Roundup: Talking About History

Robert Bevan: Who Remembers the Armenians?

Hundreds died every day from cold, starvation and disease. By this stage, the Nazis had so successfully spatially separated the Jews that their "subhuman" otherness became a tourist attraction. Coach parties of German soldiers visited. Whips were brandished to provoke the "wild animals". Alfred Rosenberg reported on a visit for the Reich’s press department: "If there are any people left who still somehow have sympathy with the Jews then they ought to be rec

Ellen Bork: The Armenian Genocide

[Ellen Bork is deputy director at the Project for the New American Century.] IN ISTANBUL LAST OCTOBER, an acquaintance invited me to lunch with three participants in a conference of historians, journalists, and civil society activists that had recently been held at Bilgi University. Its subject was the fate of Armenians in Turkey during the early part of the 20th century. Although it received far less attention abroad than the prosecution of novelist Orhan Pamuk for spe

William A. Gordon: What Kent State's Memorial Lacks

Kent State's memorial to the May 4, 1970 shootings on its campus has spawned quite a few phony issues. 

H.D.S. Greenway: Whitewashing the Founding Fathers

LAST YEAR in Britain I went to hear Simon Schama of Columbia University lecture about his book, ''Rough Crossings," which has just been published in the United States. The British-born professor's tale was music to British ears, but could make an American a little uncomfortable. His story is the story of thousands of blacks in the 13 American Colonies who rallied to the British lines during the Revolutionary War because they believed that is where freedom lay. It is a tale not

Jan TenBruggencate: Rat tracks tell story of Pacific

Rats are playing an ever more important role in the understanding of the early human travels through the Pacific. That's because, according to the best available evidence, rats were passengers or cargo on virtually all voyages of discovery by Polynesians. Nearly every Pacific island inhabited by the early Polynesians was also populated by the Pacific rat, Rattus exulans. Once they got there, rats did not play a benign role in the environment. In Hawai'i, the rise in the

Pao-yu Ching: Mao's Legacy in China's Current Development

A Chinese worker said,"This is not socialism with Chinese characteristics as Deng Xiaoping told us. Instead, what we have here is capitalism with Chinese characteristics." A Chinese peasant said,"When Chairman Mao warned us about the restoration of capitalism, we really did not understand what he was talking about. Now we do." In China & Socialism -- Market Reforms and Class Struggle[i], Martin Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett argued successfully why the so-called"market socialis

Martin E. Marty: Strauss and Judaism

[Martin E. Marty's biography, current projects, upcoming events, publications, and contact information can be found at www.illuminos.com.] The Chronicle of Higher Education keeps paying attention to religion, a fact that many of us in academe cheer. The April 14 issue features Richard Wolin's discussion of Leo Strauss ("Leo Strauss, Judaism, and Liberalism"). Strauss on religion? Wasn't he the inspiration to the neo-cons who were i

Trudy Kuehner: Teaching the History of India

AINSLIE T. EMBREE of Columbia University noted India's recent rise in U.S. headlines, especially with the joint statement issued after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's summer 2005 visit to Washington. The statement, pledging the U.S. to "help India become a major world power in the 21st century" and calling the two countries "natural partners," wouldn't have been dreamt of fifty years ago. But today, the U.S. needs India as a counterweight to China and to cooperate in

Laurie Kahn-Leavitt: Sealing up `our nation's attic'

THE NONPROFIT Smithsonian Institution and television's for-profit Showtime Networks are teaming up. The plan is to create programming based on the many remarkable collections housed at the Smithsonian's taxpayer-supported museums and show it on a new cable TV network. When I found out about this deal several weeks ago, I didn't initially object because I know how desperately the Smithsonian needs money. I was curious, however, and called several insiders at the Smithsonian. My jaw

Mae Ngai: San Francisco's Survivors

[Ms. Ngai is an assoc. prof. of history at the U. of Chicago.] ONE hundred years ago today, at 5:12 a.m., the quaking earth jolted Wong Bok Yue out of his bed in San Francisco's Chinese quarter. As the walls shook, Wong and his family fled their one-room apartment on Clay Street with nothing but the clothes on their backs. A neighbor carried Wong's two-year-old daughter, Bessie, while he carried his wife, who had bound feet. They hurried to Van Ness Avenue, where they huddled as bui

Richard Primus: Why Reconstruction Matters

merican constitutional law has never come fully to grips with the Civil War. A constitution is a system of government, and no system of government fulfills its basic purposes if it cannot settle divisive political issues by non-violent means. In other words, a civil war is a constitutional failure. In the American case, it may be said that the Civil War of 1861-1865 marked the catastrophic failure of the Constitution of 1787. Given the enormity of the collapse, it is remarkable t

Trevor J. Hoffman: Judas on Trial

[Trevor J Hoffman is a retired academic lawyer who has spent the last decade researching the origins of Christianity. He is currently working on a history of Roman Catholicism, and has just finished ‘The Sion Prophecy’, a novel exploring early Christian intrigue.] 2006 started well for Judas Iscariot; after almost two millennia of top-shelf vilification the apostle who betrayed Jesus was having his case reviewed. The London Times announced in January that the unlikely brief of rehab

Bringing the secrets of Antigoneia to light

Though Greece and Albania have much in common, Greece has not been officially involved in the burgeoning archaeological excavations and the activities of foreign archaeology schools in Albania in recent years. But the cooperation memorandum signed last year by the Greek Culture Ministry and the Archaeological Institute of the Tirana Academy of Sciences has paved the way.Joint research is being carried out at ancient Antigoneia under the supervision o

Martin E. Marty: Remembering William Sloane Coffin

Where are the Bill Coffins of today? That question comes up in most reflective comments on the death of William Sloane Coffin, Jr., the most celebrated and charismatic liberal Protestant preacher of the last half-century. Not long ago we responded to major secular figures who were asking, "Where are the Reinhold Niebuhrs of today?" as they recalled the gifts and influence of the most noted twentieth-century Protestant theologian. Catholics and Jews ask, "Where are the John Cour

David Horowitz: Response to criticism by Mark LeVine

Mark LeVine's rambling one-sided and deceptive account of our radio debate is yet another lame attempt to discredit my work without paying the slightest attention to what I have actually written. LeVine's book (the one I didn't read) was published in August 2005 after I submitted my manuscript. It wouldn't have mattered anyway. Here is the first paragraph from the LeVine profile: "Mark LeVine is a radical activist and gui

Peter Steinfels: Did Judas betray Jesus, or did the National Geographic Society and assorted scholars betray Judas?

Did Judas betray Jesus, or did the National Geographic Society and assorted scholars betray Judas? At issue, of course, is the newly restored and translated Gospel of Judas. If last weekend's news articles were to be believed, it was a kind of police surveillance tape from the Last Supper and Garden of Gethsemane, raising big questions about what occurred between Jesus and Judas. There is no question that the Gospel of Judas, a third-century Coptic copy of a second-ce

Richard Wrightman Fox: The President Who Died for Us

[Richard Wightman Fox, the author of "Jesus in America: Personal Savior, Cultural Hero, National Obsession," is writing a book about the aftermath of Lincoln's assassination.] THIS year, Good Friday, the day commemorating Christ's crucifixion, falls on April 14, as it did in 1865. On that evening, in the balcony box of Ford's Theater in Washington, John Wilkes Booth fired a handmade .41-caliber derringer ball into the back of Abraham Lincoln's head. In the day

Margaret M. Mitchell: What Is Truth in Recent Claims about Christian Origins?

[Margaret M. Mitchell is Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Literature at the University of Chicago Divinity School, and coeditor (with Frances Young) of The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 1: Origins to Constantine.] Before noon last Friday, April 7, we were presented with a trinity of mass media stories about ancient Christianity: a "lost gospel" of Judas appeared on the front page of the New York Times; a British court decided Dan Brown did not plagi

Adam Gopnik: In the “Gospel of Judas,” the renegade is redeemed

The great wheel of history always turns, if slowly, and so, at last, the ultimate betrayer, Judas Iscariot himself, comes around again for another inspection, a potential record-clearing moment occasioned by the publication of “The Gospel of Judas” (National Geographic; $22), a very ancient, though not actually contemporary, rendering of Jesus, as seen by the man who ratted him out. Written in Coptic, and found, three decades ago, within a papyrus codex that contains other non-canonic writing, t

Heather Gray: Atlanta and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

[Heather Gray is the producer of "Just Peace" on WRFG-Atlanta 89.3 FM covering local, regional, national and international news. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia and can be reached at hmcgray@earthlink.net.] In 1968, the tragic events in the first week of April turned the world upside down. Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed in Memphis on Thursday, April 4. He was there to support sanitation workers who were on strike. In a recent i