Roundup: Talking About History

Hazem Saghieh: The six-day war, forty years on

[Hazem Saghieh is political editor of the London-based Arab newspaper al-Hayat.] In June 2007 the Arab world will mark a bitter anniversary in its modern history, namely the passing of forty years since the six-day war with Israel. For the Arabs, their decisive defeat in June 1967 occupies a very special, if not unique place in their region's post-independence era. Perhaps this is because the event was laden with significance - political, cultural, economic and of course military -

James Castagnera: Falwell v. Flint ... Recalling the Confrontation of Pop Cult Icons

[Jim Castagnera, a Philadelphia lawyer and writer, is the Associate Provost at Rider University. He writes a weekly newspaper column, “Attorney at Large.”] The sudden demise last week of the Reverend Jerry Falwell recalled to me a U.S. Supreme Court case that at one time I taught, when on the faculty of the Widener Law School. The 1988 decision is Hustler Magazine v. Falwell. I’m sure no reader of this highly respectable newspaper has ever purchased a copy of Hustler Magazin

Lou Cannon: Falwell didn't elect Reagan

[Lou Cannon is the author of five books on Ronald Reagan and a co-author of the forthcoming “Reagan’s Disciple: What George W. Bush Did to the Reagan Revolution.”] JERRY FALWELL, who died on Tuesday, would no doubt be pleased that so many obituaries gave him credit for putting Ronald Reagan in the White House. Mr. Falwell encouraged this view of his influence, as well as the related notion that he and Mr. Reagan were cut from the same conservative cloth. The record does

Slate: Slide show on the disappeared in Latin America

How do you memorialize people who vanish? [Click on the SOURCE link to watch a slide show.]

Sen. Fred Thompson: Why military history needs to be restored to school curriculums

If you went to college in the Sixties, like I did, you might not know how much higher education has changed since then. Universities today are different places. At Vanderbilt, where I got my law degree, I hear you can take courses in third wave feminism or colonial governmentality. Your guess is as good as mine. On the other hand, some of the courses that we took for granted aren’t around at all. One area of study that’s almost disappeared from universities today is mi

Lisa Miller: The Pope Writes a Biography of Jesus

Who was Jesus, really? It has become acceptable, even fashionable, lately to speak of the Christian Lord in casual terms, as though he were an acquaintance with a mysterious past. Pope Benedict's trip to Brazil last week revived an old retelling of the Christian story in which Jesus is cast as a social revolutionary determined to overthrow the established order. The massive success of "The Da Vinci Code" reflected the hunger of millions to see Jesus as a regular person—a man with a wif

Economist: The burden of history in the new EU

Javier Solana, the European Union's top foreign-policy honcho, recently offered a neat turn of phrase to explain the importance that Europeans attach to the past. Ponder the phrase “that's history”, and what it implies on either side of the Atlantic, he suggested. When Americans say something is “history”, they mean it is no longer relevant. When Europeans say the same thing, “they usually mean the opposite”. Is this mere wordplay? If only. History lies at the heart of many disputes

WaPo Editorial: Making the U.S. citizenship test more 'meaningful'

WHAT IS or should be required to become an American? According to U.S. law, the criteria include basic knowledge of English and U.S. civics. What "basic knowledge" means, however, varies from region to region. Citizenship applicants must answer 10 of the 96 civics questions produced by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. But which 10 questions, whether the hardest 10 or the easiest 10, and whether they are written or oral, is determined by the office or the pers

Judith Pascoe: Napoleon's Penis

[Judith Pascoe, a professor of English at the University of Iowa, is the author of “The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors.”] THE owner of Napoleon’s penis died last Thursday in Englewood, N.J. John K. Lattimer, who’d been a Columbia University professor and a collector of military (and some macabre) relics, also possessed Lincoln’s blood-stained collar and Hermann Göring’s cyanide ampoule. But the penis, which supposedly had been severed by a pri

Tom Holland: Scrapping A-level classical history in British schools is lunacy

[Tom Holland is the author of Rubicon and Persian Fire.] ... In modern schools, of course, history tends to mean Hitler. A simple lesson is served up to students on a plate: fascism is bad. The political and moral ambiguities of classical history, which inspired Machiavelli and Shakespeare, Jefferson and Marx, barely intrude upon the classroom. Students who wish to study Greece and Rome - no less the bedrocks of our own civilisation now than in previous centuries - already find it d

David Eisenhower: World War II and Its Meaning for Americans

[David Eisenhower is co-chair of FPRI’s History Institute for Teachers and author of Eisenhower at War, 1943–1945 (Random House, 1986). He teaches at the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Pennsylvania. This article is based on his presentation made at Teaching about the Military in American History: A History Institute for Teachers, held March 24–25, 2007, at the First Division Museum, Wheaton, Ill. The Institute was co-sponsored by the Cantigny First Division Foundation i

Robert D. Kaplan: Foreign Policy ... Munich Versus Vietnam

[Robert D. Kaplan, a national correspondent for The Atlantic, is the Class of 1960 Distinguished Visiting Professor in National Security at the United States Naval Academy.] For decades now, two analogies have battled for supremacy in American foreign policy circles: those of Munich and Vietnam. At the moment, Vietnam has the upper-hand. But don’t count Munich out. The appeasement of Nazi Germany at the Munich Conference in 1938—when British Prime Minister Neville Chamb

Walter Issacson: Is America the New Rome?

[Walter Isaacson, the president of the Aspen Institute, is the author of “Einstein: His Life and Universe” and “Benjamin Franklin: An American Life.”] The only sure thing that can be said about the past is that anyone who can remember Santayana’s maxim is condemned to repeat it. As a result, the danger of not understanding the lessons of history is matched by the danger of using simplistic historical analogies. Those who have learned the lessons of Munich square off against those wh

George Bisharat: For Palestinians, memory matters

[George Bisharat is professor of law at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. He writes frequently about the Middle East.] Why do some people have the power to remember, while others are asked to forget? That question is especially poignant at this time of year, as we move from Holocaust Remembrance day in early spring to Monday's anniversary of Israel's declaration of independence on May 14, 1948. In the months surrounding that date, Jewish forces expelled, or

Jim Barksdale and Francine Berman: Saving Our Digital Heritage

[Jim Barksdale is the former chief executive of Netscape Communications Corp. and is an executive member of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program Advisory Council. Francine Berman is director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California at San Diego. She holds the High Performance Computing Endowed Chair at UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering.] It is commonly agreed that the destruction of the ancient Library of Alexandria

Mark Safranski: Historians ought to help policy makers set policy

[Mr. Safranski is an educational consultant to secondary schools. He frequently writes about the military.] Last week, HNNran a somewhat critical piece by John Elrick on Colonel H.R. McMasterand Frederick Kaganentitled"The Two Historians

Peter C. Mancall: What Really Began at Jamestown

[Peter C. Mancall is a professor of history and anthropology at the University of Southern California and author of Hakluyt's Promise: An Elizabethan's Obsession for an English America, published this year by Yale University Press.] President Bush, Queen Elizabeth, Bill Clinton, and Sandra Day O'Connor are among the notables helping to mark the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, the once-struggling little outpost on the edge of a swamp that gave the English a permanent

Shlomo Avineri: The Nakba?

[Shlomo Avineri is a professor of political science at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.] The Palestinians will mark the annual Nakba Day on May 15, as they have done in previous years. We must listen to their voices. As human beings and as Jews we must listen and be attentive to the other's pain, even if the other is - at the moment - our enemy. However, we must listen critically. First and foremost we may ask, why May 15? It was on this day that the British Mandate on

Timothy Garton Ash: The Stasi on Our Minds

[Timothy Garton Ash is Professor of European Studies and Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford. His books include The File, an account of his own experience with the Stasi, and, most recently, Free World.] One of Germany's most singular achievements is to have associated itself so intimately in the world's imagination with the darkest evils of the two worst political systems of the most murderous ce

Ruben Navarrette Jr.: Latinos give PBS a history lesson

[Ruben Navarrette Jr. is a member of the editorial board of The San Diego Union-Tribune and a nationally syndicated columnist.] SAN DIEGO, California (CNN) -- There is an ongoing battle between filmmaker Ken Burns and a coalition of Hispanic veterans, organizations and lawmakers over plans by Burns and the Public Broadcasting System to release a documentary on World War II that ignores the 500,000 Hispanics who fought in the war. Now there could be a truce. After initially