Roundup: Talking About History

Sidney Blumenthal: Bush has gone from ignoring history to hoping it will save him

There has never been a moment when we were not winning in Iraq. Victory has followed victory, from "Mission Accomplished" to the purple fingers of the Iraqi election to, most recently, President Bush's meeting at Camp Cupcake in Anbar province with Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha, the Sunni leader of the group Anbar Awakening (who was assassinated a week later). Turning point has followed turning point, from Bush's proclamation two years ago of his "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq&qu

Peter Balakian and Deborah Lipstadt: Turkey Must Acknowledge its Past

[Peter Balakian is professor of the humanities at Colgate University and the author of The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response, which won the Raphael Lemkin Prize. Deborah Lipstadt is professor of Holocaust studies at Emory University and author of History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving, which won the National Jewish Book Award.] Turkey’s ambassador to Israel, Namik Tan, told The Jerusalem Post (Aug. 27) that Israel must force the ADL to retract

Tim Harford: Ending the black market in stolen antiquities

[Tim Harford is a columnist for the Financial Times. His latest book is The Undercover Economist.] I am writing this column in one of my favorite London haunts—the Great Court of the British Museum. I've just been to see one of the museum's most famous and controversial exhibits, the Parthenon Sculptures—also known as the Elgin Marbles <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elgin_Marbles> . These carvings were removed from the

Saul Cornell: The Antifederalists ... The Other Founders of the American Constitutional Tradition?

[Mr. Cornell is Professor of History, The Ohio State University.] ... The changing historical view of Antifederalism has itself become a remarkable historical litmus test for the political mood of the nation. Throughout American history, Antifederalist ideas have been resurrected by groups eager to challenge the power of the central government. Historians have not been exempt from the tendency to see Antifederalism through a political lens. Over the course of the twentieth century h

Scott Solomon: Do We Need the Original Lucy Fossil?

The 3.2-million-year-old fossilized remains of Lucy, the most intact human ancestor ever discovered, began a six-year tour of U.S. museums last Friday. The scientific community has expressed concern about shipping and exhibiting such a precious and delicate specimen, and several prominent American museums have refused to display her. Given that many museums around the world have nearly identical plaster casts of Lucy, how important is the original fossil? Very important. Although fo

Deborah Lipstadt: Iranian TV shows acccurate series on the Holocaust ... Go figure.

[Ms. Lipstadt is Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University and author of History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving.] AP reports that Iranian TV has been broadcasting a mini-series on the Holocaust. It does NOT deny it. The show tells the story of an Iranian diplomat who, while based in Paris, helps Jews escape the Holocaust.This would be noteworthy in and of its

Gerard Baker: A quick history lesson ... America is no Rome

[Gerard Baker is United States Editor and an Assistant Editor of The Times. He joined in 2004 from the Financial Times, where he had spent over ten years as Tokyo correspondent and Washington Bureau Chief. ] The US is indeed in the middle of another gloomy ride around the “America as Rome” theme park of half-understood history lessons. The pessimists, equipped with their Fodor’s guidebooks, their summer school diplomas, and their DVD collection of Cecil B. DeMille movies, are convin

Dave Barry: Historian for a new millennium

Humorist Dave Barry discontinued his column writing in 2004, but still examines current events in his popular Year in Review pieces. The one's he wrote between 2000 and 2006 are collected in "Dave Barry's History of the Millennium (So Far)." Read an excerpt: Foreword As Abraham Lincoln once said, “Journalism is the first rough draft of history.” Or possibly it was Thomas Edison who said that. I’m pretty sure somebody said it, because you often hear jour

Donald Lazere: ‘The Closing of the American Mind,’ 20 Years Later

[Donald Lazere, professor emeritus of English at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, has written on the culture wars for many scholarly and journalistic periodicals. His books include Reading and Writing for Civic Literacy: The Critical Citizen’s Guide to Argumentative Rhetoric and English Studies and Civic Literacy: Teaching the Political Conflicts, forthcoming.] “HITS WITH THE APPROXIMATE FORCE AND EFFECT OF ELECTROSHOCK THERAPY” raved Roger Kimball’s review in The New York Times, as quote

S.J. Redman: Yale Chooses to Return Peruvian Artifacts (Everybody Likes a Happy Ending)

[Mr. Redman is a graduate student in the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He studies American intellectual and cultural history.] In October of 2004, a unique traveling exhibition arrived at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. The title of the exhibition was Machu Picchu: Unveiling the Mystery of the Incas. The exhibit, like many other hosted by major natural history museums, featured objects from outside of the host museum’s collection

Licia Corbella and Paul Berton: Vets vs. History ... Is the Canadian War Museum a place to honour soldiers or discuss history?

Bombing raids by Canadians targeting German cities and factories are a controversial legacy of the Second World War. The Canadian War Museum in Ottawa tried to acknowledge this, but wording for a display panel has been sent for a re-write following pressure from veterans, who argued it was disrespectful to the brave airmen who fought the Nazis. Sun Media's Licia Corbella and Paul Berton choose sides in the fight between honouring veterans and explaining history. CORBELLA: The words

Robert Fisk: It is the death of history (re: Iraq's historic places)

2,000-year-old Sumerian cities torn apart and plundered by robbers. The very walls of the mighty Ur of the Chaldees cracking under the strain of massive troop movements, the privatisation of looting as landlords buy up the remaining sites of ancient Mesopotamia to strip them of their artefacts and wealth. The near total destruction of Iraq's historic past – the very cradle of human civilisation – has emerged as one of the most shameful symbols of our disastrous occupation. Evidence

Humberto Fontova: Fidel Castro: Reagan's Savior?

[Humberto Fontova is the author of Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant, a Conservative Book Club "Main Selection."] The latest essay from Fidel Castro's ghostwriters (referred to as "Fidel Castro" by news agencies that have earned Havana bureaus) claims the Cuban Maximum leader saved President Ronald Reagan's life in 1984. "Right-Wing Terrorists" (the same bunch, you may recall, that the same source blames for JFK's assassination) were plotting the murde

Rachel Donadio: 20 years after Harold Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind

[Rachel Donadio is a writer and editor at the Book Review.] Twenty years ago, when Reagan and Gorbachev were negotiating the end of the cold war and college cost far less than it does today, a book arrived like a shot across the bow of academia: “The Closing of the American Mind,” by Allan Bloom, a larger-than-life political philosophy professor at the University of Chicago. Subtitled “How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students,” it spen

Steven Hahn: Rebels Robert E. Lee and Toussaint Louverture

[HNN Editor: In this article, excerpted here, Steven Hahn compares Robert E. Lee and Toussaint Louverture, using two recent biographies to make his points. He calls them both rebels. Below is a section pertaining to Lee. Click on the SOURCE link to read about the Haitian leader.] Steven Hahn is a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of A Nation Under our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South From Slavery to the Great Migration.

Herbert London: Accepting The Lies Of Post-Zionist Revisionists

[Herbert London is president of Hudson Institute and professor emeritus of New York University. He is the author of “Decade of Denial” (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2001).] The revisionists are still hard at work in their attempts to recast the history of Israel’s birth. Without fanfare the Israeli Education Ministry has approved a textbook for Arab third graders in Israel that concedes the war that gave birth to Israel was a form of ethnic cleansing. Text

David A. Nichols: Ike Liked Civil Rights

[David A. Nichols is the author of “A Matter of Justice: Eisenhower and the Beginning of the Civil Rights Revolution.”] FIFTY years ago this week, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a law providing voting protections for blacks known as the Civil Rights Act of 1957. While that act is hardly as well remembered as the landmark laws of the 1960s, it’s not because it wasn’t important: at the time, it had been 82 years since any federal civil rights legislation had been passed because

Raymond Whitaker: Biko - the forgotten martyr

[Thirty years after he was murdered in police custody, the African trade unionist remains a thorn in the side of the ANC and a stark reminder of a more radical approach to dealing with apartheid and its aftermath. ] I met Steve Biko once. His miserable death on the floor of a South African prison cell, 30 years ago today, still lay a few years in the future. So did his friendship with the white newspaper editor, Donald Woods, resulting in the book and film, Cry Freedom!, which made

David Horowitz: How the Left attempted to take down a book that exposes their corruption of American universities

[David Horowitz is the author of numerous books including an autobiography, Radical Son, which has been described as “the first great autobiography of his generation.” It chronicles his odyssey from radical activism in the ‘60s to his current position as the head of the David Horowitz Freedom Center and who one journalist has called "the left's most articulate nemesis." His book, The Art of Political War was described by White House political strategist Karl Rove as “The perfect guide

Stacy Perman: A growing number of young German Muslims lash out against Holocaust studies

[Excerpted from Guilt & Pleasure (Spring 2007), a quarterly magazine that grapples with questions of Jewish identity, community, and meaning. Subscriptions: $24.95/yr. (4 issues) from Box 23026, Jackson, MS 39225; www.guiltandpleasure.com.] ... Progressive Germans like to point to districts such as Kreuzberg and the quaint scene of Turkish coffeehouses, halal butchers, and Anatolian travel agencies as examples of their modern, multic