Roundup: Talking About History

George F. Will: That Longfellow's 200th birthday passed unremarked is redundant evidence of this forward-leaning democracy's historical amnesia

One hundred years ago, Feb. 27 was enlivened by events around the nation commemorating what had happened 100 years before that, in 1807. But last week's bicentennial of the birth of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow passed largely unnoted, which is noteworthy. It was, naturally, a poet (Shelley) who declared that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." Wishful thinking, that, but Plato took poets so seriously as disturbers of the peace that he wanted them expelle

Randall Stross: Edison the Inventor, Edison the Showman

This article was adapted from “The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World,” by Randall Stross, a contributor to The New York Times. The book, to be published on Tuesday by Crown Publishers, examines the reality and the myths surrounding the Edison legacy. *** THOMAS ALVA EDISON is the patron saint of electric light, electric power and music-on-demand, the grandfather of the Wired World, great-grandfather of iPod Nation. He was the person

Ronald H. Spector: Military History ... Teetering on the Brink of Respectability

Forty-five years ago, Walter Millis, a respected military analyst and historian, wrote a short treatment of military history for the American Historical Association's Service Center for Teachers of History. Of all the distinguished authors who have contributed to those guides over the years, Millis may well be the only one who advised his readers not to bother. "The study of military history" had two functions, Millis declared, "to train professional military men in the exercise o

Bryan LeBeau: 150th anniversary of Dred Scott decision

[Bryan Le Beau holds a Ph.D. in American Studies and is currently Dean of Institutional Services at the Kansas City Kansas Community College.] The Dred Scott case took several years to work its way through the courts, and the issues involved were many and complicated. In sum, however, although the jury in a lower state court ruled the Scotts legally free, upon appeal the Missouri State Supreme Court reversed the decision. The judges ruled that Scott’s presence in a free territory di

Bill McKibben: Make money, get happy? No more.

... Growth no longer makes most people wealthier, but instead generates inequality and insecurity. Growth is bumping up against physical limits so profound—like climate change and peak oil—that trying to keep expanding the economy may be not just impossible but also dangerous. And perhaps most surprisingly, growth no longer makes us happier. Given our current dogma, that's as bizarre an idea as proposing that gravity pushes apples skyward. But then, even Newtonian physics eventually shif

Michael Johnson: On Montesquieu's renewed relevance

[Michael Johnson is a former correspondent for The Associated Press.] You can hardly turn around in the Bordeaux area without bumping into a plaque, a statue or some other reminder of Montesquieu, a great thinker whose books inspired the American Constitution. The Lycée Montesquieu is around the corner from my home and I often have business on the rue Esprit des Lois, a street named for his masterwork, "The Spirit of Laws." Montesquieu is alive and well, 252 y

Stevenson Swanson: Does America need another Robert Moses?

Huge swaths of New Orleans are still devastated a year and a half after Hurricane Katrina. The effort to rebuild the World Trade Center site has sputtered for more than five years. Across the country, projects remain on the drawing board for years while studies, hearings and court cases play out in the bureaucratic equivalent of super-slow-motion. Does America need another Robert Moses? Moses, an unelected official who ran a bewildering array of New York public agencie

Chicago Trib Editorial: No hiding from history (Re: Japan)

Japan's new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, wants his country to shake off that hangdog, defeated-nation mind-set and take its rightful place as a world power--with a real military, better relations with its neighbors and a seat on the United Nations Security Council. But Abe, who campaigned on a promise to rewrite Japan's pacifist constitution, must first break away from the crowd that wants to rewrite its past. Fourteen years after Japan issued a halfhearted apology for the sexual en

Michael Rubin: Archaeology, Heritage, and Identity

[Michael Rubin, of the American Enterprise Institute, reviews a number of books on Iraq. The article originally appeared as review essay in the Spring 2007 edition of Middle Eastern Quarterly.] Nothing dampened optimism about post-Saddam Iraq faster than looting. Satellites beamed images of Iraqis looting and burning buildings. Rumsfeld dismissed the initial reports of looting and on April 11, 2003, chided journalists."The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over,

Matthew Bogdanos: Fighting for Iraq’s Culture

[Matthew Bogdanos, a colonel in the Marine Reserves and an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, is the author, with William Patrick, of “Thieves of Baghdad.”] WITH the situation in Iraq growing seemingly graver by the day, Americans are increasingly reluctant to risk American blood to save Iraqi lives. So it’s a pretty tough sell to ask people to care about a bunch of old rocks with funny writing. But what if they understood that the plunder of Iraq’s 10,000 poorly

Fred Barnes: Eisenhower's civil rights showdown

[Mr. Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard and co-host, with Morton Kondracke, of"The Beltway Boys" on Fox News Channel.] In spring 1954, as the Supreme Court was deliberating on Brown v. Board of Education, President Dwight D. Eisenhower invited Chief Justice Earl Warren to a stag dinner at the White House. He seated Warren at the same table as John W. Davis, the lawyer who had argued against school desegregation before the court. Eisenhower proceeded to tell the chief

Joseph Ellis Vs. Michael Novak: Were the Founders Religious?

HNN Editor: These were the opening salvos in a civilized debate conducted over the last 2 weeks. To read continuing blog entries in this debate click on the SOURCE link above and follow the embedded links.Joseph Ellis Although the Declaration of Independence mentioned “Nature’s God” and the “Creator,” the Constitution made no reference to a divine being, Christian or otherwise, and the First Amendment explicitly forbid the establishment of any official church or creed. T

Steven Aftergood: Nixon, the Joint Chiefs, and the Big Leak

In the course of an urgent search for the sources who were providing classified information to journalist Jack Anderson in 1971, the Nixon Administration discovered a surprising culprit. A Navy yeoman in the National Security Council named Charles Radford was not only the "almost certain source" of the Jack Anderson leaks, but he was also in the habit of routinely copying classified documents in the briefcases of Henry Kissinger,

Ron Rosenbaum: Sex and Hitler & Norman Mailer

[Ron Rosenbaum's most recent book is The Shakespeare Wars.] Sex and Hitler. It's an all too irresistible combination. All too many attempts to explain Hitler have been haunted by the assumption that his heart of darkness resides in a dark secret about his sexuality. Whether it's a rumored deformation of his genitals, a putative degrading sexual preference, there must be some abnormality. It makes us nervous to think anyone in any way "normal" could become a Hitler. Norman

Jack Shafer: Were Vietnam vets spat at?

Were veterans spat upon as they returned from serving in Vietnam? When Holy Cross College scholar Jerry Lembcke studied the allegations for his 1998 book Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam, he found no evidence to back the claim. Since 2000, I've been using this column to track Vietnam vet spit allegations as they appear in the press, and have found nothing that contradicts Lembcke's basic assessment. On Jan. 30, when I wrote a column criticizing a current News

John David Smith: The Evil That Americans Did

[John David Smith is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Among his recent books is Black Judas: William Hannibal Thomas and "The American Negro" (Ivan R. Dee, 2002).] In 1997, Rep. Tony P. Hall, a Democrat of Ohio, proposed that the federal government offer an official apology for slavery, a proposal that President Bill Clinton took to heart when, on June 13, 1997, he issued an executive order establishing the President's Advisory Board

Rob Weir: Teaching Without Textbooks

[Rob Weir is the author or editor of five books. He recently gave up a senior faculty position to pursue part-time teaching, involvement with professional organizations, and freelance journalism. He now teaches at Smith College and in the honors college at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.] Here’s a statement with which everyone can agree: College instructors cannot assume that students come to their classes in possession of basic knowledge. Now here’s one sure to generate

Anne Applebaum: An Archive With Tales To Tell

Anyone who has ever had the good luck to work in old archives knows how surprising they can be. A thick and unappetizing file might, with patience, yield a wealth of interesting detail; a pile of yellowed papers can contain the solution to an old riddle. Recently, an amateur archivist stumbled across the letters of Otto Frank, Anne Frank's father, in a collection of documents that had been gathering dust in the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research for 30 years -- proving that there was still more

William Underwood and Kang Jian: Japan’s Top Court Poised to Kill Lawsuits by Chinese War Victims

[At a moment when the “comfort women” controversy is dominating the growing global discussion about Japanese war responsibility, the Japan Supreme Court is set to permanently foreclose the possibility of redress for Chinese war victims within the Japanese court system. Japan’s top court will hold a special hearing on March 16 in a compensation lawsuit brought by Chinese forced labor survivors against Nishimatsu Construction Corp. and the Japanese government. If, as expected, the Supreme Court ru

Alexis Dudden and Kozo Mizoguchi: Abe’s Violent Denial ... Japan’s Prime Minister and the ‘Comfort Women

On March 1, 2007, Japan’s Prime Minister Abe Shinzo denied the comfort women. Technically, Abe denied Japanese governmental responsibility for the forced coercion of women and girls into the system of sexual slavery that involved an estimated 80,000 to 200,000 victims from throughout Asia, particularly Korea and China. Looked at in starkest relief, the democratically elected leader of the world’s second richest nation — one that currently aspires to international leadership in