Roundup: Talking About History

Reinhold Neibuhr: Awkward Imperialists

[This is the sixth in a series of archival excerpts in honor of the magazine's 150th year of publishing.] Our empire was developed almost overnight. At the beginning of the World War we were still in debt to the world ... We wiped out our debt and put the world in our debt by well-nigh thirty billion dollars in little more than a decade, and we have increased our holdings in the outside world by one to two billion dollars per year ... We are not prosperous because we a

Ainslie T. Embree: Why It’s Important To Know About India

[Ainslie T. Embree is professor emeritus at Columbia University. This essay is based on his presentation to the History Institute for Teachers on “Teaching India,” held in Chattanooga, March 11-12, 2006. The conference was sponsored by FPRI’s Marvin Wachman Fund for International Education, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s Asia Program, and the University of Pennsylvania South Asia Center, and made possible by a grant from the Annenberg Foundation.] Fifty years ago, when I bega

Steven Pinker: Are Jews Smarter?

My grandparents were immigrants from Eastern Europe who owned a small necktie factory on the outskirts of Montreal. While visiting them one weekend, I found my grandfather on the factory floor, cutting shapes out of irregular stacks of cloth with a fabric saw. He explained that by carving up the remnants that were left over when the neckties had been cut out and stitching them together in places that didn't show, he could get a few extra ties out of each sheet of cloth. I asked him why he was do

Johann Hari: The truth? Our empire killed millions

We are still a nation locked in denial. If you point out basic facts about the British Empire - that the British deliberately adopted policies that caused as many as 29 million Indians to starve to death in the late 19th century, say - you smack into a wall of incomprehension and rage. The historian Niall Ferguson called me "Hari the horrible" for writing about this in my column last week. Another neo-imperi-alist historian, Lawrence James, accuses me in The Sunday Times o

Peniel E. Joseph: Black Power's Quiet Side

[Peniel E. Joseph, an assistant professor of Africana Studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is the author of the forthcoming "Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America."] JUST over 40 years ago, on June 16, 1966, Stokely Carmichael, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, mounted a podium on a sticky evening in the Mississippi Delta and introduced the phrase "Black Power" to a crowd of c

Greg Palast: My Father's Victory in the Pacific

[Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Armed Madhouse.] In 1995, in Chicago, veterans of Silver Post No. 282 celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of their victory over Japan, marching around a catering hall wearing their old service caps, pins, ribbons and medals. My father sat at his table, silent. He did not wear his medals. He had given them to me thirty years earlier. I can figure it exactly: March 8, 1965. That day, like every other, we walked to t

Glenn W. LaFantasie: Civil War Battlefield's Cyclorama Center’s Days Are Numbered

[Glenn W. LaFantasie, the Frockt Family Professor of Civil War History at Western Kentucky University, is the author of Gettysburg Requiem: The Life and Lost Causes of Confederate Colonel William C. Oates.] Near the High Water Mark on Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg, a massive white building shaped like a drum sits flat on the eastern slope of the ridge, obscured partially by a grove of fruit trees. Almost exactly in the center of the lines that Major General George Gordon Meade’s Army of the

Jonathan Zimmerman: A Florida law banning relativism in classes ignores reality and 75 years of academic tradition

[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.] JUST WHEN YOU thought it was safe to study American history again … the revisionists are back! You know, those relativists who distort or simply fabricate the past to make it fit their present-day biases. For instance, shortly after the U.S

Paul A. Kramer: The Philippine-American War as Race War

[Paul A. Kramer is an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University and is currently a visiting professor at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States nd the Philippines (University of North Carolina Press, 2006). He can be reached at pakramer@jhu.edu.] Speaking on May 4, 1902 at the newly-opened Arlington Cemetery, in the first Memorial Day address there by a U.S. President, Theodore Roosevelt placed colonial

Chris J. Bickerton: How can we remember what we do not know? (France's History Wars)

France's non-commemoration last year of the bicentennial of Napoleon's great victory at Austerlitz was a sign of national uncertainty about the role of history and its relationship to the state. It seems from recent events that the French malaise is no longer confined to the present. It applied to contemporary problems of the nation's economy and politics, and now it also encompasses the past. Through a challenge to French history it has reached the foundations of national republicanism.

Brent Staples: The Racist Side of WW II We Prefer Not to Think About

Nations tend to write their histories by forgetting the shameful parts. In America, once-buried issues associated with slavery and the genocide against Native Americans have resurfaced and been incorporated into the national memory. But World War II has thus far been held apart as an era that is almost beyond reproach. Indeed, the people who led the country in the 40's and fought the war have been transformed from mere mortals — with faults like the rest of us — into sudden secular saints. They

Black Jack battle lit a fuse to Civil War

As battles go, it wasn’t much of one. No one was killed, and only three people were severely wounded. But what separates the Battle of Black Jack from others is it was the first armed skirmish between pro- and anti-slavery forces and lit the fuse on what would become the Civil War. Much has been written over the years about the battle, which occurred June 2, 1856, about three miles east of what is now Baldwin. While accounts vary, there are certainties. The infamous Joh

George F. Will: AIDS, 25 Years Later

"In the period October 1980-May 1981, five young men, all active homosexuals, were treated for biopsy-confirmed Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia at three different hospitals in Los Angeles, California. Two of the patients died." -- U.S. Centers for Disease Control June 5, 1981 Those words 25 years ago announced the arrival of something many thought anachronistic -- an infectious disease epidemic. At first it was called GRID -- gay-related immune deficienc

Debra Burlingame: Ground Zero ... Why We Need the Museum

[Ms. Burlingame, a director of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, is the sister of Charles F. "Chic" Burlingame III, the pilot of AA flight 77, which was crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.] They came and would not leave, an army of ironworkers and heavy-equipment operators, stopping only when the scent-trained dogs barked out a signal. They cut and moved twisted steel and steaming concrete, clearing an astonishing 1.8 million tons in a continuous convoy

Mark Feldstein: Lessons from the Jack Anderson Case

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee: Thank you for the opportunity to testify and for the important oversight role you play keeping the government accountable to the people. My name is Mark Feldstein. I am an associate professor of media and public affairs and director of the journalism program at George Washington University. I am here today wearing two hats: First, as someone with first-hand experience who was recently visited at home by two FBI agents seeki

Roy Rosenzweig: Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past

History is a deeply individualistic craft. The singly authored work is the standard for the profession; only about 6 percent of the more than 32,000 scholarly works indexed since 2000 in this journal's comprehensive bibliographic guide, "Recent Scholarship," have more than one author. Works with several authors—common in the sciences—are even harder to find. Fewer than 500 (less than 2 percent) have three or more authors. Historical scholarship is also characterized

Harry Clark: How It All Began ... Truman & Israel

[Harry Clark grew up in the Illinois congressional district represented for twenty-two years by Paul Findley, a centrist Republican. Findley's support for the Palestinians aroused the ire of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, which eventually drove him from office. Studying Zionism is an avocation.] The Truman Administration's policy on Palestine challenges at its start the "strategic asset" view of the US-Israel relationship, and reinforces the "Israel lob

Catesby Leigh: The unbearable lightness of the Pentagon memorial.

[Catesby Leigh is author of the forthcoming Monumental America.] HARRIED DESIGNERS, and the number crunchers breathing down their necks, are hacking away at plans for the World Trade Center Memorial, struggling to fit this bloated, billion-dollar, largely subterranean leviathan into the $500 million budgetary straitjacket prescribed by Governor George Pataki and New York's mayor, Michael Bloomberg. But apart from the staggering expense, the six-acre antimonument's conce

Abraham H. Miller: Remembering the Farhud

[Abraham H. Miller is emeritus professor of political science, University of Cincinnati. His writing has appeared in numerous academic and popular venues, both here and abroad. He now lives in the East Bay.] Today marks the 65th anniversary of the Farhud. Arabic for “violent dispossession,“ this is the word used to describe the infamous pogrom of June 1, 1941, against the Jews of Baghdad. In its wake, the Farhud left some 200 dead, 2000 injured, and 900 Jewish homes destroyed. It wa

Jason Emerson: The Madness of Mary Lincoln

[Jason Emerson is currently working on a book about the Mary Lincoln insanity letters, to be published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2007, and a biography of Robert Lincoln to be titled Giant in the Shadows. He was an HNN intern.] Her son had her committed. She said it was so he could get his hands on her money. Now, 130 years after this bitter and controversial drama, a trove of letters—long believed destroyed—sheds new light on it. In August 1875, after spe