Roundup: Talking About History

Robert Jensen: "Dangerous" Academics ... Right-wing Distortions About Leftist Professors

[Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a member of the board of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. He is the author of "The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege" and "Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity" (both from City Lights Books). Email to: rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu] In an “urgent” email last week, right-wing activist David

James Carroll: Finally, the Mall Gets Integrated

America has had a difficult time reckoning with its racist past. Slavery was a defining part of the cultures and economies out of which the nation grew, and for most of its first century the ownership of humans by other humans was taken for granted. A pseudo-Darwinian ranking by ''race" justified that order, which stood on pillars of skin color and ethnic origin. When that blatant structure of denigration was overthrown by the Civil War, implicit assumptions of white supremacy remained so l

Arnold Beichman: The demise of the New Leader

[Arnold Beichman is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.] THERE IS NOTHING SADDER--for me anyway--than watching a newspaper or magazine go under, as has just happened to the New Leader, for which I used to write. I go back far enough to recall the shutdown in 1931 of the New York World, the Pulitzer flagship, which Pulitzer's sons sold to the New York Evening Telegram. I was working my way through Columbia College as a night copyboy at the N

James Ottavio Castagnera: Is Your Kid Getting Brainwashed at College?

[Jim Castagnera is a Philadelphia attorney and author, who writes a weekly newspaper column, “Attorney at Large.”] Pennsylvania lawmakers are worried that our kids in college are being brainwashed. Late last month a committee of the Pennsylvania state legislature convened in Philadelphia to investigate whether the Commonwealth’s colleges discriminate against politically conservative students. The committee took two days of testimony at Temple University. Established last July

Kenneth R. Gregg:The Engineer of the American Revolution

The young Tadeusz (or Thaddeus) Andrzej Bonawentura Kosciuszko (pronounced KOS-CHOOS-KO, 2/4/1746-10/15/1817), born near Brest (now in Belarus) studied military engineering in Paris with the intent of serving in his native Poland. However, in 1772 Prussia, Austria and Russia had partitioned Poland, seizing around 30% of its territory and forcing governmental changes through bribes, threats and arrests. There was no place in the Polish Army for Kosciuszko, and he left in 1775 to France where, at

Jeffrey Hart: The Burke Habit

In "The Conservative Mind" (1953), a founding document of the American conservative movement, Russell Kirk assembled an array of major thinkers beginning with Edmund Burke and made a major statement. He proved that conservative thought in America existed, and even that such thought was highly intelligent--a demonstration very much needed at the time. Today we are in a very different and more complicated situation. Nevertheless, a synthesis is possible, based on what Ameri

Greg Mitchell: Sliming a Famous Muckraker: The Untold Story

A recent Los Angeles Times article, and then a widely-published Jonah Goldberg column, questioned the character of Upton Sinclair, based on the discovery of a 1929 letter about the Sacco and Vanzetti case. One problem: Some facts were overlooked or wrong. This is the story of a recent Los Angeles Times “scoop” that was error-ridden and misleading and resulted in a hysterical rightwing attack, led by Jonah Goldberg, on a famed author nearly 40 years after his passing.

Rodger Citron: Whatever Happened to Charles Reich?

The recent nomination of Judge Samuel Alito Jr. to the Supreme Court unearthed yet another reminder of the continuing influence of the politics of the 1960s counterculture on our current legal and political culture. After Alito arrived at Yale Law School in the fall of 1972, he hoped that he would take his first-year constitutional law class from Professor Robert Bork, according to The Washington Post. Instead, Alito’s constitutional law professor turned out to be Charles Reich, a lib

Henry Louis Gates Jr: My Yiddishe Mama

[Mr. Gates, the executive producer and host of "African American Lives," a four-part series beginning tonight on PBS, is the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities at Harvard and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research there. He is the editor, along with Kwame Anthony Appiah, of "Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience" (Running Press, 2003).] Since 1977, when I sat riveted every night for a week i

Earl Ofari Hutchinson: Coretta Scott King was More Than Just Dr. King's Wife

[Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a columnist for BlackNews.com, an author and political analyst.] I certainly appreciate your concern, and I would appreciate anything that you can do to help." That was the dignified but worried request for help that Coretta Scott King made in a phone conversation with then Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy. There was good reason for worry and the plea for help. In early 1959, her husband, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Mideast conflict hits endowed chairs

"At universities across North America, endowed chairs have become another weapon in the campus battle between supporters of the Palestinian cause on one side and Israel on the other," says Liel Leibovitz, a contributor to this bimonthly magazine of Jewish culture. Funds for chairs in Arab studies have come mainly from countries, principalities, and kingdoms in the Persian Gulf, explains Mr. Leibovitz, whereas money for Israeli chairs is largely from wealthy entrepreneurs

Timothy Burke: Culture, Politics, Academia and Other Shiny Objects

Michael Berube’s most recent essay on academic freedom deserves wide exposure: it would make a good pamphlet to be sent and circulated not just among academics, but between academics and their various publics, including legislatures and pundits. One part of it that caught my eye in particular was Berube’s observation that the defense of academic freedom should be one part of a wider commitment to procedur

John Radzilowski: The Real Myths of Yalta

John Radzilowski, at frontpagemag.com (5-13-05):[John Radzilowski, Ph.D., is a writer, historian, and senior fellow at Piast Institute (http://www.piastinstitute.org). He can be contacted at jradzilow@aol.com.]"Outrage” … “cause for shame”[1] … “incendiary.”[2] This was the mainstream media’s reaction to President Bush’s speec

Martin E. Marty: Textbooks and Religion ... The Problem

Historians, to whose company I belong, are often taught to feel irrelevant. Survey after survey shows that most citizens know appallingly little about the past, including "their" past, the past on the basis of which they make decisions. Whether the fault is with us historians for doing our job badly or with publics for failing to pay attention is hard to discern. One point ought to be clear, however, in these days when our sub-cultures fight our sub-cultures and our "multi-&quo

Joseph Rago: Rosenberg Reruns (The left can't face the truth that they were guilty)

[Mr. Rago is an assistant features editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.] You would think, by now, with a half-century of scholarship behind us and a great deal of damning evidence on display, we would not have to be arguing about the guilt or innocence of various iconic figures of the late 1940s and 1950s: Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White or, perhaps most notoriously, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. But the martyr status of such figures seems irresistible, even today, to a

Andrew E. Busch: The Goldwater Myth

"During the campaign of 1964, [he] was our incorruptible standard-bearer," recalled William F. Buckley, Jr., in his 1998 obituary of Barry Goldwater, the career senator from Arizona, 34 years after the watershed. Goldwater, of course, was defeated resoundingly on Election Day, winning only six states. "It was the judgment of the establishment that Goldwater's critique of American liberalism had been given its final exposure on the national political scene," Buckley continued.

Henry Siegman: Israel's History and Spielberg's Munich

... I saw nothing in the movie to justify the claim that it seeks to establish the moral equivalence of terrorist killings of civilians and Israeli retaliations. While the movie includes an emotional exchange between a Palestinian terrorist and the leader of the Israeli counterterrorism team about the moral claims of their respective national struggles, the focus of Munich is on members of the Israeli assassination team and their mounting doubts about their assignment and what it may be doing to

Kwan Weng Kin: Koizumi's Obstinacy Could Isolate Japan ... Yasukuni and Asia

[This article appeared in the Straits Times on January 13, 2006. Kwan Weng Kin is the Japan correspondent for the Straits Times ( Singapore).] ... Critics say Mr Koizumi makes up for his lack of diplomatic finesse by his deftness at substituting real issues with those of his own creation. He insists that his decision to visit Yasukuni is a 'matter of the heart' and that it is natural for a prime minister to express gratitude to his country's war dead. But

Susan Vigilante: Opus Dei 101 (Investigating a “history” class)

[Susan Vigilante blogs from Minneapolis at www.desperateirishhousewife.blogspot.com.] So here I am facing another Minnesota winter, looking to expand my mind. Naturally I turn to "The Winter & Spring 2006 Community Education Catalog" of the Eden Prairie, Minnesota public schools, where I see the very first course offering is "Da Vinci Code Historical Seminar." Did you find the historical events in the 2003 fictional best-seller interesting but too fant

Daniel Golden: New Battleground in Textbook Wars ... Religion

The victors write the history books, the saying goes. But increasingly, religious advocates try to edit them. Religious pressure on textbooks is growing well beyond Christian fundamentalists' attack on evolution. History books are the biggest battleground, as groups vie for changes in texts for elementary and secondary schools that cast their faiths in a better light. Two Hindu groups and a Jewish group have been set up in the past three years as textbook watchdogs, add