Roundup: Talking About History

June 19, 2005

Alan Wolfe: The Referendum of 2004

Alan Wolfe, for the Wilson Quarterly (6-18-05):[Mr. Wolfe is director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. His latest book, Return to Greatness: How America Lost Its Sense of Purpose and What It Needs to Do to Recover It, has just been published.] The presidential election of 2004 is widely regarded as one of the most importa

June 19, 2005

James Oliver Horton: Historical Perspective on Martin Luther King Jr. Day

James Oliver Horton, for Historynow.org (6-18-05):[Mr. Horton is the Benjamin Banneker Professor of American Studies and History at George Washington University.] ... The March on Washington at which King delivered his speech was the largest political demonstration in U.S. history that had occurred up to that point, an inspiring occasion. It was a day filled with lofty words from a range of

June 19, 2005

David Waldstreicher: The Invention of the Fourth of July

David Waldstreicher, for Historynow.org (6-18-05):[Mr. Waldstreicher is a Professor of History at Temple University] The Fourth of July, or Independence Day, as it has come to be known, is perhaps the most and the least American of holidays. It is the most American because it marks the beginning of the nation, because it rapidly became an occasion for expressing what America is all about, a

June 18, 2005

Pavel Litvinov: No American Gulag

Pavel Litvinov, in the Washington Post (6-18-05):[Mr. Litvinov was a dissident active in human rights causes in the Soviet Union, now lives in the United States.] Several days ago I received a telephone call from an old friend who is a longtime Amnesty International staffer. He asked me whether I, as a former Soviet "prisoner of conscience&qu

June 18, 2005

Isaac Herzog: Moving Forward by Falling Back

Isaac Herzog, in the NYT (6-18-05): [Mr. Herzog is Israel's minister of construction and housing.] I recently received a letter from a former high school teacher of mine in Tel Aviv. He was liberated from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp by a British Army unit in which my father served. Now, he was criticizing me for working on the government's plan to withdraw from 21 Jewish settlements

June 18, 2005

John Q. Barrett: "Deep Throat," Justice Jackson and Suicide Pacts

John Barrett, From his Jackson List (6-15-05): [Mr. Barrett is the editor of the memoirs of of Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson.] After “Deep Throat” was identified definitively two weeks ago, I read for the first time former senior FBI official W. Mark Felt’s previously little-noticed memoir, The FBI Pyramid from the Inside (New York:

June 17, 2005

Jim Sleeper: Europe 1, American Right 0

Jim Sleeper, in the American Prospect (6-17-05):[Mr. Sleeper, a lecturer in political science at Yale, examines tensions between American market hedonism and moral education in the 40th-anniversary issue of the quarterly Salmagundi, out this fall.] “Ranting like yours against capitalism is so over,” a vaguely neoconservative friend and writer

June 17, 2005

Zbigniew Brzezinski and William B. Quandt: From Bush, Mideast Words to Act On

Zbigniew Brzezinski and William B. Quandt, from the Washington Post (6-17-05):[Mr. Brzezinski was national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, and Mr.. Quandt was a senior member of his staff with responsibility for the Middle East.]The statement President Bush delivered at the conclusion of his recent meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abb

June 17, 2005

Vaclev Havel: A Rose for the 'Unfree'

Vaclav Havel, in the Washington Post (6-15-05)On Sunday Aung San Suu Kyi will celebrate her 60th birthday, which in a Buddhist culture marks an important milestone in one's life. I would like to meet her and give her a rose like the one she is seen holding in a photograph in my study. Such an ordinary wish, however, in the case of such an extraordinary woma

June 16, 2005

Clark G. Reynolds: Time for Reality to Replace "PDB" History

Clark G. Reynolds, in Historically Speaking (6-16-05): The United States has been at war against Middle Eastern-based terrorists since September 11, 2001. Does the American public—much less professional historians and their students—know why? Other than the few specialists in Middle Eastern studies, are historians making serious efforts to learn and teach the causes, stakes,

June 16, 2005

Brian Moron: The Cool War

Brian Morton, in the Nation (6-27-05)On August 1, 1956, the 84th Congress extended the terms of the President's Emergency Fund and ratified a pet project of the Eisenhower regime, the unrevealingly named Special International Program. A cold war dateline almost inevitably lends the words a sinister and clandestine aura. One can imagine the young CIA zealots who people Norman Mailer's Harlo

June 14, 2005

David Corn & Jeff Goldberg: How Deep Throat Fooled the FBI

David Corn & Jeff Goldberg, from the Nation (6-13-05)[David Corn is The Nation's Washington editor and also the"Loyal Opposition" columnist for www.TomPaine.com and www.Alternet.org. Corn's work has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and Harper's Magaz

June 13, 2005

Daniel Pipes; What Label Should We Use to Refer to Radical Islamists?

Daniel Pipes, at his blog (12-26-04):Coming to Terms: Militant Islam or Radical Islam? My title here plays off of Martin Kramer's spring 2003 article in the Middle East Quarterly,"Coming to Terms: Fundamentalists or Islamists?" In it, he reviews the"heated debate" of the past two decades on how to label in English the phenomenon variously known as Muslim fundamentalism, Islami

June 13, 2005

Henry Kissinger: China: Containment Won't Work

Henry A. Kissinger, in the Washington Post (6-13-05)The relationship between the United States and China is beset by ambiguity. On the one hand, it represents perhaps the most consistent expression of a bipartisan, long-range American foreign policy. Starting with Richard Nixon, seven presidents have affirmed the importance of cooperative relations

June 13, 2005

Niall Ferguson: Stalin's Intelligence

Niall Ferguson, in the NYT (6-12-05)IN the past four years the United States has paid heavily for two major intelligence failures. Before the 9/11 attacks, accurate warnings of the threat posed by Al Qaeda were not acted upon. Conversely, before the invasion of Iraq, inaccurate assessments about Saddam Hussein's military ca

June 12, 2005

Henry Mark and Erika Holzer: Jane Fonda: Guilty as Charged

Henry Mark Holzer and Erika Holzer, in the Frontpagemag.com (6-11-05)For three decades Jane Fonda obfuscated, distorted and lied about virtually everything connected with her wartime trip to North Vietnam: her motive, her acts, her intent, and her contribution to the Communists’ war effort. With the aid of clever handlers, she so successfully suppressed and spun her con

June 10, 2005

Barry Gewen: Forget the Founding Fathers

Barry Gewen, in the NYT Book Review (6-5-05):[Barry Gewen is an editor at the NYT Book Review.]The founding fathers were paranoid hypocrites and ungrateful malcontents. What was their cherished Declaration of Independence but empty political posturing? They groaned about the burden of taxation, but it was the English who were shouldering the real burden, paying taxes on everything from property to beer, from soap to candles, tobacco, paper, leather and b

June 10, 2005

Victor Navasky: Deep Threat

Victor Navasky , in the Nation (6-27-05)Whatever their motives, Mark (Deep Throat) Felt; Woodstein (Bob and Carl); Judge John Sirica, who refused to accept the notion that the Watergate break-in began and ended with the men arrested inside the Watergate complex (and the two White House aides who recruited them); Senator Sam Ervin, with the battered copy of the US Constitution in his pocke

June 6, 2005

Charles Lane: The Paradoxes of a Death Penalty Stance

Charles Lane, in the Washington Post (6-4-05)In the debate between Europe and the United States over the death penalty, no country is more vocal than Germany. German media regularly decry executions in Texas. A recent U.S. Supreme Court case concerning the rights, under international law, of foreign defendants in capital cases grew in part out of a German lawsuit

June 6, 2005

Hugh Fitzgerald: Columbia Teaches "Hate"

Hugh Fitzgerald, at FrontPagemag.com (6-6-05)Gil Anidjar is an Assistant Professor at Columbia, with his primary responsibility the teaching of Comparative Literature – but there is a lot of comparison, and very little literature, in his writing. He offers two Comparative Literature courses. One is on Freud and Derrida. The