Roundup: Talking About History

David Forsmark: A New History of the Great Depression

The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression by Amity Shlaes (HarperCollins, $26.95, 464pp.) Everybody has impressions of the Great Depression and many talk glibly about it, but most people have little substantive knowledge of the era or its causes. Our images come from black-and-white photos and grainy newsreels of Dust Bowl farmers and bread lines, Grandma’s stories and pop culture references ranging from John Steinbeck to Laurel and Hardy. We also have so

Max Boot: Is it better to tell children the truth about history or not?

I was struck by the juxtaposition of these two recent articles, one in the New York Times and one in the Washington Post. The Post article describes how Vladimir Putin’s acolytes are rewriting history textbooks used in Russian schools to give them a more nationalist flavor. One of the manuals issued to Russian teachers declares in its last chapter: “We see that practically every significant deed is connected with the name and activity of President V.V. Putin.” Another manual paints th

Joshua Zeitz: Why Did America Explode in Riots in 1967?

[Joshua Zeitz is a contributing editor of American Heritage magazine and the author of Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern (Crown).] Around daybreak on Sunday, July 23, 1967—40 years ago today—Detroit police officers raided an illegal after-hours bar, located in the city’s West Side black ghetto, where revelers were celebrating the homecoming of two Vietnam War veterans. The officers began cuffing 80 black men and women and shoving

Michael Levy: Stalin Good, Putin Better? Politics, Education, and Indoctrination

[Michael Levy is the Executive Editor for Britannica’s Core editorial department. He received a bachelor’s degree (1991) in political science from the University of North Carolina and a doctorate (1996) in international relations and comparative politics from the University of Kentucky. ] Two stories recently caught my eye, one in the Washington Post that discussed the publication of a new Russian teaching manual, written ”in-part by Kremlin political consultants,” that is very nati

Peter Dreier: Riot and Reunion ... Forty Years Later

[Peter Dreier is professor of politics and director of the Urban & Environmental Policy program at Occidental College. He is co-author of The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City (University of California Press, 2005) and Place Matters: Metropolitics for the 21st Century (2nd edition, University Press of Kansas, 2005) and coeditor of Up Against the Sprawl.] A year after I graduated from high school, my hometown--Plainfield, New Jersey--exploded. Over three nights an

Jerry Green: The baseball player who tried to stop the Detroit riots

The ballgames are fixtures in the life and the sweat and the pain of the city. It is that way in towns across America -- from New York through Chicago to Los Angeles. They have their teams, their games, their athletes, their hopes. But there is no other town quite like Detroit, a lunch-bucket city with the working man's passion for the ballgames. We take pride in that. Always have. So the Tigers played that Sunday 40 years ago when the fires flared and the

Clarence Page: How riots changed us

[Clarence Page is a member of the Tribune's editorial board.] Forty years later, residents of Newark, N.J., and Detroit still disagree as to whether the historic July disturbances in their cities should be remembered as "riots" or "rebellions." Let's split the difference, I say. Call them "uprisings." There were more than 100 similar violent disturbances in various cities in 1967. But the most remembered were in Detroit, where 43 people died in late Jul

Jacob Heilbrunn: Ronald Reagan ... A Uniter, Not a Decider

[Jacob Heilbrunn writes regularly for The New York Times and Los Angeles Times, and is author of the forthcoming They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons (Doubleday Books: December 2007).] Jules Tygiel, Ronald Reagan and the Triumph of American Conservatism (New York: Pearson Longman, 2006), 392 pp., $14.95. Thomas W. Evans, The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism (New York: Columbia Uni

Andrew Roberts: Secret recordings explode the myth Hitler's generals knew nothing about the Holocaust

[Andrew Roberts is the author of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900.] During the latter half of World War II, the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) undertook a massive clandestine operation of which the full, extraordinary details are only now coming to light. Between 1942 and 1945, a section of SIS - known as MI19 - secretly recorded no fewer than 64,427 conversations between captured German generals and other senior officers, all withou

C. Douglas Lummis: Ruth Benedict's Obituary for Japanese Culture

[C. Douglas Lummis is the author of Radical Democracy and is a Japan Focus associate. He taught at Tsuda College.] I first found Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword in the Charles Tuttle Bookstore in Okinawa in 1960. I had just decided to spend some time living in Japan (little suspecting that “some time” would turn out to be a big part of the rest of my life) and I was delighted to discover that Benedict, whose Patterns of Culture I greatly admired, had written this book too.

Peggy Noonan: Washington DC, half a century ago

Robert Novak's new memoir of 50 years in journalism, "The Prince of Darkness," is 638 pages of storytelling and score settling by a Washington institution who paints himself, convincingly, as churlish, brave, resilient, petty and indefatigable. I got it as soon as it came out and found it entertaining and, in spite of the usual pitfalls of such books--a rote "When Clinton came in second in New Hampshire I was not surprised" unspooling of year-by-year events--human, and frank.

Michael Nelson: Nixon's Final Campaign

[Michael Nelson is a professor of political science at Rhodes College. He is author, with John Mason, of How the South Joined the Gambling Nation: The Politics of State Policy Innovation (Louisiana State University Press, 2007) and, with Sidney Milkis, The American Presidency: Origins and Development, 1776-2007 (CQ Press, 2007).] Richard Nixon ran more campaigns for national office than any other American except Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom he tied. In the six presidential elections

Philip J Cunningham : In both the revisionist and the human rights camps, getting history 'right' is the key to solving Japan's social malaise and making future progress

[Philip J Cunningham is a freelance writer and political commentator.] For Japan to be the country it deserves to be, its burden of guilt must be lifted. So argues US Congressman David Scott, adding a voice of support to US Representative Mike Honda's House Resolution 121 calling on Tokyo to ''formally acknowledge, apologise, and accept historical responsibility in a clear and unequivocal manner'' for the crime of forcing young women to work in military brothels. Embatt

Andrew G. Bostom: Remembering the Mass Jewish Exodus from Arab Lands

[Andrew G. Bostom, MD, MS is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Brown University Medical School, and occasional contributor to Frontpage Magazine. He is the author of The Legacy of Jihad (2005), and the forthcoming The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism (2007), which can be previewed here.]

Hershel Shanks: Israeli and Palestinian authorities are failing to protect the Temple Mount

[Mr. Shanks is editor of Biblical Archaeology Review and author of the forthcoming "Jerusalem's Temple Mount -- From Solomon to the Golden Dome" (Continuum).] Within the last few days, a trench two-feet deep -- starting from the northern end of the platform where Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock sits -- has begun working its way toward the southern end of the Temple Mount. The work is being done without any regard for the archaeological information or treasures that may lie be

David A. Bell: Nicolas Sarkozy declares an end to French repentance

[David A. Bell is a contributing editor at The New Republic and the author of The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare As We Know It.] ... President Nicolas Sarkozy, who clearly sees himself as a new de Gaulle of sorts, seems to stand on the side of repressing bad memories. He has declared that the controversies over Vichy and Algeria threaten French national identity, and in his victory speech after the presidential election in May called for "an end to

Alan Wolfe: Russell Kirk's shallow defenders

[Alan Wolfe, a political scientist, is a contributing editor at The New Republic.] Russell Kirk, though once revered on the right as a crucial link in the synthesis that made twentieth-century conservatism a viable intellectual force, was, in retrospect, a shallow thinker who said little that was original and twisted himself into self-tied knots to avoid confronting the contradictions in his worldview. That, in the essence, was the argument of my TNR review ("Contempt," Ju

Nigel Hamilton: The resurrection of Bill Clinton in his first term

[Nigel Hamilton is a fellow of the McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies and author of "Bill Clinton: Mastering the Presidency," which was published this week.] ... How Clinton pulled himself -- and the country -- together in the aftermath of the 1994 meltdown is surely one of the great turnabouts in modern American political history. From his performance over the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing in to the imposition of the Dayton Peace Accords that ended civil war in Bosn

Sarah Wildman: Lady Bird Johnson walked the first-lady tightrope perfectly

[Sarah Wildman was until recently an assistant editor at TNR.] In 1964, fresh from a bruising battle over President Lyndon Johnson's recently signed Civil Rights Act, Lady Bird Johnson got on a train to stump for her husband. Alone. It was the first time a first lady had ever attempted a solo campaign to support her husband's bid for office. But the "Lady Bird Special," as her whistle stop tour was called, was no White House Easter Egg Roll photo opportunity, nor perfectl

Sidney Blumenthal: A Southern, and liberal, Lady

The obituaries of former first lady Lady Bird Johnson extol her beautification projects, graciousness and steady handling of the outsize personality of her husband. But she was also an unwavering supporter of civil rights and through the decades kept close ties to key people in the movement. Her achievements are inseparable from her marriage. Lady Bird managed Lyndon's turbulence, quietly offered her counsel, ignored his wandering eye, and calmed those he might upset. Nothing of that relationshi