Roundup: Talking About History

Jeffrey Kimball: Kissinger Gets It Wrong Again

[Jeffrey Kimball is professor emeritus at Miami University, the author of award-winning books and articles on the history of war, foreign relations, peace, politics, and ideas, past president of the Peace History Society, a former Nobel Institute Senior Fellow, and a former Woodrow Wilson International Center Public Policy Scholar.]

Lynne Olson: Why Winston Wouldn't Stand For W

[Lynne Olson, a former White House correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, is the author or coauthor of four books of history.] President Bush's favorite role model is, famously, Jesus, but Winston Churchill is close behind. The president admires the wartime British prime minister so much that he keeps what he calls "a stern-looking bust" of Churchill in the Oval Office. "He watches my every move," Bush jokes. These days, Churchill would probably not care for much o

Steven Shapin: How uses, not innovations, drive human technology

The technologies that we have available substantially define who we are. The nineteenth-century Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle didn’t much like the new industrial order, but he did understand the substantive relationship between human beings and their technologies: “Man is a Tool-using Animal. . . . Nowhere do you find him without Tools; without Tools he is nothing, with Tools he is all.” Seen in this light, my kitchen is a technological palimpsest. Even the older items were once innovations—l

William J. Bennett: How do we ask our children to fight, and perhaps die, for a country they do not know?

[Former Secretary of Education William J. Bennett is the author of America: The Last Best Hope, Volume 2 (From a World at War to the Triumph of Freedom), and the Washington fellow of the Claremont Institute.] Tens of millions of Americans are about to celebrate our nation’s Founding. The worrisome question is, will future generations take to this celebration the way we have for the past 231 years if they do not know the first, second, or third thing about their country? Two ye

Elizabeth Song: A different sort of July 4th

[Elizabeth Song is a College junior from Clemmons, N.C.] In Philadelphia's graveyards, history comes alive. Take a stroll through the cobble-stoned heart of Old City, and you'll find some of America's earliest burial grounds. Christ Church Burial Ground is one of these. On the corner of 5th and Arch streets, the church's property holds the graves of seven signers of the Declaration of Independence, including that of Benjamin Franklin. Franklin's grave is li

Greg Lockhart: The Minefield ... An Australian Tragedy in America’s Vietnam War

[Greg Lockhart is a former army officer, turned Vietnam literary scholar and translator. His book, The Minefield: An Australian Tragedy in Vietnam was published in May 2007 by Allen & Unwin of Australia.] In 1967 the commander of First Australian Task Force (1ATF), Brigadier Stuart Graham ordered the construction of an 11 kilometre ‘barrier fence and minefield’ in Phuoc Tuy Province, southern Vietnam. This ‘barrier’, which ran for some 11 kilometres through the southern Phuoc Tu

Tessa Morris-Suzuki: Who Was Responsible ... From Marco Polo Bridge to Pearl Harbor

[Tessa Morris-Suzuki is Professor of Japanese History, Convenor of the Division of Pacific and Asian History in the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University, and a Japan Focus associate. Her book Exodus to North Korea: Shadows from Japan's Cold War has just been published at Rowman & Littlefield ] When, in mid-2005, Japan’s Yomiuri newspaper began to publish a series of articles on the question of “war responsibility”, the event attracted nationwide and ev

Trudy Kuehner: Teaching About the Military in American History

On March 24–25, 2007 FPRI’s Marvin Wachman Fund for International Education hosted 44 teachers from 23 states across the country for a weekend of discussion on teaching about the Military in U.S. history. The Institute was held at and co-sponsored by the Cantigny First Division Museum in Wheaton, Ill. It was webcast to registrants worldwide (see www.fpri.org/education/militaryushistory for videocasts and texts of lectures).The History Institute for Teachers is co-

David Satter: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union

[David Satter is Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of Age of Delirium: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union (Yale 2001) and Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State (Yale, 2004). This essay is based on his presentation at Living Without Freedom: A History Institute for Teachers sponsored by FPRI’s Marvin Wachman Fund for International Education, May 5–6, 2007, held at and co-sponsored by the National Constitution Cente

Priscilla J. McMillan: A Word About Lee Harvey Oswald

[Priscilla J. McMillan is the author of Marina and Lee (Harper & Row, 1977), and more recently, The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Modern Arms Race (Viking, 2005).] After decades of speculation about a grassy knoll, the Zapruder film, and an acoustical tape, the man behind it all is too often overlooked. Lee Oswald was not a cardboard figure but a human being, and although he had barely turned twenty-four at the time he killed President Kennedy, he had a moti

Mother Jones Magazine: 30th Anniversary of Mass Arrests at Seabrook, NH, Anti-Nuclear Rally

On April 30th, 1977, a rag tag army of 2,400 people descended, marching and singing, on Seabrook, New Hampshire, to protest the building of a new nuclear power station. Inspired by the civil rights movement and mentored by the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group, the "Clamshell Alliance," a small group of local activists, had trained the crowd to express their collective frustration with the powerful nuclear lobby. The tactic was non-violent civil disobedien

Amity Shlaes: Why should we celebrate the New Deal?

[Miss Shlaes, a Bloomberg columnist and visiting senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is author of the just-published "The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression" (HarperCollins), from which this is adapted.] The late Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. was a true liberal -- a man who welcomed debate. Just before he died this winter, he wrote, quoting someone else, that history is an argument without end. That, Schlesinger added, "is why we love it so.

Charles Culbertson: Gun might have altered outcome of Civil War

From the death notice that appeared in the Staunton Spectator, you'd never have known there was anything special about Lorenzo Sibert, who died Sept. 25, 1881: "In Staunton, on Sept. 25th, of paralysis of brain, Lorenzo Sibert, aged 77 years and 4 months." And that was it. Not a single additional line was devoted to the life of a man who came within a hair's breadth of changing the outcome of the Civil War. Sibert, bankrupt and forgotten, was buried in an unma

Jerome Cohen: An anniversary worth remembering ... Mao's crackdown on intellectuals

[Mr. Cohen is a New York University law professor specializing on China and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.] This is a time for commemorations in China, some public, others necessarily private. The 10th anniversary of Hong Kong's return to Beijing's rule is currently the subject of official celebrations in both places. Also, thanks to the autonomy conferred on their Special Administrative Region, tens of thousands of devoted Hong Kong democrats recently demonstr

Tony Platt, Alexandra Stern: It's time to stop honoring the leaders of the eugenics movement

[Tony Platt, professor emeritus of social work at Cal State Sacramento, is the author, with Cecilia O'Leary, of "Bloodlines: Recovering Hitler's Nuremberg Laws, From Patton's Trophy to Public Memorial" (Paradigm Publishers, 2006). Alexandra Minna Stern is the Zina Pitcher collegiate professor of the history of medicine at University of Michigan and the author of "Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America" (University of California Press, 2005).

Richard Labunski: Madison and Mozart ... June 1788

[Richard Labunski is a journalism professor at the University of Kentucky and author of "James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights." (www.richardlabunski.com)] June is not just a time to celebrate the beginning of summer. It is an occasion to remember two extraordinary individuals -- one practicing the art of politics, the other the art of music -- who during this month in 1788 changed the world for the better.

Merlin Chowkwanyun: How Oprah was taken in by a slavery myth

[Merlin Chowkwanyun is a PhD student in history at the University of Pennsylvania.] It seemed like just another harmless moment on daytime TV: Oprah Winfrey began an"Ask Dr. Oz" segment with the physician Mehmet Oz, and the two arrived at the subject of excessive sweating. Oz cited high blood pressure as a major cause and then asked Winfrey if she knew why black Americans experienced hypertension at disproportionate rates. No problem so far. But then Winfrey answered Oz's questio

Chester Finn: Why national academic standards are needed

The United States isn't the only land where primary-secondary schooling was traditionally the responsibility of the states or provinces, while the national government played a minor, even peripheral role. Nor are we the only people now struggling to adapt that old decentralized arrangement to the realities of the 21st century, with its globalizing economy, rising mobility, instant communications, and ebbing affection for local idiosyncrasy--and agonizing over what mechanisms might best yield a m

Michael Gerson: Unchained by Idealism-The 200th anniversary of history's end of the British slave trade

In many quarters, the role of religion in public life and foreign policy is under question as a source of hatred and extremism. But this year marks the 200th anniversary of history's strongest counterexample -- the strange, irrational end of the British slave trade. By 1820, some 2.6 million Europeans had left their homes for the Americas. And perhaps 9 million Africans had also made the journey -- in chains, branded like cattle and packed like cordwood. Every slave voyage involved

Thurgood Marshall Showed What `Justice' Means

Forty years ago, on June 13, 1967, President Lyndon Johnson strode into the Rose Garden for a news conference, accompanied by a tall, distinguished black man. "I shall send to the Senate this afternoon," Johnson said, "the nomination of Mr. Thurgood Marshall to the position of associate justice of the Supreme Court. ... He is best qualified by training and by very valuable service to the country. I believe it is the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the righ