Roundup: Talking About History

Atilla Yayla: What happened when I criticized Ataturk

What is the defining line between a civilized and uncivilized country? In my own experience in Turkey since Nov. 19, it is freedom of expression: I have been accused of treason in the press and suspended from my university for defending the common values of civilization and re-evaluating Turkey's history. I am an academic, a university professor, studying politics, political philosophy and political economy. On Nov. 18, I spoke on a panel in the western coastal city of Izmir organiz

Robert Trumbull: A Day of Infamy, Two Years of Hard Work

Here, 64 years late, are edited excerpts from a dispatch sent to The New York Times by Robert Trumbull, the paper’s correspondent at Pearl Harbor. It details a triumphant but mostly forgotten story of World War II: the salvage effort that rebuilt the Pacific Fleet after the Japanese attack. A city of seamen, engineers, divers, carpenters, welders, pipe fitters and other industrial workers arose overnight at the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard. Its slogan was “We keep them fit to fight,” and

Jeremy Siegel: Irrational Exuberance, Reconsidered

[Mr. Siegel is professor of finance at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.] Ten years ago yesterday, Alan Greenspan made what was to become the most famous speech in his 18-year tenure as chairman of the Federal Reserve. Against a backdrop of a strong economy and soaring stock market, Mr. Greenspan said: "How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values? . . . We should not underestimate . . . the interactions of asset markets and the eco

Russell Jacoby: Hannah Arendt's Fame Rests on the Wrong Foundation

[Russell Jacoby is a professor in residence in the history department at the University of California at Los Angeles. He is the author, most recently, of Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age (Columbia University Press, 2005).] A street is named after her. Back-to-back conferences celebrate her. New books champion her. Hannah Arendt, who was born 100 years ago this past October, has joined the small world of philosophical heroes. Nor has this attention come to h

Andrew Leonard: Mystery Cassandra

Who said this, and when? Our civilization rests upon a technological base which requires enormous quantities of fossil fuels. What assurance do we then have that our energy needs will continue to be supplied by fossil fuels: The answer is -- in the long run -- none. In the face of the basic fact that fossil fuel reserves are finite, the exact length of time these reserves will last is important in only one respect: the longer they last, the more time do we h

Michael Lind: Fifth worse president in history

... To qualify a president for the Worst of All Time list, a war must be catastrophic as well as unnecessary. Ronald Reagan's invasion of Grenada, George H.W. Bush's invasion of Panama and Bill Clinton's invasion of Haiti don't cut it -- they were unnecessary, but minor. And presidents can be forgiven costly wars that were necessary or hard to avoid, such as Harry S. Truman's stalemated war in Korea and Lyndon B. Johnson's failed war in Vietnam, each of which was a Cold War battle more than a se

Roger Matthews and Michael Seymour: Iraq ... must the loss of heritage continue?

[Roger Matthews was the last resident director of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, living in Baghdad until 1990, and is currently professor of Near Eastern archaeology at ucl Institute of Archaeology. Michael Seymour is a specialist in the history and politics of archaeology in the Middle East. He recently completed a doctorate at UCL Institute of Archaeology, and is now Raymond and Beverley Sackler scholar in ancient Iranian studies at the British Museum for 2006–7.] In A

Andrew Delbanco: Teaching About War

[Andrew Delbanco is director of American Studies at Columbia University. His most recent book, Melville: His World and Work, has just been published in paperback by Vintage.] It's a peculiarity of academic life that, every fall, I find myself a year older facing students who somehow remain the same age. This poses a problem for anyone who takes seriously John Dewey's dictum that "knowledge of the past and its heritage is of great significance when it enters into the present, b

Eric Foner: Bush is the worst ever

[Eric Foner is DeWitt Clinton professor of history at Columbia University.] Ever since 1948, when Harvard professor Arthur Schlesinger Sr. asked 55 historians to rank U.S. presidents on a scale from "great" to "failure," such polls have been a favorite pastime for those of us who study the American past. Changes in presidential rankings reflect shifts in how we view history. When the first poll was taken, the Reconstruction era that followed the Civi

David Greenberg: At Least He's Not Nixon

[David Greenberg teaches history and media studies at Rutgers University.] In 1950, President Harry S. Truman was under fire for "losing" China to communist forces, engaging in deficit spending and seeking to expand unemployment insurance. Harold E. Stassen, a prominent Republican, blasted him as "the worst president ever to occupy the White House." Four years later, under Dwight D. Eisenhower, job growth had slowed and wages were down. West Virginia Sen. M

Douglas Brinkley: Move over Hoover

[Douglas Brinkley is director of the Roosevelt Center at Tulane University.] Shortly after Thanksgiving I had dinner in California with Ronald Reagan's best biographer, Lou Cannon. Like many historians these days, we discussed whether George W. Bush is, conceivably, the worst U.S. president ever. Cannon bristled at the idea. Bush has two more years to leave his mark, he argued. What if there is a news flash that U.S. Special Forces have killed Osama bin Laden or that North Kor

Vincent J. Cannato: Time's on Bush's Side

[Vincent J. Cannato teaches history at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.] After the 2004 election, a number of terribly depressed people at my university told me what a shame it was that President Bush had been reelected. If only people knew history, they lamented, they would never have voted for him. It must be a comforting thought that this abstract thing called "history" can give us the wisdom to choose the right president, as if history books were

Christian Neef: Diary of a Collapsing Superpower

Editor's Note: Seventeen years ago, the Berlin Wall fell, and two years later the Soviet Union broke apart. More than 1,400 minutes published earlier this month in Russia from meetings that took place behind the closed doors of the Politburo in Moscow read like a thriller from the highest levels of the Kremlin. They reveal Mikhail Gorbachev as a party chief who had to fight bitterly for his reforms and ultimately lost his battle. But in doing so, he changed the course of history and helped bring

Ross Douthat: Poll of historians on the 100 most influential Americans

Who are the most influential figures in American history? The Atlantic recently asked ten eminent historians. The result was The Atlantic’s Top 100—and some insight into the nature of influence and the contingency of history. Was Walt Disney really more influential than Elizabeth Cady Stanton? Benjamin Spock than Richard Nixon? Elvis Presley than Lewis and Clark? John D. Rockefeller than Bill Gates? Babe Ruth than Frank Lloyd Wright? Let the debates begin. It's a nebulous concept, i

M. Shahid Alam: Pitting the West Against Islam (Zionism)

[M. Shahid Alam is professor of economics at Northeastern University, and author of Challenging the New Orientalism: Dissenting Essays on America's 'War Against Islam'.] It is tempting to celebrate the creation of Israel as a great triumph, perhaps the greatest in Jewish history. Indeed, the history of Israel has often been read as the heroic saga of a people marked for extinction, who emerged from Nazi death camps--from Auschwitz, Belzec and Treblinka--to establish their own state

Robert Lacey: A rule for narrating history as poetry

[ Robert Lacey is the author of "Great Tales from English History." The third volume, "The Battle of the Boyne to DNA, 1690-1953," will be published next month.] "The poetry of history," wrote British historian George Macaulay Trevelyan, "lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passion, but now all gone, one

Jack Beatty: What did the Great War accomplish?

... Unlike the British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, who lost a son in the war, or the opposition leader Bonar Law, who lost two sons, Wilson did not spend his family’s blood in the"war to end all wars." The 114,000 U.S. dead and 205,000 U.S. wounded spent the blood. Wilson’s idealism was heartbreaking because their sacrifice, like that of the U.S. troops dying and suffering today in Iraq, was worse than in vain. Rather than peace without victory, U.S. intervention assured a victory with

Timothy Noah: Happy Birthday, Iran-Contra! ... An anniversary the media overlooked

Editors, my Slate colleague Jack Shafer has oft noted, swoon before anniversaries. Shafer's particular bête noire is magazines that celebrate their own anniversaries, but anniversary mania also extends to newspapers and their commemoration of big public events, the most notable recent example being the flood of stories prompted by the fifth anniversary of 9/11. Editors adore anniversaries because they possess a quality prized by managers but rare amid the rude hurly-burly of news: They are

Jonathan Zimmerman: The Historical Fallacy

[Jonathan Zimmerman, who teaches history and education at New York University, is the author of"Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century."] Nobody knows what caused police officers to kill Sean Bell, a 23-year-old African-American, outside a Queens, N.Y., nightclub last weekend. Not the Rev. Al Sharpton, who met with Mayor Michael Bloomberg to demand"fairness and justice." Not the Rev. Herbert Daughtry, who called the episode part of a"pattern of police abuse

Assessment of career of Robert Bellah

Robert N. Bellah turns 80 early next year, and Duke University Press is honoring him with The Robert Bellah Reader, edited by Bellah, an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley, and Steven M. Tipton, a professor of sociology at Emory University. The book, just published, presents a selection of Bellah's work over the last 50 years, along with a new introductory essay he has written about his career. Long one of sociology's most influential scholars, Bellah hel