Roundup: Talking About History

Amartya Sen: Democracy Isn't 'Western'

[Mr. Sen, the 1998 Nobel laureate in economics, is the author of "Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny," published next week by Norton.] "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings." Culture too, like our stars, is often blamed for our failures. Attempts to build a better world capsize, it is alleged, in the high sea of cultural resistance. The determinism of culture is increasingly used in contemporary global

Diane Ravitch: Memo to Bill Gates

Bill, I heard you speak a few weeks ago at Davos, when you told a large audience that education is the biggest challenge for the future. You are right about that. You pointed to the 1,500 or so small high schools that the Gates Foundation has funded as evidence of your commitment to make a difference. If you are worried about our nation's future competitiveness, I am not so sure you made the right investment. Small schools are not always the best answer to low achievement. Sometimes

Mark Vlasic: How to remember Milosevic

Today, Slobodan Milosevic will be buried. His funeral will be solemn and respectful--exactly unlike the final moments for so many of his victims. For the last week, his Serbian nationalist supporters have eulogized him the way he would have wanted to be eulogized: They have celebrated his life by ignoring or whitewashing his crimes. One assumes they will do the same by his graveside today. But the world should not be fooled. I served on the prosecution team that built a case agains

James Delingpole: What are museums for?

Why is it that so often when I visit a museum these days, I leave feeling ever so slightly cross? I’m thinking, say, of those wretched animatronic dinosaurs we parents have to queue for at the Natural History Museum, completely ignoring the genuine prehistoric skeletons either side. And of that display cabinet at the National Maritime Museum where nautical objects have been plonked apparently at random in the same glass case in order to illustrate a curator’s trendy post-modern point about the h

Martin Johnson: Everyone remembers baseball's Negro Leagues. Here's the story of the basketball counterpart.

The story of the Negro Leagues of Baseball, a circuit of teams that provided a showcase for many of Black America's top athletes during the first half of the 20th century, is well known. But the story of the Black Fives, a parallel set of basketball teams, is just beginning to come to light. The Black Fives typically refers to leagues that first thrived in the African-American communities of New York, Pittsburgh, Washington and Chicago in the teens and '20s but soon spread to the So

Allen Esterson: Einstein's wife was a math genius who helped her husband in his great 1905 discoveries. Or so some people claim.

It must have been around 1990 that I first read newspaper reports about the claims that Einstein’s first wife, Mileva Marić, had made substantial contributions to his early achievements in physics. The contentions seem not to have made much headway in the UK, and, after two popular biographies of Einstein published in 1993 rejected the claims, I presumed the story had ended up in the backwaters of speculative notions on great scientific figures. How wrong I was. Towards th

David A. Hollinger: Race, Politics, and the Census

[David A. Hollinger is a professor of history and chairman of the department at the University of California at Berkeley. His book Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (Basic Books, 1995) was recently reissued in a 10th-anniversary edition that develops the themes in this essay.] What distinctions among people in the United States really matter? The U.S. Census Bureau provides the official answer: Americans are white, black, Asian-American, American Indian, or Hawaiian and Pa

Robert Polner: The mythologizing of Rudy Giuliani

[Robert Polner covered former mayor Rudy Giuliani for Newsday.] If people were surprised by Rudy Giuliani’s steadying performance on September 11, 2001, I was not among them. As a Newsday reporter in the City Hall press room for more than four years, I had observed and chronicled the restive and driven politician who was comfortable with conflict and ill at ease in periods of relative calm. Peaceful times, of course, can invite scrutiny and debate, two things the forme

Chuck Morse: The Nazi Connection to Islamic Terror

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Chuck Morse, the author of The Nazi Connection to Islamic Terrorism - Adolf Hitler and Haj Amin al-Husseini. Mr. Morse will be speaking at the International Institute for Holocaust Research-Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, March 23. He is a Republican candidate for Congress in Massachusetts where he is campaigning against Barney Frank. Glazov:

David Horowitz: Response to Luker, Beito and Johnson

Editor: This is a response to an article by Ralph Luker, David Beito and KC Johnson published in the American Historical Association's Perspectives . Professor David Beito is a libertarian, Professor K.C. Johnson a conservative whose job I defended when it was under attack, and Professor Ralph Luker a liberal who is obssessive in his hatred for myself and this website. The three put up a resolution at the rececent convent

David Beito, Ralph E. Luker, and Robert K. C. Johnson: The AHA's Double Standard on Academic Freedom

Click here to read David Horowitz's response. Has the AHA turned its back on academic freedom? In January, members present at its business meeting rejected a resolution to condemn attacks on academic freedom, whether from the right or from the left. Instead, they passed a weaker resolution that selectively condemned only threats coming from the right. We weighed into this controversy as part of a three person "

Nicholas Wade: The Twists and Turns of History, and of DNA

EAST ASIAN and European cultures have long been very different, Richard E. Nisbett argued in his recent book "The Geography of Thought." East Asians tend to be more interdependent than the individualists of the West, which he attributed to the social constraints and central control handed down as part of the rice-farming techniques Asians have practiced for thousands of years. A separate explanation for such long-lasting character traits may be emerging from the human gen

Kinue Tokudome: Troubling Legacy ... World War II Forced Labor by American POWs of the Japanese

[Kinue Tokudome is the Founder & Executive Director of a California non-profit organization “US-Japan Dialogue on POWs, Inc.” that maintains a bilingual website: http://www.us-japandialogueonpows.org] During World War II, massive forced labor took place in two instances. [1] Nazi Germany used about 10 million forced laborers from Eastern Europe in order to sustain her wartime economy. In contrast to Jewish slave laborers in concentration camps and ghettos who were worked to death, most o

John Wertman: Bush's Obstruction of History

[The writer was on President Bill Clinton's White House staff from 1999 to 2001 and is now director of public policy at the Association of American Geographers.] At some point in the next few months, President Bush is expected to announce his choice for the location of his presidential library. Once it's open, most of the media attention is likely to focus on the public exhibits, which will no doubt extol the president's compassionate conservatism, his leadership immediately after t

Carlin Romano: The Nazi skeleton in writer's closet

WHERE have we seen this story before? An influential European writer and thinker, celebrated in his mature years for works of sophisticated philosophical nuance, turns out to have been an anti-Semitic, pro-Hitler creep in his 20s. The standard query immediately presents itself: Will the nefarious politics destroy the reputation? Marta Petreu's An Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania (Ivan R. Dee, 2005), inevitably hurtles humanists of a certain age back to o

Editorial: One man's crusader is not another man's terrorist

HISTORY may very well be written by the victors, but that is no guarantee that it will be written -- or taught -- correctly. For proof of this depressing fact, look no further than Justine Ferrari's report in yesterday's edition of The Australian which revealed that a textbook widely used in Victoria's high schools compares, in a completely relativistic and non-judgmental fashion, the European Crusaders of the Middle Ages (whose actions arguably kicked off the rebirth of Europe) with the terrori

M.J. Rosenberg: The response to "Munich" & "Paradise Now" assumes it's still 1940 for Jews

[The views expressed in IPF Friday are those of MJ Rosenberg and not necessarily of Israel Policy Forum. If you have colleagues or friends who would appreciate receiving this weekly letter, or you would like to unsubscribe, send an e-mail to: ipfdc@ipforumdc.org .] There must be a word for it, although I don't know what it is. I'm trying to describe the phenomenon when people appear trapped in a different historical period than the presen

Amy Dorsett: Secularity obscures Alamo's sacred character

[Amy Dorsett is a staff writer.] Strolling the grounds of the Alamo, where background noise is provided by hucksters across the street trying to lure tourists to their gaudy attractions, it's easy to forget that the area is sacred ground, where 170 years ago today, hundreds of men died. Even the landmark's own gift shop can feature less-than-tasteful souvenirs (nothing says Remember the Alamo quite like an ashtray made in China, retail price $5.25), and last spring it o

Louis Galambos: The Business of History

[Mr. Galambos, a professor at Johns Hopkins and the Maguire Professor at the John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress, is the author, with Roy Vagelos, of "Medicine, Science, and Merck" (Cambridge, 2004).] What did you learn about business in the history courses you took in your college or university? Not much, I suspect. Not if you're thinking about the kind of business you do every day, the company you work for, and the people with whom you work. You may have lear

Stanley Kauffmann: CSA: Confederate States of America

[Stanley Kauffmann is TNR's film critic.] CSA: Confederate States of America is an entry in the "what if" school of fiction. (A recent instance: Philip Roth entered that school with The Plot Against America, in which he postulated that Charles Lindbergh had been elected president in 1940.) A new director named Kevin Willmott has made a pseudo-documentary about what would have happened if the Confederacy had won the Civil War and this entire country had become the Confedera