Roundup: Talking About History

May 11, 2005

Olivia Ward: How WW II Changed the World

Olivia Ward, in the Toronto Star (5-7-05): The end came with ironic calm: signatures penned on a piece of paper by five generals in a makeshift schoolhouse building in northeastern France - a German, an American, a Briton, a Russian and a French observer. Sixty years ago today, Germany surrendered to the Allied forces, and the most destructive war in history ended in Europe. The ceremony was brief and businesslike. Victory in Europe Day would be officially celebrate

May 10, 2005

Gunter Grass: What Liberation Day Means in Germany

Gunter Grass, in the NYT (5-7-05): TOMORROW, it will be 60 years to the day since the German Reich's unconditional surrender. That is equivalent to a working life with a pension to look forward to. It goes so far back that memory, that wide-meshed sieve, is in danger of forgetting it.Sixty years ago, after being wounded in the chaotic retreat in Lausitz, I lay in a hospital with a flesh wound in

May 10, 2005

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: The Good War?

Geoffrey Wheatcroft, in the Boston Globe (5-8-05): [Geoffrey Wheatcroft is an English journalist and author. His most recent book is ‘‘The Strange Death of Tory England.’’] ‘‘NO ENGLISH SOLDIER who rode with the tanks into liberated Belgium or saw the German murder camps at Dachau or Buchenwald could doubt that the war had been a noble

May 10, 2005

Alexander H. Joffe: Why Didn't Archaeologists Criticize Saddam as Well?

Alexander H. Joffe, at the website of Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum (5-10-05):[Alexander H. Joffe directs Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum, He holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Archaeology.]Archaeology is once again making news in Iraq. Iraqi

May 6, 2005

Nicholas Birch: Turkey Criminalizes History

Nicholas Birch, in the Irish Times (5-5-05): Turkey's new criminal code was supposed to be a crucial part of its efforts to bring itself in line with European norms. Instead, it stumbles from one controversy to another. Last autumn, voices were raised over plans to criminalise adultery. The centre of attention now is an article that looks as if it sets the courts loose on anyone describing the 1915 mass expulsion of Ottoman Armenians as a "genocide".

May 6, 2005

Why German Museums Have No Option but to Present a "Black Armband" View of History

Hans-Martin Hinz, in the Australian (5-5-05): ... German museums have established a tradition of helping come to terms with the realities of the Third Reich and exhibitions are extensively discussed in the media. Political criticism is not entirely absent. A few years ago a travelling exhibition about the crimes of the Wehrmacht, prepared by a private research institute in Hamburg, went almost unnoticed in the first five German cities it visited. Then conservative

May 6, 2005

Jonathan Zimmerman: Americans Should Think Twice Before Criticizing Japan's Textbooks

Jonathan Zimmerman, in the Christian Science Monitor (5-4-05):[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history at New York University's Steinhardt School of Education. He is the author of 'Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools.]Should history textbooks make you love your country? Most people would say "yes." And that's why textbooks inevitably distort the past - even here, in the good old

May 6, 2005

Jacob Heilbrunn Vs. David Horowitz: Is the Left a Threat to America?

From FromPageMag.com (5-6-05):This is the first of a series of exchanges between Jacob Heilbrunn, an LA Times editorial writer and author of a forthcoming book on neoconservatism, and David Horowitz to discuss the themes of Horowitz’s book

May 6, 2005

In an Anti-Gay Climate Teaching About Discrimination Is Personal

Bonnie J. Morris, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (5-6-05): [Bonnie J. Morris is an adjunct assistant professor of women's studies at George Washington University.]Last fall I was deeply moved when one student took the time to offer me her condolences. No, I had not experienced a death in my family or been turned down for tenure. The student was responding to the fact that 11 states had passed new laws fo

May 6, 2005

Seymour Topping: Remember, Ho Chi Minh Wanteed Truman's Help But Was Spurned

Seymour Topping in a letter to the editor of the NYT (5-4-05): Re "The War We Could Have Won" (Op-Ed, May 1):Stephen J. Morris writes about confrontation with the "profoundly ideological and aggressive totalitarian regime" of North Vietnam over five decades. But he doesn't mention how that came about. In 1945, President Harry S. Truman abandoned President Franklin D. Roosevelt's proposal for transformation of Indochina into a United Nations tr

May 4, 2005

Gertrud Mackprang Baer: Germans Wrestle With Culture of Memory

Gertrud Mackprang Baer, in the Toronto Star (4-29-05):[Gertrud Mackprang Baer is the Ottawa-based author of In the Shadow Silence - From Hitler Youth to Allied Internment: A Young Woman's Story of Truth and Denial, which was short-listed for the 2002 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction] The 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz has produced an extraordinary global response. Leaders have met at the former extermination camp and in the German capi

May 4, 2005

Jack Torry and Joe Hallett: Military Historians Who See Parallels Between Iraq and Vietnam? Yep.

Jack Torry and Joe Hallett, in the Columbus Dispatch (4-29-05):Building a government that enjoys popular support. Creating a modern army willing to fight a powerful insurgency. Maintaining widespread support on the home front. The United States fell short of those goals in Vietnam. Thirty years after the fall of Saigon, the country is giving them another go, in Iraq. Americans have not suffered anything like the casualties they endured in Vietnam, but the w

May 4, 2005

Lynda Hurst: Who Was Hitler?

Lynda Hurst, in the Toronto Star (4-30-05): ... Who was Adolf Hitler? What was he? ... In the unstable Germany of the 1930s, there was a desire for a strong leader, says McGill University historian and author Peter Hoffmann. "But a lot of people shook their heads when they saw the crowds' reaction to him. They thought these people were fools or black sheep." An acknowledged expert on the German Resistance (which included his fa

May 4, 2005

Hugo Hamilton : Germany Has Europe's Lowest Birth Rate ... Are They Ashamed to Have Children?

: Hugo Hamilton, in the Irish Times (4-30-05): Hitler is dead. The war is over. It is 60 years ago, five times the duration of the Third Reich, since the greatest disaster of Europe came to an end with the capitulation of the German command on May 8th, 1945. The world has moved on, Europe has come together as never before, and yet there is something about the events of the Nazi era which makes time stand still. The Holocaust is always yesterday. We are no di

May 4, 2005

Was there Once a Female Pope?

Kelly Patterson, in the Ottawa Citizen (5-1-05): Crammed along the Via Sacra in Rome, thousands of faithful hold their breath in anticipation. At long last, the new pope, in full regalia, comes into view, wending his way from St. Peter's to the Lateran Basilica. Suddenly the primate crumples to the ground, doubled over in pain. The crowd gasps in horror: the Pope is giving birth! Yes, under those fetching robes, Pope John VIII was really Pope Joan, the mos

May 3, 2005

Jonah Goldberg: Sometimes, it simply isn't Vietnam

Jonah Goldberg, in USA Today (4-27-05): This Saturday marks the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War. For a child born today, that war is as ancient as World War II was for someone born in 1975. But for some, Vietnam is still current events, not history. The cliché is that generals like to fight the last war. The phrase is usually invoked to su

May 3, 2005

Robert Spencer: Ridley Scott's Misguided Film About the Crusades

Robert Spencer, at frontpagemag.com (5-3-05):[Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch; author of Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West (Regnery), and Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith (Encounter); and editor of the essay collection The Myth of Islamic Tolerance: Islamic Law and Non-Muslims (Prometheus). He is working on a

May 3, 2005

Roger Pulvers: Remembering the End of World War II (The Russian Perspective)

Roger Pulvers, in Japan Times (5-1-05): [Roger Pulvers is an Australian author, playwright and theater director, and a professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology. A collection of his fiction and nonfiction writings,"Half and More," will be published by Shinchosha in March 2005. His website is: http://www17.ocn.ne.jp/~h-uesugi/secondpage.htm]Way back in 1964 and 1965 I made extended trips to and around the Soviet Union. Memories that are 40 years old are hard enough to relate to the r

May 3, 2005

How GESO Is Influencing Scholarship

David Glenn, commenting on the impact that GESO--the Graduate Employees and Students Organization--has affected the scholarship of those who have been active in the student union movement; in the Chronicle of Hiher Education (5-6-05) (subscribers only): ... The Yale union battles, whatever their outcome, have already left a lasting imprint that goes deeper than the leaflets and counterleaflets piling up in New Haven.

May 2, 2005

Brent Staples: What Godzilla Was Really All About

Brent Staples, in the NYT (5-1-05):Film directors who once stood helpless while studios recut their movies can now console themselves with "directors' cuts" put out on DVD. This option was not available to the influential Japanese director Ishiro Honda, whose 1954 classic "Godzilla" - known in Japan as "Gojira" - made a household name of the tow