Roundup: Talking About History

Michiko Kakutani: Trying to Tell if Reagan Was a Leader or Was Led

In an effort to describe President Ronald Reagan, reporters and biographers have resorted to all sorts of metaphors and images. Garry Wills called him "the perfect Scout," a "Doctor Feelgood," "the demagogue as rabble-soother." Lou Cannon wrote that both conservatives and pragmatists in the Reagan White House treated him "as if he were a child monarch in need of constant protection" - "they paid homage to him, but gave him no respect." Others hav

Roger Kahn: Gene McCarthy ... The Quiet Man

ON Nov. 30, 1967, I traveled to Washington for The Saturday Evening Post to cover a speech by Senator Eugene McCarthy. McCarthy, who died this month at 89, was planning to announce that he was going to take on President Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic nomination for the presidency.... Where most campaigns open with trumpets, Eugene McCarthy's began with civility. He felt, he would tell me later, that the Kennedy style and what went with it, the troops of publicists, the hired chee

Robert Bruegmann: Why Sprawl Is a Good Thing

[Robert Bruegmann is the author of Sprawl: A Compact History (U. of Chicago Press).] One of the most important facts about cities from the beginning of recorded history until the fairly recent past was the sharp distinction between urban and rural ways of life. Within the city wall of most early cities, a visitor would see a dense mass of buildings, congested streets, and a rich and highly dynamic urban life offering many choices, at least for those able to afford them. A few miles outside t

The North's Convenient Amnesia About Slavery

Americans typically grow up believing that slavery was confined to the cotton fields of the South and that the North was always made up of free states. The fact that slavery was practiced all over the early United States often comes as a shock to people in places like New York, where the myth of the free North has been surprisingly durable. The truth is that New York was at one time a center of the slave trade, with more black people enslaved than any other city in the country, with the possible

Sara Bader: Historians seek notices that Google could send to electronic oblivion

[Sara Bader is the author of "Strange Red Cow: And Other Curious Classified Ads from the Past."] Google's latest venture, Google Base, offers free space on the Internet to anyone with information to upload. Google will happily post family recipes, camp photographs, homeopathic remedies, poems you wrote to your girlfriend in high school - and classified ads about almost anything. Analysts predict that, with its finely tuned search engine, Google's new service w

Daniel Henninger: How about a cease-fire in the Christmas war?

It was the week before Christmas and all through the house the pundits were hanging each other with flair. It had to happen. The universal holiday of Clement Clarke Moore's "Night Before Christmas" has been displaced this year by the "war on Christmas." On one snow-blown hilltop stand the Sons and Daughters of Christmas Past, who believe the phrase "Have a happy holiday" is quashing Christmas. Across this pond of frozen opinions one finds

Lee Clark: The Worst Cases in History

Mr. Clark is the author of Worst Cases: Terror and Catastrophe in the Popular Imagination (University of Chicago Press, 2005). Tenerife This is presently the worst air disaster, in terms of body count. In 1977, on the Spanish island of Tenerife, 583 souls were lost when two Boeing 747s

Alex Beam: Boston Is Neglecting Ben Franklin on His 300th Anniversary

The "Bencentennial" the 300th anniversary of Franklin's birth on Jan. 17, here, on Milk Street approacheth, and Frankophiles complain that Boston Latin School's most distinguished graduate isn't feeling any love from his hometown. Philadelphia, predictably, is going bonkers. Today, for instance, a 4 1/2-month-long exhibit, "Benjamin Franklin: In Search of a Better World," opens at the National Constitution Center on the Independence Mall. From there it will trave

Whose Artifact Is It?

For years, the Greek government has tried to get the British Museum to return to Athens various antiquities — most famously the Elgin Marbles — that Greece and others believe were inappropriately removed in the early 19th century. And this year, two of the most prominent museums in the United States — the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum — find themselves in increasingly messy debates over whether some priceless items in their collections were once stolen from collections

Bill Moyers: LBJ didn't manipulate intelligence like Bush has

... It's always a fight to find out what the government doesn't want us to know. And no one in this town has done more to fight for open democracy or done more to see that the Freedom of Information Act fulfills its promise than the Archive. The fight goes back a long way. You'll find a fine account of it in Herbert Foerstel's book, Freedom of Information and the Right to Know: The Origins and Application of the Freedom of Information Act (Greenwood Press, 1999). Foerstel tells us that although

George McGovern: Remembering Eugene McCarthy

Gene McCarthy was a pure original. No other senator had the combination of endowments Gene possessed: He was a philosopher, a skilled 6' 4" baseball and hockey player, a visionary statesman, a moralist, an eloquent orator and graceful poet with a mastery of English diction and a wit equal to Shaw's that had no match in the Senate. He, of course, was a human being with his own trademark faults. At times he seemed to retire to his lair rather than engage in battles on the S

Alexander H. Joffe: Georgetown Sells Out to the Saudis

[Alexander H. Joffe is director of Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.] The news that Prince Alaweed bin Talal has given $20 million each to Georgetown and

Daniel Lazare: Are Jews Unique?

Eventually, nearly every discussion of the Jews, pro or con, sympathetic or hostile, gets around to their alleged singularity. Twelve or thirteen centuries ago, when everyone from the Indus to the Atlantic was choosing sides between the crescent and the cross, the Jews were sticking to a path all their own, studying their own books, formulating their own laws and rejecting everyone else's. They were stubborn, clannish and standoffish, and even when they stopped wearing those funny clothe

Garrison Keillor: Getting History Right

One more reason to believe in God is the hope for the ultimate judgment when someday Someone will pronounce the final truth and we'll be done with all these small mean anecdotes that pass for history. Meanwhile, they constitute most of what we know about politics, stories told by men with a grudge. This is discouraging to the older person. This is all I will ever know about George W. Bush, a series of disparaging observations by people who've met him. Thanks to his own need for secrecy and comfo

David Brooks: The Holy Capitalists

What explains success? What forces drive some nations and individuals to move forward and grow rich while others stagnate? These happen to be the most important questions in the social sciences today. In the scholarly arena, you see an array of academic gladiators wielding big books and offering theories. Over here are the material determinists. Jared Diamond, with his million-selling "Guns, Germs, and Steel," says the West grew rich not because of any innate

Lincoln Essays Published by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

The current issue of HISTORY NOW looks at Abraham Lincoln. Allen Guelzo examines the strategy that shaped the writing of the Emancipation Proclamation; Harold Holzer unravels the myth surrounding Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech; George Rable looks at the controversies surrounding the president’s religious views; David Reynolds explores Walt Whitman's admiration for Lincoln; and Douglas Wilson considers slavery as a political as well as a moral dilemma for the president.

WSJ Editorial: Clean Gene's Other Legacy

Eugene McCarthy's death Saturday at age 89 has offered antiwar liberals an opportunity to relive the glory days of 1968, when then-Senator McCarthy embarrassed President Lyndon B. Johnson out of the race with an insurgent run on an anti-Vietnam line. We hate to interrupt the self-reverie, but it's worth noting that Gene McCarthy's achievement in driving his own party's sitting President out the primary campaign is unlikely to be repeated any time soon. And the reason is campaign-fin

Cynthia Tucker: Merry whatever

... many of the Christmas traditions that Western Christians have adopted do not hark back to the birth of Christ; indeed, some of them trace their origins to pagan rituals. Take the "Christmas" tree. Anthropologists and historians have followed a trail of dried-out fir needles all the way back to ancient cultures, which used evergreens as reminders of the spring that would return after long and barren winters. Ancient Egyptians decorated their homes with green date palm l

John Tagliiabue: The French: Married to the Past, and Thinking of Divorce

THE French, the historian Danielle Domergue-Cloarec says, "have always had problems with their history." She should know. She specializes in French colonial history, which her compatriots can't decide whether to love or hate. They feel the same about Napoleon, and this month both problems have been on vivid display. Colonial history figured in a raucous legislative debate over how French history itself should be taught. Last February, in an effort to please v

David Brooks: What Speilberg's "Munich" Movie Leaves Out

Every generation of Americans casts Israel in its own morality tale. For a time, Israel was the plucky underdog fighting for survival against larger foes. Now, as Steven Spielberg rolls out the publicity campaign for his new movie, "Munich," we see the crystallization of a different fable. In this story, the Israelis and the Palestinians are parallel peoples victimized by history and trapped in a cycle of violence. In his rollout interview in Time, Spielberg spoke of the M