Roundup: Talking About History

Michael Punke: Q & A About the North Butte Disaster of 1917 ... the worst hard-rock mining disaster in American history

This is an interview with Michael Punke, author of Fire and Brimstone : The North Butte Mine Disaster of 1917 (Hyperion). Q: What was the North Butte disaster of 1917 and how did it start? A: T

Eric Muller: The Pope's Disastrous Speech at Auschwitz

When the white smoke told the world that Josef Ratzinger had been elected pope, it took some of us a moment or two to get our minds around the idea that the College of Cardinals had elevated a childhood member of the Hitler Youth to one of the world's leading positions of moral leadership. Clearly, Ratzinger had been no teenaged Nazi, but his public comments about that period of his (and his country's) life left some – myself included – with the nagging sense that he was airbrushing his memories

Mark Roth: Pitt anthropologist thinks Darwin's theory needs to evolve on some points

Darwin was wrong, and his modern-day adherents perpetuate his mistakes. That sounds like the opening salvo of an advocate for Intelligent Design or some other religiously driven critique of the theory of evolution. But it actually summarizes the ideas of Jeffrey Schwartz, a noted anthropologist at the University of Pittsburgh and one of a growing group of critics of standard Darwinian theory. Most of the recent publicity Dr. Schwartz has received has focuse

Alexander Smoltczyk: German Silence in Auschwitz

Pope Benedict XVI's visit to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz during his trip to Poland attracted worldwide attention. While some Holocaust survivors were satisfied with the German pontiff's address, other members of the Jewish community missed a mention of anti-Semitism.... "Words fail in this place. Only a devastated silence can stand here -- a silence that is a necessary cry to God: Why were you silent?" That's how he begins his address. Standing in front of the stone

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad discusses the Holocaust

In an interview with SPIEGEL, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad discusses the Holocaust, the future of the state of Israel, mistakes made by the United States in Iraq and Tehran's nuclear conflict with the West. [Excerpt]SPIEGEL: First you make your remarks about the Holocaust. Then comes the news that you may travel to Germany -- this causes an uproar. So you were surprised after

Nishimura Hideki: The Retrial of the “Yokohama Incident” ... A Six Decade Battle for Human Dignity

[Nishimura Hideki is a journalist and author of Kita Chosen yokuryu (North Korean Internment) (Iwanami gendai bunko) and Osaka de tatakatta Chosen senso (The Korean War Fought in Osaka) (Iwanami shoten). Kumatani Shin’ichiro is an editor and writer. Translated for Japan Focus by Aaron Skabelund (ahs39@columbia.edu), a JSPS postdoctoral fellow at Hokkaido University and Japan Focus associate. He is the author of “Can the Subaltern Bark? Imperialism, Civilization, and Canine Cultures in Nineteenth

Robert Hefner : We Shouldn't Identifiy Islam with the Arab Middle East

Robert Hefner is Director of the Program on Islam and Civil Society at Boston University and author of Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia (Princeton, 2000). This essay is based on his presentation at FPRI History Institute’s May 6-7, 2006 conference on Islam, Islamism, and Democratic Values.We in the West have long identified Islam with Arab culture. In one sense this is reasonable enough. After all, th

Adam Gopnik: Was the French Reign of Terror Really Terrible?

Revisionism in history knows no boundaries. Just in the past few years, we have been told that that comet may have glanced right off the dinosaurs, prodding a few toward flight and feathers; that the German blitzkrieg barely meandered across Europe; and that Genghis Khan was actually a sharing and caring and ecumenical leader, Bill Moyers with a mustache and colorful folk costume. So it was inevitable that we would get a revisionist history of the French Reign of Terror—the period from September

Michael Lopez-Calderon: About Those Second Thoughts on the Bombing of WW II Cities

[Michael Lopez-Calderon runs the website Calderon's Call and is also featured on Inherit the Wirbelwind.] “The bomber will always get through …The only defence is offence. You have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourself.” – Stanley Baldwin, November 10, 1932[1] “War is a nasty, dirty, rotten business. It’s all right for the Navy to blockade a city, to starve the inhabitants to death. But there is something wrong, not nice, about bombi

Paul Richard: Something Has Gone Terribly Wrong With the Statues of Monumental Washington

Remember, tomorrow's Memorial Day. That's what it's for, remembering. The holiday's gone blurry. Now it's mostly fun (ballgames, setting up the barbecue, another day off work), but it used to be for focused recollections of the dead. Not the dead in general, the dead in sharp particular. Half a million soldiers had died in the Civil War. When the rites were first observed in 1866, there were plenty to recall. Each spring at the end of May, their graves were

Patrik Jonsson: The Restoration of Confederate Gen. T.R.R. Cobb's House Has Many in the South Seeing Red

What most people in Athens remembered about Tom Cobb's old house was its saggy demeanor and chimneys full of pigeons. No one could recall its original color. White, they assumed. Like Tara. Once the home of a Confederate philosopher-king - a Renaissance man with an austere streak of Calvinism - T.R.R. Cobb's house had gone down through the decades as a rectory, an apartment building, and even a frat house. Finally, it was shipped off in pieces 50 miles away to Stone Mountain, where

Oleg Grabar: Dome of the Rock ... Both Mosque and Work of Art

[Mr. Grabar is professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton N.J. His book on the Dome of the Rock will be published in the early fall by Harvard University Press.] No one visiting Jerusalem can escape the gilt dome and shining tiles of the Dome of the Rock. In contrast to the sensuous solidity of the yellow-brown Palestinian masonry that surrounds it, it is a colorful, striking and architecturally unique monument on the vast platform of the Haram al-Sharif, &quo

David N. Gibbs: Reassessing Soviet Motives for Invading Afghanistan

[David N. Gibbs IS Associate Professor of History and Political Science University of Arizona.] ABSTRACT: This article reassesses Soviet motives for invading Afghanistan in 1979, based on newly available archival materials, especially from the former USSR. The article argues that these Soviet documents show that the 1979 invasion reflected defensive rather than offensive objectives. Specifically, the USSR sought to restrain extremist elements of the Afghan communist party, who were

Stephen Hesse: A road to ancient history's ruin (Ireland)

Irish politician Dick Roche is in the business of government, and his two-decades-long career has touched on public administration, finance, transportation and economic planning and development. Unfortunately, he has little or no professional knowledge of environment, anthropology, archaeology or history -- or if he does, he has kept it off his Web site and well hidden from the public. Nevertheless, in September 2004 Roche was appointed Minister for the Environment, H

Randy Salzman: Removing relics vs. preserving history

[Randy Salzman is a freelance writer and former journalism professor.] It took trips to opposite corners of the globe to settle my opinion as to whether museums' collections represented the "preservation" or "theft" of other cultures' artifacts. In Australia, the Melbourne Museum broadcasts this debate through a video featuring actors playing two 19th-century historical figures - a museum curator and an Aboriginal chieftain. Baldwin Spencer, who collected

Robert Spencer: Saudi Textbooks ... Still a Problem

A recent article in the Washington Post, written by Nina Shea of Freedom House, laid bare Saudi hypocrisy in claiming to have removed hateful material from textbooks, when in fact that material remains in abundance. This is not just an issue within the Kingdom, for the Saudis export such material in large quantities to Muslims in other countries. But the article points to a deeper problem – one that Western authorities sooner or later will have to deal with: much of the objectionable material is

Astra Taylor: How the Right Stole the '60s (And Why We Should Get Them Back)

It wasn't until I got to college that I heard that the 1960s had "failed" and that all the Baby Boomers went straight and sold out. Yet such sweeping proclamations never quite rung true. Those weren't the people I knew when I was a kid: the aging organic farmers, the people living on and running a commune founded long before I was born, the self-sacrificing teachers and social workers, the lawyers who gave up a big paycheck for a good cause, or my friends' parents, who man

Andrew L. Yarrow: Getting a Ph.D. in History at Age 48

Andrew L. Yarrow, a former reporter for The New York Times, is outreach director for special projects for the economic studies program at the Brookings Institution. He received his Ph.D. in history from George Mason University. Not too many people get doctorates in history at age 48, as I did this year. At a time when business and technology careers are venerated, and more idealistic mid-life career-changers tend to gravitate to service professions such as theolo

Daniel Henninger: "The Da Vinci Code" shows that conspiracy theories have no limits

"The Da Vinci Code" would not be the subject of this column had it not sold 60.5 million copies, according to its publisher Doubleday. Of course this does not make it the best-selling book of all time. That title, as irony would have it, goes to the Bible, half of which one of Dan Brown's characters dismisses as "false." Like the Bible but unlike Mr. Brown's novel, most of the books in the sales Pantheon have had utilitarian staying power--McGuffey's Reader, the

Roger Scruton: 200th Anniversary of Birth of John Stuart Mill

[Mr. Scruton is author, most recently, of "Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life" (Continuum, 2005).] May 20 sees the 200th anniversary of the birth of John Stuart Mill, the greatest exponent of 19th-century liberalism, whose philosophy still dominates jurisprudence in the English-speaking world. Mill was a many-faceted intellectual who wrote on all aspects of philosophy, on law and morals, on political economy, and on poetry and the arts. His home-schooling at the hands of