Roundup: Talking About History

June 1, 2005

Alexander H. Joffe: Academics Against Israel

Alexander H. Joffe, at frontpagemag.com (6-1-05):[Alexander H. Joffe is director of Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum that critiques Middle East Studies at North American colleges and universities.]The latest news from Britain is that the Association of University Teachers (AUT) boycott of two Israeli universities

June 1, 2005

Michiko Kakutani: On the Difference Between Bill Clinton and George W. Bush

Michiko Kakutani, in the NYT, in the course of a review of a new biography of Bill Clinton (John F. Harris's The Survivor), 5-31-05: ... Although Mr. Harris notes that all presidents must "play the hand they are dealt," he adds that the greatest ones "manage simultaneously to create their own circumstances - to impose their own values and purposes on the age." Mr. Clinton did

May 31, 2005

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.: FDR at Yalta

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in the Times Literary Supplement (5-25-05):[This is an edited version of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr’s foreword to My Dear Mr Stalin: The complete correspondence of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph V. Stalin, edited by Susan Butler, to be published by Yale University Press in December.]Roosevelt and Stalin met only twice

May 30, 2005

Oren Ben-Dor: The Israeli Boycott Should Continue

Oren Ben-Dor, in the London Independent (5-30-05): [Dr. Oren Ben-Dor, originally from Israel, is a Lecturer in Law at Southampton University in the United Kingdom.] Driving towards my birthplace of Nahariya in northern Israel, you pass an impressively designed Holocaust memorial, dedicated to 'the fighters of the ghettos'. It is difficult not to be touched by its importance and prominence. Three hundred metres fur

May 30, 2005

Ian Buruma: Why he Japanese Are Now Receptive to Patriotic History

Ian Buruma, in the Financial Times of London (5-28-05): ... Asked what he thought was wrong with most Japanese textbooks, one well-known Tsukurukai member, Nobukatsu Fujioka of Tokyo University, said that "they are not written with Japanese people in mind. They present a history that is hostile to Japan." He attributes this to "Japanese socialists, communists and liberal media", as well as foreigners who see "Japan as nothing but an evil aggressor d

May 27, 2005

James Pinkerton: President Bush's Historical Revisionism (The Shame of Memorial Day)

James Pinkerton, in Newsday (5-26-05): On Memorial Day, next Monday, many Americans will commemorate past war sacrifice. Sadly, more Americans will watch TV, oblivious to our sacred national history. But what's new for Memorial Day 2005 is the recasting of America's past in such a way that "blasphemes" our civil religion of service and sacrifice. That's the view of historian Michael Vlahos of Johns Hopkins University - making a sharp thesis, using a cutti

May 27, 2005

Jeff Shesol: The Reagan Legacy Project

Jeff Shesol, in the NYT (5-22-05): [Jeff Shesol is the author of ''Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud That Defined a Decade,'' and was a speechwriter for President Bill Clinton.]Just about one year ago, as millions of television viewers watched the sun set in Simi Valley, Calif. -- the terminus of Ronald Reagan's cross-country funeral procession -- the late president's advance men called an end to Operation Serenade, their code name for this nationa

May 27, 2005

Mark Lilla: Why Americans Are Turning to Religion

Mark Lilla, in the NYT (5-15-05): [Mark Lilla is a professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. His study of modern theology and politics, ''The Stillborn God,'' will be published next year.] EVERYONE, it seems, wants to get religion. Since the re-election of George W. Bush our magazines and newspapers have been playing catch-up, running long

May 27, 2005

David Gelernter: Bible Illiteracy in America

David Gelernter, in the Weekly Standard (5-23-05): A REPORT JUST ISSUED BY the Bible Literacy Project (more on this later) suggests that young Americans know very little about the Bible. The report is important, but first things first: A fair number of Americans don't see why teenagers should know anything at all about the Bible.Scripture begins with God creating the world, but there is something these verses don't tell you: The Bible has itself created worlds. Wherever you s

May 25, 2005

Tom Brune: It's the Threat of Filibusters that Have Shaped Judicial Fights

Tom Brune, in the WaPo (5-24-05): Had it not been for his fear that a faction of liberal senators might filibuster his judicial confirmation, Richard H. Poff would have been nominated to a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court instead of William H. Rehnquist.A conservative Republican congressman from Virginia who opposed civil rights laws, Poff was tappe

May 25, 2005

Kevin Myers: Sorry, But Speer Knew. He Knew. Of Course, He Knew.

Kevin Myers, in the Sunday Telegraph (5-22-05): Gitta Sereny - a writer whom I respect greatly - has been arguing that Albert Speer, Hitler's confidant and armaments minister, did not know of the Holocaust. She was prompted to do this by the recent broadcast by the BBC of German films made by Heinrich Breloer: Speer und Er, which clumsily translates as "Speer and He", "he" being Hitler. I do not speak German, I have not read the thousands of do

May 25, 2005

Antony Beevor: Was WW II Bomber Harris Really Villainous?

Antony Beevor, in the London Independent (5-21-05): THE HISTORY of warfare is never black and white. This is true even of that most morally justifiable struggle, the fight against Nazism. On the British side, few leaders have been so controversial as Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, who directed the strategic air offensive against Germany. 'Bomber' Harris took over in early 1942, a year which turned out to be a very hard time for the Allied cause. Rommel was pushing t

May 25, 2005

A Casino at Gettysburg? No!

Editorial in the Columbus Dispatch (5-24-05):Gettysburg has to be the worst place in Pennsylvania for a casino. Historians, Civil War buffs and preservationists would like to crush this asinine proposal before it gets off the ground. If approved by a state commission, the casino and spa would be built about 1 1/2 miles east of the Gettysburg National Military Park, near enough to be considered a desecration of the memory of the thousands

May 25, 2005

Larry Schweikart: My Advice to Conservative Graduate Students

Larry Schweikart, at frontpagemag.com (5-24-05):For the conservative student entering a graduate history program there is no simple advice. Your way will be tenuous, precarious, and often downright dangerous. Can a conservative student survive? Yes. But more often than not, he or s

May 21, 2005

Face-Off on History Education: Jon Wiener Vs. Diane Ravitch

A debate at Slate.com between Jon Wiener and Diane Ravitch (week of May 16, 2005): [Diane Ravitch is research professor of education at New York University and is the author of The Language Police. She was the primary writer for the California History/Social Science Framework adopted by the State Board of Education in 1988 and has served as consultant for history curriculum to several other states. Jon Wiener is professor of history at the University of California, Irvine,

May 20, 2005

Jonathan Cott: Studs Terkel ... Why America Suffers from Alzheimer's

Jonathan Cott, in the Nation (5-20-05): No one has listened and captured the human voice better than Studs Terkel in his twelve books of oral histories, including Division Street: America, The Good War, Race and Working. Someone once said, "When America talks, Studs listens." On the occasion of his 93rd birthday (May 16), we turn the tables--Terkel talks. The following is an abridged transcript of a 2003 interview with Studs conducted by Jonathan Cott, who started by ask

May 19, 2005

George F. Will: Donald Kagan's Wise Approach to History

George Will, in the Wa Po (5-19-05):When Yale awarded President John F. Kennedy an honorary degree, he said he had the ideal combination -- a Yale degree and a Harvard education. Today he might rethink that, given the Harvard faculty's tantrum that caused President Lawrence Summers's cringing crawl away from his suggestion of possible gender differences of cognition. At least the phrase "Yale

May 19, 2005

Donald Kagan: In Defense of History

Donald Kagan, the 2005 Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities (5-12-05):... André Malraux said that "All art is a revolt against man's fate." If he is right, Sophocles's plays, the other tragedies, and much of ancient Greek literature are not art. Malraux seems to me to reflect the Romantic view that is determined to see the artist as an individual apart from, superior to and in rebellion against the establis

May 19, 2005

Jacob Heilbrunn: The Left's Flawed View of the American Empire

Jacob Heilbrunn, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (5-19-05): [Jacob Heilbrunn is an editorial writer for the Los Angeles Times and is at work on a book about the neoconservative movement.]Belief in America's decline is on the rise. The surge began with the Yale historian Paul Kennedy's 1987 best seller The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (Random House), which argued that Ronald Reagan's economic bungling

May 17, 2005

Anthony Paul: The Battle That Shaped Asia's Century at 100

Anthony Paul, in the Straits Times ( Singapore) (5-14-05): ON A sunny Saturday afternoon a century ago, an extraordinary sight transfixed Singapore. Headlines in The Straits Times files of April 10, 1905 capture the city's excitement: 'Most magnificent sea spectacle since the Armada. Forty-four mighty vessels in battle array.' Said the accompanying report: 'Never - according to all the chances of war and precedents of history - will ( Singapore) ever witness