Roundup: Talking About History

Jonathan Zimmerman: Beware China's Role in US Chinese Classes

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of “Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century,” which will be published in the fall by Harvard University Press.] Let’s suppose that a cruel, tyrannical, and repressive foreign government offered to pay for American children to study its national language in our schools. Would you take the deal? Actually, we already have. Starting this fall, the College Board i

Brian M. Carney: The conspiracy-minded Oliver Stone curiously couldn't find a conspiracy in 9/11 even though there was one

... When word got out that Oliver Stone was making a movie about September 11, many feared we were in for another iteration of his 1991 conspiracy-minded "JFK." Those fears were unfounded; "World Trade Center" plays it straight. It is scrupulously apolitical and emotionally correct, tugging on all the right heartstrings and offering a view not so much of heroism on that terrible day as of basic human kindness and perseverance in the face of unimaginable horror and destruction

A.O. Scott: Pinned Under the Weight of Skyscrapers and History in World Trade Center

How will Hollywood respond? This question began to surface not long after the Sept. 11 attacks — shockingly soon after, if memory serves. It was impossible to banish the thought, even in the midst of that day’s horror and confusion, that the attacks themselves represented a movie scenario made grotesquely literal. What other frame of reference did we have for burning skyscrapers and commandeered airplanes? And then our eyes and minds were so quickly saturated with the actual, endles

Martin A. Davis, Jr. : Know Your Enemy (9/11)

[Martin Davis is Senior Writer and Editor for the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. A former adjunct professor of medieval history at the University of South Carolina, he made the jump to journalism in 2000. As a writer and copy editor for National Journal, a respected political weekly, Martin covered religion and public policy issues as well as the nonprofit world. He was named managing editor of Philanthropy magazine in 2002 and for three years wrote extensively on philanthropy and education issue

Scott McLemee: Conspiracy theories about 9/11 were inevitable even if the plot wasn't

Last month, Thomas M. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton published Without Precedent, an account of their time as co-chairs (Republican and Democratic, respectively) of the 9/11 Commission. Whatever the uses of a deliberate and scrupulous bipartisanship in political life, it does not make for good memoir-writing. I read it, but kept slipping into that mild coma that is an occupational hazard for anyone who reviews a lot of not-very-good or just-sort-of-okay books for newspapers. Yet one thing

Daniel Pipes: CAIR's Twisted Stand on Academic Freedom

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.] Hark the ringing prose about academic freedom by Rima Kapitan, the volunteer attorney in CAIR's Chicago office.Another casualty in the

Juan Cole: How Google Is Changing Scholarship

Google books is an astonishing, epochal development. But I am tired of journalists who write about it ignoring the fact that the core of the digitized collection is the 7 million volumes at the University of Michigan. It is always mentioned that Harvard and Oxford are participating. Last I knew, Oxford offered them access to 40,000 volumes.. But U-M President Mary Sue Coleman offered Google access everything we have, and has been good at giving the project an intellectual rationale. Goog

James Castagnera: A plagiarism case that the media largely overlooked

[Mr. Castagnera, a Philadelphia journalist and attorney, is the Associate Provost at Rider University and author of the weekly newspaper column ìAttorney at Large.] Back at the beginning of the summer I published a column in this space entitled “Who Done It? Creative Artists Wrangle Over Ownership.” Among my examples was the lawsuit between Dan Brown, author of the all-time bestselling novel, “The DaVinci Code,” and his publisher, Random House, on the one hand, and writer Le

Hadassa Ben-Itto: The Lie That Wouldn't Die ... The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Hadassa Ben-Itto, a former Israeli judge, honorary president and past president of the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists. She is the author of the book The Lie That Wouldn't Die: The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion, now published in nine languages. FP: What inspired you to write this book? Ben-Itto: During my years on the bench I was occasionally invited to represent Israel in various internat

George F. Will: The Uneasy Sleep of Japan's Dead

TOKYO -- The past is present everywhere, but Japan is an unusually history-haunted nation. Elsewhere the Cold War is spoken of in the past tense. Japan, however, lives in a dangerous neighborhood with two communist regimes -- truculent China and weird North Korea. For Japan, the fall of the Berlin Wall did not close an epoch. Even World War II still shapes political discourse because of a Shinto shrine in the center of this city. Young soldiers leaving Japan during that war often wo

Daniel Kehlmann: Guenter Grass .. A Prisoner of the Nobel

[Daniel Kehlmann is the author of the forthcoming novel “Measuring the World.” This article was translated from the German by Ross Benjamin.] A DIDACTIC play attempts to explain what man must do to make the world better and life more rational; a tragedy shows that life will never be rational and the world will never be good. Long before Bertolt Brecht, German culture was enamored with parables about the triumph of reason. Yet man is a tragic being, irrational and divided within hims

Peter Gay: The Fictions of Günter Grass

[Peter Gay, a professor emeritus of history at Yale, is the author of the forthcoming “Modernism: The Lure of Heresy.”] INDIGNATION, it seems, is the most gratifying of all emotions. Nothing is quite so soothing as the feeling of superiority over sinners who have committed offenses that we are sure to be innocent of and that allow us to purse our lips in disdain: another giant with feet of clay! I have been drawn to these sober reflections by the Günter Grass affair. So

Peter Steinfels: What would you put on a list of forces that have shaped and reshaped religion in the United States?

Broad religious movements like frontier revivalism, the Social Gospel or the pluralism of faiths owed to Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu immigrants? Theological currents like Transcendentalism in the 19th century or neo-Orthodoxy in the 20th? Theological battles like those over slavery, evolution and church-state ties? Charismatic preachers like George Whitefield, Billy Graham and Martin Luther King Jr.? How about the Federal-Aid H

Franck Salameh: Arab Nationalism Run Rampant at Middlebury

[Mr. Salameh teaches Arabic studies at Boston College. This article was written for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.] At Middlebury College's Arabic Summer School, where I recently taught Arabic, students were exposed to more than intensive language instruction. Inside the classroom and across campus, administrators and language teachers adhered to a restrictive Arab-nationalist view of what is generically referred to as the "Arab world." In practice, this

NYT Editorial: Gunter Grass's work still stands

In a recent interview, the German author Günter Grass, who was 6 years old when Hitler came to power, added a significant, and overwhelming, detail to the account of his war years. He has always admitted being a Nazi sympathizer. Now he has admitted being drafted by the Waffen SS, the military arm of that criminal corps, in the last winter of World War II. He served in a tank division based in Dresden and claims he never fired a shot. He also states that at the time, he saw nothing wrong with th

Stephen Kinzer: The 14 Governments the US has Overthrown

[Stephen Kinzer's Overthrow recounts the 14 times the United States helped overthrow foreign governments. Kinzer is a reporter at the New York Times.] I. FIRST BURST OF EXPANSIONISM HAWAII: In 1893, a group of sugar planters and descendants of missionari

Betsy Ross--Did she sew the first flag?

In June 1776, George Washington and a secret committee, assembled to create the first American flag, visited the Philadelphia upholstery business of Betsy Ross. The recently widowed seamstress was eager for any kind of work, but Ross wasn't thrilled with one detail of the original design. The flag featured a six-pointed star, a symbol she objected to because it was the commonly used star in English heraldry. America, she said, should use new imagery: a five-pointed star. To silence the men's pro

Australian Editorial: Australian history should not be taught as tragedy or farce

ADDRESSING the dinner opening today's Australian History Summit last night, federal Education Minister Julie Bishop said: ''History is not peace studies. History is not social justice awareness week. Or consciousness-raising about ecological sustainability. History is history.'' She is exactly right. Yet for too long Australian history, when it is taught at all, has been used as an excuse to indoctrinate students in politically correct fads rather than give them a solid grounding i

Julie Bishop: If we forget our nation's past, we will fail our future

[Australian Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop, at the country's "history summit."] LAST year Roy Eccleston, a journalist at The Australian, returned home after four years ... in the US. There his young son learned the basics about important Americans in first grade: from George Washington to Martin Luther King. His daughter's fourth-grade history book traced the national story from Native Americans through the Revolutionary War and onwards. Since returni

Humberto Fontova: Historians Have Absolved Fidel Castro

[Humberto Fontova is the author of "Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant," a Conservative Book Club Main Selection.] "You may pronounce me guilty," declared Adolf Hitler during the trial in 1924 for his failed Rathaus putsch, "but the eternal court of history will absolve me." "Condemn me, it doesn't matter," declared Fidel Castro during the trial in 1953 for his failed Moncada putsch. "History will absolve me."