Roundup: Talking About History

Joseph Mussomeli: "The Worst Genocide Ever" (No, not the Holocaust)

[Mr. Mussomeli is U.S. ambassador to Cambodia.] PHNOM PENH -- One of the greatest crimes of the 20th century has gone unpunished for 30 years. Between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge systematically tortured, starved and "smashed" approximately 2.2 million fellow Cambodians, or between one-fourth and one-third of the entire population. Their list of enemies was long: the indigenous Muslim population, the Vietnamese minority, Buddhist monks, city dwellers, anyone with a diplo

Dionne Grant: Whitewashing slave history in Liverpool?

Blacks in Liverpool question idea of rebranding colonial legacy I approached Liverpool’s infamous Penny Lane half expecting be blinded by bright camera lights flashing from the cameras of those hoping to archive their visit to the lane made famous by the Beatles in 1967 with the No2 hit of the same name. Surprisingly an eerie silence greeted me, accompanied by an idle breeze that spiralled past me and worked its way down the li

Gwen Shaffer: Philadelphia's first integrated housing development turns 50

In 1964 the commonwealth of Pennsylvania hired an industrial designer named Art Friedman to create an exhibit on fair housing. As part of the assignment they sent Friedman to interview homeowners in Greenbelt Knoll, a housing development surrounded on three sides by Pennypack Park. The 19 homes on the cul-de-sac were similar in appearance—all single-story rectangular boxes with flat roofs, broad windows, natural wood siding and tubular metal chimneys soaring toward the sky. Certainl

David Greenberg: Why the villain of The History Boys is the better teacher

[Mr. Greenberg is the author of Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image (2003). He teaches history at Rutgers University.] The opening scene of The History Boys—the Alan Bennett drama that, against the odds, has been enjoying Broadway success—shows a clever but cynical young historian advising British members of Parliament on how to s

Christopher Shea: Historians are finally giving the suburbs their due--and changing their lily-white image

DEPICTIONS OF THE SUBURBS in movies and on TV run the gamut from A to, well, maybe C. Life there is derangingly conformist (``American Beauty"), creepily repressed (``Blue Velvet"), farcical (``Desperate Housewives"), or some combination of the three. What the suburbs never seem like is a setting for history. Dismissed as places without a sense of place, they also seem timeless, in a bad sense: Except for the square footage, what separates the Levittown of the 1950s f

John Dean: The Story Behind the Bogus History of Watergate Presented in Silent Coup

This is an excerpt from John Dean's new book, Conservatives Without Conscience. ... About 7:00 a.m. on Monday, May 6, 1991, I received a phone call that was both literally and figuratively a wake-up call, one that would dramatically change the political world as I thought I

Chad Millman talks about his new book, Detonators: The Secret Plot to Destroy America and An Epic Hunt for Justice, about a 1916 terrorist attack in New York City with eerie parallels

An explosion that rocked lower Manhattan. Foreign terrorists. An American government that hadn’t connected the dots. 9/11? No, a different, long-forgotten incident that took place 90 years ago. In his new book Detonators: The Secret Plot to Destroy America and An Epic Hunt for Justice (Little, Brown), Chad Millman, 35, a senior editor at ESPN The Magazine, tells the gripping saga of foreign espionage on American soil in the days before World War I. Millman, who has also written two sports boo

Jesse Lemisch: Weather Underground Rises from the Ashes: They're Baack!

I attended part of a January 20, 2006, "day workshop of interventions" -- aka "a day of dialogic interventions" -- at Columbia University on "Radical Politics and the Ethics of Life."1 The event aimed "to stage a series of encounters . . . to bring to light . . . the political aporias [sic] erected by the praxis of urban guerrilla groups" in Europe and the United States from the 1960s to the 80s.2 Hosted by Columbia's Anthropology Department, workshop spea

Peniel E. Joseph : Black Power's Powerful Legacy

[Peniel E. Joseph is an assistant professor of Africana studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His book Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America will be published by Henry Holt and Company this month.] As far back as I can remember, I have been fascinated by what has been called the "Black Power" movement. As a young boy in the 1980s, I sat mesmerized before public-television documentaries about the civil-rights str

Robert Skidelsky: Hot, Cold & Imperial

The question of how the world should be run, and America's part in its running, is the subject of much academic and political discussion in Washington these days. The factual questions are: Is the United States on the road to becoming an empire like the Roman and British Empires before it? What are the prospects for such an enterprise in today's world? More speculatively, does globalization require an imperial underpinning? There are also questions of value: Is imperialism a good or bad thing? S

H-Diplo Roundtable: Eric Alterman, When Presidents Lie

H-Diplo is pleased to announce the publication of the following roundtable: Eric Alterman, When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and Its Consequences (New York: Viking, 2005). Roundtable Editor: Thomas Maddux Reviewers: Carolyn Eisenberg, Lloyd Gardner, Tom Nichols, Melvin Small, Randall Woods Introduction by Thomas Maddux, California State University, Northridge When did the first U.S. President lie to the American public about matters of wa

Vicente Navarro: The Spanish Civil War, 70 Years On ... The Deafening Silence on Franco’s Genocide

Counterpunch Editors’ note: 70 Years ago this week, General Franco launched his attack on the Spanish Republic, backed by Hitler, Mussolini and, tacitly, by the US and other Western powers. Across the next few days and weeks we will be publishing articles on this pivotal struggle, and the imperishable gallantry of the Republic’s defenders. We start with a overview by Vicente Navarro of the enduring significance of the Fascist onslaught and the malign tenacity of Franco's admirers to this day in

Robert Jensen: Florida's Fear of History

[Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center http://thirdcoastactivist.org/. He is the author of "The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege" and "Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity" (both from City Lights Books).] One way to measure the fears of people in power is by the intensity of the

Edward Grey: Historians used to fight about much larger topics

[Edward Gray is associate professor of history at Florida State University and editor of Common-place.] I have a friend who’s always ranting about the fact that historians can no longer handle a good scholarly fight. Mea culpa. Wimp. Coward. That’s me. I have never written anything that put a shot across another historian’s bow. My first book was about a subject historians don’t much care about: language. Insofar as it got any play, it was among the lit crit crowd. And my subsequent

Thomas Doherty: The Wonderful World of Disney Studies

[Thomas Doherty is a professor of American studies at Brandeis University. His most recent book is Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture (Columbia University Press, 2003).] ... When Disney died on December 15, 1966, according to his obituary in Variety, he had earned 31 Oscars, six Emmys, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and was under serious consideration for the Nobel Peace Prize. The first soot in the pixie dust was thrown by the

Fred Barnes: The Gipper's record is being distorted to make President Bush look bad.

was recently asked about President Bush's chances of a political resurgence. Might Mr. Bush be able to recover as strongly as President Reagan did from a slump in his second term in the 1980s? My response was, Reagan recovery? What Reagan recovery? Though he continued his ultimately successful fight to win the Cold War, Reagan achieved nothing new--practically nothing--after the Iran-contra scandal broke in 1986. His presidency was crippled. The Republicans had lost the Senate. His

TSUYOSHI HASEGAWA vs. SADAO ASADA: Debating Hiroshima

Letter from TSUYOSHI HASEGAWA: I would like to respond to Sadao Asada’s review of my book, Racing the Enemy [published in Journal of Strategic Studies 29/1 (February 2006) 169–71]. He raises two important interpretive questions: whether or not there was a ‘race’ between Truman and Stalin, and which event, the atomic bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the Soviet entry into the war, played a more decisive role on Japan’s decision to surrender. On the first issue, I

David R. Roediger: Whiteness Studies ... Where Things Stand Now

[David R. Roediger is a professor of African-American studies and history at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His recent books include Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey From Ellis Island to the Suburbs (Basic Books, 2005; paperback edition from Perseus Books Group, 2006) and the collection of essays History Against Misery (Charles H. Kerr, 2006).] The theologian Thandeka tells of being faced with a daunting request during

Mark Bauerlein: The True Story of America's first black dynasty

[Mr. Bauerlein, a professor at Emory University, is the author of "Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906."] At the 1880 Republican Convention in Chicago, as James Garfield beat Ulysses Grant for the presidential nomination, the post of running mate was still open. Among the candidates was Blanche Bruce, 39-year-old senator from Mississippi and a key player in the party. In his home state, he occupied positions crucial to local influence--county sheriff, tax assessor, s

George Marsden: Henry Ward Beecher was a renown abolitionist. But, it turns out, he was also a philanderer.

[Mr. Marsden, the author of "Jonathan Edwards: A Life," teaches American religious history at the University of Notre Dame.] Suppose that a man with Bill Clinton's charisma and wayward habits were the son of Billy Graham and had become the most famous liberal preacher in the country. He might be something like a contemporary equivalent of the 19th-century superstar pastor Henry Ward Beecher. Though surpassed in fame by his sister, "Uncle Tom's Cabin"