Roundup: Talking About History

Peggy Noonan: Prepared to hate the Woodward book, she loves it

Thirty-two years into his career as a writer of books, Bob Woodward has won a reputation as slipshod ("Wired"), slippery ("All the President's Men," "The Final Days"), opportunistic ("Veil"; everything) and generally unaware of the implications even of those facts he's offered that have gone unchallenged. As a reporter he's been compared to a great dumb shark, remorselessly moving toward hunks of information he can swallow but not digest. As a writer his s

C. Ikehara: The Constitution and Original Intent ... Sorting Out the Issues with Mozart's Help

[C. Ikehara has been a Librarian for over ten years. His Masters Degree in Library Science is from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.] "Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it." (George Orwell)      In Germany, there is a flap over a production of an opera performance that includes a scene with the bloody severed head of Mohammed as well a

Rashid Khalidi: The challenges of writing Palestinian history

[Rashid Khalidi holds the Edward Said Chair in Arab Studies at Columbia University, where he directs the Middle East Institute. This essay is adapted from his new book, ``The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood" (Beacon Press). ] AS I WRITE, with rival Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah unable to agree on the fundamental basis for a new coalition government, and with the devastating effects of the Israeli and international boycott provoked by Hamas'

Warren Kozak: The Conspiratorial Mind

.... it should come as no surprise that five years after 9/11, there now appears to be a growing number of people who say Al Qaeda did not perpetrate the attacks on that day. They believe this, in spite of the fact that the terror was witnessed firsthand by thousands of people and tens of millions more on live television. Osama bin Laden has even taken credit for the attacks, and that confession is captured on videotape as well. But to conspiracy theorists, evidence is as irrelevant as truth. Ev

Mark Noll: 50 years ago, evangelicals were a sideshow of American culture. No more.

[Mark A. Noll is the Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame and the author of numerous books, including The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (University of North Carolina).] ... In retrospect, it is clear that the fundamentalist-modernist controversies of the early 20th century had greatly weakened American Protestantism, leading to an intellectual collapse. By the 1950s, specific Christian influence of any sort was rare in the nation's leading uni

Judith Thurman: Marie Antoinette, out of the closet

Marie Antoinette, the ex-Queen of France, wa thirty-seven when she was taken from her cell in th Conciergerie, the fourteenth-century fortress on the Îl de la Cité, and paraded in an open oxcart to th scaffold in the Place de la Révolution, a mile away Some of the onlookers in the vast crowd lining th route that morning, on October 16, 1793, may hav been among those screaming obscenities at her i 1789, when they marched with pikes on Versailles; o axed their way, in 1792, into her apart

Johan Norburg: Humanity's Greatest Achievement

[Mr. Norberg, a senior fellow at the Center for the New Europe, is author of "In Defense of Global Capitalism" (Cato, 2003).] ... In the last 100 years, we have created more wealth than in the 100,000 years before that, and not because we work more. To the contrary: In the last century, work hours have been halved in the Western world. It is because new ideas have made it possible for us to work smarter and find easier ways to satisfy our needs and demands. Th

Frederick Rasmussen: Let's Not Forget Axis Sally

The death this week of Toguri D'Aquino, who was better known as Tokyo Rose, was the last of the infamous World War II enemy radio propagandists. She was 90. Axis Sally, her sultry-voiced European counterpart who broadcast for Radio Berlin during the war years, was actually Maine-born Mildred Elizabeth Sisk. Born in Portland and raised in New York City and Ohio, she later took the name of Mildred Gillars after her mother remarried. Gillars had planned to be an act

Gary Palmer: The Harlem Hell Fighters (WW I)

[Gary Palmer is president of the Alabama Policy Institute, a non-partisan, non-profit research and education organization dedicated to the preservation of free markets, limited government and strong families, which are indispensable to a prosperous society. ] History, particularly military history, is a great interest of mine and occupies a great deal of my "discretionary" reading. Not too long ago I came across a story that tells a little history of World War I that you m

John J. Miller: Is Military History Dead?

... Although the keenest students of military history have often been soldiers, the subject isn’t only for them. “I don’t believe it is possible to treat military history as something entirely apart from the general national history,” said Theodore Roosevelt to the American Historical Association in 1912. For most students, that’s how military history was taught — as a key part of a larger narrative. After the Second World War, however, the field boomed as veterans streamed into higher education

Eric Gibson: Selling art once stolen by the Nazis sparks controversy

Christie's recently announced that, in November, it will sell four paintings by the early-20th-century Austrian modernist Gustav Klimt, works whose combined estimated value is between $93 million and $140 million. The news has caused a sensation, and not only because of the greatness of the art and the size of the price tag. These Klimts, three landscapes and a portrait, are part of a group of five turned over to Maria Altmann by the Austrian government earlier this year. After a se

Geoffrey Wheatcroft vs. Carol Gould: Was Israel Born of Terrorism?

Editor: This week Geoffrey Wheatcroft penned an essay in the Guardian which claimed that Israel embraced from its origins the kind of terrorist tactics it now condemns. His article was subsequently answered in frontpagemag.com by Carol Gould. Excerpts from both articles follow. [Geoffrey Wheatcroft is the author of The Controv

William Underwood: Reparations for Korean Forced Labor in Japan

QUESTION: Choose the correct statement about Korea under Japanese rule. 1) A government-general was established and Ito Hirobumi was the first governor-general. 2) Korea was the first foreign territory acquired by Japan after the Meiji Restoration. 3) The system of giving Koreans Japanese names was implemented at the time of annexation. 4) Koreans were forcibly transported to Japan during World War II. [1] Four is the correct answer to the world hi

The woman falsely accused of being 'Tokyo Rose' dies in Chicago

CHICAGO — Iva Toguri D'Aquino, who was convicted and later pardoned of being World War II propagandist "Tokyo Rose," died Tuesday of natural causes, said her nephew, William Toguri. She was 90. Tokyo Rose was the name given by soldiers to a female radio broadcaster responsible for anti-American transmissions intended to demoralize soldiers fighting in the Pacific theater. D'Aquino was the only U.S. citizen identified among the potential suspects. In 1949, she

Jonathan Chait: The Myth of The Fighting Irish

You have probably heard the story about how a former Notre Dame football player, George Gipp, lay dying in bed and asked his coach, Knute Rockne, to tell the players to "win one for the Gipper." Later on, when his team is trailing at halftime, Rockne goes on to relay this moment to his players, who, in a burst of inspiration, go on to win the game. It is one of the most iconic episodes in the history of American sport. It's also a fabrication. Rockne never hea

Ruth Franklin: Anti-Semitism in Poland after World War II was even worse than you thought

In spring 1945, not long after his liberation from Auschwitz, Primo Levi, traveling across southern Poland by train, got off in a small town to stretch his legs and immediately found himself at the center of a group of curious people, all speaking excitedly, and incomprehensibly, in Polish. "Perhaps I was among the first dressed in 'zebra' clothes to appear in that place," he surmised, referring to the striped uniform of the death camp, in The Reawakening, his memoir of the journey hom

Stephen Oppenheimer: Myths of British Ancestry

The fact that the British and the Irish both live on islands gives them a misleading sense of security about their unique historical identities. But do we really know who we are, where we come from and what defines the nature of our genetic and cultural heritage? Who are and were the Scots, the Welsh, the Irish and the English? And did the English really crush a glorious Celtic heritage? Everyone has heard of Celts, Anglo-Saxons and Vikings. And most of us are familiar with the idea

David Greenberg: Even Presidents Doodle

[DAVID GREENBERG, who teaches history and media studies at Rutgers University, wrote the text for "Presidential Doodles," published by Basic Books.] THE ART OF DOODLING is an ancient one. Prehistoric South African cave drawings and Mesopotamian clay tablets bear marks unrelated to their main content. So it should come as no surprise that presidents doodle too. In fact, they exhibit a range of styles and subjects as varied as the personalities of the men who have held the o

Tsuneishi Kei-ichi: New Facts about US Payoff to Japan’s Biological Warfare Unit 731

[Tsuneishi Kei-ichi is a Kanagawa University professor who specializes in disarmament of biological and chemical weapons. He is the leading specialist on Japan's wartime biological and chemical warfare Unit 731. This article was distributed by the Kyodo News Agency and appeared in the Kanagawa Shimbun on August 18, 2005. Translated by James Orr.] Sponsored by the Nagasaki Peace Museum last July 9 the top Japanese researcher on Japan’s wartime biological weapons (BW) program, Tsunei

Michael Novak: Washington's Faith and the Birth of America

Almost everything about George Washington was hard-earned, and his faith was no exception. Although he ended up owning a library of nearly 1,000 books, some 40 or so concerning religious questions, his preferred teacher was experience. In his father’s line there was at least one Anglican cleric, and his mother was unusually devout and quite attentive to the religious life of her children. But Washington’s faith mostly grew out of his diligent efforts at self-improvement. Washington