Roundup: Talking About History

Elizabeth Lee: Heritage Food Movement Seeks Revival Of S. Carolina Rice

After three days of eating barbecued pork fattened on rice bran, eggs Benedict on rice-flour waffles, saffron rice pudding, rice truffles and a parade of Lowcountry specialties ladled over rice, there was just one thing left to say. Campbell Coxe, a tall, sunburnt farmer, stepped up to the microphone. "This isn't whiiiite rice," he said, drawing out the "white" with an exaggerated accent. "This is a gourmet rice." Carolina Gold

Andrew Delbanco: Henry Adams, Bitter Old Man

Some people are hard to imagine as ever having been young. When Henry Adams referred to himself in old age as an "octogenarian rat," it was as if he had finally arrived at the role for which he had rehearsed all his life: the superannuated pest. It pleased him to witness age triumphing over youth, as when he explained in a letter to his niece how the financier Levi P. Morton, a man "hovering in or about the nineties," survived a railroad accident, then

Uradyn E. Bulag: The Controversy Over the Boundaries of East Asia

[Uradyn E. Bulag teaches socio-cultural anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of Nationalism and Hybridity in Mongolia (Oxford 1998) and The Mongols at China’s Edge: History and the Politics of National Unity (Rowman and Littlefield 2002).] ... More than at any other period in modern times, there now is a real opportunity for Central/Inner Asia to become once again “Central”, as famously discussed by the late worl

Benjamin Cheever: Is It Really “The Worst Generation”? (Baby Boomers)

...Google “the Worst Generation” and you get us, the boomers. First there’s a book actually titled The Worst Generation. I quote from the preface: “Boomers have created an anti-America, an “Evil Twin” America, a Frankenstein America… .” The next hit is an essay with the same title by Paul Begala, published in Esquire in 2000. “I hate the Baby Boomers,” writes the former Clinton adviser. “They’re the most self-centered,

Edward Renehan: The War Over the Robber Barons

[The writer is author of Dark Genius of Wall Street.] During the bleak days of the Depression, Matthew Josephson -- at that time a self-proclaimed Marxist - published a biased and mistake-packed economic history of the Gilded Age. Josephson's The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861 - 1901 hit bookstores in 1934. At the time -- in the midst of massive unemployment, historically-high industrial malaise, and all the human suffering attendant to those realities -- criti

Julia Whitty: What America Owes the Indians ... $176 Billion

When Montana banker Elouise Cobell added up the Indian trust money lost, looted, and mismanaged by the U.S. government, the tab came to $176 billion. Now she's here to collect.... Cobell filed her lawsuit in 1996 after years of kinder entreaties failed, demanding payment of all unpaid revenues from Indian leases for the past century, a tally of past revenues, and a new accounting system to deal with future revenues. According to Cobell's forensic accountants, the government owes $17

David Eisenstadt: "Surf Historians" Debate Invention Of Neoprene Wetsuit

At 77, Bob Meistrell leads deep-sea diving expeditions to Catalina Island and remains at the helm of Body Glove International, the multimillion-dollar Redondo Beach surf company he co-founded with his twin brother Bill half a century ago. Jack O'Neill, 82, is a bit landlocked these days after turns as a wartime pilot, surfing legend and driving force behind Santa Cruz-based O'Neill Inc., one of the surf industry's most recognized brands. Age forced Hugh Bradner, an 89-y

Cecilia Rasmussen: Gold Rush Lured Quirky Women To California

Women were a rarity in Gold Rush California, but the ones who got here and prospered were doozies -- formidable women -- as well as a few floozies. They hauled freight and mined for gold. They lobbied to get equal pay and the vote. They were missionaries, writers, madams and mavericks. Some even passed themselves off as men to avoid the inevitable harassments that women endured. * Eliza Farnham, a widow and former matron of Sing Sing Prison in New York, came to Californ

Jeremy Watson: Scotland's Robert the Bruce Remembered

One was a national hero and guerrilla fighter who restored Scottish pride before dying a glorious, if bloody, martyr's death. The other was a self -serving opportunist who betrayed his countrymen in his own ambitious quest to become the King of Scotland. Well, according to the movies anyway. Now aristocratic descendants of Robert the Bruce are fighting to restore the legendary king's reputation as the true saviour of Scotland after Hollywood gave the honours to William Wallace.

Randy Lewis: B.B. King's Life Examined

The tour bus where B.B. King is sitting has parked right outside the artists' entrance at Gibson Amphitheatre in Universal City so the walk to the stage will be short and painless. The venerated guitarist, singer and songwriter is balancing his lifelong yearning to get onstage against offstage life with diabetes. The illness has given him a latter-day second career as a spokesman for a glucose monitoring device, and he mentions those ads for comic relief once he's in front of an aud

Hugh Fitzgerald: Nadia Abu El-Haj's Biased View of Israeli Anthropology

[Hugh Fitzgerald wrote this piece for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum, which is designed to critique and improve Middle East Studies at North American colleges and universities. It is part of a series of analysis addressing Columbia University's Middle East Studies faculty.] Nadia Abu El-Haj, an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Barnard, is listed among the members of the MEALAC faculty at Columbia. A graduate student at Duke University, she turned her doctoral

Richard Jensen: Abe Fortas ... The Justice Who Should Have Been Impeached

Abe Fortas was a brilliant lawyer—and a fixer who could manipulate the system to his client’s advantage. LBJ immediately spotted this skill; Fortas saved LBJ’s Senate election in 1948. He made Fortas a key advisor, appointing him to the Supreme Court in 1965 and tried to promote him to Chief Justice in 1968. As Justice Fortas secretly continued to be LBJ's top advisor especially on Vietnam, with many White House meetings. Before the Senate in 1968 he repeatedly swore h

Maria Puente: 'New' New Orleans Means Refurbishing Historic Districts

Lots of major American cities have historic districts; New Orleans is the only one that is almost entirely a historic district. So now what? What happens to the scores of structures that lay submerged in a filthy, toxic soup after Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed the Crescent City's levees and were flooded again during Hurricane Rita? Can homes be restored, or will they have to be bulldozed for safety? Who decides? Who pays? Let the wrangling begin. In the day

Paula Cocozza: East Germans Endeavored To Create Socialist Style

When the German Democratic Republic launched its first Berlin fashion week in the summer of 1958, lectures were given to instruct workers on all the important tenets of modern socialist thinking: "To each type the suitable haircut," for instance, and "Stronger women (as the ruling Communist party liked to describe its larger female members) can also dress fashionably." Fashion was offered as proof of the modernity of socialism. Improvised catwalks were set up in factories for

Scott McLemee: Hitler — the Classic?

It is disagreeable to approach the cashier with a book called How to Read Hitler. One way to take the stink off would be to purchase one or two other volumes in the new How to Read series published by W. W. Norton, which also includes short guides to Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein. But at the time, standing in line at a neighborhood bookstore a couple weeks ago, I wasn’t aware of those other titles. (The only thing mitigating the embarrassment was knowing that my days as a

Spencer Dew: The Trivialization of Nazism

[Spencer Dew is a Ph.D. student in Religion and Literature at the University of Chicago Divinity School.] With the death of Simon Wiesenthal on September 20, the Holocaust has slipped further into the past. As survivors pass on, memories of the event recede, and the event itself risks, as Wiesenthal warned, the threat of "trivialization." Wiesenthal's prophetic role was to remind the world of the human faces behind the incomprehensible tragedy and horror of t

Keith Windschuttle: Mao's Lies

In the summer of 1936, the American journalist Edgar Snow left Peking for China’s northwest to visit the new territory taken over by the Chinese Communist Party. There he conducted a number of lengthy interviews with the party leader Mao Tse-tung. He wrote them up and published them as The Mao Tse-tung Autobiography, the first and only extensive account of his life Mao ever gave. Snow interviewed other Communist leaders and then converted all his material into his own book, Red Star over China,

Arjun Makhijani: The Soviet Nuclear Waste Explosion America Helped Cover Up (And Other Crimes Against Public Health)

Arjun Makhijani is president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Takoma Park, Maryland. He is the principal editor Nuclear Wastelands: A Global Guide to Nuclear Weapons Production and Its Health and Environmental Effects (MIT Press: 2000).On September 29, 1957, at 4:20 p.m., an enormous explosion in a tank containing highly radioactive waste occurred in the Mayak nuclear weapons plant in the southern Ural mountains of the Soviet Union. The fallout plume

WSJ Editorial: The European assertion of moral superiority to Turkey on history is hard to swallow

Of all the pretexts to keep Turkey out of the European Union, perhaps the most cynical has been to link its candidacy to the massacres of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire during World War I. It would indeed be a welcome sign of maturity if Turkey were to face up to this dark part of its history. But to make it a precondition for modern Turkey's EU membership, as the European Parliament demanded last week, smacks of double standard. No similar demands have ever been made of other m

Susan Juster: Killing, and dying, in the name of God in the New World

[Susan Juster is professor of history at the University of Michigan. Her recent publications include Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England (1994) and Doomsayers: Anglo-American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution (2003). She is currently working on a cultural history of religious violence in the American colonies.] One of the most chilling images in early American history is the deliberate firing of Fort Mystic during the Pequot War of 1637.