Roundup: Talking About History

Daniel Lang/Levitsky: Sacco & Vanzetti ... Smeared Again

Daniel Lang/Levitsky is a theatre artist and organizer based in NYC. Recent work appears in Representing Sacco and Vanzetti (ed. Trasciatti & Delameter), What Democracy Looks Like (ed. Lang & Tichi), and Bridges/Brikn/Puentes. Lang/Levitsky is active in Jews Against the Occupation – NYC, the Mehmet Tarhan Defense Network, white picket fences and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice.A recent

David Cannadine: Christmas past?

... Sooner or later, of course, all children learn that Father Christmas isn't real: it's part of the process of growing up. It may be true for some of them that Christmas is never quite as magical an event again, and I hope I'm not disillusioning any young (or perhaps not-so-young) listeners by making this point now. In any case, in the long history of celebrating the twenty fifth of December, which by definition has gone on for the best part of two millennia, Father Christmas is

Brendan O'Neill: Europe must embrace true free speech

In Europe, five years into the 21st century, two writers face trial and imprisonment for something they said or wrote. Both could be incarcerated, not for physically harming another person or for damaging property, but for uttering words that European states deem offensive. Yet only one has been defended by the international literati, who have described the attempt to curtail his freedom of speech as an act of "anachronistic brutality." The other writer's plight has been i

Max Hastings: This is the country of Drake and Pepys, not Shaka Zulu

[The past 500 years have been dominated by westerners, so there's little point teaching children about other societies.] Most of the coverage given to last week's report from the government's Qualifications and Curriculum Authority focused upon the decline of school language studies. Because I am a historian by background and inclination, my own attention fell upon its remarks about history. It expresses concern about the overwhelming Nazi focus. It argues that schools "

Simon Schama: How will the noughties be remembered by historians?

... But if, for the hell of it, we can imagine an oracular, though fully digitised, historian a century hence - let's call her Sibyl - looking back at the first five years of the millennium, and marvelling at the the obtuseness of the generation that failed to see The Writing On The Wall, what would it be about the noughties that she would single out as glaringly ominous? Well, Sibyl would say, there was the teeny matter of the beginning of the end; of planet Earth, that is, the last chan

Robert Marquand: Treaty of Portsmouth now seen as global turning point

For a month 100 years ago, a quiet New England port held the focus of the world. From Aug. 9 to Sept. 5, diplomats were thrown together with local ladies clubs, and foreign reporters swooped onto picket-fenced streets and called the town a beacon of hope to end the cataclysm between "East" and "West." In fact, the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, fought mostly in Manchuria, was so profound in its effect that some historians now call it "World War

Gregory Melleuish: Too many historians know little history outside their own area of expertise

[Gregory Melleuish is associate professor of history and politics at the University of Wollongong.] ON the ABC quiz show The Einstein Factor there is a so-called brains trust as well as contestants. Sometimes questions are referred to the brains. On occasions the brains trust includes a historian to whom questions of a historical nature invariably are referred. What is amazing is how often these historical experts, who boast the title Doctor, get the answer wrong. On on

Hendrik Hertzberg: The "War" on Christmas

...Christmas itself, in something like its recognizably modern form, with gifts and cards and elves, dates from the early nineteenth century. The War on Christmas seems to have come along around a hundred years later, with the publication of “The International Jew,” by Henry Ford, the automobile magnate, whom fate later punished by arranging to have his fortune diverted to the sappy, do-gooder Ford Foundation. “It is not religious tolerance in the midst of religious difference, but religious att

Yvonne Abraham: The Armenian Controversy in Massachusetts

History teacher Bill Schechter and high school senior Ted Griswold believe their lawsuit is about a worthy and innocent educational principle: presenting different views of a tricky and disputed historical topic. The Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School teacher and his student believe that when Massachusetts high school students learn about the deaths of at least 1 million Armenians in Turkey during the early part of the 20th century, they should be taught that, while many historians call it a g

George Monbiot: The Turks haven't learned the British way of denying past atrocities

In reading reports of the trial of the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, you are struck by two things. The first, of course, is the anachronistic brutality of the country's laws. Mr Pamuk, like scores of other writers and journalists, is being prosecuted for "denigrating Turkishness", which means that he dared to mention the Armenian genocide in the first world war and the killing of the Kurds in the past decade. The second is its staggering, blithering stupidity. If there is one course of

Jeffrey Hart: The making of a conservative mind

[Mr. Hart, professor of English emeritus at Dartmouth, is author of "The American Conservative Mind Today" (ISI, 2005).] 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 t

Aaron J. Klein: Separating truth from fiction in Spielberg's movie

Co-written by the playwright Tony Kushner and based in part on a book, Vengeance by George Jonas, that has been widely called into question, Steven Spielberg's Munich is not a documentary. Indeed, it is full of distortions and flights of fancy that would make any Israeli intelligence officer blush. Before the opening credits, Spielberg informs us that the movie was "inspired by real events"—which raises the question, where in Munich does fact end and fiction begin? The dar

Andrew Burstein: How Christmas Became Merry

[Andrew Burstein, the author of "Jefferson's Secrets," is writing a biography of Washington Irving.] IN 1809, under the pseudonym Diedrich Knickerbocker, Washington Irving published "Knickerbocker's History of New York." In this book-length parody of colonial America, Irving took much glee in satirizing the early Dutch settlers of New York and their traditions, including their patron saint, Nicholas, whom they referred to as Sancte Claus. But in doing so, he also

Matt Bai: Fred Korematsu, The Man Who He Said No to Internment

In February 1942, a little more than two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which effectively decreed that West Coast residents of Japanese ancestry - whether American citizens or not - were now "enemy aliens." More than 100,000 Japanese-Americans reported to government staging areas, where they were processed and taken off to 10 internment camps. Fred Korematsu, the son of Japanese immigrants, was at the time a 23-year-old welder a

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto: We'd learn more history if we didn't teach it in school

[The author teaches at Tufts University and Queen Mary, University of London.] Trust a quango to make a drama out of drivel. The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority is 'increasingly concerned' because British schoolteachers devote most of the history timetable to the Tudors and the Nazis. This is a reflection of British proclivities. The public in this country likes sex and horror. So it likes Henry VIII and Hitler. Nothing wrong with that " except the common-or-garden Brit

Max Holland: Gene McCarthy Did Not Force LBJ Out of the '68 Race

Nearly all the obituaries for Eugene McCarthy credit the former Minnesota senator with forcing Lyndon Johnson out of the 1968 race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Without taking anything away from McCarthy's principled run against a sitting president of his own party, this is simplistic history that ignores everything we have since learned about that fateful year. To be sure, McCarthy added to Johnson's sense of beleagurement when the little-known senator made an unexpectedly st

Thomas Frank: The Public Intellectual Vs. the Professor

This is a brief excerpt from Thomas Frank's response to an extended analysis of his book, What's the Matter with Kansas, by Professor Larry Bartels. The full text makes for interesting reading. (Thanks to Rick Perlstein for bringing this to HNN's attention.) I suppose I should be grateful to Larry Bartels. After all, it’s not every author who gets to have his work assailed by the director of a prestigious Ivy League political science research center. It’s even more unusual to be cl

The New Jewish Studies

When a group of graduate students and young professors gathered for a workshop on “pushing the boundaries” of Jewish studies Monday, they broke up into small groups to consider some questions. One of them was: “How would you describe your work without using the words ‘Jew,’ ‘Jewish,’ or ‘Judaism?’” That’s not the kind of question that would have been asked at a Jewish studies meeting a decade ago. But even if this session was not entirely typical of those at this year’s annual meeti

Peter Kolchin: In the mid-18th century, one in five New Yorkers was a chattel

[Mr. Kolchin, the Henry Clay Reed Professor of History at the University of Delaware, is the author of "American Slavery, 1617-1877" (rev. ed., Hill & Wang, 2003) and other books on slavery and emancipation.] Let's begin with three facts. In the middle of the 18th century, slaves constituted about one-fifth of New York City's population. Slavery persisted in New York well into the 19th century. Although male slaves outnumbered females in rural New York, in the city the

Jeremy Seal: Just Another Displaced New Yorker (Santa)

[Jeremy Seal is the author of "Nicholas: The Epic Journey From Saint to Santa Claus."] A Cincinnati newspaper announced in 1844 that "the sterling old Dutchman, Santa Claus, has just arrived from the renowned regions of the Manhattoes," or Manhattan, "with his usual budget of knickknacks for the Christmas times." Manhattan is where Santa Claus, the secular re-imagining of St. Nicholas, first emerged care of canny cultural nostalgics among t