Roundup: Talking About History

Priscilla J. McMillan: A Word About Lee Harvey Oswald

[Priscilla J. McMillan is the author of Marina and Lee (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), and more recently, The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Modern Arms Race (New York: 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 Presi

Nouri Al-Maliki: America had its civil war. Why expect freedom to come easy to Iraq?

BAGHDAD, Iraq--Americans keen to understand the ongoing struggle for a new Iraq can be guided by the example of their own history. In the 1860s, your country fought a great struggle of its own, a civil war that took hundreds of thousands of lives but ended in the triumph of freedom and the birth of a great power. Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation signaled the destruction of the terrible institution of slavery, and the rise of a country dedicated, more than any other in the world of nat

Tom Segev, Mona El-Farra and Norman Finkelstein: On the 6-Day War and Its 40-Year Legacy (debate)

AMY GOODMAN: As we continue our discussion of Israel and the Occupied Territories, we turn to the words of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Earlier this week he discussed the impact of the 1967 war on the Palestinians. PRESIDENT MAHMOUD ABBAS: In June, the six-day war went down in history of marking the defeat of the Arabs by Israel. Our standing up to this defeat, in spite of the hardships, could make up for what we have lost in war. Perhaps we can even erase it from memory wit

Ken Gewertz: Albert Einstein HIdden Record as a Civil Rights activist

Einstein’s response to the racism and segregation he found in Princeton was to cultivate relationships in the town’s African-American community. Jerome and Taylor interviewed members of that community who still remember the white-haired, disheveled figure of Einstein strolling through their streets, stopping to chat with the inhabitants, and handing out candy to local children. Here’s something you probably don’t know about Albert Einstein. In 1946, the Nobel Prize-winn

Simon Jenkins: In Iraq's four-year looting frenzy, the allies have become the vandals

Fly into the American air base of Tallil outside Nasiriya in central Iraq and the flight path is over the great ziggurat of Ur, reputedly the earliest city on earth. Seen from the base in the desert haze or the sand-filled gloom of dusk, the structure is indistinguishable from the mounds of fuel dumps, stores and hangars. Ur is safe within the base compound. But its walls are pockmarked with wartime shrapnel and a blockhouse is being built over an adjacent archaeological site. When the head of I

Akiko Takenaka: How did war criminals come to be enshrined at Yasukuni Shrine?

[Akiko Takenaka teaches architectural history and theory in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Michigan. She is the author (with Laura Hein) of “Exhibiting World War II in Japan and the United States since 1995,” in Pacific Historical Review 76.1 (February 2007), 61-94 and “Architecture for Mass-Mobilization: The Chureito Memorial Construction Movement, 1939-1945,” in Alan Tansman ed., The Culture of Japanese Fascism (Duke University Press, forthcoming). She is currently w

Robert Kurson: Curators Under the Sea

[Robert Kurson is the author of “Shadow Divers” and, most recently, "Crashing Through: A True Story of Risk, Adventure and the Man Who Dared to See."] LAST month, a Florida-based treasure-hunting company made perhaps the richest undersea score ever. It discovered, somewhere in the Atlantic, a Colonial-era shipwreck containing more than 500,000 silver coins and hundreds of gold coins. Total estimated value, according to one coin marketer: $500 million. In days

Marc Gellman: Israel's Six Day War offered American Jews a refuge from the social traumas of the 1960s

[Gellman holds a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Northwestern University. He was ordained by the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and is the senior rabbi of Temple Beth Torah in Melville, New York. Gellman is a past president of the New York Board of Rabbis.] I will gladly cede to pundits and political scientists the dubious task of deciding how the Six Day War, whose 40th anniversary we mark this week, changed the Middle East c

Paul Kengor: 25 years after the Pope and Ronald Reagan met in Rome

[Paul Kengor, Ph.D. is author of God and George W. Bush. He is also a professor of political science at Grove City College and a visiting fellow with the Hoover Institution. ] On Monday, June 7, 1982, President Ronald Reagan arrived in Rome to meet with Pope John Paul II at the Vatican, a little over a year since both men survived near-fatal assassination attempts. The two shared a commonality not only of personal experiences but also of political interests—interests that each felt

Gary Kamiya: Are We Rome?

[Gary Kamiya: a writer at large for Salon.] Comparing the present historical epoch to a past one is an excellent intellectual parlor game. It requires you to know enough about the two periods to assess their similarities and differences. It encourages a broad, synthetic analysis and a long view. And it defamiliarizes the present, forcing you to look with fresh eyes at cultural and political realities you had previously taken for granted. At its worst, it can become a mere display of

Eric Boehlert: Jeff Gerth blames NY Times editors for Whitewater "mistakes"

Former New York Times reporter Jeff Gerth has often been criticized for the reporting he did on Whitewater during the Clinton years -- reporting that prompted federal authorities to launch several fruitless investigations. Now, Gerth is finally offering up some clues about his past work. They can be found in the pages of the new Hillary Clinton book that Gerth co-authored, Her Way, a prepublication copy of which was obtained by Media Matters for America. Be prepared to be disappoint

Peter Worthington: 6 days that changed the world

Yesterday marked the 40th anniversary of the start of Israel's six-day war with Egypt -- a war that changed history in the Middle East, and led to many of today's problems. I was in Cairo for the war, reporting for the old Toronto Telegram. Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser had ordered UN peacekeepers out of Egypt, had closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, and all signs indicated that Egypt and Syria (with reluctant support from Jordan's King Hussein) planned to attac

Michael Oren: Newly de-classified documents debunk claim that Israel sought '67 War

[Michael Oren, a senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, is the author of "Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East."] Great wars in history eventually become great wars about history. Only a few years after the last soldier leaves the battlefield, accepted truths about the nature of a military conflict and the motivations for it invariably come under assault by revisionists and counter-revisionists whose vehemence can rival that of the

Sam Wineburg: Opening Up the Textbook to an Alternative Viewpoint

[Sam Wineburg is the author (with Susan Ramirez and Peter Stearns) of Human Legacy, a high school world history textbook. He is also the author of Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past, and directs the PhD program in History Education at Stanford University. ] I am the author of a high school world history textbook and yes, I stand to gain financially if you buy it. With that little bit of information out of the way

Bret Stephens: Most of the conventional wisdom about the Six Day War is wrong

[Mr. Stephens is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.] On the morning of June 5, 1967, a fleet of low-flying Israeli jets surprised the Egyptian air force on the ground and destroyed it. This act of military pre-emption helped save Israel from what Iraq's then-President Abdul Rahman Aref had called, only several days earlier, "our opportunity . . . to wipe Israel off the map." Yet 40 years later Israel's victory is widely seen as a Pyrrhic one--"a ca

David Meir-Levi: Remembering The Six-Day War

[David Meir-Levi lectures in English, Hebrew, and Spanish and is a contributor to Frontpagemag.com.] By late 1949, Israel’s willingness to accept the UN partition plan, to establish peace with its neighbors, and to repatriate refugees were all for naught. The Arab world, and especially the five confrontation states -- Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq -- insisted that although they had lost ‘round one,’ there would be another, and if need be, another, and another, until the Zi

Tom Segev: What if Israel Had Turned Back?

[Tom Segev, a columnist for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, is the author, most recently, of “1967: Israel, the War and the Year That Transformed the Middle East.”] FORTY years ago today, on the morning of June 5, 1967, Jordan launched an artillery attack on the Israeli part of Jerusalem. In reaction Israel conquered the Arab sections of the city as well as the West Bank. History is full of “what ifs,” and responsible historians should not indulge in such speculation. Bu

Abraham Rabinovich: How the West Bank was accidentally won

... If the Six Day War was born of misreadings by the parties of each other's intentions, the battle for Jerusalem and the West Bank was, at least from Israel's point of view, an afterthought not conceived of when the day began. On Tuesday night, the second night of the war, the government met to decide the fate of the Old City. At foreign minister Abba Eban's suggestion, the cabinet declared the conquest of the walled city to be a military response to the Jordanian shelling. Histor

Michael Oren: Remaking the world in six days

[MICHAEL OREN, a senior fellow at the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies at the Shalem Center, is the author of "Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East."] BY ALL contemporary accounts, it was one of the most stunning military victories in history. In six intense days of fighting that began on June 5, 1967, Israeli forces saved their country from an imminent existential threat, defeated three major Arab armies and almost quadrupled the terr

Leslie Susser: Was the Six-Day War a blessing or a curse for Israel's place in the Middle East and its long-term survival?

Was the Six-Day War a blessing or a curse for Israel's place in the Middle East and its long-term survival? Forty years on, the jury is still out. In the war's immediate aftermath, it seemed Israel's sweeping victory would guarantee the Jewish state's future and set the stage for a grand regional peace. But the war also unleashed powerful new forces that militated against a settlement of the core Israeli-Palestinian conflict and left simmering the overarching Israeli-Ar