Roundup: Talking About History

Max Blumenthal: Princeton Tilts Right

On a couch outside Princeton University's Dodds Auditorium, where a conference titled "The Conservative Movement: Its Past, Present and Future" was taking place, a veteran culture warrior, William Bennett, found himself surrounded by a group of eight African-American graduate students who had gathered to protest a racially charged remark he had made on his radio show months earlier: "You could abort every black baby in this country and your crime rate would go down."

Scott McLemee: David Horowitz's Book on "Dangerous" Professors

The groves of academe now echo with howls of outrage over The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America —a new book from Regnery Publishing, a conservative press, by David Horowitz. All over the country, scholars have turned its pages with mounting fury, indignant at not being listed. One prof even did a podcast just to (in his words) “spit n’cuss about being left out.” In the meantime, Horowitz himself has hit the airwaves. The book is being subjected to searching exa

Matthew M. Aid: Declassification in Reverse

Beginning in the fall of 1999, and continuing unabated for the past seven years, at least six government agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Defense Department, the military services, and the Department of Justice, have been secretly engaged in a wide-ranging historical document reclassification program at the principal National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) research facility at College Park, Maryland, as well as at t

Interview with David Horowitz: The Professors

FP: Mr. Horowitz, welcome to Frontpage Interview. Horowitz: Well, it's not as though I'm a stranger here. But thanks.FP: When DiscovertheNetworks.org first came out, the Left launched its attacks within just a few hours of the database’s appearance on the web, meaning, clearly, that it had not even begun the process of examining the website’s huge content. To continue this tradition, various leftists have scathingly “reviewed” The Profess

Samina Ali: Black History Month ... Why It's Important to Preserve

I wanted to share with you on this article I read on msnbc.msn.com. In an interview with 60 Minutes, Morgan Freeman was asked how he felt about Black History Month. He stated that he doesn't want a Black History Month because Black History is American History. I personally don't agree and I'm disturbed he made the comment. I know it's been debated before and the article mentions this, but I guess since Morgan Freeman said it - people are agreeing with him. He covers all the bases or catego

Kalavai Venkat: Textbooks Proselytize for Allah

Muslim organizations have not only used California schools and textbooks to proselytize for Allah, but they now seek to portray other religions through an Islamic prism, claim the modern Jews do not have an historical connection to the nation of Israel, and reintroduce the charge of deicide to American textbooks. At least three major publishers whose textbooks are under consideration for adoption by the State of California – Ballard & Tighe, Houghton-Mifflin, and McDougal Littell &ndas

George Erikson: Who Were The Earliest Americans?

In Atlantis In America: Navigators of the Ancient World Ivar Zapp and I proposed that when the identities of the first Americans were finally known that they would likely turn out to be South Pacific Islanders. The idea that open-sea navigators would be the first Americans was the result of our belief that the great stone spheres of Costa Rica were sculpted by the earliest peoples in the Americas and that they resembled structures used as sighting stones throughout the Pacific. The Te Atibu n

Ellen Schrecker: Worse Than McCarthy

When Barrows Dunham, chairman of Temple University's philosophy department, faced the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953, he knew that his job was on the line. He was determined not to cooperate with the committee or name names; so, after giving his name, address, and — reluctantly — his date and place of birth, he invoked the Fifth Amendment's privilege against self-incrimination. He was more forthcoming with Temple's investigation, explaining to a special faculty-administration com

Wakamiya Yoshibumi and Watanabe Tsuneo: Calls for a National Memorial to Replace Yasukuni

[Many older Japanese conservatives are deeply committed to pacifism as a result of their personal experiences in World War II, despite recent Japanese government efforts to assert the right to belligerence in the present and the legitimacy of Japan’s wars in the 1930s and 1940s. Nonaka Hiromu, the former Secretary-General of the Liberal Democratic Party, retired from politics last year. But he still openly criticizes Prime Minister Koizumi’s visits to Yasu

Victor Davis Hanson: What Ancient History Tells Us About Iraq

Victor Davis Hanson gave the following speech at the Wednesday Morning Club at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles, California, on February 1, 2006. For more information on the Wednesday Morning Club, e-mail Mike. --FrontPageMag Editors. Michael Wiener: It’s truly an honor to be here to introduce to you somebody whom I greatly admire and whom I consider a friend. Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a classical scholar. He’s a Director Emeritus of Classics at Califo

Martin Kramer: Title VI ... Bring the Languages Back

As I've just reported, the National Research Council of the National Academies has commenced its $1.5 million review of Title VI, the federal subsidy program for language and area studies in universities. The first question members of the review committee should ask themselves is this: is Title VI doing the job Congress thinks it's doing?Title VI has always been marketed to Congress as a language program, fir

Martin Edlund: A 1939 film about Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln's long limbs and saturnine features have lately been stretched out on the psychotherapist's couch. The cover to last October's Atlantic Monthly considered "Lincoln's Great Depression" (an excerpt from Joshua Wolf Shenk's book Lincoln's Melancholy). Applying modern clinical diagnoses to the historical record, Shenk found him to be a severe manic depressive with suicidal tendencies. Peeking into his medicine cabinet, he noted a pharmacopeia of opiates, sarsaparilla, cocai

John R. MacArthur: Why This Upper West Side Liberal Is Trouibled by a Park Named After Wm. Tecumseh Sherman

Every time I take my kids to the Tecumseh Playground, at 77th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, in Manhattan, I'm troubled by a political paradox. On the one hand, this Western-themed lot for tots means to honor Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, of Confederacy-destroying and Indian-killing fame, as does the adjacent public school, which bears his full name. A placard at the playground entrance also touts Sherman's tour as a New Yorker, since the scourge of Atlanta and the Carolinas spent h

Ronald Radosh: Yet more dumb JFK conspiracies

[Mr. Radosh, adjunct senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, is co-author with Joyce Milton of "The Rosenberg File."] Everyone loves conspiracy theories, and Europe is no different. First they had the best-selling French book whose author claimed the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were covert actions of American intelligence; next there was the Arab world's claim that it was an operation by Israeli intelligence. Now we have a new one - in th

Mark M. Smith: Shouldn't we think of slavery in terms of smell, taste and other senses?

[Mark M. Smith is a professor of history at the University of South Carolina and editor of Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt (University of South Carolina Press, 2005). This excerpt is from How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses, published this month by the University of North Carolina Press.] ... modern discussions of race and racial identity are hostage to the eye. With few exceptions, popular writing as well as many academic works — even

Sam Roberts: Dot-Dot-Dot, Dash-Dash-Dash, No More

MRS. Sandoval," Homer Macauley said, "your son is dead. Maybe it's a mistake. Maybe it wasn't your son. Maybe it was somebody else. The telegram says it was Juan Domingo. But maybe the telegram is wrong." Beginning in the mid-19th century, the telegram was the most immediate way of distributing news or sending a message. Whether it was one of those dreaded "regret to inform you" notices from the War Department that William Saroyan's Homer delivered in "

Adam Cohen: According to Webster: One Man's Attempt to Define 'America'

When Noah Webster published "A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language," purists were horrified. Webster Americanized the British spellings in Samuel Johnson's famous dictionary, turning "defence" and "honour" into "defense" and "honor," and dropping the "k" from "musick." Webster included new American words like "subsidize" and "caucus," and left out hoary Britishisms like "fishefy." John

Michael Hill: What if Lincoln had lived?

[Mr. Hill is a staff reporter for the Baltimore Sun.] Most say that America today is a distressingly polarized country - deeply divided over issues from abortion to gun control, from affirmative action to evolution. Hah! You want polarized? Think of the country that Abraham Lincoln faced when he took office in 1861 - states seceding, a Civil War on the horizon, all over the seemingly insoluble issue of slavery, the one that had stumped the founding fathers.

The baby boomers vs. the greatest generation

The legacy of the baby-boom generation may not be as great as some boomers like to believe it is, says Gary Kamiya, executive editor of the online magazine. This he writes in response to the new book The Greater Generation (St. Martin's Press, 2006), by Leonard Steinhorn, an associate professor of communication at American University. In the book, Mr. Steinhorn argues that even though it was the boomers' parents -- often referred to as "the greatest generation" -- who dra

Noliwe M. Rooks: African-American studies began in a multiracial movement for social reform

[Noliwe M. Rooks is associate director of the program in African American studies at Princeton University. Her book White Money/Black Power: The Surprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race in Higher Education has just been published by Beacon Press.] In the late 1960s, black studies became a part of American higher education. By 1971 more than 500 programs, departments, and institutes had been founded on four-year college campuses; add in black-studies init