Roundup: Talking About History

Adrian Brune: Yale Project Laboring To Show Softer Side Of Jonathan Edwards

Those of us who think we know Jonathan Edwards, the 18th-century fire and brimstone theologian, don't really know one of Connecticut's most famous sons. We really only know the side that brought his congregation to their knees with words like this: ``The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider ... abhors you, he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire.'' Yale Divinity School historian Kenneth P. Minkema wants people to see t

Scott Burchill: Sharon's Eulogists Ignore The Blood On His Hands

Presentism -- overemphasising the significance of current events and denying historical perspectives -- reached epidemic proportions after September 11, 2001, as Western governments scrambled to deny that Islamists acted out of any sense of legitimate grievance. According to Prime Minister John Howard, the West was targeted by extremists ''because of who we are, not because of what we have done''. There is no cause for self-examination because our enemies are driven by a ''detestati

Andrew Busch: The Goldwater Myth ... He didn't become a libertarian until his twilight years

[Mr. Busch is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and author most recently of "Reagan's Victory: The Presidential Election of 1980 and the Rise of the Right" (University Press of Kansas). This article appears in the Winter issue of the Claremont Review of Books.] "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

Max Boot: Ariel Sharon's unending legacy

WHEN ARIEL Sharon became Israel's prime minister in 2001, much of the world lamented that a fatal blow had been dealt to the Mideast peace process. He was widely denounced in European and Muslim states as a butcher and a war criminal whose goal was ethnic cleansing or possibly mass murder of the Palestinians. Now that Sharon is incapacitated, many of the same voices are mourning him — irony of ironies — as a peacemaker whose loss would make a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian c

Harvey J. Kaye: Tom Paine's Common Sense ... An Anniversary Progressives Should Remember

[Harvey J. Kaye is professor of social change and development at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and the author of Thomas Paine and the Promise of America (Hill and Wang, 2005).] The 230th anniversary of the publication of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense—the brilliant little pamphlet whose arguments literally turned the world upside down— invites reflection both on the state of the nation to which it gave birth and on the state of the

Mustafa Akyol: Remembering Abdul Hamid II, a pro-American caliph

[Mustafa Akyol is a writer based in Istanbul.] AL QAEDA'S STATED GOAL--to reestablish the caliphate, the political leadership of worldwide Islam embodied first in the successors of the Prophet Muhammad and most recently in the four-century rule of the Ottoman dynasty--is pure, ahistorical fantasy. One way to appreciate this is to revisit the 33-year reign of the most remarkable modern caliph, Sultan Abdul Hamid II (1876-1909). An ally neither of bigoted Islamists nor of the radical

Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt: Did an author who claimed to unmask the Klan make-up much of his story?

[Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt are the authors of "Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything." Some of the documentary evidence discussed in this column is at www.freakonomics.com.] Our book "Freakonomics" includes a chapter titled "How Is the Ku Klux Klan Like a Group of Real-Estate Agents?" This chapter was our effort to bring to life the economic concept known as informat

Richard Powers: Mozart's Skull ... Should We Care If We've Identified It?

[Richard Powers is the author, most recently, of the novel "The Time of Our Singing."] MOZART'S skull may or may not have been rediscovered, and you probably didn't even know it was missing. Today, live on Austrian state television, scientists from the Institute for Forensic Medicine in Innsbruck will declare definitively whether the skull held by the International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg in fact belonged to the man whom many consider the most sublim

Jonathan Glancey: Save Britian's Heritage Celebrates 30 Years Of Historic Building Preservation

Forlorn Palladian country houses. Faded mechanics' institutes. Unitarian churches and Methodist chapels long abandoned by the non-conforming industrial faithful in the once sooty suburbs of northern towns . . . these are just the sort of abandoned buildings that Save Britain's Heritage was set up to rescue 30 years ago, during what had been designated European Architectural Heritage Year. Britain's contribution to that event was, in the first three months of 1975 alone, 334 applicat

Brent Staples: When Democracy Died in Wilmington, N.C.

The United States abolished the practice of owning and selling human beings when the 13th Amendment was ratified in 1865. But the commercial component of slavery was in some ways the easiest to dispense with. The systems of black powerlessness and white supremacy that supported the enterprise proved to be far more pernicious. They persisted for another 100 years in the Deep South, enforced by lynching, disenfranchisement and state-sanctioned racial terror. By the rise of the civil r

Danny Schechter: Ariel Sharon: The Collision of Memory, Myth and Media

[News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org. His latest books are "The Death of Media" and "When News Lies." See newsdissector.org/store.htm for more information.] Ariel Sharon has been a warrior all his life so his post-surgical fight for life is nothing new. Reports that he had died were quickly supplanted by news from the operating room that the tank-like former tank commander turned Israeli Prime Minister was hanging on like some modern day Sampson

Klaus Wiegrefe: New Film Offers Strong Theory but Weak Evidence About JFK Assassination

A German TV station will broadcast a documentary on Friday that wants to clear up the murder of US President John F. Kennedy. But does the film prove its own thesis? A critical analysis. On the morning of Sept. 27, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald stepped out of a bus in Mexico City after a long ride from the American border. The lanky southerner stayed in the Mexican capital at least four days, and if you believe film director Wilfried Huismann (Rendezvous With Death, airing on ARD on Jan.

Kevin Smant: Is the Republican Party the Party of Watergate as Rick Perlstein Claims?

[Mr. Smant teahes history at Indiana University South Bend.] Now that final exams and the hectic days of the holidays are behind us, I'd like to go back to something that appeared on C-Net a few weeks ago. It was the text of a talk given by Rick Perlstein at a recent Princeton University conference on the conservative movement, its past, present, etc. In it, Mr. Perlstein discusses what will be his next book, a history of American conservatism during the Nixon years, and he argues that con

Bradford William Short : Did physicians or family caregivers play a causal role in the deaths of Adams and Jefferson?

[Bradford William Short is the research editor at the Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute (C-FAM) in New York.] Many bioethicists are striving to create a grim future for America, one in which such outrages as infanticide are tolerated. But disfiguring the future isn't enough for some of them. They're doing the same thing to the past. Pro-assisted-suicide bioethicists have time and again made false and often preposterous claims about the history of suicide and assisted suicide i

Jonathan Alter: As the shadows fell, MLK looked north

Forty years ago this winter, I was an 8-year-old boy growing up on the North Side of Chicago. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had moved into a slum in the impoverished West Side neighborhood of North Lawndale to dramatize the conditions of what were then known as "Northern Negroes." King was scheduled to visit the home of a local politician to raise money for his cash-strapped movement from white "lakefront liberals." But the politician, caught between his personal sympathies

James C. Roberts: Front row at Nuremberg

Lt. John Dolibois sat in the courtroom at Nuremberg, Germany, 60 years ago watching Herman Goering testify in the war crimes trials. Much of the world was transfixed by the proceedings, but Lt. Dolibois, an Army intelligence officer, felt strangely indifferent. "I just wanted to go home," he said. "I had had enough of the Nazis." On trial were 22 high-ranking Nazis charged with crimes against humanity. Lt. Dolibois is the man who knew them the best -- their

Peter Ford: France Divided On How To Cast Colonial Past

Hardly had the fires died down in the Paris suburbs, as the November rioting by immigrant youths petered out, than the flames of another conflict fed by France's colonial past began to sweep through the political landscape here. This time they are metaphorical. But the passionate debate under way over whether French history teachers should stress positive aspects of colonialism is generating almost as much heat. The argument reveals the same ambivalence among French politicians abou

Steven Plaut: DePaul U Confronts Amerikan "Empire"

Q: How do you know when America has crossed the line into an oppressive, occupational empire?A: When DePaul University begins studying it.

Nigel Bunyan: Fulford Battlefield Society Commissions Embroiderers For Bayeux-like Piece

It may be almost 1,000 years late but campaigners are pinning their hopes on a preface to the Bayeux Tapestry to win the second Battle of Fulford - the "forgotten'' clash of 1066. The battle is considerably less well known than the clash between King Harold and William the Conqueror, and it even lags behind the Saxon encounter with Harald Hardrada at Stamford Bridge just before Hastings. However, historians believe that Fulford played a key role in the struggle for

Ian Moore: Australia's National Archives Irresponsible With Whitlam Papers

[Ian Moore is a former editor of The Sunday Telegraph and the founding editor of the Sunday Herald Sun.] History must be an impartial -- and accurate -- account of events; a record of man's achievements, failings and follies. To this end, documents such as cabinet papers are invaluable to historians, who have had to wait 30 years for the political tumult (or embarrassment) to abate before they can assess their contents. The cabinet papers released on January 1 were the