Roundup: Talking About History

Five reasons why the founding fathers could have killed slavery

For generations, white historians have taken for granted that it would not have been possible to abolish slavery during the revolutionary era. In 1976, as the nation was celebrating the bicentennial of the American Revolution, it was commonplace to commend the founding fathers for not attempting to end slavery, a step regarded as hopelessly idealistic if not fanatical. Why fanatical? Partly, it is argued, because "only gradually were [white] men coming to see that [slavery] was a peculiarly

Stella Clarke: Havoc in History House (Australia)

JOHN Howard's Australia is a solid, sandstone institution, civilised and exemplary, like a private school in fine repair. But wait, what's all that noise? Where's the teacher? Who's in charge? In History House, where the nation's biography should be sagely intoned by dignified experts for the edification of the class, behold a disgraceful mess: pandemonium. Little piles of history lie about, higgledy-piggledy. Some people are on the floor engaged in riotous creative play, others stand about squa

Jerome Eric Copulsky: The Meaning of Munich

[Jerome Eric Copulsky is Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies at Virginia Tech.] Three days from now, the annual ritual of the Academy Awards will be performed. Steven Spielberg's movie Munich, which depicts the exploits of a team of Israeli assassins sent to avenge the murder of eleven athletes by Black September at the 1972 Munich Olympics, has been nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. CNN hailed Munich as "a masterpiece," while Fox New

Walter Reich: David Irving isn't the real threat to the world's Jewry

[Dr. Reich, director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum from 1995-98, is a professor of international affairs, ethics and human behavior at George Washington University and a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center.] It's time for Europeans to decriminalize Holocaust denial. And it's time for them to act against threats, increasingly murderous, of a new genocide against the Jews. David Irving, the British pseudo-historian who was sentenced last week to three year

Jason Emerson: Lincoln wrote the letter to Mrs. Bixby

Mr. Emerson, a former HNN intern, is writing a biography of Robert Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln signed it. A lot of scholars say he didn’t write it. Now, newly discovered evidence helps solve an enduring mystery. In a records box in a back office in a house in the hills of Vermont, six letters about Abraham Lincoln’s famous “letter to the Widow Bixby” lay unknown and undisturbed. For how long is uncertain, although this author’s fingerprints made last March were the only ones visi

Pierre de Villemarest: Interviewed about his new book ... Untouchable, Who Protected Bormann and 'Gestapo' Muller after 1945

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Pierre de Villemarest, a member of the French Resistance from autumn 1940, thereafter officer in the French Secret Army, then officer with the Intelligence services assigned to the countries which had fallen under Soviet Communist rule. He was a member of the National Defence's Association of former special agents. As an intelligence officer, he is the only specialist to have met Hitler’s key deputy Martin Bormann in 1949, when Bormann went into p

Julian Sanchez: How the neoconservative right adopted the worst errors of the left

[Julian Sanchez is an assistant editor of Reason. He lives in Washington, D.C.] Last weekend, Johns Hopkins political scientist Francis Fukuyama declared his apostasy from the conservative philosophy he helped to create in a much-discussed New York Times Magazine essay, "After Neoconservatism." In a concise genealogy of neoconservatism, Fukuyama describes two of the movement's philosophical strains that were in tension from the outset: a deep skepticism about

Witold Rybczynski: The JFK memorial and the woes of "interpretive centers"

In the wake of 9/11, with all its discussions of memorials, I found myself wanting to revisit another memorial of a violent event that also tore the social fabric of this country. The John F. Kennedy Memorial in Dallas is one block east of Dealey Plaza, where the 1963 assassination took place. The design, by Philip Johnson, is simple, an open-air room formed by massive concrete walls that appear to float above the ground. Within, a granite slab bears the name of the president. It is all, sad to

Juan Cole: A Treatment for Radical Ignorance About Islamic Radicalism

Just as a commitment to containment of the Soviet Union served as a framework for U.S. foreign policy during the cold war, so the "war on terror" animates the foreign policy of the Bush administration. This struggle, in George W. Bush's words, is "a war unlike any other." Here, the enemy is vague, and terrorist groups are less the primary target than the conceptual glue holding together disparate policies toward Washington-defined "rogue states" such as Iran, Sudan,

Christine Rosen: Eugenics was a bad idea bred of good intentions

[Ms. Rosen is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of "Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement" (Oxford, 2004).] n 1927, physicians at the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded in Lynchburg sterilized a young woman named Carrie Buck. Although doctors at state institutions across the country had performed sterilizations before, Carrie's case was unusual. Her sterilization had received the imprimatur of the U.S

Pete DuPont: Ronald Reagan's election marked America's economic turning point

In 1981 Ronald Reagan became our 40th president, the hostages were released from Iran, Walter Cronkite retired after 19 years as "CBS Evening News" anchorman, and Sandra Day O'Connor became the first female Supreme Court justice. But a quarter of a century later we should remember 1981 as the year the kaleidoscope turned in America, a dividing point between the previous two decades' big-government beliefs and the individualism and market economy thinking of the next 20 yea

David J. Garrow: Kenneth Starr's Boo Boo

Kenneth W. Starr was a gullible and slipshod investigator. No, not in his all-too-thorough probe of Bill Clinton's dalliance with a White House intern, but seventeen years earlier, when he was the Reagan administration's point man in the background vetting of a Supreme Court nominee. During the presidential campaign in 1980, Ronald Reagan had declared that if elected, "one of the first Supreme Court vacancies in my administration will be filled by the most qualified woman I c

As World War II entered its final stages the belligerent powers committed one heinous act after another

by Mark Ealey

In a postbellum environment, far more war crimes are ultimately left untouched than are ever pursued in tribunals. 

Nicholas Kulish: Berlin decides to destroy its East German history

When I first lived in Berlin more than a decade ago, my favorite moment each morning was when my streetcar rumbled past a giant black bust of a dead Communist hero, Ernst Thälmann. Dawn came stubbornly late in winter and the temperature was often well below freezing. Waiting for the streetcar to come, stamping my feet to keep the feeling in my toes, I would often question why I had chosen the frigid outer reaches of Germany over my second choice, Barcelona. Passing ugly old Ernst's

S. Evyn Rubin: The world’s first execution of a human being by lethal gas

[Ms. Rubin is a writer and holds a B.A. in History from the University of Southern California. She is the recipient of a Puffin Foundation grant.] The world’s first execution of a human being by lethal gas took place on February 8, 1924, at the Nevada State Prison, Carson City, Nevada. The name of the first person so executed was Gee Jon, a Chinese immigrant. Gee Jon had been convicted of the murder of Tom Quong Kee. The new “lethal chamber,” as it was called, replaced a choice

Kevin Mattson: Aha, so on the Sacco and Vanzetti case, Sinclair was a self-promoting liar?

[Kevin Mattson is a professor of contemporary history at Ohio University and author, most recently, of Upton Sinclair and the Other American Century (John Wiley & Sons, 2006).] Upton Sinclair has been in the news lately. And it's not just the 100th anniversary of The Jungle. Seems the man was a liar. On December 24, 2005, the Los Angeles Times reported that an Orange County lawyer, Paul Hegness, had bought a box of papers at an auction warehouse for $100. Inside the

Christopher Phelps: How Should We Teach 'The Jungle'?

[Christopher Phelps is an associate professor of history at the Ohio State University at Mansfield and editor of a 2005 edition of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (Bedford/St. Martin's).] ... Originally published by Doubleday, Page in 1906, and celebrating its centennial in February, The Jungle describes a callous America in which the dollar trumps justice. It famously exposed the American meatpacking industry's loathsome practices and prompted federal consumer-protection laws. It is, h

Vladimir Tismaneanu: The speech that planted the seeds of freedom in Russia

[Mr. Tismaneanu is professor of politics at the University of Maryland (College Park) and author, most recently, of "Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism" (California, 2003).] Fifty years ago, on Feb. 25, Nikita Khrushchev launched his full-bore attack on the Stalin myth. At the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, a shocked audience of 1,436 delegates took in what came to be known as the "Secret Speech," one of the most im

Thai A. Nguyen-Khoa: Time for Vietnamese To Be Heard on Vietnam War

[New America Media contributor Thai A. Nguyen-Khoa teaches social studies in the San Francisco Unified School District. He was a Vietnamese Advisory Board member for the Oakland Museum conference "What's Going On," from February 2004 to July 2005. He writes for the English-edition of Nguoi Viet 2 and is an editor of Dan Chim Viet, a popular online magazine.] OAKLAND, Calif.--Thirty-three years after the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam and the ensuing debacle, America has stil

P. David Hornik: The War against the (Dead) Jews

[P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in Jerusalem. He can be reached at pdavidh2001@yahoo.com.] In a recent op-ed on “The New British Anti-Semitism” in Haaretz, Israeli historian Robert Wistrich remarks that “in absolute numbers, Great Britain is today second only to France in serious anti-Semitic incidents among European countries.” This has included “acts of vandalism in the months following the American invasion