professor of American History Emeritus, Oxford University and Professor of History Emeritus,