Roundup: Talking About History

April 11, 2005

Philip Terzian: Was Kennan Really Our Greatest Diplomat?

Philip Terzian, in the Weekly Standard (4-4-05): [Philip Terzian is Books & Arts editor of The Weekly Standard. ]AGAINST GEORGE F. KENNAN, who died last week at the age of 101, "there was no official complaint, / And all the reports on his conduct agree / That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint." He was not just "the nearest thing

April 11, 2005

Brent Staples: It's Time to Reread Madison Hemings's Account of Jefferson

Brent Staples, in the NYT (4-10-05)The 1998 DNA study that linked Thomas Jefferson to the final child of his lover Sally Hemings has settled one argument and fired up another. Most historians who had argued that Jefferson was too pure of heart to bed a slave have re-evaluated 200 years of evidence and embraced the emerging consensus: that Jefferson had a long relationship wi

April 11, 2005

Joseph Massad: Statement Before Columbia Committee

This is an excerpt from the statement Joseph Massad made on March 14, 2005 before the committee at Columbia University investigating charges of intimidation in the Middle East studies program: I have prepared a statement to read to you.  I would be happy to answer your questions afterwards. Before I begin, however, I want to ascertain that as professor Katzneslson has informed me, the only complaints that your committee has heard about me are the two complaint

April 9, 2005

John T. McGreevy: The Next Pope's Challenges

John T. McGreevy, in the New Republic (4-6-05): [John T. McGreevy teaches history at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Catholicism and American Freedom: A History.] ... The primary task for the next Pope and the next generation of American Catholic leaders will be to manage the transition from a Catholic culture to a Catholic creed. Until the 1960s, the faith inherited by American Cath

April 9, 2005

NYT: Did the Pope Win the Cold War? The Answer Is YES in Poland

Richard Bernstein, in the NYT (4-6-05):From the president of the country on down, just about everybody in Poland who has offered a historical assessment of Pope John Paul II says more or less the same thing: that without him a free Poland would not exist today. And beyond that, this appraisal goes, there would have been no collapse of Communism throu

April 9, 2005

Pope John Paul the Great?

Paul Vitello, Carol Eisenberg and Letta Tayler, in Newsday (4-4-05): The signs of the campaign were already abundant, one day after the pontiff's death. Pope John Paul II, "The Great," banners and T-shirts read. Even before the pope is buried, the quest is under way to make him not only a saint but also a "magnus," or great - a title bestowed by historians only twice in the papacy's 2,000-year history. The fledgling d

April 9, 2005

The Pope Who Had to Deal with a Less Deferntial Flock

Tony Barber, in the Financial Times of London (4-4-05):... , John Paul's long reign was a period of such rapid social modernisation that believers from the US and western Europe to Latin America and Asia are better educated, more prosperous, more geographically mobile and correspondingly less willing to show deference to the Church hierarchy than did their parents or grandparents. An earlier version of this trend caught the Vatican unawares in the 19th century,

April 9, 2005

Nicholas Thompson: Kennan and Nitze ... Last of the Cold War Giants

Nicholas Thompson, in the Boston Glob (4-3-05): IN THE SUMMER of 1943, George Kennan and Paul Nitze met on a train going from New York to Washington. Neither knew who the other was, nor was there any reason they should have. Kennan was a 39-year-old diplomat, just returned from Portugal. A Wall Street man four years Kennan's junior, Nitze was a second-level official at the Board of Economic Warfare. But Nitze found something compelling about Kennan and sat down across from th

April 9, 2005

Fresh Evidence that Hitler Knew Jews Were Being Killed

Toby Axelrod Jta, in the Jerusalem Post (3-3-05): How much detail did Adolf Hitler know about the genocide of the Jews? Quite a bit according to a rediscovered Soviet book on the subject commissioned by Josef Stalin. Hitler knew in detail about the attempted extermination of the Jews. That's according to Das Buch Hitler - "The Hitler Book" - a newly published German translation of a work written in Russian for the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in 1949. Th

April 9, 2005

The Hitler Industry in Overdrive

Derek Scally, in the Irish Times (4-2-05): Hitler is big box office. That's the likely message from the weekend box office receipts for Downfall, the German Hitler film that went on release yesterday. More than five million Germans saw the film, well timed by its producer to capitalise on the coming 60th anniversary of the end of the second World War. It comes at a time of an extraordinary glut of "Hitler news", an increasingly trivial fuel to fee

April 9, 2005

Jason Berry: The Paradoxical Pope

Jason Berry, in the Boston Globe (4-4-05): WHEN JOHN Paul II in 1979 made his first trip back to Poland as pope, he was determined to change the course of modern history. The stirring sermons exhorting human freedom, spiritual freedom, had long resonance through the final decade of the Cold War. He orchestrated clandestine support to Solidarity leaders in Poland, keeping pressure on the Communist regime. In 1989, when we watched the Soviet Empire crumble on television, John

April 8, 2005

Mark Engler: What the Obits Are Neglecting ... John Paul II's Economic Ethics

Mark Engler, in Foreign Policy in Focus (4-5-05): A steady feature in Pope John Paul II's obituaries has been mention of his unwaveringly conservative stances on issues such as abortion, birth control, gay rights, and the ordination of women. While these positions were sources of consternation for many American Catholics, they far from represent the whole of John Paul's ethical beliefs. Particularly in his teachings

April 7, 2005

Deborah Lipstadt: C-Span's Revisionist History

Deborah Lipstadt, in the NY Sun (4-6-05): [Professor Lipstadt teaches Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University and is the author of "History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving" (Ecco, 2005).]C-Span and I must occupy different planets and speak different languages. But more on that in a moment. Let me start by saying that "Book TV" is a national treasure. The only thin

April 7, 2005

Anne Applebaum: How the Pope Helped Defeat Comunism

Anne Applebaum, in the Wa Post (4-6-05): ... In essence, the pope made two contributions to the defeat of totalitarian communism, a system in which the state claimed ownership of all or most physical property -- factories, farms, houses -- and also held a monopoly on intellectual life. No one was allowed to own a private business, in other words, and no one was allowed to express belief i

April 6, 2005

Gerald L. Zelizer: What the Pope Did for Jews

Gerald L. Zelizer, in USA Today (4-5-05): [Gerald L. Zelizer, rabbi of Neve Shalom, a Conservative congregation in New Jersey, is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.]At best, many popes have merely suffered the Jews as God's outcasts. A few actively promoted their forced conversion.• In 1963, Pope John XXIII convened a church council that uprooted the pernicious

April 6, 2005

Economist Editorial: The First Pope in 500 Years to Change World History

Editorial in the Economist (4-2-05): WHATEVER future generations may say about Pope John Paul II, who died on Saturday April 2nd, aged 84, they will look back with amazement on the moment when, for the first time in 500 years, a Christian bishop was in the vanguard of world history. That was in June 1979, barely nine months after the Polish prelate's surprise call to the Vatican, following the untimely d

April 6, 2005

Timothy Garton Ash: The Pope Was the Greatest Actor of the Age

Timothy Garton Ash, in the Guardian (4-4-05): The world lived this death. It was a global Calvary. People from every corner of the earth gathered in St Peter's Square, peering up at those two windows of the papal apartment, illuminated against the night sky. Across five continents, Christians, Jews and Muslims joined them through television. Marcello, from Rio de Janeiro, emailed CNN: "We are watching

April 5, 2005

Keith Windschuttle: Ward Chruchill and Other Signs of the Decline of Universities

Keith Windschuttle, at frontpagemag.com (4-5-05): [Keith Windschuttle is author of, among other books, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (Macleay Press, 2002) and The White Australia Policy (Macleay Press, 2004).]A university education in the humanities was once supposed to be a civilising experience. But just how antiquated are the traditional advocates of this ideal - such as Charles Badham, pro

April 5, 2005

A Former Priest Turned Writer Who Says the Pope Was Suspicious of Modernity (Including Democracy)

Virginia Heffernan, in the NYT (4-5-05): The panoramic television coverage of the death of Pope John Paul II has represented him as an athlete, an actor, an enemy of totalitarianism, a world traveler, a polyglot, a pacifist, a penitent and an ecumenist. He has also been described, almost compulsively, as a rock star.What has been harder to divine in all these television images is the

April 5, 2005

Thomas Cahill: How the Pope Weakened the Appeal of the Catholic Church

Thomas Cahill, in the NYT (4-5-05): [Thomas Cahill is the author of"How the Irish Saved Civilization,""Pope John XXIII" and, most recently,"Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter."]With the news media awash in encomiums to the indisputable greatness of Pope John Paul II, isn't it time to ask to which tradition he belonged? Partisans unfamiliar with Christian history may judge this a strange question. Why, they may answer, he belonged to the Catholic tradition,