Roundup: Talking About History

Jim Sleeper: Gip, Gip, Hooray! A new appreciation of Ronald Reagan protests too much

[Mr. Sleeper, a lecturer in political science at Yale, was a political columnist for the New York Daily News. He lives in the East Rock neighborhood of New Haven.] Re: John Patrick Diggins's, Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History (Norton). In his 1990 memoir Being Red, the novelist Howard Fast offered glimpses of Depressionera America that come back to me whenever I try to understand Ronald Reagan. Most of the people Fast knew in the desperate New York

Allen Esterson: Einstein’s Wife ... PBS Fails the Test of Integrity

[Allen Esterson is the author of Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of the Work of Sigmund Freud] In July I had one of those good news/bad news days. First the good news. In response to the detailed complaint I had submitted in February 2007 to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation about their promotion of the film “Einstein’s Wife”,[1] I received the following from Simon Melkman, ABC Audience & Consumer Affairs: “Due to the breaches of the ABC’s Code of Practice which you have ide

John Elrick: The Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project (Website Review)

[Mr. Elrick is an HNN intern.]The Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, based at the University of Washington under the direction of Professor James Gregory, is a multi-media website dedicated to documenting the Pacific Northwest’s multiracial labor and civil rights history. It offers over 1000 primary documents and photographs, over 70 video oral histories, original research essays produced by undergraduate and gra

Chester Finn & Diane Ravitch: The liberal arts make us competitive in the ways that matter most

[Mr. Finn and Ms. Ravitch, former assistant U.S. Secretaries of Education and members of the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education at the Hoover Institution, are editors of "Beyond the Basics: Achieving a Liberal Education for All Children" (Thomas B. Fordham Institute, 2007).] In a globalizing economy, America's competitive edge depends in large measure on how well our schools prepare tomorrow's workforce. And notwithstanding the fact that Congress and the White

David Greenberg: George Bush's kooky sense of his place in history

[David Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers, has two new books out: Presidential Doodles and Calvin Coolidge. ] For a guy with a reputation as an intellectual slacker, George W. Bush has always professed a surprisingly strong interest in history—however politicized some of his takes on the past may be. Bush has likened the "war on terrorism" to the Cold War, compared the occupation of Iraq to that of Germany, endorsed the "stab in the back&qu

Bruce Bartlett: “Starve the Beast” ... where the metaphor comes from

[Bruce Bartlett is a syndicated columnist. He was formerly a staff economist to Congressman Jack Kemp, executive director of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, and deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the U.S. Treasury Department.] In recent years, one of the most common metaphors for using tax cuts to discipline government spending has been “starve the beast.” The idea is that if revenues are unilaterally reduced, this reduction will lead to a higher budget defi

David Brooks: How we name our kids reflects who we are

... I didn’t become aware of the true import of names until I read Laura Wattenberg. She has taken her obsession with names — which in other hands could be regarded as an eccentricity — and has transformed it into a window on American society. On her blog, The Baby Name Wizard, Wattenberg tracks the rise and fall of naming fashions. One of her mega-observations, which isn’t that surprising, is that we are living in the age of the long tail when it comes to naming our kids. In 1880,

Oliver Kamm: Hiroshima ... Terrible, but not a crime

Today is Hiroshima day, the anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb. As the wartime generation passes on, our sense of gratitude is increasingly mixed with unease regarding one theatre of the second world war. There is a widespread conviction that, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, America committed acts that were not only terrible but also wrong. Disarmament campaigners are not slow to advance further charges. Greenpeace maintains that a different American approach might have

Ronald Takaki: The Lessons of Hiroshima

[Ronald Takaki, professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb (Little Brown).] Sixty-two years ago, on Aug. 6, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima changed the course of world history. We still live in the shadow of Hiroshima, though most of us do not know why or how it happened. The U.S. deployment of this weapon of mass destruction did not have to happen. In

Caroline Glick: Compare and contrast two separate actions taken last month by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem

... Speaking to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, University of Toronto historian Michael Marrus complained that there is "an unspoken political dimension" to the debate about Bergson. He alleged that in lobbying the museum to recognize Bergson, the Wyman Institute was trying to advance the right-wing agenda of Jewish activism that Bergson and the Revisionists embraced. So even 70 years after the Holocaust, when it is clear that the Bergson's group's efforts led to the only U

John Kerry: The Vietnam War was worse than what followed

James Taranto misinterpreted my words and misreads history (" 'It Didn't Happen,' " July 26). I know the tragedy that followed a tragic war. John McCain and I led the effort to locate American POWs and ultimately normalize relations with Vietnam. I traveled to Cambodia to help create a genocide tribunal to bring to justice the butchers of the killing fields. But what did not happen was the region-wide war or i

Robert Townsend: The End of Cultural History?

[Robert Townsend is AHA Assistant Director, Research and Publications. Robert serves as senior staff assistant to the Association's Research Division, maintains databases and statistics on the historical profession in the U.S., and oversees scheduling and production of all print and online publications. He is currently completing his doctoral studies at George Mason University, working on a dissertation about the discipline under the working title “Making History: Scholarship and the Historical

Will Fitzhugh: If we cared as much about history as basketball

[Will Fitzhugh is the founder of Consortium for Varsity Academics® and The Concord Review.] If a college basketball coach is interested in a hot high school prospect this is a checklist of the kind of information that is made available to him about the student: # of points for season yes (made available) % of goals per game yes # of three-pointers yes % of three-pointers yes # of free throws

Rami G. Khouri: A new history lesson in Israel

[Rami G. Khouri is director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut and editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star. This article was distributed by Agence Global.] Here's a little event that may have big implications. The Israeli education ministry has approved a textbook for Arab third graders in Israel that for the first time describes the 1948 war that gave birth to the state of Israel as a "catastrophe" for the indigenous Palestinians and

Brian Bethune: Did Hitler try to kidnap the pope?

Did he do all that he could have done, all that he should have done? Controversy over the conduct of Pope Pius XII during the Holocaust has raged for over 40 years. Pius's once sterling reputation for having done what he could behind the scenes for persecuted Jews first came under sustained attack in 1963, when Rolf Hochhuth's play The Deputy cast his failure to publicly denounce the Nazi genocide in an anti-Semitic light. The bitter debate has never really stopped since, fuelled by Pius's ongoi

Peter Quinn: The hidden impact of the Irish on English

[PETER QUINN is a novelist and essayist, and a chronicler of Irish-America. A third-generation New Yorker whose grandparents were born in Ireland, Quinn is the author of Banished Children of Eve (1994), which won the American Book Award. This essay forms the introduction to Daniel Cassidy’s How the Irish Invented Slang. His latest book is Looking for Jimmy: A Search for Irish America.] In 1799, troops with Napoleon’s army in Egypt unearthed an ancient tablet inscribed with a tr

Richard Pells: History Descending a Staircase ... American Historians and American Culture

[Richard Pells is a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. His books include Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture Since World War II (Basic Books, 1997).] Who was Marcel Duchamp, and why did his painting "Nude Descending a Staircase" provoke so much outrage at the Armory Show in 1913? What does George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" have to do with both the Jewish and African-American experience in the U

FrontPageMag.com Symposium: Should Holocaust Denial Be Criminalized?

An effort is now being made across the European Union to illegalize Holocaust Denial. But is denying the Holocaust really a form of hate speech? What will be solved by criminalizing the denial? Could doing so make the lie more dangerous and powerful? To discuss this issue with us, Frontpage Symposium has assembled a distinguished panel. Our guests are: Alan Dershowitz, a professor of law at Harvard. His most recent book is Preemption: A Knife that Cuts Both Ways (Norton, 2006).

Peter J. Kuznick: The Decision to Risk the Future ... Harry Truman, the Atomic Bomb and the Apocalyptic Narrative

[Peter Kuznick, author of Beyond the Laboratory: Scientists as Political Activists in 1930s America, is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University.] In his personal narrative Atomic Quest, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Arthur Holly Compton, who directed atomic research at the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory during the Second World War, tells of receiving an urgent visit from J. Robert Oppenheimer while vacati

Michael Crowley: K Street Cashes in on the 1915 Armenian Genocide

[Michael Crowley is a senior editor at The New Republic. ] As a rising St. Louis politician in the mid-1970s, Richard Gephardt was among a dynamic group of aldermen dubbed "The Young Turks." So perhaps it's not surprising that, 30 years later, the former Democratic minority leader of the House of Representatives has aged into an Old Turk. This spring, Gephardt has been busy promoting his new favorite cause--not universal health care or Iraq, but the Republic of Turkey, whi