Roundup: Talking About History

WSJ Editorial: Reaganomics, 25 Years Later ... Still Morning in America

Twenty-five years ago today, Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as the 40th President of the United States promising less intrusive government, lower tax rates and victory over communism. On that same day, the American hostages in Iran were freed after 444 days of captivity. If the story of history is one long and arduous march toward freedom, this was a momentous day well worth commemorating. All the more so because over this 25-year period prosperity has been the rule, not the excepti

Richard Wightman Fox: Lincoln's Religious Quest

[Richard Wightman Fox, professor of history at the University of Southern California, is the author of Jesus in America: Personal Savior, Cultural Hero, National Obsession.] The recent avalanche of Abraham Lincoln books announces the ever-closer approach of Lincoln's 200th birthday. (Lay in some extra bunting: Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on the same day, Feb. 12, 1809.) The year 2005 began with C.A. Tripp, in The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, freely speculating about

Joel Engel: Bill Clinton, Historian?

[Joel Engel is an author and journalist in Southern California.] A MEMORIAL SERVICE for former senator Eugene J. McCarthy was held last Saturday at the National Cathedral in Washington, and former president Bill Clinton was there to eulogize him. This was not surprising: President Clinton will probably be present to eulogize every other boomer icon, whenever photographers are permitted, for as long as his health permits. What was surprising, though, was that Clinton credited the se

R. J. Del Vecchio: Lessons of Viet Nam ... By Whose Judgment?

[R. J. Del Vecchio is a veteran activist and long-time student of the conflict in SE Asia, starting prior to joining the Marines and serving in the 1st Marine Division in 1968. He has been making presentations on the war as a guest lecturer at colleges and high schools since 1996, is active in several veteran’s organizations, and was a speaker at the 2004 Boston Conference on the Myths of Viet Nam. He is a co-author of “Whitewash/Blackwash: Myths of the Viet Nam War”, a teacher’s aid booklet c

Michiko Kakutani: Runaway Relativism and the Fictional Memoir

...We live in a relativistic culture where television"reality shows" are staged or stage-managed, where spin sessions and spin doctors are an accepted part of politics, where academics argue that history depends on who is writing the history, where an aide to President Bush, dismissing reporters who live in the"reality-based community," can assert that"we're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." ... Around the same time [as"our culture's enshrinement of subjectivity], b

Stacy Schiff: Poor Richard's Redemption

[Stacy Schiff is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France and the Birth of America."] AMERICAN history is short on 300th birthdays. Which is only one reason to salute Ben Franklin, who had the foresight to have been born three centuries ago today. It was one of many generous acts for his country. He makes us feel we have a history. As a man of science, Franklin lamented that he had been born too soon. (A beautiful woman 40

Christopher Hitchens: Benjamin Franklin was the Socrates of his day

It might seem a little extreme to compare the Philadelphia of the 18th century A.D. with the Athens of the fifth century B.C., but seldom can any one city have been the center of so much learning, inquiry and innovation. And not just a center -- for work in astronomy, medicine, law and other fields -- but also a magnet. When Joseph Priestley, the virtual discoverer of oxygen, had his laboratory smashed by the mob that shouted "Church and King," he quit Birmingham, England, and removed

Taylor Branch: Globalizing Martin Luther King's Legacy

The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.'s name carries more resonance than impact - noble, universal, yet bounded by race and time. The official celebration of his birthday draws tributes to the end of legal segregation, reprises of landmark oratory and varied appraisals of problems for minorities. Yet despite America's high-stakes national commitment to advance free government around the world, Americans consistently marginalize or ignore King's commitment to the core values of democr

David Levering Lewis: Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s final chapter

In one of his more bizarre Oval Office confidences, Lyndon Johnson said that he didn’t want to “follow Hitler” but that Hitler had the right idea: “Just take a simple thing and repeat it often enough, even if it wasn’t true, why, people accept it.” Johnson was speaking by telephone to Martin Luther King, Jr., in Selma, Alabama, about how to convince Southern whites that Southern blacks deserved the franchise. The curious political-science tutorial came on the afternoon of January 15, 1965, King’

Tony Paterson: Uwe Benkel's Team Has Recovered Thousands Of Bodies Of WWII Allied Airmen

A fist-sized block of glass sits on top of a stack of files in Uwe Benkel's sitting-room. It looks like an expensive crystal paper weight that might have been bought at Harrods. Yet the block has a more poignant history. A few weeks before Christmas it was retrieved from a 15ft pit hidden deep in a forest in Germany's Rhineland Palatinate district near the French border. The block once formed part of the bulletproof windscreen of an American fighter bomber flown by 21-year-old Ronal

Stephen McGinty: It's time for BBC Scotland to make history in the Schama mould

... I indulged my passion for America by working my way through Ken Burns's magisterial The Civil War and The West. This was capped last Christmas by Alistair Cooke's 13-part history of America, first broadcast in 1972, which remains informative and fascinating. Then came Michael Wood's tight-trousered jaunts through the ancient world, In Search of the Trojan War and In Search of Alexander the Great. I must have been infected by the Macedonians' desire to take on the world, for next I embarked

Patrick Barkham: 850 Year Old Middlesex Village In Heathrow's Path

Elm trees hugged the main street in Sipson when Jack Clark earned his weekly 3s 9d on Thomas Wild's farm. Fields, he recalls, were lined with hummocks of strawberries. Grapes and peaches grew in glasshouses. Plums dangled over the walls of orchards. There was a pump for spring water. A mile-and-a-half down the road was a small cluster of cottages called Heathrow. The only grey objects in the sky above the market gardens of Middlesex were Clark's pigeons. Jack Clark is 94 and still k

Vincent Carroll: Rocky Mountain News Editor Takes Historians To Task

The power of the individual If young people today are turned off by the study of history - and by and large they are - it is partly the fault of the historians and educators who write the books that students read. History is most vivid and real when it highlights the extraordinary individuals, good and evil, who shaped it. But many scholars disdain such a focus, dwelling instead on culture, class and economics as the driving forces in our past. Their impersonal approach

Deodorants Have Been Used For Centuries

Body odour was once an inevitable part of life, but thanks to a mystery inventor, modern society smells a lot nicer. In 1881, an unidentified man in Philadelphia made the first antiperspirant to be sold commercially, known as "Mum". The product was originally sold through his nurse and made with zinc, but later deodorants changed to aluminium chloride after complaints of skin irritation. It was originally sold as a cream in a jar. Helen Barnett, a

Ralph Vartabedian/Stephen Braun: New Orleans' Levees Suffered From Numerous Defects

In the frantic days after Hurricane Katrina, the Army Corps of Engineers scrambled to plug a breach on the 17th Street levee, dropping massive sandbags from a fleet of helicopters. But the engineers were baffled: The sandbags kept disappearing into the watery breach. The pit eventually swallowed 2,000 sandbags, each weighing between 3,000 and 20,000 pounds. It was an early sign that the hurricane had opened an extraordinarily deep hole in the foundation of the storm wall, pointing t

John Kay: Global Trade Roots Planted In History, Geography

The Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company was founded before legislation permitted the establishment of limited liability companies, and still operates today under the royal charter its self-made founders, Arthur Anderson and Brodie Willcox, obtained when they won the lucrative contract to ship the Royal Mail to Britain's eastern colonies. The 20-year-old Queen Victoria could hardly have imagined that the business on which she bestowed these favours would one day be subje

Heroic Scottish Explorer Died In Poverty Due To Shackleton

The family of Henry "Chippy" McNish, a Glasgow-born shipwright who made possible the epic open-boat voyage of explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, wants a posthumous award of the Polar Medal. McNish -- who later settled in New Zealand -- helped save the lives of the expedition's 28 men, but Shackleton branded him a troublemaker and refused to recommend him for a Polar Medal, an accolade given to most members of the failed 1914-16 Imperial Trans-Antarctic expedition. Andrew Leac

Nick Chordas: All About The Benjamin

You have to hand it to Benjamin Franklin: How many 300-year-olds can say they helped found the United States and inspired a Diddy song? B. Frank was an O.G. (Original Genius) long before his mug appeared on the $100 bill. Every grade-school graduate knows that Franklin signed the Declaration of Independence, published Poor Richard's Almanack and flew a kite during a lightning storm. But who knew that Franklin invented the armonica? Furthermore, what the hec

Jim Ritter: The First American: Benjamin Franklin

Today, America celebrates the 300th birthday of the Founding Father who called himself Benjamin Franklin, printer. Ben Franklin was much more than that, of course. Take your choice: scientist, diplomat, inventor, civic booster, publishing magnate, politician, writer, celebrity, ladies' man and the most famous kite flier in history. "He probably had more IQ points than most anyone else who has walked the American earth," said University of Pennsylvania historia

Patricia Q. Wall: Writing a Children's Book About Slavery in New England

“I never knew there were slaves in New England.” That is the most common response among nearly 4000 teachers, parents and other readers to my book, Child Out of Place: A Story of New England. Bas