Roundup: Talking About History

Paul Rockwell: How GI Resistance Altered The Course Of History ... Sir, No Sir, A Timely Film

[Paul Rockwell is a columnist for In Motion Magazine. His latest essay on military resistance appears in 10 Excellent Reasons Not To Join The Military, edited by Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg, just published by New Press.] When award-winning actors Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland organized an anti-war review, touring U.S. military bases and towns around the world, the GI rebellion against the war in Vietnam was already in full force. In one theatrical episode, evoking laughter and

Gary Leupp: Did Judas Have God on His Side? (Or is that a dumb question?)

I can’t think for you You’ll have to decide Whether Judas Iscariot Had God on his side.--Bob Dylan The National Geographic Society has dramatically raised the curtain on the long lost “Gospel of Judas,” which depicts Judas and his action of betrayal in a positive light. It was known to have been composed by the 2nd century but a copy was only found in Egypt three decades ago. Having admirably underwritten the long process of reco

Philip Howard: The Classical Association meeting hears how Ancient Greeks had their own obsessions with size

MODERN Western society is obsessed by body image. We worry about the interrelated questions of size (of various body parts) and what (not) to wear. The Ancient Greeks’ answer to the above question was: “Call that a bum? Nothing like big enough.” Big bottoms indicated fertility. The Classical Association meeting at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne yesterday examined our fetishes for stick-insect female bodies, and found them unclassical. Anyone who was seen any Greek art knows that G

Thomas D. Williams: Judas Unredeemed

[Father Williams is dean of the theology school at Rome's Regina Apostolorum University, and a Vatican analyst for NBC News and MSNBC.] Modern men and women have always had a soft spot for Judas Iscariot. Unlike Dante Alighieri who in his "Inferno" consigned poor Judas to the lowest spot in hell, his head locked between Satan's jaws, our contemporaries are more likely to let him off with a slap on the wrist or, better yet, to exonerate him altogether. It's eno

Stan Cox: What if the South had won the Civil War?

[Stan Cox is a plant breeder and writer in Salina, Kan.] One hundred forty-one years ago today, General Robert E. Lee issued "General Orders No. 9," instructing all Confederate troops to "return to their homes." On the previous day, April 9, 1865, he had surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, ending the Civil War. But what if the roles had been reversed? What if it had been Lee accepting Grant's surrender? Certainly, we'd be living in a very different Ame

John Rosenthal: D-Day for Revisionists

[John Rosenthal's writings on international politics have appeared in Policy Review, the Opinion Journal, Les Temps Modernes and Merkur. He is the editor of the Transatlantic Intelligencer (www.trans-int.com).] On June 6, 2004, the 60th anniversary of D-Day, French President Jacques Chirac stood before hundreds of American veterans of the Allied invasion of Normandy at the American Cemetery at Colleville-Sur-Mer, where their fallen comrades ar

Jon Meacham: God and the Founders

America's first fight was over faith. As the Founding Fathers gathered for the inaugural session of the Continental Congress on Tuesday, September 6, 1774, at Carpenters' Hall in Philadelphia, Thomas Cushing, a lawyer from Boston, moved that the delegates begin with a prayer. Both John Jay of New York and John Rutledge, a rich lawyer-planter from South Carolina, objected. Their reasoning, John Adams wrote his wife, Abigail, was that "because we were so divided in religious sentiments"—

Thomas Bender: No Borders ... Beyond the Nation-State

[Thomas Bender is a professor of history and university professor of the humanities at New York University. This essay is adapted from A Nation Among Nations: America's Place in World History, to be published this month by Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2006 by Thomas Bender.] I want to propose the end of American history as we have known it. "End" can mean both "purpose" and "termination," and I have in mind both th

Daniel J. Kevles: A history of poison

[Daniel J. Kevles teaches history at Yale. His works include In the Name of Eugenics and The Baltimore Case.] Think murder by poison, and Lucrezia Borgia comes quickly to mind. Willful, beautiful, sexually promiscuous, and by historical reputation ruthless, she was said to rival her brother Cesare and her father, Pope Alexander VI, in jealousy, intrigue, and homicide, dispatching those who thwarted her with a dash of white arsenic in their drinks. But in a recent biography—Lucrezia

Michael J. Petrilli: History suffering from NCLB

[From the Capital to the Classroom: Year Four of the No Child Left Behind Act, Center on Education Policy, March 2006.] History, science, and the arts are being de-emphasized by most schools in order to make room for teaching basic reading and math skills, according to a new study. Who's to blame for this? Critics of reform point to the No Child Left Behind law. And they're right to do so--to a point. NCLB mandates that schools boost achievement in reading and math--on

Mark Bowden: Atlantic Monthly devotes front cover story to the failed Iranian hostage rescue of 1980

The meeting began with Jimmy Carter's announcement: “Gentlemen, I want you to know that I am seriously considering an attempt to rescue the hostages.” Hamilton Jordan, the White House chief of staff, knew immediately that the president had made a decision. Planning and practice for a rescue mission had been going on in secret for five months, but it had always been regarded as the last resort, and ever since the November 4 embassy takeover, the White House had made every effort to

John Noble Wilford: A Cold, Hard Explanation for a Biblical Feat

In the night that followed the miracle of the loaves and fishes, as St. Mark tells the story in the New Testament, Jesus further astonished his disciples by walking on water. It was a stormy night on the Sea of Galilee and the disciples were out in a boat, battling a contrary wind, when they saw Jesus approaching, as if a spirit. "And he went up to them into the ship; and the wind ceased," it is written in Mark 6:51. "And they were sore amazed in themselves beyond mea

Michael Kort: Is the latest revisionist account right about Truman & Hiroshima?

Tsuyoshi Hasegawa’s Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Harvard University press, 2005) has received a great deal of favorable press since its publication last year. Reviewers in leading newspapers have called it “brilliant and definitive,” “a landmark book,” “the definitive analysis” of the American decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan, etc. Hasegawa’s extensive use of Japanese and Russian sources has added to the book’s luster. His multilingual source base is

Edmund Morris: Portrait of the President as a Young Man

TWENTY-FIVE years ago last Thursday, in another era, another century, the president of the United States walked into a salvo of bullets, one of which brought him to the brink of death. It's possible that as the doctors worked desperately to overtake the flood of blood draining from him, he may have dreamed, as dying people are supposed to do, about his past life. We only know that he survived and cheated death — if not dementia — for another couple of decades. Without

Jacob Weisberg: Kevin Phillips is wrong about everything. Why is he taken so seriously?

In 1969, an obscure Republican political strategist named Kevin Phillips published a nerdy, statistics-laden book titled The Emerging Republican Majority that offered a Machiavellian analysis of how the GOP could use the issue of race to win over working-class Democrats and ensure future political dominance. In the years since, almost every aspect of that description has been turned around. Phillips long ago left behind both obscurity and conservatism, becoming one of our most ubiquitous politic

Luke Harding: The Fake Escape (the truth about The Great Escape)

He played a starring role in one of the most famous episodes of the second world war. But yesterday BA "Jimmy" James - one of the last survivors of the mass break-out by Allied prisoners from a Nazi prisoner of war camp - described the celebrated film version of his story as "a load of rubbish". James, now 90, said the 1963 movie The Great Escape, starring Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson and Richard Attenborough, bore little resemblance to what actually took place

Damon Linker: The Christianizing of America

[Review of: Richard John Neuhaus's Catholic Matters: Confusion, Controversy, and the Splendor of Truth (Basic Books).] Liberal modernity exasperates traditional religion. It fosters a pluralism that denies any one faith the power to organize the whole of social life. It teaches that public authorities must submit to the consent of those over whom they aspire to rule, thereby undermining the legitimacy of all forms of absolutism. It employs the systematic skepticism of the scientific

Victor Davis Hanson: The definitive books on the battles of the 20th century

1. "The Price of Glory" by Alistair Horne (St. Martin's, 1963). 2. "With the Old Breed" by E.B. Sledge (Presidio, 1981 3. "The Face of Battle" by John Keegan (Viking, 1976). 4. "Stalingrad" by Antony Beevor (Penguin, 1998). 5. "The Fall of Fortresses" by Elmer Bendiner (Putnam, 1980).

Ofira Seliktar: ‘Tenured Radicals’ in Israel ... From New Zionism to Political Activism

... Critical theory, also known as post-modernism, is an umbrella term denoting a loose amalgam of theories that have come to dominate American and European universities in the past half a century. They can be traced to a number of philosophical and epistemic traditions in Europe and the United States. Perhaps the best known is the deconstructionist philosophy of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan, who argued that the accepted ‘societal narratives’ reflect the power structu

Frontpagemag Roundtable: The End of Black History Month?

As the month of February passed by, so too did Black History Month – the occasion for Black Americans to focus attention on the contributions that Black Americans have made to America and to civilization. This month of study is meant, arguably, to counter the many myths that have distorted Black History. Today we gather at Frontpage Symposium to scrutinize the meaning and purpose of Black History Month. And we focus on two basic questions: (1) What exactly is the objective and meaning of