Roundup: Talking About History

Peter Foster: Raj India Era Monument To George V Restored

New Delhi - For decades after Indian independence the now dusty field in north Delhi where George V staged his sumptuous 1911 Coronation Durbar went to rack and ruin. ... In Delhi political circles the Coronation Park was seen, perhaps with a hint of satisfaction, as a fittingly tatty postscript to the vainglorious era of the British Raj. Now, however, the New Delhi government and the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage are restoring the park as a touri

Humberto Fontova: Castro's Plan to Attack Macy's the Day After Thanksgiving, 1962

[Mr. Fontova is the author of Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant.] ... On Nov. 17, 1962, J. Edgar Hoovers' FBI cracked a terrorist plot (though the term "terrorist" was not used at the time) by Castro-Cuban agents that targeted Macy's, Gimbel's, Bloomindales and Manhattan's Grand Central Station with a dozen incendiary devices and 500 kilos of TNT. The holocaust was set to go off the following week, the day after Thanksgiving. A little perspective: for their

Ian Marland: Scots Should Take Pride In St. Andrew's Day

The majority of Scots are likely to go about their business today without a thought for the significance of the date, and without any plans to note either its arrival or passing. ... There are signs Scotland is slowly waking up to the benefits of celebrating St Andrew, if not with an official holiday, then with cultural and social festivities which set the day apart from any other. ... So this year, the Executive hosts festivities in Edinburgh for the first time: a On

Ann Givens and Katie Thomas: Shinnecock Indians' Court Victory Helps Tribe Gain Legitimacy

Earlier this month, a federal judge granted the Shinnecock Indians one of their biggest victories since English settlers arrived in Southampton four centuries ago - in a rare decision, U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Platt decided the Shinnecocks were a bona fide Indian tribe. In the weeks since Platt's ruling, Newsday has examined the hundreds of documents that make up the tribe's application for federal recognition to the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, which is pending. ... The

Kathryn Hughes: Historians Generally Sneer At Genealogists, But Their Work Is Compelling

One of the more convenient side-effects of the explosion of interest in family history is that you need never again be stumped for what to give your nearest and dearest for Christmas. Instead of a lacklustre pair of socks or bottle of whisky, what could be more thrilling than a voucher that entitles the grateful recipient to extended access to the online version of the 1901 census? For we are all historians now, chroniclers not so much of big events like the 1832 reform bill but of

Henry Samuel: French Politicians To Shun Austerlitz Bicentenary

The bicentenary of the battle of Austerlitz, Napoleon's greatest victory, is to be shunned by France's two leading politicians. Their absence comes amid an escalating row over whether to fete the emperor as a great leader or denounce him as a dictator. Neither President Jacques Chirac nor his prime minister, Dominique de Villepin - an ardent admirer of Napoleon - will take part in the official ceremonies to mark the French army's defeat of Austrian and Russian forces on

WSJ Editorial: How the Pilgrims Made Progress

The textbooks don't explain why the Pilgrims had only a meager harvest in 1621, so we will. For their first two years in Plymouth, the settlers conducted an experiment in communalism. It wasn't until 1623 that they divided the land into private plots and could look forward to the kind of bounty that many of us enjoyed yesterday. In his "History of Plimoth Plantation," the colony's governor, William Bradford, wrote about how the settlers studied human nature and laid the foundation for

Mike Lafferty: 100 Years Ago Einstein Rocked The World

By all measures, E=mcc is the most famous equation in history, and its author, Albert Einstein, the most famous scientist. It turns out, according to Frank Wilczek, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 2004, that Einstein originally wrote the equation as m=E/cc, in which E stands for energy, m for mass and cc for the speed of light squared. As any seventh-grader knows, the equation works either way. But Einstein was interested in matter, so his first stab at i

Rodney Stark: How Christianity (and Capitalism) Led to Science

[Rodney Stark is university professor of the social sciences at Baylor University. This essay is adapted from The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, to be published in December by Random House.] When Europeans first began to explore the globe, their greatest surprise was not the existence of the Western Hemisphere, but the extent of their own technological superiority over the rest of the world. Not only were the proud Maya, Aztec,

Ian Williams: The Secret History of Rum

Rum has always tended to favor and flavor rebellion, from the pirates and buccaneers of the seventeenth century to the American Revolution onward. In addition, sugar and rum pretty much introduced globalization to a waiting world, tying together Europe, the Americas, Africa and the Caribbean in a complex alcoholic web of trade and credit. Not until oil was any single commodity so important for world trade. So it is not surprising that the Bacardi Corporation has become one of the world's first t

Tina Susman: Survivors of 1921 Tulsa Race Riot Hoping for Justice

Eighty-five years ago, allegations that a black man had tried to assault a white woman in a city elevator spurred hundreds of whites to attack what was one of the country's most prosperous black communities, a bustling neighborhood called Greenwood. Wess Young was only 3, but he still remembers his mother rousing him from bed in the middle of the night, and the gunshots crackling like fireworks as they ran through the burning streets to escape the riot. Otis Clark, who was 18, recal

Jefferson Morley: Decades after that trip to Dallas, some writers still have grave doubts about the Kennedy assassination.

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy remains the great unsolved mystery of American politics. With dozens of books in print on the subject, the case of the murdered commander in chief now seems to attract more interest from the publishing industry than from journalists or historians. The fascination with a shocking crime is not hard to understand. On Nov. 22, 1963, the president was shot in the head during a motorcade through Dallas. Police arrested an ex-Marine named Lee

Jonathan Yardley: Duke's William H. Chafe Emphasizes the Personal in Biographical Sketches of Great 20th Century Leaders

One of the oddities of conventional biography is that when the subject is a person of great influence and renown, his or her private life is scanted at best, ignored at worst. We know, for example, that Franklin D. Roosevelt's mother was overbearing and dominating and that he was unhappy in prep school and college, but these crucial aspects of youth usually are noted by his biographers and then passed over, so that the march of great events -- the Depression, the 1932 election, the New Deal, cou

Phyllis C. Murray: There is Nothing New About Slavery

[Ms. Murray is UFT Chapter Leader, P.S. 75, Bronx, NY 10459.] Slavery is by no means a new phenomena. Therefore, it should not be used synonymously with the word African in America. Slavery is older than the Bible. The Israelites were enslaved in Egypt. It is not anomily that people throughout history have sunk again and again to the bowels of the earth to demonstate the worst case scenario of man's inhumanity to man: the enslavement of another. Lest we not forget Adolf Hitler. And if e

Yuki Tanaka: Japan’s Kamikaze Pilots and Contemporary Suicide Bombers

[Yuki Tanaka, Hiroshima Peace Institute, is a Japan Focus Coordinator and author of Hidden Horrors. Japanese War Crimes in World War II.] It is widely believed that the major source of kamikaze suicide pilots was the Air Force Cadet Officer System in the Japanese Imperial Navy and Army Forces, which recruited university and college students on a voluntary basis. In fact, however, the majority of kamikaze pilots were young noncommissioned or petty officers, that is graduates of Navy

Martin Kramer: MESA ... The Academic Intifada

Every three years, the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) brings its annual conference to Washington, presumably to impress upon lawmakers the relevance of Middle Eastern studies. The conference is meeting in a Washington hotel right now. So it's an appropriate moment to consider how the field's priorities have shifted since 9/11 and the Iraq war.

Harvey A. Silverglate and Norman S. Zalkind: Censoring Turkish History

[Harvey A. Silverglate is of counsel to the law firm of Good & Cormier. Norman S. Zalkind is a member of Zalkind, Rodriguez, Lunt & Duncan.] A FEDERAL lawsuit we recently filed seeks to reaffirm a guiding American legal principle endangered by the ''culture wars," namely the right to an unrestrained mind, free of censorship and state orthodoxies. Centered broadly on competing historical interpretations of a century-old conflict but, more precisely, on tech

James C. Cobb: Liberals shouldn't learn the wrong lesson from Rosa Parks

The recent flood of admiring farewell tributes to Rosa Parks offers a sharp contrast to the generally gloomy tone of last year's fiftieth anniversary assessments of the significance of Brown v. Board of Education. In keeping with the prevailing tendency throughout the academy to emphasize the agency of the masses, over the last decade or so, many historians have made grassroots activism in the face of local hostility and national indifference the overriding theme of their interpretations of the

James E. McWilliams: The Pilgrims Gave Thanks but Not for the Menu

[James E. McWilliams, a history professor at Texas State University at San Marcos, is the author of "A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America."] ...The native American food that the Pilgrims supposedly enjoyed would have offended the palate of any self-respecting English colonist - the colonial minister Charles Woodmason called it "exceedingly filthy and most execrable." Our comfort food, in short, was the bane of the settlers' culinary

Interview with Nuremberg Prosecutor Whitney Harris

Sixty years ago on Sunday, the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial got under way to bring leading Nazis to justice. Whitney Harris was one of the principle figures for the prosecution. SPIEGEL ONLINE spoke with him about Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, the emotional scars left behind by the trial, and the United States of today. Whitney Harris was the right-hand man of US Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson during the Nuremberg Trials.SPIEGEL ONLINE: In 1945 when you began collecting evidence