Roundup: Talking About History

Hirata Tetsuo and John W. Dower: Japan’s Red Purge ... Lessons from a Saga of Suppression of Free Speech and Thought

Introduction: John Dower [John W. Dower, professor of history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the author of Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for nonfiction. He is a Japan Focus associate.] History often taps us on the shoulder unexpectedly. War and occupation—and, more particularly, occupied Iraq vis-a-vis occupied Japan a half-century ago— is a good example of thi

Richard Bulliet: The history of Muslims in Europe needs to be rewritten

[Mr. Bulliet is a professor of history at Columbia University.] Distorted by today's political lenses, European historical memory selectively focuses on past violence perpetrated by Muslims and either forgets Europe's cultural borrowings from Muslim societies, or regards them as unimportant remnants of a closed chapter in European-Muslim relations. Fourteen European countries have been wholly or partly under Muslim rule for at least one of the last 14 centuries. With th

Fred Siegel: American liberals took leave of reason after JFK's murder

[Mr. Siegel is a professor of history at The Cooper Union in New York.] "Inherit the Wind" is running on Broadway again, night after night pitting the righteously rational Clarence Darrow against the Bible-thumping antievolutionist William Jennings Bryan. The 1955 play--a chestnut of high-school English courses across the country--concerns the Scopes "Monkey Trial" of 1925 and is meant to capture the moment in American history when science and reason superseded,

Eric Rauchway: Was the New Deal un-American?

[Eric Rauchway, the author of Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America and The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction, is professor of history at the University of California, Davis.] Seventy-five years ago this week, on July 2, 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt accepted the Democratic nomination for president and pledged "a new deal for the American people." He promised public works, agricultural price supports, new mortgage markets, working-hours

Joseph Epstein: How the JFK myth helped wreck the Democratic Party

[Mr. Epstein is the author, most recently, of "Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy's Guide" (Eminent Lives, 2006).] ... As someone with a vivid memory of Kennedy's brief and lackluster term as president, I have been amused over the following 44 years to watch the myth of the greatness of John F. Kennedy grow. Here was a president who initiated no impressive programs, was less than notably courageous in coming to the aid of civil-rights workers in the South, got the nation enm

Meron Rapoport: History Erased

[Meron Rapoport is a journalist for Haaretz in Israel.] In July 1950, Majdal - today Ashkelon - was still a mixed town. About 3,000 Palestinians lived there in a closed, fenced-off ghetto, next to the recently arrived Jewish residents. Before the 1948 war, Majdal had been a commercial and administrative center with a population of 12,000. It also had religious importance: nearby, amid the ruins of ancient Ashkelon, stood Mash'had Nabi Hussein, an 11th-century structure where, accord

Monique Doyle Spencer: Crash course in US history

[Monique Doyle Spencer is author of "The Courage Muscle: A Chicken's Guide To Living With Breast Cancer." ] IT'S A GOOD thing the school year is finally over. It's the Fourth of July and we don't need seventh-graders ruining our holiday by doing homework. Why? Because they study American history, and they want your help. "Hey Mom, quiz me on the Bill of Rights," they say. You ask, "Well, who signed the Bill of Rights?" Your child roa

Keith Windschuttle: Postmodernism and the Fabrication of Aboriginal History

[Keith Windschuttle is a historian, author and publisher. He is a frequent contributor to Quadrant, Sydney, and The New Criterion, New York. ] History is an intellectual discipline that goes back to the ancient Greeks. The first real historian, Thucydides, did a remarkable thing. He set out to distance himself from his own political system and to write a work that examined critically what happened to Greece in the Peloponnesian Wars. He not only told of his own side's virtues and vi

Michael Gerson: Why We Keep This Creed (July 4th)

[President Bush's speech writer until summer 2006, Michael Gerson then joined the Council on Foreign Relations as a Senior Fellow. He is the author of "Heroic Conservatism", a "first-hand, high-level account of the events of the George W. Bush years as well as his own blueprint for the future of the Republican party."] One of the great Independence Day speeches of American history was an attack on Independence Day. On the Fourth of July, 1829, Willia

Andrew Ferguson: How To Design a Lincoln Museum

[Slate Introduction.] In his new book, Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe's America, Andrew Ferguson crisscrosses the nation on a quest to understand our ongoing obsession with our lanky 16th president. In the process, he interviewed Lincoln buffs and Lincoln impersonators; historians, collectors, and business gurus; and dozens of others who have built their lives around the man. In today's excerpt, Ferguson explains how and why the state of Illinois hired Disney-style theme-park de

Kai Bird and Svetlana Chervonnaya: Was Alger Hiss really the Soviet spy named Ales, and if not, who was?

[Kai Bird is the co-author with Martin J. Sherwin of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Svetlana Chervonnaya, a Russian historian and TV documentary writer and producer, has a special interest in the history of Cold War espionage.] Nearly 60 years ago, Alger Hiss, a former high official in the U.S. State Department, was convicted of perjury and sentenced to prison on the grounds that he had lied abo

David Corn: Where's the CIA's Missing Jewel?

What's the missing jewel? Today, the CIA released its infamous "Family Jewels" file. This is a set of internal memos compiled in the mid-1970s after press reports revealed numerous CIA dirty tricks. In 1973, CIA director James Schlessinger, having learned that Watergate burglars E. Howard Hunt and James McCord (each a CIA veteran) had been in contact with the Agency while carrying out illegal activities for President Richard Nixon's reelection campaign, ordered divisions w

Peter Dreier and Dick Flats: Patriotism's Secret History

Many Americans believe that the left is "antipatriotic" (and even anti-American), while the political right truly expresses the American spirit and reveres its symbols. Particularly since the late 1960s--when the movement against US intervention in Vietnam gained momentum--the terms "progressive" and "patriotism" have rarely been used in the same sentence, at least in the mainstream media. It has become conventional wisdom that conservatives wave the American flag w

Maya Jasanoff: We should also remember the Loyalists this July 4th

[Maya Jasanoff is an associate professor of British history at Harvard University. She is the author of “Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850”] Every Independence Day we celebrate the founding of the world’s most powerful — and for some, inspirational — nation. Yet for several months after July 4, 1776, the self-proclaimed United States of America looked set to go down in history as a nation that never was. That August, in the biggest battle of the Revo

James Bowman: What does it say about us that Halberstam was given hero status?

[James Bowman was born in Kane, Pennsylvania in 1948 and grew up in Jupiter, Florida. He attended Davidson and Lebanon Valley colleges in America and Pembroke College, Cambridge University in England, from which he holds an M.A. Mr. Bowman taught school (English and General Studies) at Westminster School and Portsmouth Grammar School in England from 1980 to 1989 and was the American correspondent of The SpectatorI of London from 1989-1991. Since 1991 he has been the American editor of the Time

Joyce Malcolm: Our Founders were talented men -- and lucky ones too

[Ms. Malcolm teaches legal history at George Mason University School of Law and is the author of several books, including "Stepchild of the Revolution: A Slave Child in Revolutionary America," forthcoming from Yale University Press.] It's easy now, in a nation awash with complaints about what our Founders did not do, what imperfect humans they seem to 21st century eyes, to overlook how startlingly bold their views and actions were in their own day and are, in fact, even to

Andrew Leonard: Japanese history lessons

Japan's defense minister, Fumio Kyuma, resigned on Tuesday, after causing an outcry with his comment that the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima "could not be helped." How the World Works in no way condones the use of nuclear weapons against civilian populations, but there's a problem here. In March, Japan's prime minister Shinzo Abe declared that there was no proof that the Japanese military had forced "comfort women" into prostitution.

John Ibbitson and Michael Valp: Debate ... Should we can Canadian history?

The writers are columnists for the Globe and Mail.John Ibbitson: Studying Canada's past is parochial — not to mention divisive. And who really cares about Louis Riel anyway? Bring back the history of Western civilization Your province's history curriculum is propaganda designed to brainwash children and stoke ancient resentments, and should be abolished. A Canadian history curriculum, properly constructed, would focus primarily on the role that our nation has played

Bonnie Goldstein: The CIA, Castro, and the Mafia

The Central Intelligence Agency this week released a large cache of documents describing long-ago secret missions at odds with the agency's charter as laid down in the National Security Act of 1947. The documents were compiled in 1973 and are referred to within the agency as the "family jewels" (see below). Among the weirder adventures they relate is the enlistment of Johnny Roselli, a member of the Las Vegas mob who "had connections leading into Cuban gambling interests," to

Steven Aftergood: The Veep Doesn't Possess the Classification Authority He Claims

The White House press office and some Bush Administration critics are insisting that the 2003 executive order on classification policy endowed the Vice President with a unique status and classification powers identical to those of the President himself. But that's not what the executive order says."In this executive order the President is saying that the Vice President is not different than him,"