Roundup: Talking About History

Chow Kum Hor: Historians, Intellectuals, and Politics Do Not Mix In Malaysia

Criticise the Government and face the music. That's the perception formed by some about academic staff who freely express anti-establishment views. This view gained renewed currency with the controversies over the departures of University of Malaya's Dr Edmund Terrence Gomez and Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia's Prof Dr P. Ramasamy. ... A classic example is Dr Syed Husin Ali, the former UM sociology and anthropology professor who was arrested under the Internal Security

Jonathan Freedland: The '90s Now Seem A Golden Time

Four years later, few doubt that 9/11 ushered in a new epoch. What's less obvious is that that day also marked the "end" of an era. For Sept. 11, 2001, was the last day of the 1990s. Of course that's not literally, chronologically true. But just as the great British historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote a history of the 19th century, which, he decided, started in 1789 and ended in 1914, so we can look back on the 1990s and see that they too were not an exact match with the dates o

Cecilia Rasmussen: The Battle of Palmdale

In the midst of the Cold War, when Nike missile sites dotted the Southland, a bright red runaway Navy drone airplane veered off course and headed for Los Angeles, triggering a dangerous sequence of events known as the "Battle of Palmdale." It's not a battle that the military could say it won back on Aug. 16, 1956. The Navy summoned two fighter jets to shoot down the pilotless drone, a Grumman F6F-5K Hellcat, minutes after it went out of control after being lau

Marily Myers Slade: Canterbury Shaker Village And Its Gardens

Gardens reflect their designers' sensibilities as surely as houses reveal their owners' personalities. Nowhere is this more evident than at Canterbury Shaker Village in Canterbury, New Hampshire. There, amid captivating blossoms and exuberant growth, it is possible to step back in time and experience what it meant to be a Believer. The village was established in 1792 by the followers of Mother Ann Lee, who fled England in 1774 to escape religious persecution. By the mid-1850s, Cante

Stephanie Shapiro: Honoring Dead, Seeking Meaning: United Flight 93

...On the anniversary of the shattering day now known as 9/11, the public and relatives of those who died on Flight 93 will gather in the Shanksville field where the plane crashed for a commemorative service. They will also learn more about the design chosen last week for a permanent National Park Service memorial on the 2,200-acre site. The memorial, anchored by a "Tower of Voices" filled with 40 wind chimes, is expected to cost $30 million and be completed in four years.

Jamie Stiehm: Banneker-Douglass Museum Links New Gallery To Church

The Banneker-Douglass Museum in Annapolis is now closer to Church Circle, with its front door moved 10 paces to the left - bringing a visitor into a stark space where the old and new architecture of the museum meet. Inside the Franklin Street entrance, gleaming black floor tiles and a modern light oak staircase make a seamless match with the tall right wall from the exterior of the 1890s brick building. All this sets the stage for a maritime mural of the City Dock circa 1870, the po

David Bly: Sleuthing Students Unravel Historical Mysteries

Two Mount Royal College history instructors are putting together a website that will allow students to investigate a 19th-century mystery. Jennifer Pettit and Kori Street have been researching the murders of the Black Donnellys, an Irish-Canadian family that lived in Biddulph Township, Ont., in the 1800s. Their research will become part of Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History, a series of instructional websites designed to encourage students to increase their kn

Natalie Soh: Singapore Reflects On The End Of WWII

The setting was grand. The Municipal Building looked out over the harbour, with '100,000 of the local population on the ground' - so wrote one Major-General Sir C. Lanes Letter. Former prisoners of war packed the balconies of the building now known as City Hall, watching the defeated Japanese march in. Locals waited on the Padang for the ceremony, which would mark the end of three years of oppressive Japanese rule. The same Union Jack that had been taken down on Feb 15

Jim Duffy: Editing The Awkward Bits Out of Ireland's National Narrative

[Jim Duffy is a historian and political commentator.] Ireland loves its history. But it likes one-sided history. The side may change, depending on each generation's fad, fashion or political correctness. Take the early 20th century myth: how an oppressed Ireland rose up against its British oppressor in 1916. Not exactly. In reality only a tiny fringe rose. Far from having the country behind them, they needed protection from Dublin mobs, while nationalist newspapers call

Peckinpah Masterpiece Restored: Missing Scenes from Major Dundee

This year, film preservationist Grover Crisp came to the end of a long journey. He was able to unveil a new version of Major Dundee, a film long regarded as a mutilated masterpiece by fans of maverick director Sam Peckinpah. Film historian David Thomson calls the Civil War drama starring Charlton Heston and Richard Harris "a broken thing" because of the way it was cut after Peckinpah lost his fight to see it released in its original form in 1965. The beautiful

Greta Garbo Documentary

It's 100 years since Greta Lovisa Gustafson was born in the Southern Maternity Hospital in Stockholm. It has been 15 years since her death and more than 60 since she retired from acting, but no one seems any closer to unravelling the enigma of Greta Garbo. Just how did a plump shop assistant in a Stockholm department store become the brightest star in the MGM firmament? And what precisely did Garbo do with her time during that immense hiatus between her final film, Two-Faced Woman, in 1941, and

De Valera Recast By History As Dictator

Historians here have distorted the historical record for the past 30 years by propagating the State's "reinterpretation" of its foundation which involved Eamon de Valera being painted as "a dictator" and Michael Collins as a constitutionalist protecting democracy, a leading Scottish historian has argued. This reinterpretation was propagated "not because it was good history but because it was politically expedient to do so", said Dr John Regan of the Uni

Nick Squires: Captain Cook's Legacy In The Pacific

Captain Cook: British imperial bully or benevolent explorer? It is a question that historians have been debating for decades, and which is now being tackled by one of Sydney's leading museums. A new exhibition at the Museum of Sydney, titled "Cook's Sites", consists of a dozen contemporary photographs of places Cook visited during his three voyages of discovery around the Pacific. The photographs are enormous, several metres wide, and are contrasted with sketches and paint

Mexican troops back in the U.S. (n.a.)

A Mexican army convoy rolled into the United States yesterday with food, water and medicine for Hurricane Katrina victims, the first Mexican military operation on U.S. soil since 1916. The convoy of 45 vehicles and some 200 troops is part of an aid package that includes ships and rescue teams. ... Mexican forces under revolutionary Gen. Francisco (Pancho) Villa, angry at U.S. support for a rival, staged a small raid into New Mexico in 1916. They were the b

Jonathan Jones: The Evil Empire: Persia's Kings Are History's Great Villains

The title of this exhibition is a bit misleading. Forgotten Empire, the British Museum calls its spectacular resurrection of ancient Persia. Yet the Persians are as notorious in their way as Darth Vader, the Sheriff of Nottingham, General Custer, or any other embodiment of evil empire you care to mention. They are history's original villains. In its day, which lasted from the middle of the 500s BC until the defeat of Darius III by Alexander the Great in 331 BC, the Persian empire ru

Mike Pride: 'Widow' Is A Civil War Casualty Too

THE WIDOW OF THE SOUTH, By Robert Hicks. Warner, 409 pp., $24.95. Shelby Foote was not the greatest Civil War historian of his generation, but he was the best Civil War talker. Just after he died this year, Fresh Air, Terry Gross' public radio show, rebroadcast an interview with him. It was mesmerizing - the gentle Southern voice, the quiet authority, the personal connection to the war and to the South. Then there were Foote's instant replies to the big questions. Years

Robert Lipsyte: Sports As A Lifeline

The Saints went marching out, an apt metaphor of Hurricane Katrina, even though it was part of football's footnote to the disaster. The New Orleans Saints played their NFL home games in the Superdome and thus needed a new home. For now, at least, the team's headquarters will be in San Antonio. Meanwhile, more important, hundreds of Pee Wee, high school and college football teams, as well as other fall sports, have also been displaced. With Americans drowning in their attics, t

Warren Brown: Japanese Eyes On The Australian Prize

What if? This is one of the most intriguing aspects of history. The argument as to whether Australia was ever on Imperial Japanese drawing boards has raged since Pearl Harbour. Last week, the vociferous Dr Peter Stanley, principal historian for the Australian War Memorial, produced a paper designed to shout down anyone who believes Imperial Japan intended to invade Australia. The answer is more complex than Dr Stanley points out. It's unlikely

Alan Dershowitz: Telling the Truth About Chief Justice Rehnquist

My mother always told me that when a person dies, one should not say anything bad about him. My mother was wrong. History requires truth, not puffery or silence, especially about powerful governmental figures. And obituaries are a first draft of history. So here's the truth about Chief Justice Rehnquist you won't hear on Fox News or from politicians. Chief Justice William Rehnquist set back liberty, equality, and human rights perhaps more than any American judge of this generation.

Laurence H. Tribe: Why Rehnquist Was "Gentleman of the Court"

... That Chief Justice Rehnquist was unlike both puritanical conservatives like Warren E. Burger and movement conservatives like Antonin Scalia was evident in the character of his questions in the two gay rights cases I argued in the mid-1980's, one about firing teachers for "advocating" homosexual activity and the other about prosecuting consenting adults for same-sex intimacy. In neither case did his questions have the "I'm shocked" tenor of Chief Justice Burger's contribut