Roundup: Talking About History

May 17, 2005

Carla Crowder: Hellen Keller--The Awkward Fact Alabama Ignores -- She Was a Leftwinger

Carla Crowder, Newhouse News Service (5-15-05): TUSCUMBIA , ALA. -- It’s impossible to miss the ubiquitous brown signs for Ivy Green, the birthplace of Helen Keller. She’s the pride of the north Alabama town of Tuscumbia. Townspeople celebrate her with an annual festival and performances of "The Miracle Worker" play, and her childhood home is preserved like a shrine. Visitors learn that her father was a captain in the Confederacy. They see the

May 17, 2005

Les Payne: The Umph the Reparations Movemwent Is Getting from a Chicago Law Requiring Corporations to Reveal Theeir Slavery History

Les Payne, in Newsday (5-15-05): My bank, it turns out, accumulated early assets by trafficking in slavery. So did my insurance company. Ditto the newspaper I delivered door-to-door as a child growing up in Hartford, Conn. What should descendants of slaves make of J.P. Morgan Chase Bank? Aetna Insurance Co.? The Hartford Courant? Consider the current evidence against this most honorable U.S. banking institution that held in human bondage hundreds of Af

May 17, 2005

Stephen Bayley: What the British Can Still Learn from Churchill

Stephen Bayley, in the London Independent (5-15-05): With the shortcomings " moral, oratorical, practical, symbolic " of our present crop of national leaders very much in mind, it is interesting to reflect on that famous photograph of our most revered warrior chieftain. He stands pin-striped and pugnacious, bow-tied beneath a dark Homburg. I dare say he has enjoyed a glass or two of his favourite Pol Roger champagne (and it was his habit to start the day with a whis

May 16, 2005

David Greenberg: Why Blogging Is Hard Work

David Greenberg, in the NYT (5-15-05):"YOU should have a blog." Apparently I push my opinions on my friends rather aggressively, because I often hear this remark.Last week, I had my chance. My wife and I agreed to be "guest bloggers" - the online equivalent of what David Brenner used to do for Johnny Carson - for Dan Drezner, a political scientist at the Univers

May 16, 2005

Roger Cohen: Why History Is So Much in Dispute Around the World These Days

Roger Cohen, in the NYT (5-15-05):[Roger Cohen, who writes the Globalist column for The International Herald Tribune, is author of"Soldiers and Slaves: American P.O.W.'s Trapped by the Nazis' Final Gamble" (Knopf).]THE Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Aleksandr Yakovenko, had an interesting suggestion the other day."The job of historians is to tell the truth," he ventu

May 15, 2005

Arthur Hertzberg: The Pope Should Apologize for the Papacy's Indifference to the Holocaust

Arthur Hertzberg, in the NYT (5-14-05):[Arthur Hertzberg, a visiting professor of the humanities at New York University, is the author of"The Fate of Zionism."]LASTweek, Pope Benedict XVI vowed to Rome's former chief rabbi that he would renew the Vatican's commitment to Catholic-Jewish dialogue. The statement, which came at the same time that Germany unveiled its new Holoc

May 13, 2005

Juan Cole: Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven--Not Bad

Juan Cole, at his blog (5-9-05): I saw Kingdom of Heaven Sunday. The film has many virtues, with its attention to costume and scene. I could quibble. Medieval European swords of the 1100s could not be wielded in the way they were shown here; they were very heavy. And I doubt that whatever the catapults were throwing in the way of fiery material would explode like bombshells on impact. Even bombshells didn't explode until the 18th century, as I recall. The history is not entirely wro

May 13, 2005

Ralph Luker: A Brief History of History Blogs

Ralph Luker, in the AHA's Perspectives (May 2005):As the 20th century faded into the 21st, the Internet gave birth to a new form of communication, the weblog or"blog." A blog is a commonplace journal maintained on the Internet, where it is accessible to other readers. At the beginning of 1999, there were about two-dozen blogs known to exist. This was an intimate world, in which every bl

May 13, 2005

Kwan Weng Kin: The Professor Who Got Japan to Adopt Patriotic Textbooks

Kwan Weng Kin, in the Straits Times ( Singapore) (5-13-05): IT ALL began with 'comfort women', a euphemism to describe the thousands of mostly Asian women forced to provide sexual services to Japanese soldiers during World War II. In 1996, when Professor Nobukatsu Fujioka, 62, learnt that all seven history textbooks for Japan's junior high schools included that term, he rounded up several like-minded acquaintances to rewrite history. Together, they

May 13, 2005

John J. Tkacik: China Should Think About Correcting Its Own Textbooks, too

John J. Tkacik, in the Weekly Standard (5-9-05):[John J. Tkacik, a retired State Department officer who served in Taipei, Beijing, Hong Kong, and Guangzhou, is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation.]MILLIONS OF CHINESE FAMILIES SUFFERED during the invasion and occupation of the mainland by Imperial Japanese armies in the Second World War. But President Hu Jintao

May 12, 2005

Mark Selden: Now How Do American Textbooks Treat the Japanese?

Mark Selden, at the website of Japan Focus (5-8-05): [Mark Selden is a coordinator of Japan Focus. His most recent book is War and State Terrorism: The United States, Japan and the Asia-Pacific in the Long Twentieth Century. ] Japan, the Jap

May 12, 2005

Max Boot: Why Putin's Grand Show Left a Bitter Taste

Max Boot, in the LAT (5-12-05): Goose-stepping soldiers. Hammers and sickles. That was some spectacle in Red Square to commemorate the 60th anniversary of V-E Day. Like his communist predecessors, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin isn't shy about claiming for his country an outsized share of the credit for defeating Nazi Germany. No one can gainsay the sacrifices of

May 12, 2005

Eric Silver: How Israel Sees the Boycott by British Academics

Eric Silver, in the London Independent (5-5-05): 'To boycott this university among all the universities in Israel is so bizarre and so distorted that I simply can't understand it,' said Aaron Ben-Ze'ev, the president of Haifa University, one of two Israeli academic institutions blacklisted last week by Britain's Association of University Teachers (AUT). 'We are the most pluralistic and most tolerant university in Israel.' He could hardly be expected to say less, but he made o

May 12, 2005

Carlin Romano: What the Media Have Left Out About the Pope's WW II Past

Carlin Romano, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (5-11-05):Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle and literary critic of The Philadelphia Inquirer, was a finalist this spring for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in criticism.... As the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II arrives in Europe, it's appropriate to bring b

May 11, 2005

Anne Applebaum: What Liberals (And Conservatives) Are Missing About Bush's Yalta Mistake

Anne Applebaum, in the Wa Po (5-11-05): "It just offends me that the president of the United States is, directly or indirectly, attacking his own country in a foreign land." That was 1998. The speaker, Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), was then House majority whip. The president was Bill Clinton, who had "attacked his own country" while in Uganda. "Going back to the t

May 11, 2005

Clemens Wergin: Why Japan Needs to Come to Terms with History as Germany Has

Clemens Wergin, in the London Financial Times (5-10-05): [The writer is an editorial writer for the German daily Der Tagesspiegel]This week, memories of German atrocities again feature in media headlines around the world. That the past has not disappeared - neither for Germany nor for its neighbours - is a fact the majority of Germans have come to accept. Perhaps the Japanese, too, should not have been surprised that their history came back with a vengeance this year,

May 11, 2005

Andrew Osborn: How May 9th Plays in Russia

Andrew Osborn, in the London Independent (5-9-5): In London they danced in the fountains but in Moscow they were too shell-shocked, too exhausted and too battle-weary to manage such high jinks. Up to 30 million soldiers and civilians were dead, the Soviet Union had lost a third of its national wealth, cities such as Stalingrad had been reduced to lunar landscapes, and an entire generation of men had been decimated. ... Today, 9 May, is the traditional day when first th

May 11, 2005

Paul McKay: The Brave Teenager Who Escaped from Auschwitz and Told the War What Was Happening There

Paul McKay, in the Ottawa Citizen (5-6-05): A brave teenager, now a Canadian, made a daring escape from Auschwitz and first warned the world of its horrific secret. His report saved 200,000 lives. Rudolf Vrba was once imprisoned there. After 21 harrowing months, the teenager and a fellow Slovak Jew escaped to alert Europe about the Nazi death factory in Poland. Scholars generally agree that the escapees' 60-page report, including diagrams of the camp layout

May 11, 2005

Jonathan Steele: WW II Nostalgia--And Myths

Jonathan Steele, in the Guardian (5-6-05): Like other recent "60ths" - D-day last June, and the liberation of Auschwitz in January - this year's remembrance in Moscow has the poignancy of being the last in which significant numbers of survivors will be able to join. But will it make the breakthrough in western minds that previous postwar historiography has failed to do? Will the Soviet Union's overwhelming role in defeating Hitler finally be accepted, or is Monday'

May 11, 2005

Dennis M. Mahoney: New View Of Crusades Abandons Simple Stereotypes

Dennis M. Mahoney, in the Columbus Dispatch (5-6-05): In 1096, the rallying cry of western Europe's Christians was "Deus volt," or "God wills it." Today, the Crusades serve as a rallying cry for some as an example of the West's mistreatment of Muslims. But in reality, misconceptions about the Crusades abound in the modern world. The Crusades, contends historian Thomas Madden, were primarily a reaction by Christians to aggression by Musli