Roundup: Talking About History

Elizabeth Kolbert: Rachel Carson's book changed the world

The red imported fire ant, or Solenopsis invicta, is about an eighth of an inch long, with a ruddy-brown body covered in tiny hairs. [It comes from South America. In the 1930s it moved to North America.] ... Among those who watched the progress of the ants with horror were officials at the United States Department of Agriculture. In 1957, the department decided to eradicate the insects. Its weapons of choice were the pesticides heptachlor and dieldrin, both of which concentrate as

Adam Cohen: What the History of Memorial Day Teaches About Honoring the War Dead

Memorial Day got its start after the Civil War, when freed slaves and abolitionists gathered in Charleston, S.C., to honor Union soldiers who gave their lives to battle slavery. The holiday was so closely associated with the Union side, and with the fight for emancipation, that Southern states quickly established their own rival Confederate Memorial Day. Over the next 50 years, though, Memorial Day changed. It became a tribute to the dead on both sides, and to the reunion of the Nor

Will Fitzhugh: Why There's Not Much to Cheer About in the Results of the Latest National History Test

[Will Fitzhugh is Founder and President of The Concord Review.] One of the most misleading aspects of the just-released National Assessment of Educational Progress report on American students’ knowledge of United States history in the schools, is the NAEP practice of reporting how many students performed at the levels of “Basic or Above.”

Rebecca Clarren: Rachel Carson's alarm still echoes

[Rebecca Clarren writes about the environment for national magazines from her home in Northeast Portland. Her work is frequently supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism. She can be reached atrclarren@yahoo.com.] T oday marks Rachel Carson's 100th birthday. She has been dead for more than 40 years, but the environmental movement she gave life to with her seminal book "Silent Spring" has evolved from the gras

Rich Lowry: It is a mistake to think that war history is unimportant

... Battles are so important to history that their names alone — Vienna, Waterloo, Stalingrad — can evoke the beginning or end of epochs and empires. Violent conflict is one of the most persistent characteristics of human history, and warfare features the interplay of strategy, weaponry, chance, logistics, emotion, and leadership. It is an occasion for folly and brutality, and — as we remember on Memorial Day — heroism and sacrifice. It is for all these reasons that books and TV pro

Eric Alterman: Why we can't talk about Israel

[Termed"the most honest and incisive media critic writing today" in the National Catholic Reporter, and author of"the smartest and funniest political journal out there," in the San Francisco Chronicle, Eric Alterman is Professor of English and Journalism at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, the"Liberal Media" columnist for The Nation, senior fellow and"Altercation" weblogger for Media Matters for America, (formerly at MSNBC.com), a senior fellow at the Center for American Prog

Jonathan V. Last: The Memorials We Deserve

[Jonathan V. Last is online editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.] When the design for the Flight 93 permanent memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, was first announced in September 2005, there was a minor eruption. The winning plan, titled "Crescent of Embrace," was remarkable. Like many modern monuments, it was intentionally antisymbolic. Nothing about it would evoke the heroism of the passengers who rushed the hijackers of their plane on September 11, 2001, likely sparing the

Danny Loss: The failings of narrative history

[I'm Danny Loss. I currently work as a library assistant at the Harvard College Library, but I'll be starting a PhD in history at Brown this fall.] A few weeks ago, while reading responses to the teaching of the Holocaust in British schools, I came across the Conservative History Journal. CHJ's "Tory Historian" expressed an intriguing belief that "History teaching should start at the beginning and go forward in a chronological fashion." Back on May 13, Ralph Luke

Paul Muldoon: Paving over history as old as Stonehenge in Ireland

[Paul Muldoon is the author, most recently, of “Horse Latitudes.”] TOMORROW is the anniversary of the Battle of Tara Hill, fought on May 26, 1798, between 4,000 United Irishmen and 700 British yeomanry. The British carried the day. More than 200 years later, the hill of Tara, a little over 30 miles north of Dublin, is the scene of yet another battle, between the forces of modern Ireland, represented by the advocates of the M3 motorway, and those of us who believe that the routing of

James Langton: It's hardly Pocahontas: new exhibits portray Jamestown colonists as killers and rapists

England's first successful colonists in America have been branded as rapists and murderers who imported slavery and oppressed the local Indian population. The controversial portrait of pioneer life in 17th-century Jamestown has become a central part of this year's 400th anniversary of the colony, whose settlement led directly to the birth of the world's most powerful nation. When the Queen arrives in Virginia as guest of honour in early May, she will find that organiser

Judy Creekmore: Louisiana River Parishes slave rebellion was the largest in U.S. history

This story is part of an occasional series celebrating the bicentennial of the River Parishes. For months during the cane grinding season, slaves and their masters alike worked long, hard shifts to bring in the crop and produce sugar. When the season was over, resentment of forced labor, chattel status, and other indignities suffered by those held captive was more likely pronounced, more vividly on their minds at harvest time than at any other, historian and author Gwendolyn Midlo Ha

Dmitry Shlapentok: How Iran is using history to bolster nationalism

[The writer is associate professor of History at Indiana University South Bend in the United States.] THE history of Iran - as of any other nation - has never existed outside its political context. Iran's recent increased interest in its Achaemenian past, as seen in events ranging from the strong official response to the Hollywood film 300 to the organisation of global exhibitions featuring artifacts from its pre-Islamic past, could be a sign of a vital change in the ideology and ge

Paul Hawken: Largely unnoticed, the largest social movement in history is developing world-wide, in response to massive ecological degradation and global warming

[Paul Hawken is an entrepreneur and social activist living in California. His article in this issue is adapted from "Blessed Unrest," to be published by Viking Press. ] Something earth-changing is afoot among civil society -- a significant social movement is eluding the radar of mainstream culture.... By conventional definition, this is not a movement. Movements have leaders and ideologies. You join movements, study tracts, and identify yourself

Elaine Pagels: Why we may have to rewrite the history of the Gospel of Judas

[ELAINE PAGELS is the Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University and has published widely on Gnosticism and early Christianity. Her latest book, coauthored with Karen King, in Reading Judas.] The first time I heard of the Gospel of Judas was about five years ago, when I got a call from someone who said, I have a book for you to edit—the Gospel of Judas. That astonished me, since I knew that the "church father" Irenaeus had mentioned such a gospel

John S. Hagopian: The Myths of Caldeonia

[John Hagopian of Whitby was called to the Ontario bar in 1987. He has published articles on various aspects of Canadian history in several academic journals.] Author's Note 5/23/07 The author acknowledges that the Hamilton Spectator’s expressed reason for not publishing this rebuttal was that it was too lengthy for a single installment, and they were unwilling to dedicate two installments for it. One Spectator editor stated that the rebuttal might not be too long if I

Andrew Marr: A swansong to 'olde Britain'

[The 1950s marked the last decade of "olde Britain" - when women were housewives, men smoked pipes and schoolboys sported caps and shorts, says Andrew Marr (right), whose TV history of post-war UK starts on Tuesday.] Between the fall of Attlee's Labour government and the return of Labour under cocky Harold Wilson, Britain went through a time which some believe to be a golden-tinted era of lost content. To millions of others these were the grey, conformist, &qu

Norman Markowitz: The Backlash Against Labor History

[Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs. ] Author's note: The following is the text of a paper that I gave at the Conference of the Labor and Working Class History Association (LAWCHA)/ Southern Labor Studies Association on May 18, at the Terry Sanford Institute for Public Policy at Duke University. LAWCHA is the kind of scholar activist group that deserves support from anyone interested in understanding and contributing both the past and present struggles an

Adam Gopnik: Lincoln’s language and its legacy

This all began on a very long plane ride East Coast to West, when I was readin Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals,” he book about Abraham Lincoln and his politica competitors, and how, in the course of the Civi War, he turned them into a collegial Cabinet. I is a well-told, many-sided story, which attempts to give context to Lincol without diminishing him, to place him among his peers and place him abov them, too Coming to the end of the book, to the night of April 14, 1865, a

BBC: History of failed peace talks in the Middle East

In the 40 years since the Middle East war of June 1967, there have been many peace plans and many negotiations. Under Carter, the US oversaw the first Arab-Israeli peace treaty Some of these have been successful, including those between Egypt and Israel and Israel and Jordan, but a settlement has still not been reached in the core conflict, the dispute between the Israelis and Palestinians. The BBC News website is publishing a series of articles about the a

Martin A. Davis, Jr.: What the New History Report Card Tells Us

[Martin Davis is Senior Writer and Editor for the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. A former adjunct professor of medieval history at the University of South Carolina, he made the jump to journalism in 2000.] The venue selected for the release of the 2006 NAEP results in U.S. history and civics was Boston's Old State House. Delicious