Roundup: Talking About History

Folger Institute examines terrorism — historical and contemporary — on the 400th anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot

When scholars gathered in the basement of the Folger Shakespeare Library on November 4 for a workshop examining the Gunpowder Plot, many of them were alert to the ironies of the occasion. Earlier that same day, the Folger had hosted the Prince of Wales and his wife, Camilla. That the heir to the British throne was perusing the library's collection as scholars prepared to talk about a foiled plot to blow up King James I and his entire government in London 400 years ago was not lost o

Michael Kimmelman: Regarding Antiquities, Some Changes, Please

In the latest debacle over the looting of antiquities from Italy, there's plenty of hypocrisy to go around. The Metropolitan Museum is now negotiating with the Italian authorities over objects in its ancient Greek and Roman collection, trying to avoid the crisis facing the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, with its former curator of antiquities on trial in Italy. Those aren't the only museums suddenly being scrutinized. American museums always pretend to be taken aback to learn t

Editorial: Canada's PM should leave history to historians

"It's also very important to put in place educational materials so that it never happens again and so that Canadians know what has happened," Prime Minister Paul Martin told a sympathetic radio audience of Chinese-Canadians this week. He was referring to one of his latest campaign spending promises: $2.5 million to increase awareness of the infamous poll tax imposed on Chinese immigrants. It's hard to believe in this politically correct age that many Canadians remain unaw

John Strausbaugh: How a Black Entertainer's Shuffle Actually Blazed a Trail

At the height of his career, from the late 1920's into the mid-30's, Lincoln Perry soared as Hollywood's first black superstar. His "Laziest Man in the World" shtick, so exquisitely honed that the New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther wrote that it was "as stylized as James Joyce," made him an icon everywhere in the world. He effortlessly stole scenes from the finest actors in Hollywood, earning the respect of greats like Charlie Chaplin, Lionel Barrymore and Will Rogers

Steve Plaut: Israel's Campus Watch

[Steven Plaut is a professor at the Graduate School of the Business Administration at the University of Haifa and is a columnist for the Jewish Press. A collection of his commentaries on the current events in Israel can be found on his "blog" at www.stevenplaut.blogspot.com.] A specter is haunting the far-left fever swamps found inside Israeli universities: "Israel Academia Monitor." It is Israel's new cousin to t

Steven W. Mosher: Leftwing Monster ... Mao Zedong

[Steven W. Mosher was the first American social scientist allowed to carry out fieldwork in Mao's China. He is the author of "Hegemon: China's Plan To Dominate Asia and the World."] Mao Zedong was the leader of the Chinese Communist Party from 1935 until his death in 1976. Chairman Mao, as he became known to generations of admiring Western leftists, is arguably the greatest mass murderer in history, eclipsing even the murderous Joseph Stalin in this regard. Some 70 milli

William F. Buckley, Jr.: Murrow vs. McCarthy

Here is a coincidence of extra-parochial interest. — Hollywood releases a movie featuring (the late, lamented) Edward R. Murrow and (the late, unlamented) Senator Joe McCarthy. It is called Good Night, and Good Luck, and it portrays a famous broadcast denouncing McCarthy, shown in March 1954, on the eve of the Army-McCarthy hearings. Murrow concluded his half-hour blast by inviting McCarthy to take the half-hour slot the following week to reply to Murrow’s charges.

Maryland's long history of capital punishment

Maryland has been engaged in capital punishment for more than 200 years - first by hanging, then a gas chamber and finally by lethal injection. The earliest recorded execution in the state took place Oct. 22, 1773, when four "convict servants" were hanged for slitting the throat of their master, Archibald Hoffman, according to a Maryland Penitentiary historian who wrote an overview on capital punishment for the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services

Michael Connor: Australia's shaky foundation for native title rights

Terra nullius was only injected into the legal debate in the late 20th century, says Michael Connor THE prime minister believed in it. In his address to the nation on the Mabo judgment in 1993, Paul Keating said: "The lie was terra nullius -- the convenient fiction that Australia had been a land of no one. The truth was native title." The majority of the High Court judges believed it. In the Mabo decision Gerard Brennan claimed: "International law recogni

Gertrude Himmelfarb: The Debate Over Darwin Hasn't Evolved

In 1958, at a cocktail party in London, I was introduced to Sir Julian Huxley, one of England's most eminent scientists. (He had just been knighted.) My hostess, seeking, in good English fashion, to establish some common denominator between her two guests, told him that I was writing a book on Darwin, and then, perhaps to provoke him, went on to say that the book might put evolution in a new light. "New!" Huxley protested. "There is nothing new to say about evolution. Everything t

Rick Perlstein: 'I Didn't Like Nixon Until Watergate' ... The Conservative Movement Now

This past weekend, Princeton University presented the conference "The Conservative Movement: Its Past, Present, and Future." The sponsor, the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, advertises itself "an independently funded center...[s]tarted by the courageous and interpid Robert P. 'Robby' George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence in Princeton's Politics Department." George is a member of the President's Council of Bioethics. "I b

Adam Cohen: This Season's War Cry ... Commercialize Christmas, or Else

Religious conservatives have a cause this holiday season: the commercialization of Christmas. They're for it. The American Family Association is leading a boycott of Target for not using the words "Merry Christmas" in its advertising. (Target denies it has an anti-Merry-Christmas policy.) The Catholic League boycotted Wal-Mart in part over the way its Web site treated searches for "Christmas." Bill O'Reilly, the Fox anchor who last year started a "Christmas

William Chafe: Something in JFK pulled him from brink

[William Chafe, a history professor at Duke University, is the author of"Private Lives/Public Consequence: Personality and Politics in Modern America."] As we remember John F. Kennedy this week, on the 42nd anniversary of his assassination, it is particularly appropriate to recall his wisdom in dealing with the imminent threat of nuclear conflagration during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. Secretly, the Soviet Union had installed more than 150 missile sites in Cuba,

David Gelernter: Abraham Lincoln's Thanksgiving

[David Gelernter is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard. His book on Americanism is due to be published next year by Doubleday.] FOUR THEMES FLOW TOGETHER AT one of the most remarkable points in American history--the evening when Abraham Lincoln for the last time proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving. It was April 11, 1865: two days after the Civil War ended with Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox; four days before the president was murdered. Our national Thanksgiv

Susan Jacoby: The founders left God out of the Constitution (And it wasn't an oversight)

... The marvel of America's founders, even though nearly all of the new nation's citizens were not only Christian but Protestant, was that they possessed the foresight to avoid establishing a Christian or religious government and instead chose to create the first secular government in the world. That the new Constitution failed to acknowledge God's power and instead ceded governmental authority to "We the People…in order to form a more perfect Union" was a break not only with historica

Michael Lennick: A final interview with the most controversial father of the atomic age, Edward Teller

On October 31, 1952, Halloween was just getting rolling in California when, half a world away on the South Pacific island of Elugelab, the firing circuits closed on Ivy-Mike, the first practical test of the prototype hydrogen bomb. Ghosts and goblins roamed the Berkeley streets as Dr. Edward Teller, the driving force behind the new weapon, sat quietly in a darkened basement, patiently scanning for subtle, indirect evidence that he had irrevocably altered the world yet again. He had to squint to

David P. Barash: Remembering the Anniversary of CP Snow

The year 2005 is the centenary of the birth — and the 25th anniversary of the death — of C.P. Snow, British physicist, novelist, and longtime denizen of the "corridors of power" (a phrase he coined). It is also 45 years since the U.S. publication of his best-known work, a highly influential polemic that generated another phrase with a life of its own, and that warrants revisiting today: The Two Cultures. Actually, the full title was The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revo

Jeanne Cooper: Hawaiian Holiday Traditions Include Reviving Ancient One

Mele Kalikimaka and Hau'oli Makahiki Hou! That phrase appears in many of the Hawaiian Christmas cards I've purchased over the years, and I have to confess for a long time I thought it meant "Merry Christmas and Happy New Year." I was about half right -- or maybe three-quarters. "Mele Kalikimaka," as fans of Hawaiian music will know, is simply the Hawaiian phonetic rendering of "Merry Christmas." (When you only have 13 letters in your alphab

Nick Jackson: Britain's History Lab Network Seeks To Enliven Postgraduate Study

Serious academic study can be a lonely business. Many postgraduate students spend so much time buried in archives and libraries that they see little of colleagues in their own department, let alone at other universities. The History Lab, the first ever national postgraduate history network, set up in October, is hoping to change all that. The history of social networks, or at least the pub, is long and august in academia. One raucous drawing by Engels of a meeting of fellow Left Heg

Joe Humphreys: Ireland's Franciscan Library Obtains Early Drafts of Constitution With de Valera Papers

Early drafts of the 1937 Constitution and secret British intelligence reports allegedly "suppressed" after the 1916 Rising are among the documents contained in a newly catalogued collection of papers belonging to Eamon de Valera. The papers were donated by the former taoiseach and president in his will to the Franciscan Library in Killiney, Co Dublin, which in turn transferred them for safekeeping to University College Dublin in 1998. It is only now, however,