Roundup: Talking About History

Tom Standage: It Was the Tax on Rum, Not Tea, that Provoked the Colonists' Ire

Tom Standage, in the LAT (7-4-05):[Tom Standage, technology editor at the Economist, is author of"A History of the World in 6 Glasses" (Walker & Co., 2005).]American independence owes much to a dispute over a drink, but it wasn't tea. Even someone with the most tenuous grasp of history will be familiar with the Boston Tea Party. The short version goes like this: In 1773, the British government imposed a tax on the tea shipped to its Amer

Charles C. Mann: What the Founding Fathers Owed to the Iroquois

Charles C. Mann, in the NYT (7-4-05): [Charles C. Mann is the author of the forthcoming "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus."] ... So vivid were these examples of democratic self-government that some historians and activists have argued that the Great Law of Peace directly inspired the American Constitution. Ta

David Blight: Frederick Douglass's Great 4th of July Oration

David W. Blight is Class of '54 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, Yale University. He is the author of the Bancroft Prize-winning Race and"Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory" (2001) and the forthcoming"What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? Frederick Douglass's Greatest Speech."

Jeff Chu: The Historians Who Loathe Lincoln

Jeff Chu, at Time.com (6-26-05): ... At the lectern, University of South Carolina history professor Clyde Wilson, who edited the papers of antebellum leader and states'-rights advocate John C. Calhoun, rasped through a declamation against Abraham Lincoln (the subject of a great American "fable"), the Republican Party ("It has never done and will never do anything for the South") and Nor

David Greenberg: What John Dean's Book About Rehnquist's Selection Tells Us About SCOTUS Nominations

David Greenberg, in a review of John Dean's The Rehnquist Choice: The Untold Story of the Nixon Appointment that Redefined the Supreme Court, in the Washington Monthly (Dec. 2001):... The nomination ritual as it is practiced today was set in motion by Richard Nixon's appointment of Chief Justice William Rehnquist--one of the Bush Five--which is the subject of John Dean's new bo

Jonathan Jones: Why Ghana's Slave Barracks Tell a More Compelling Story of Slavery than a Liverpool Museum

Jonathan Jones, in the Guardian (6-30-05):... The slave trade was two centuries ago. But here in this castle [ Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, west Africa] it remains more immediate than anywhere else on earth. The enlightened 18th-century Britons who drank coffee and tea with sugar harvested by African slaves on Caribbean plantations couldn't see the violence beneath the sweetness, until campaigners p

Harvey J. Kaye: Why Tom Paine Is Now So Popular

Harvey J. Kaye, in the American Prospect (July 2005): [Harvey J. Kaye is the Rosenberg Professor of Social Change and Development at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. This article is excerpted from Thomas Paine and the Promise of America, to be published in August by Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.] On July 17, 1980, Ronald Reagan stood before the Republ

Russell Lewis: How Nelson Saved the World

Russell Lewis, in the WSJ (6-29-05): [Mr. Lewis is a former general director of the Institute of Economic Affairs, London.]On Oct. 21 1805, off Cape Trafalgar on the Spanish coast, Admiral Lord Nelson won the greatest battle in the annals of sail, routing Napoleon's Navy without losing a single ship himself. The Queen launches this year's bicentennial celebrations in Portsmouth today. It's under

Richard Brookhiser: Why Hamilton Matters

Richard Brookhiser, in the WSJ (6-30-05): [Mr. Brookhiser is the author of "Alexander Hamilton, American" (Free Press, 2000) and the forthcoming "What Would the Founders Do? Our Problems, Their Solutions" (Basic).]When I was a boy my family had a Time-Life book on the mind which featured a chart of the presumed IQs of famous dead men. Goethe, as I recall,

Chester Finn: Philadelphia's Misguided Demand for African-American History

Chester Finn, in the newsletter of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation (6-16-05):Philadelphia's public school system, under the leadership of Paul Vallas, has been making so much progress on so many fronts that it's a special disappointment when they blunder. But blunder they are doing.In February, the"School Reform Commission" voted to offer courses in African and African American history in the city's high schools. Last week, the district decreed tha

Interview with David McCullough

Excerpts from an interview with David McCullough about his new book, 1776, posted on the website of his publisher, Simon & Schuster (June 2005):Q: As a historian what are you trying to accomplish with this book? What's your goal here? DM: I want people to see that all-important time in a different way-in the way it was. For of a number of reasons, including

Michael Cross-Barnet: The NYT Shafted My Father

Michael Cross-Barnet, in LA Times (6-26-05)[Mr. Cross-Barnet, formerly an editor at the Los Angeles Times, is an editor at the Baltimore Sun.] The letter hasn't yellowed much since it arrived on a summer's day in 1955. And the words have lost none of their power."You are hereby commanded to appear befo

Joshua Wolf Shenk: The True Lincoln

Joshua Wolf Shenk, in Time Magazine (7-4-05)[Mr. Shenk is the author of Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness, to be published in September by Houghton Mifflin.]... after 140 years of manipulation, can Lincoln's memory ever again find its true shape?Abraham Lincoln died shortly after 7 a.m. on April 15, 1865. &quo

John Tierney: The MIld, Mild West

John Tierney, in the NYT (6-25-05):The actors from HBO's "Deadwood" are coming to the scene of their crimes today, and they can expect a hero's welcome when they pose for pictures on Main Street. Some people in the real Deadwood are offended by the series' lurid language and scenes, but the ones wh

Roy Rosenzweig: Digital Archives Are a Gift of Wisdom to Be Used Wisely

Roy Rosenzweig, in the Chronicle for Higher Education (6-24-05):[Mr. Rosenzweig is a professor of history and new media at George Mason University and director of the university's Center for History and New Media. He is co-author, with Daniel J. Cohen, of Digital History: A Guide to Preserving, Presenting, and Gathering the Past on the Web, scheduled to be published in the fall b

Anne Applebaum: The Only Thing That the Museum of American History Doesn't Do Is Teach History

Anne Applebaum, in the Washington Post (6-22-05):According to its director, the Smithsonian's Museum of American History needs new plumbing, new wiring and better lighting. So desperately does the building require renovation, in fact, that there is talk of shutting the whole place down for a year or two, of bringing in some fresher architecture, even of designing

Peter Dreier: Lynching Lessons

Peter Dreier, from Tikkun (6-17-05): [Mr. Dreier, professor of politics and director of the Urban & Environmental Policy program at Occidental College, is co-author of Place Matters: Metropolitics for the 21st Century (University Press of Kansas, 2005) and The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City (University of California Press, 2005).] On June 13, t

Michael Dobbs: Watergate and the Two Lives of Mark Felt

Michael Dobbs, in Washington Post (6-20-05)The Watergate scandal had reached a peak, and President Richard M. Nixon was furious about press leaks. His suspicions focused on the number two

Jeremy Hildreth: The British Empire's Lessons for Our Own

Jeremy Hildreth, in the WSJ (6-14-05):[Mr. Hildreth is co-author of Brand America: The Mother of All Brands, out now from Cyan Books.]In the 1920s, one quarter of the world's population fell under the rule of the British Empire. And while it's more popular to decry its consequences, the empire brought education, relative prosperity and the concept

Joanna Bourke: A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous

Joanna Bourke, for the Independent (6-17-05):[Ms. Bourke, professor of history at Birkbeck College, is the author of Fear: a cultural history.] The anonymous author of this memoir was living in Berlin in April 1945 when Red Army soldiers marched into the city. What followed was an orgy of rape. The first time she was dragged out of the cellar and gang- raped, her n