Roundup: Talking About History

Gregory McNamee: Sputnik ... A Somber Anniversary

[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.] Half a century ago, the Cold War raging, scientists on all sides of the world were working diligently on new, improved, and better ways to kill from afar. America had Wernher von Braun, on permanent loan from the Third Reich, and

Rick Perlstein: The best wars of their lives

[Mr. Perlstein is working on a book about Richard Nixon.] Conservatism's cherished fantasy of American omnipotence has died once again, this time in the sands of Iraq, and the grieving process has begun. But conservatives mourn differently from you and me. They begin with denial, anger and bargaining, just like everyone else. And that's where they stay--forever paralyzed by a petulant refusal to acknowledge their fantasy's passing, a simple inability to process reality. The de

WSJ Editorial: Congress should not pass a resolution condemning Turkey for the deaths of Armenians

History is messy enough without politicians getting into the act. Tell that to the Members of the U.S. House of Representatives who are clamoring to have the final word on a painful chapter of Ottoman history. A pending Resolution, co-sponsored by 226 Members, calls on the President to ensure that U.S. foreign policy "reflects appropriate understanding and sensitivity concerning ... the Armenian Genocide" in 1915 when Turks carried out "the systematic and deliberate a

Thomas Laqueur: The Allure of the Whip

[Thomas Laqueur: teaches European cultural history at the University of California-Berkeley.] In 1700, the abbé Jacques Boileau published a book called Historia flagellantium that would forever change its subject. He argued that whipping as a form of penance had no biblical authority, that it was of pagan origin, and that, at best, it belonged to an earlier, more spiritually heroic age. That had all been said before. What got him on the Catholic Church's Index of Prohibited Books by

Yuki Tanaka: The roots of Oda Makoto's antiwar activism were in Hiroshima and Nagasaki

[Yuki Tanaka is Research Professor, Hiroshima Peace Institute, author of Japan’s Comfort Women. Sexual slavery and prostitution during World War II and the US Occupation, and a coordinator of Japan Focus.] On 30 July, 2007, social and political critic, novelist and political activist Oda Makoto died in Japan at the age of 75. Throughout his life, he published numerous essays and more than 100 books including some thirty novels. Two of his novels, Hiroshima and Gyokusai (The Breaking

Gordon Franz: Tabloid Archaeology

One day a friend sent me an invitation to a church meeting and asked me if I knew anything about the subject. On the flyer was a picture of a human skeleton with crooked teeth and a rock embedded in his forehead. The title above the skull read: “They’ve Found Goliath’s Skull!” Needless to say, that caught my attention. I read with great interest what was written on the flyer. It reported: Diggers in Israel believe they’ve made a giant discovery. For they’re convinced they’ve

Eric H. Cline: Biblical archeology is too important to leave to crackpots and ideologues. It's time to fight back.

[Eric H. Cline is the author of "From Eden to Exile: Unraveling Mysteries of the Bible." He is chair of the department of classical and Semitic languages and literature at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He is also associate director (USA) of the ongoing excavations at Megiddo (biblical Armageddon) in Israel. He can be reached at ehcline@gwu.edu.] The Ark of the Covenant. The Garden of Eden. Sodom and Gomorrah. The

Peter D. Zimmerman: We were lucky the Soviets beat us into space

[Mr. Zimmerman, a physicist, recently retired as professor of science and security at King's College London. He was previously chief scientist of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee and science adviser for arms control at the U.S. State Department.] ... In all probability the Eisenhower administration was actually glad to have been beaten into space. In deepest secrecy, the U.S. was working on another satellite program -- a system intended to take close-up photos of Russia a

Jerry Bowyer & Glen Meakem: FDR was a market meddler

Sometimes, books create paradigm shifts in how we view history. The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression , by Amity Shlaes, is just such a book. An absorbing journey through that era, it sets the record straight on both the causes of the Great Depression and how the New Deal policies failed. Conventional wisdom holds that the Great Depression was sparked by the 1929 stock market crash; that capitalism had to be saved from itself; that Hoover failed to do so; and that

Alan M. Dershowitz: Ahmadinejad's Holocaust Myths

In his speeches, most especially the one at Columbia University, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad repeats two myths about the Holocaust. The first every reasonable person knows is a total lie: namely that the Holocaust did not occur. The second myth, however, is one that escapes critical attention for the most part, because many people are not aware of its falsity. The myth is that the Palestinian people and their leadership had absolutely nothing to do with the Holocaust. The conclusion that is supposed to

Ben Macintyre: Elephants ... the way to beat looters of Iraqi treasures

[Ben Macintyre is a Times correspondent.] ... Numerous attempts have been made to stamp out the trade in stolen artefacts, and a number of prominent curators and dealers have recently been prosecuted for handling stolen goods. But still the market for looted antiquities expands, fed by a growing demand from the Middle East, Japan and China. Where once a rich man might adorn his palace with tiger skins and the heads of rare rhino, collectors now bag shards of Sumerian pottery and Bud

Vicente Navarro: How the U.S. Schemed Against Spain's Transition from Dictatorship to Democracy

[Vicente Navarro is Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the Pompeu Fabra University, Spain, and The Johns Hopkins University, USA. In 2002 he was awarded the Anagrama Prize (Spain's equivalent to the Pulitzer Prize in the USA) for his denunciation of the way in which the transition from dictatorship to democracy has been engineered, in his book Bienestar Insuficiente Democracia Incompleta, De lo que no se hable en nuestro pais (Insufficient Welfare, Incomplete Democracy; a book a

Gideon Rachman: The wrong lessons from Munich

[Mr. Rachman is a journalist.] ... There are few more damaging taunts than to be compared to the British prime minister who tried and failed to appease Hitler at the Munich summit of 1938. In the US, in particular, the ghost of Chamberlain is regularly brought out to frighten those who are deemed insufficiently resolute in confronting the enemy of the moment. In the run-up to the Iraq war, the lessons of Munich were invoked by President George W. Bush and any number of neo-conservat

Alan Taylor: A fresh look at the founding fathers

[Alan Taylor is a professor of American history at the University of California at Davis and the author, most recently, of The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (Knopf). ] Nothing succeeds like success in America, especially in the writing of popular history. Readers long to know how the United States became the world's grandest nation and who should get the glory as our founding heroes. In recent years, publishers have thrived

Shelby Steele: The Legacy of Little Rock

[Mr. Steele, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, is the author of "White Guilt" (HarperCollins, 2006).] ... On this 50th anniversary of Eisenhower's troop deployment, the significance of the Little Rock crisis--its place in history--is much clearer. I believe it was the beginning of a profoundly different America. For one thing, it foreshadowed the end of white supremacy as a legitimate authority. The Little Rock crisis was a conflict between tw

Humberto Fontova: The History Channel Shills For Che Guevara

[Humberto Fontova is the author of Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him.] The A&E Network recently produced a Biography show on Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Years back they produced one on Senator "Tail-Gunner Joe" McCarthy. The depictions contrast sharply.

Roger Cohen: What those pictures of guards at Auschwitz tell us

... How fresh-faced and playful the SS women look in the 116 photographs that, 62 years after the liberation of the Nazi camp, have found their way by a circuitous route to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. It is not easy to imagine these young ladies moving on from a picnic to administer death wholesale. In thinking about the Holocaust, we have grown accustomed to images of the Nazis’ victims: shadowy naked figures on the edge of ditches about to be dispatched by the SS-

Daniel Pipes: 5 years of Campus Watch

[Daniel Pipes is the founder of Campus Watch and director of its parent organization, the Middle East Forum.] What has Campus Watch, a project to critique and improve Middle East studies in the United States and Canada, achieved since it opened its doors this week in 2002?Along with like-minded organizations – the National Association of Scholars, the David Horowitz Freedom Center, National Review, and the Manhattan Institute – it as

Gail Collins: The Women Behind the Men in the Civil Rights Movement

Daisy Bates had to march with the wives. When the nation observes the 50th anniversary of the Little Rock school desegregation on Monday, there will undoubtedly be a great deal said about Bates, who was head of the city’s N.A.A.C.P. chapter. She helped recruit nine black teenagers and escorted them through irate mobs of white adults and into their first classes. As a result, she and her husband, Lucius, lost their business. She was jailed, threatened and the Ku Klux Klan burned an 8

William Fitzhugh: History Vacations (Re: Teachers who get TAH grants)

[Mr. Fitzhugh is founder of the Concord Review.] I have been involved in only three Teaching American History grant programs in three states so far, as a presenter or an evaluator, but I am wondering how many of the hundreds of other funded programs, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, resemble the history vacations for teachers that I have seen. History teachers are paid to attend summer programs where they hear lectures by college professors of history, and