Roundup: Talking About History

Mark D. Tooley: Apologizing to the Missionaries

[Mark Tooley is director of United Methodist Action at the Institute for Religion and Democracy.] Apologizing for the sins, real and contrived, of Western Civilization, is suffocatingly trendy among the West’s cultural elites. It fits their ideological assumption that the West and its religion have ceaselessly victimized benign indigenous cultures around the world. But this fad was tossed topsy turvey, recently, when Papua New Guinea tribesmen apologized for their ancestors h

Victor Davis Hanson: Why Study War

[Victor Davis Hanson is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University , a professor emeritus at California University , Fresno , and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services.] Try explaining to a college student that Tet was an American military victory. You’ll provoke not a counterargument—let alone an assent—but a blank stare: Who or what was Tet? Doing interviews about the recent hit movie 300, I encountered similar bewilderment from listeners

John Leo: Blame the '60s for America's perpetual adolescence? Nah, blame the '20s.

[Mr. Leo edits Minding the Campus, a Web site on universities sponsored by the Manhattan Institute.] In the 1990s, most people who played video games were teenagers. Now the average gamester age is nearly 30. Cultural products aimed at tots and preteens capture the attention of adults. "SpongeBob SquarePants," intended for the 6-to-11 age group, draws almost 19 million viewers from the 18-to-49 crowd. Some famous museums, uncomfortable with their adult role as guardians of

Seth Frantzman: Ethnic cleansing in Palestine?

[The writer is in the doctoral program at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His master's thesis was on the 1948 war.] As negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority aimed at creating a Palestinian state willing to live side-by-side with Israel in peace resume, one of the major sticking points continues to be the Arab refugee issue. Bitter arguments among politicians and scholars continue to surround the creation of the refugee problem during Israel's War of Independen

Jim Castagnera: The joys of time travel

[Jim Castagnera, of Havertown, is the Associate Provost/Associate Counsel at Rider University and a 2007-08 Fellow of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.]        About 15 years ago, when I was still practicing law with a firm in downtown Philly, a colleague at the firm was politely thumbing through some vacation pictures I’d foisted in his face.  Suddenly he turned and shoved one back at me.  My kids and I were splashing in the Ocean

Sandip Roy: The magic glue that holds India's democracy together

As a schoolboy in India, my Indian history textbooks always ended at midnight on Aug. 14, 1947, when the country became independent. Within a year, Mahatma Gandhi, the father of the nation, was assassinated, and everything after that fell into the realm of political science and current affairs. In "India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy," historian Ramachandra Guha looks at the 60 years since independence. It is an ambitious work that takes on the

WSJ Editorial: Shoot to Kill (Re: East Germany)

Estimates vary, but up to 780 people were killed by East German border guards for trying to flee to the West during the Cold War. Yet Saturday's revelation of an official 1973 order that Stasi secret-police agents "stop or liquidate" anyone trying to escape the socialist paradise has stunned Germany. The story preoccupies the media and politicians alike. Granted, the order is unique in its explicit inhumanity. "Do not hesitate to use your firearm, not even when the bo

Evan R. Goldstein: Professors on the Battlefield

[Mr. Goldstein is contributing editor at Moment magazine.] ... Nearly six years into the war on terror, there is reason to believe that the Vietnam-era legacy of mistrust--even hostility--between academe and the military may be eroding. This shift in the zeitgeist is embodied by Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the multinational forces in Iraq. Gen. Petraeus, who holds a doctorate from Princeton University in international relations, made a point of speaking on coll

John Nichols: The Worst House Speaker in American History

[John Nichols' new book is THE GENIUS OF IMPEACHMENT: The Founders' Cure for Royalism. Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson hails it as a "nervy, acerbic, passionately argued history-cum-polemic [that] combines a rich examination of the parliamentary roots and past use of the 'heroic medicine' that is impeachment with a call for Democratic leaders to 'reclaim and reuse the most vital tool handed to us by the founders for the defense of our most basic liberties.'"] Dennis Hastert

Andrew Leonard: Who invented calculus

The Partition of India occurred at midnight, Aug. 15, 1947. Pakistan, however, celebrates Independence Day on Aug. 14, while India's Independence Day is Aug. 15. For eloquent meditations on the 60th anniversary of independence for both countries, I recommend British historian William Dalrymple, author of the fabulous"The Last Mughal," writing in The Guardian on the topic of Pakistan, and Nobel Prize winning economist and philosopher Amartya Sen, writing on India for Forbes. But

Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin: Summer of love beats cynicism of today

[Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, history professors at Hamilton College and Georgetown University respectively, are authors of "America Divided: The Civil Wars of the 1960s."] In the current wave of media-generated nostalgia over the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love, it's fitting that one of that summer's most recognizable songs is "A Whiter Shade of Pale." Procol Harum's lyrics had nothing to do with race - die-hard fans still debate what "One of

Kimie HARA: Micronesia .. “An American Lake”

The post-war Asia-Pacific witnessed many conflicts involving major regional players. These include the divided Korean Peninsula, the Cross-Taiwan Strait problem, and the sovereignty disputes over the Southern Kuriles/“Northern Territories”, and the Tokdo/Takeshima, Diaoyu/Senkaku, and Spratly/Nansha islands. These and others, such as the ongoing Okinawa problem, emblematic of the large US military presence in the region, and the US-imposed outcomes in Micronesia, all share an important common fo

Chloe Arnold: Seventy Years Later, Stalin's Image Softening

[Chloe Arnold is RFE/RL's Moscow correspondent. She has worked in the former Soviet Union for 10 years, first at "The Moscow Times" and then as the BBC's South Caucasus reporter, where she covered the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia and the death of Azerbaijani President Heydar Aliyev. ] As Russia marks the 70th anniversary of Josef Stalin's drive to purge opponents of his regime, the commemorations have sparked a debate on how Stalin is currently portrayed in Russia and t

David Novak: The Origins of Jewish-Christian Animosity

[David Novak is a professor of Jewish studies at the University of Toronto and the author of Natural Law in Judaism (Cambridge University Press).] When The Passion of the Christ elicited such great public controversy a few years ago, it raised once again the old question of how Jews and Judaism are portrayed in classical Christian sources, first and foremost in the New Testament. And it raised the new question as to how accurately Mel Gibson's film represented that portrayal. From a

Arnaud De Borchgrave: Israel's Embarrassing history

The Palestinians call Israel’s 1948 war of independence their nakba, or catastrophic ethnic cleansing, or forced exile. The Israelis, for their part, have steadfastly rejected any suggestion of ethnic cleansing as calumny in all its anti-Semitic horror. Historic revisionism is now under way. Without fanfare, just below the media radar screen, 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 “

Hywel Williams: History or bunk ... Politicians who write biographies should be careful which lessons they draw from the past

When politicians turn into historians it's natural they should opt for biography as a good way into the past. (The list of top summer reading for MPs includes William Hague's life of Wilberforce and Tom Bower's biography of Gordon Brown.) The day-to-day business of democratic politics revolves around personalities - especially in Britain and America, where questions of character are never far away. New Labour was inseparable from Tony Blair's character, and an assessment of its shifting sands wa

Matthew Scully: The only person the speechwriter Michael Gerson made look better than President Bush was Michael Gerson

[Matthew Scully, a writer living in Southern California, is the author of Dominion (2002). From July 1999 until August 2004, he served as a senior speechwriter for President Bush.] Michael J. Gerson, my former speechwriting colleague in the Bush White House, is a talented fellow with a first-rate mind and serious purposes—all of which we can expect to see in his new book, Heroic Conservatism. But reading a few insider stories in the first chapter of the book, which his publisher has

Tom Segev: A historian's joy

...In September 1968, David Ben-Gurion drew up a list of forecasts for the future. He was replying to a request from Shlomo Zalman Shragai, a leading figure in the religious Zionist movement and the Jewish Agency. The target year was 1987. Here are Ben-Gurion's predictions: Russia will be a democracy and the United States, a welfare state; water desalination will help make Africa and Asia bloom; a new source of energy will equalize the standard of living across the globe; the birth control pill

Mark D. Tooley: The Methodist Church mythologizes Nagasaki and Hiroshima

[Mark D. Tooley directs the United Methodist committee at the Institute on Religion and Democracy.] The Religious Left, in its historical commemorations, rarely if ever recalls the great holocausts committed by the totalitarian tyrants of the 20th century. The tens of millions slain by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Tojo, not to mention the hundreds of thousands killed by Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, Kim Il Sung, among others, never have reached a high level of importance. But ne

Jamala Rodgers: Tuskegee ... The Experiment That Haunts Black Health

[BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member Jamala Rogers is the leader of the Organization for Black Struggle in St. Louis and the Black Radical Congress National Organizer.] Thirty-five years ago, the covers were pulled off the Tuskegee syphilis experiment conducted by the Macon County Public Health Service (PHS). The 40-year experiment allegedly was set up to study the impact of untreated syphilis on some 600 black men, about 200 in a control group, beginning in 1932.