Roundup: Talking About History

Allan M. Brandt: How a PR Firm Helped Establish America's Cigarette Century

The following excerpt is from chapter 5 of The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America by Allan M. Brandt, (Basic Books, 2007). The passage starts at the moment that the tobacco industry began to face serious scientific data suggesting the connection between lung cancer and cigarette smoke. The tobacco industry's response to hire a PR firm to fight the scientific evidence gave rise to the approach that industry and ideological

Garrison Keillor: History teaches you humility

Once when I was teaching a composition class at the university, I flew back from New York for class and neglected to get back on Central Standard Time. I came bustling into the classroom and walked to the front, took off my coat, set my briefcase on the table, smiled at the students assembled, and was about to open my mouth and start talking about the importance of structure in comic writing and then something struck me as Not Right. Familiar faces were missing. I leaned down and said to a girl

Humberto Fontova: The Bay of Pigs -- Anniversary of Heroism and Shame

[Humberto Fontova is the author of "Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him."] "They fought like tigers," writes the CIA officer who helped train the Cubans who splashed ashore at the Bay of Pigs 46 years ago this week. "But their fight was doomed before the first man hit the beach." That CIA man, Grayston Lynch, knows something about fighting – and about long odds. He carried scars from Omaha Beach, The Battle o

Michael Berenbaum: Holocaust Denial: Iranian Style

[Michael Berenbaum is a leading expert on the Holocaust. He is the former director of the United States Holocaust Museum Research Institute and President of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.] In honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day this week, it’s worthy to wonder: What’s the difference between Holocaust denial in the West and Holocaust denial as practiced by the President of Iran and his followers? In the West, Holocaust denial challenges the fundamen

Robert Hanks: First rule of history ...  Verify your references

[Subhead: Truth matters; and if we think it doesn't, the door is ajar for anybody with an agenda and no scruples.] Many of the reports last week of Kurt Vonnegut's death mentioned his most famous novel, Slaughterhouse 5, and the events that inspired it. In February 1945, the city of Dresden was devastated by several nights of air raids by British and American forces; tens of thousands were killed in the firestorm that the bombing spawned. Vonnegut was one of many Allied prisoners o

Julia Keller: Many wars, a singular sorrow: Vonnegut's vision

[Tribune cultural critic.] He claimed it was about World War II, but it couldn't have been. Not really. It was Vietnam, right? Had to be. The pointlessness. The gore. The absurdity. That novel had Vietnam written all over it -- in letters stamped crisp and deep, like the data on a dog tag. Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" (1969) was ostensibly about one war but wound up being interpreted as a commentary on another. As admirers of Vonnegut, who died last

Brooke Allen vs. Michael Novak: Were the Founding Fathers Christian? (Continued)

Many apologies to Mr. and Ms. Novak for assuming they are a husband and wife team! Sorry not to have done more background research…. In response: Mr. Novak is concerned, in his most recent posting, with drawing some very fine lines. My purpose in writing Moral Minority was rather more basic. It was, very simply, to address a statement that I had heard George W. Bush and various members of his administration make frequently, as though it was a widely acknowledged fact: “This count

Anthony Grafton: Historians should try collaborating

[Anthony Grafton is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History. He can be reached at grafton@princeton.edu. ] ... I'm on leave this year. Instead of teaching and urging seniors to read piles of books and ransack the darkest corners of JSTOR, I've been doing it myself. And I've had a little time to reflect on an issue that oddly connects the world of workshops and seminars with that of seniors writing theses: Collaboration.

Maarja Krusten: The Bush Library Controversy

[Ms. Krusten is a historian and former National Archives Nixon tapes archivist.] Some very lengthy observations on a rainy Saturday evening, drawn from the National Journal article (hidden from some readers of this blog behind a subscription wall) and from comments made by the Air Force historian about electronic recordkeeping. I will be interested to see if these stories about email spark additional interest in electronic recordkeeping among historians. There is plenty of food for

David Brooks: A new grand narrative

Standing on a hill in East Jerusalem, amid the clash of religious and political orthodoxies, stands a musty old museum devoted to human progress. When you walk into the Rockefeller Museum with its old-fashioned display cases crowded with ancient pottery shards and oil lamps, you can begin by looking at the stone tools of early man. Then you proceed room by room through the invention of agriculture and cities, winding up finally with the statues and reliquaries of the medieval era. W

NYT Editorial: Turkey and the U.N.’s Cover-Up

More than 90 years ago, when Turkey was still part of the Ottoman Empire, Turkish nationalists launched an extermination campaign there that killed 1.5 million Armenians. It was the 20th century’s first genocide. The world noticed, but did nothing, setting an example that surely emboldened such later practitioners as Hitler, the Hutu leaders of Rwanda in 1994 and today’s Sudanese president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir. Turkey has long tried to deny the Armenian genocide. Even in the moder

John Brady Kiesling: History lessons for the Balkans

[John Brady Kiesling is a former US diplomat and author of "Diplomacy Lessons: Realism for an Unloved Superpower".] The new Greek textbook seems a sensible attempt to match the teaching of history to current Greek reality. Among its goals is to downplay the inevitability of national/racial/religious conflict in the Balkans, to reduce the sense of Greek victimisation by hostile outsiders and to weaken the myth that Greek national independence is a gift of the church.

Robin Fleming: Silken Saxons? Medieval England wasn't all wool

During England's late Anglo-Saxon period, before the Norman Conquest of 1066, "people of means moved heaven and earth to get silk because it allowed them to appropriate its associated meanings for themselves," reports Robin Fleming, a professor of history at Boston College. Contrary to common belief in her field that even important figures in communities of the time wore earth-toned woolen clothing, Ms. Fleming writes that "hard, tough, serious individuals" -- in

Gyan Prakash: Do the revisionists make a good case for imperialism?

[Gyan Prakash, a professor of history at Princeton University, is the author of Another Reason: Science and The Imagination of Modern India, among other books.] E.M. Forster's A Passage to India ends with a poignant exchange between Aziz, a young Muslim doctor, and Fielding, a Briton sympathetic to Indians. Though Aziz is acquitted of the false charge of molesting a British woman, he is deeply wounded by the experience and wants nothing to do with the colonial race. Fielding, an old

Barry Rubin: U.K. Schools' Sickening Silence

AS a Middle East specialist, I daily see material from Arab and Islamic sources containing hair-raising threats against America, Israel and the West. But an item in a British newspaper may be the scariest sentence I ever read: A report by the U.K. Department for Education and Skills says that schools in England are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils. And it's not just that the institution most entrusted with preserving democratic society a

Israeli Excavations in Jerusalem: They Do or Do Not Threaten Muslim Shrines? (Two Views)

David Gelernter: No [David Gelernter is a national fellow of the American Enterprise Institute.] Israeli government authorities are building a ramp to allow non-Muslims to reach the enormous platform atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The old ramp was condemned as unsafe and torn down several years ago. The interim ramp that replaced it was designed for short-term service only. (Muslims have their own private access routes.) The new ramp is controversial. Some ramp mu

Mandy Katz: Was Einstein a Jewish Saint?

[Mandy Katz is an associate editor at Moment. In December 2006 she reviewed photographer Annie Leibovitz’s highly acclaimed A Photographer’s Life for Moment.] As usual, Albert Einstein hadn’t dressed for the occasion. Most of the 40 or so young men waiting for him that Friday night in January at Princeton’s Murray-Dodge Hall sported the “college man’s” uniform of 1947—their best tweed sport coats and shined loafers. But their guest of honor, when he finally showed up, was wearing a

David Ignatius: JFK, Assassination and Nosenko ... New Information

Roll back the tape to January 1964: America is still reeling from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and investigators don't know what to make of the fact that the apparent assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, lived for three years in the Soviet Union. Did the Russians have any role in JFK's death? Then a KGB defector named Yuri Nosenko surfaces in Geneva and tells his CIA handlers that he knows the Soviets had nothing to do with Oswald. How is Nosenko so sure? Because he handle

Alexis Dudden: CRS Report on Japan's Comfort Women Being Taken Seriously in Asia

On April 9, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) released a report on the military comfort women, which Japan Focus presents here in full. Much of the report’s content will not be new to Focus readers. The research and reporting of scholars and journalists such as Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Yuki Tanaka, Sarah Soh, George Hicks, and Norimitsu Onishi contribute much to author Larry Nikch’s findings. But the report also draws ex

Kasey S. Pipes: Ike's surprising civil rights record (interview)

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Kasey S. Pipes, president of the Pipes Company, a corporate communications consulting firm. A commissioned officer in the United States Navy Reserve, Mr. Pipes worked on Capitol Hill, served in the Bush White House, wrote speeches for Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and was chief author of the 2004 National Republican Party Platform. He is the author of the new book Ike's Final Battle: The Road to Little Rock and the Challenge of Equality. F