Roundup: Talking About History

Hisane Masaki: Is Japan a Cultural Looter?

[Hisane Masaki is a Tokyo-based journalist, commentator and scholar on international politics and economics. Masaki’s email address is Yiu45535@nifty.com.] Italian authorities investigate Roman antiquities in Japanese museums, just as Japanlaunches a global cultural offensive.

Aaron Sussman: The destructive legacy of Agent Orange

[Aaron Sussman is the co-founder and Executive Editor of Incite Magazine; he can be contacted at Aaron@InciteMagazine.org. For more of Sussman's work, visit www.ACrowdedFire.com. ] "This is the crime of which I accuse my country . . . and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not kno

Michael C. Dorf : The Big News in the Rehnquist FBI File: There is None

[Michael C. Dorf is the Isidor & Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia University. He is the author of No Litmus Test: Law and Politics in the Twenty-First Century and he blogs at www.michaeldorf.org.] Revelations from the recently-released FBI file of the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist have had legal observers all atwitter over two particularly salacious details: First, that Rehnquist had a long-time addiction to a prescription drug; and second, that while he was hosp

Catesby Leigh: Why presidential portraiture lost its stature.

[Mr. Leigh is at work on a book about public monuments.] Days after President Ford's death on Dec. 26, his portrait appeared on the Washington Post's front page. The picture hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, the only venue besides the White House with likenesses of all the nation's past presidents. The Post photo of this rather bland and ingratiating production--the work of Everett Raymond Kinstler--served as a poignant reminder that the once-august genre of presidential portr

Andrei S. Markovits: Why Europe Dislikes America

[Andrei S. Markovits is a professor of comparative politics and German studies at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. This essay is adapted from his book Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America, to be published this month by Princeton University Press.] When my father and I arrived in the United States as immigrants from Romania — by way of Vienna — in the summer of 1960, we spent a number of weeks living with American families in the greater New York area. Some were Jews,

Eric Foner: The Antislavery Politics of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln

The abolition of slavery in the United States appears in retrospect so inevitable that it is difficult to recall how unlikely it seemed as late as 1860, the year of Abraham Lincoln's election as President. Slaveowners had pretty much controlled the national government since its inception. The 4 million slaves formed by far the country's largest concentration of property (their economic worth exceeded the value of all the factories, railroads and banks in the country combined). Racism was deeply

Rick Perlstein: Conservatives still don't get Martin Luther King

When Martin Luther King was buried in Atlanta, the live television coverage lasted seven and a half hours. President Johnson announced a national day of mourning: "Together, a nation united and a nation caring and a nation concerned and a nation that thinks more of the nation's interests than we do of any individual self-interest or political interest--that nation can and shall and will overcome." Richard Nixon called King "a great leader--a man determined that the American Negro

Eric Alterman: Why the media (at first) missed the story of the South's oppression of blacks

The Race Beat, by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, is one of those remarkable works of history that make you see your own times more clearly. Subtitled The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation, the book tells the story of how the press, after ignoring the issue for so long, played a crucial role in awakening Americans to the evil--and heroism--in their midst. One of the great mysteries of American history--one that will never be fully solved--is why the No

John Londregan: Don't Cry for PInochet

[John Londregan, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton, is the author of Legislative Institutions and Ideology in Chile.] The death of Augusto Pinochet Ugarte marks the definitive end of his efforts to associate himself with conservatism. It also marks the ultimate success of his efforts to avoid accountability for his murderous behavior as a leader of the Chilean military junta that took power in 1973. In September 1973, Chile was in the midst

Daniel Cohen: The Flawed Agreement between the National Archives and Footnote, Inc.

[Daniel Cohen is Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University and the Director of Research Projects at the Center for History and New Media. ] I suppose it's not breaking news that libraries and archives aren't flush with cash. So it must be hard for a director of such an institution when a large corporation, or even a relatively small one, comes knocking wi

Robert Crease: The Internet is affecting not only how scientists communicate, but also how future science historians will have to work

[Robert P Crease is chairman of the Department of Philosophy, State University of New York at Stony Brook and historian at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, e-mail rcrease@notes.cc.sunysb.edu] Until quite recently, letters were the most common way – and often the only way – for scientists to communicate informally with each other. It is not surprising therefore that science historians have long relied on letters as invaluable source

Meredith L. McGill: Lurking in the Blogosphere of the 1840s

[Meredith L. McGill examines the relations between intellectual property law and literary publishing in American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853 (Philadelphia, 2003). She is associate professor of English at Rutgers University.] These days I find I’m turning more and more to Internet blogs for the kind of sustenance I used to derive from magazine writing. The magazines pile up unread as I spend my time hunched over my computer, checking in on my favorite academic

Mark Oppenheimer: Why MLK's speeches resonate

[Mr. Oppenheimer, the editor of In Character (www.incharacter.org), is writing a book about contemporary American oratory.] For most Americans, to watch Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech is to be introduced to something that is wonderfully familiar--we all recognize the words--but also somewhat alien. The dignity with which the men on the dais and the thousands in the audience carry themselves, wearing well-pressed slack

Anne Applebaum: Poland's Unholy Past

Like so many other scandals, this one unfolded in a pattern at once familiar and depressing. First there was an unsubstantiated leak in a somewhat marginal weekly; then a denial. Then there were more substantial leaks in more mainstream media; then more denials. Then, all at once, there were behind-the-scenes maneuvers, interventions at high levels and, finally, at the last possible minute, a resignation. But this scandal had a few twists: Instead of a politician, the authority figu

Susan Breitkopf: Lost ... The Looting of Iraq’s Antiquities

The only real comparison is to the surface of the moon. Craters as deep as 16 feet cover multi-acre sites that are remnants of what is widely considered the cradle of civilization. The craggy, arid earth, all but barren of vegetation, lies in mounds alongside the deep pits where thousands of Iraqi antiquities—cuneiform tablets, ancient scrolls and kings commemorated in stone that might give clues to how civilization began—have been ripped from their resting places and sold to nefarious (or

Alicia C. Shepard: How Woodward learned not to rush to judgment

[Ms. Shepard, who teaches journalism at American University, is the author of Woodward and Bernstein: Life in the Shadow of Watergate. Click here for her website.] Many people often attack best-selling author Bob Woodward for not including his opinion or making a judgment in his many books. It has a lot to do with Gerald Ford. Woodward and his partner, Carl Bernstein, played a key role in helping to bring down Pr

Edwin Black: Nazis rode to war on GM wheels

[Edwin Black is the author of the award-winning "IBM and the Holocaust" and the recently published "Internal Combustion: How Corporations and Governments Addicted the World to Oil and Derailed the Alternatives." This article is adapted from an investigative series done for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.] James D. Mooney thrust his arm diagonally, watching its reflection in his hotel suite mirror. Not quite right. He tried once again. Still not right. Was it too s

James Castagnera: Rehnquist’s Hypocrisy

[Jim Castagnera is a Philadelphia lawyer and writer, and the Associate Provost/Associate Counsel at Rider University, Lawrenceville/Princeton, NJ.] Newly released FBI records reveal that a physician prescribed a powerful sleeping pill for the late William Rehnquist when he was an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. According to these records, the doctor prescribed 500 milligrams of Placidyl every evening. Instead, the justice popped 1500 milligrams every night before bedd

Bill Schneider: Seymour Martin Lipset's view of democracy

[Mr. Schneider is senior political analyst for CNN and the co-author, with Seymour Martin Lipset, of "The Confidence Gap" (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).] Many years ago, Seymour Martin Lipset, the eminent political sociologist who died last week at age 84, startled me, his student, with a casual remark. "I don't believe in education," he said. "I believe in politics." This great scholar, who had taught at Columbia, Berkeley, Harvard and later S

Dennis Ross: Don't play with maps of the Middle East

I BECAME embroiled in a controversy with former President Jimmy Carter over the use of two maps in his recent book, “Palestine Peace Not Apartheid.” While some criticized what appeared to be the misappropriation of maps I had commissioned for my book, “The Missing Peace,” my concern was always different. I was concerned less with where the maps had originally come from — Mr. Carter has said that he used an atlas that was published after my book appeared — and more with how they were