Roundup: Talking About History

Mary Habeck: What is jihadism?

Who is the enemy, and what is this thing called jihadism that everyone has been talking about? Jihadism is a modern word, not something from the Quran. Jihadis, or jihadists, call themselves salafi jihadi or salafiyya jihadiyya (-iyya in Arabic is equivalent to -ism).When I first saw the term in early 2002, I thought it perfectly described the people we're fighting and that the ideal name for the conflict we're involved in might be a war on jihadis,

Gabor Boritt: The Gettysburg drafts

[Mr. Boritt is the author of "The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows" (Simon & Schuster, www.gettysburggospel.com).] In the middle of a terrible war that would take the lives of more than 600,000 Americans, Abraham Lincoln went to a little Pennsylvania town on Nov. 19, 1863, to dedicate the nation's first national cemetery and to explain why the war had to go on. In some 270 words he gave the world a d

Andrew Leonard: Milton Friedman's bullets

In his book"Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations," economic journalist David Warsh tells the story of"the most famous dinner party in the history of modern economics." That was the night Ronald Coase came to dinner at Aaron Director's home to defend his views of transaction costs against a skeptical Chicago department. Coase had submitted a paper arguing that simply assigning property rights and then letting market processes take their course was usually a better solution than costl

Ben Terrall and John Miller: East Timor Massacre Victims Still Waiting for Justice

[Ben Terrall is a San Francisco-based writer. John M. Miller is National Coordinator of the East Timor and Indonesia Action Network <http://www.etan.org/> in New York.] This November 12 marks the fifteenth anniversary of the 1991 massacre at the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili, East Timor (also called Timor-Leste). On that day, Indonesian soldiers killed at least 271 East Timorese civilians nonviolently marching to demand a UN-su

Adam Cohen: Looking Back on Louis Brandeis on His 150th Birthday

In 1908, Louis Brandeis turned American law on its head with the “Brandeis brief.” The Supreme Court was in the midst of the notorious Lochner era, in which a pro-business majority routinely struck down laws protecting workers’ health and safety. Brandeis was defending an Oregon law that limited women’s workdays to 10 hours. It seemed likely the court would rule, as it just had in a similar case, that maximum-hours laws violated employers’ “right of free contract.” In his brief, Bra

Jonathan Zimmerman: Hey, check out those yahoos down in Florida!

[JONATHAN ZIMMERMAN teaches education and history at New York University. He is the author of"Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century," which was published last month by Harvard University Press.] Can you believe it?What a joke!Those are the types of words we’ve heard from my fellow historians about a recent Florida law, which declared that “American history shall be viewed as factual, not constructed.” And the historians ar

Harvey J. Kaye: Gift From The Greatest Generation

[Harvey J. Kaye is Ben & Joyce Rosenberg Professor of Social Change and Development Director, Center for History and Social Change University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. He is the author of Thomas Paine and the Promise of America and is currently writing FDR, the Four Freedoms, the Greatest Generation, and Us.] Progressive pundits and academics have never really grasped the meaning and significance of their fellow Americans' enthusiasm for the "Greatest Generation." At s

Linda Gordon: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment

[Editor: This article is accompanied by a stunning collage of pictures. Click on the SOURCE link above to see them.] In 1942 the U.S. War Relocation Authority hired documentary photographer Dorothea Lange to photograph the World War II internment of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans. Lange is now a world-famous documentary photographer, best known for chronicling the Great Depression of the 1930s. Her work is the subject of more than a dozen glossy art books. Even those who

Ann Louise Bardach: It was the first act of airline terrorism in the Americas

It was the first act of airline terrorism in the Americas: thirty years ago, seventy-three people died in the bombing of a Cuban passenger plane. Now, one alleged mastermind lives freely in Miami, while another awaits trial on other charges in Texas. With Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez insisting the CIA was behind the bombing, why won’t the Bush administration at last resolve enduring suspicions? A tale of thwarted dreams, frustrated justice, and murder in the sky. On October 6, 1976,

Jacques Berlinerblau: The Bible is exceedingly popular and influential. So why aren't the scholars who study it?

[Jacques Berlinerblau is director of the Program for Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. He is the author of The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously (Cambridge University Press, 2005).] This is a great time for the Bible, but can the same be said for biblical scholarship? That is most likely a question that won't be addressed later this month when biblical scholars descend upon Washington for their annual

Garin K. Hovannisian: The folly of jailing genocide deniers

[Garin K. Hovannisian is the editor of UCLA's journal of opinion and culture.] Sticks and stones can break your bones, but words can incarcerate you. Thus spake the National Assembly of France last month, when it voted to fine deniers of Turkey's 1915 genocide of Armenians up to 45,000 euros or send them on a maximum yearlong holiday to prison. The measure would join a series of European laws that have criminalized denial of the Jewish Holocaust. Although i

Norman Davies: How we didn't win the war . . . but the Russians did

“History will be kind to me,” predicted Winston Churchill, “because I intend to write it.” And so it proved. Churchill’s The Second World War, which began to appear in 1948, largely set the agenda for all subsequent presentations of the war years, especially in western countries: Britain stands in the centre of the conflict and her survival paves the way for victory. As Churchill has it, Britain’s enemies, the axis powers, provide the sole authors of aggression, of criminal conduct

Maureen Waller: Our English queens have made better monarchs than our kings

[Maureen Waller’s Sovereign Ladies: The Six Reigning Queens of England is published by John Murray today.] “The English like queens,” the grandmother of the future Queen Victoria commented cheerfully on receiving news of her birth. It was not an accolade that was lightly earned. Like latter-day career women aiming for the boardroom, our queens regnant have had to work hard to overcome the drawbacks of their sex. In almost 1,000 years since the Norman Conquest there have been only si

Elizabeth Kolbert: The Armenian genocide and the politics of silence

On September 14, 2000, Representatives George Radanovich, Republican of California, and David Bonior, Democrat of Michigan, introduced a House resolution-later to be known as H.R. 596-on the slaughter of the Armenians. The measure urged the President, in dealing with the matter, to demonstrate "appropriate understanding and sensitivity." It further instructed him on how to phrase his annual message on the Armenian Day of Remembrance: the President should refer to the atrocities as &quo

Walter Laqueur: Will science empower evildoers to destroy us?

[Mr. Laqueur was, from 1978 to 2001, co-chairman of the international research council at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.] In 1824, at the age of 81, Thomas Jefferson wrote to his friend William Ludlow about the evident "progress of society." He noted that one could see in America itself a "march of civilization" observable elsewhere--that is, "the progress of man from the infancy of creation to the present day." Where

Andrew Roberts: Suez ... The 'betrayal' of Eden

The modern-day analogy of a prime minister called Anthony committing British troops in the Middle Eastern theatre in the face of much domestic opposition is too obvious to be laboured, although it is noticeable that Tony Blair seems to have learnt from Churchill's dictum: "We must never get out of step with the Americans - never." If only Eden had paid more attention to the sensibilities of the Eisenhower administration as it faced the 1956 presidential elections, much mi

James Martin: Saints That Weren’t

[James Martin, a Jesuit priest, is the author of “My Life With the Saints.”] EVEN though today is All Saints’ Day, most Americans probably don’t know the name of the newest American saint. Or that, like several saints, she was mistreated by the church that she served so faithfully. Last month, Pope Benedict XVI declared Mother Théodore Guérin, who lived and worked in rural Indiana in the mid-1800’s, a saint. She is therefore worthy of “public veneration” by Catholics worldwide. M

Max Boot: Who likes Ike?

THE 50TH anniversary of the Suez Canal crisis and the Hungarian Revolution, which both came to a head in October 1956, should spark another look at the president who presided over these two fine messes. Dwight D. Eisenhower's reputation was rehabilitated in the 1980s by political scientist Fred Greenstein, author of "The Hidden-Hand Presidency," and historian Stephen Ambrose, author of a two-volume biography. They punctured the myth that he was a brainless doofus who spen

Max Boot: Are we the Mongols of the Information Age?

GREAT POWERS cease to be great for many reasons. In addition to the causes frequently debated — economics, culture, disease, geography — there is an overarching trend. Over the last 500 years, the fate of nations has been increasingly tied to their success, or lack thereof, in harnessing revolutions in military affairs. These are periods of momentous change when new technologies combine with new doctrines and new forms of organization to transform not only the face of battle but als

Emily Rosenberg: Bursting America's Imperial Bubble

[Emily S. Rosenberg is a professor of history at the University of California at Irvine. Among her books is Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900-1930 (Harvard University Press, 1999).] During the 1990s, a broad array of public commentators and scholars began to argue that America's "empire" could transform the world. Augmented by sophisticated new weapons and global military bases, extension of American reach could, they s