Roundup: Talking About History

April 5, 2005

Jaroslav Pelikan: The Slavic Pope Who Tried to Unify the Church

Jaroslav Pelikan, in the NYT (4-4-05): [Jaroslav Pelikan, professor emeritus of history at Yale, is the author of the five-volume history"The Christian Tradition."]On June 3, 1979, a few months after Cardinal Karol Wojtyla became the first Slavic pope, he set out as the vision of his pontificate"that this Polish pope, this Slav pope, should at this precise moment manifest the spiritual unity of Chris

April 4, 2005

George Weigel: The Pope's Biographer Assesses His Legacy

George Weigel in the WSJ: [Mr. Weigel is a senior fellow and director of the Catholic Studies program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is author of "Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II," (HarperCollins, 1999) and "The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God," just out from Basic Books.] ... In a 1968 letter to the French Jesui

April 2, 2005

Mark Mazower: Is the West Going to Remain Ascendant?

Mark Mazower, in Irish Times (4-1-05): Once upon a time there was the West, winner of history's race to modernity, and there were the rest, trying to catch up.Every society was thought to make the same journey, at greater or lesser speed, from hidebound tradition to the bright promise of industrial modernity and unrestricted economic growth. If it did not, something had gone wrong: it might be excessive attachment to (non-Christian) religions and creeds, or to pre-modern sour

March 30, 2005

Leon Fink: How History Departments Hire

Leon Fink, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (4-1-05): I recently received a request from the chair of the Harvard University department of history for help in a search to fill a tenured position in a designated subfield (I'm being intentionally vague here) of U.S. history. Neither an invitation to apply myself nor a request for other nominations, the letter rather asked me to evaluate a list of seven scholars, and add oth

March 29, 2005

Steve Fraser & Gary Gerstel: Ignoring Elites, Historians Are Missing a Major Factor in Politics and History

Steve Fraser & Gary Gerstel, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (4-1-05): [Steve Fraser is a writer and historian living in New York. Gary Gerstle is a professor of history at the University of Maryland at College Park. This essay is adapted from the book they edited, Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy, published this month by Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2005 by the Presi

March 29, 2005

Sara Dogan: Does the AHA Approve of the Goals of the Academic Bill of Rights?

Sara Dogan, at frontpagemag.com (3-28-05):[Sara Dogan is National Campus Director of Students for Academic Freedom.]Since its inception, the Academic Bill of Rights has endured frequent criticism from members of the academy, who claim that its tenets will infringe on professors’ right to free expression in the classroom. These opponents most often cite the Bill’s statement t

March 26, 2005

Gil Troy: We Live in the Age of Reagan (And Ralph Lauren)

Gil Troy, in the Boston Globe (3-13-05): [Gil Troy is professor of history at McGill University and the author of ''Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s."]

March 25, 2005

What a Historian of Skiing Has Found on the Slopes

Goldie Blumenstyk, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (3-25-05): It's been nine years since Annie Gilbert Coleman last did traditional downhill skiing, and although the falling snow makes it a little tough to see and she's using unfamiliar equipment, she quickly finds the one "black diamond" slope here at tiny Swiss Valley.... Taking a break after a few more runs, we shake fresh snow from our hats and clunk our way toward a table in the wood-beamed lu

March 25, 2005

Allan Massie: Was Judas a Judas?

Allan Massie, in the London Independent (3-25-05): And Judas Iscariot who also betrayed him ..." With these words, St Mark ends his list of the chosen 12 apostles. It's the first mention of Judas, and it stamps him indelibly. Throughout the Christian centuries, red-haired, yellow-gowned Judas has been a synonym for traitor; a Judas- king signifying treachery towards one to whom you owe loyalty ..

March 23, 2005

Francis Fukuyama: The Relevance of Max Weber Today, 100 Years After the "Protestant Ethic" Essay

Francis Fukuyama, in the NYT Book Review (3-20-05): [Francis Fukuyama is a professor of international political economy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the author, most recently, of ''State-Building.''] THIS year is the 100th anniversary of the most famous sociological tract ever written, ''The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,'' by Ma

March 23, 2005

Hywel Williams: So Sartre Barely Made the French Poll of the Top 100

Hywel Williams, in the Guardian:The idea that the French respect their intellectuals dies hard among the British. And when you wander around the streets of any French city it's easy to see why. Rues Voltaire, Hugo and Racine tend to recur just round the corner from the equally conventional Rue Bonaparte. At municipal and state level, French government likes to claim its cultural reputation by acclaiming the glorious cultured dead. La terre et les morts , happily, includes les intellos

March 23, 2005

Martin Miller: Are Reenactments Good TV AND Good History?

Martin Miller, in the LAT (3-18-05): The revolution may not be televised, but it will probably be reenacted.Around for decades, re-creating historical events for television is flourishing as never before. Once viewed as unsophisticated, hopelessly inaccurate and at times even cheesy, the reenactments are now a documentary staple able to inject thrilling action sequences and emotional complexities into the conventional, staider format of narration, static visuals, archival foo

March 23, 2005

Does the Vatican Owe an Apology to Muslims for the Crusades?

Robert Spencer, at frontpagemag.com (3-22-05):[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

March 22, 2005

Laurel Leff: Does Holocaust News Need to be “Balanced” ?

Laurel Leff, in a piece distributed by the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies (March 2005): [Laurel Leff is associate professor of in the School of Journalism at Northeastern University and author of Buried by The Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper, which has just been published by Cambridge University Press. This article was made available by The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies.] Controversy has erupted over C-Span’s

March 22, 2005

Martin Kramer: The Myth that Palestine Is Neglected by Scholars

Martin Kramer, at his blog (3-21-05): On March 31, Rashid Khalidi, Columbia's Edward Said Professor, will deliver what the New York Sun has called a "job talk" at Princeton. Earlier this month, the paper reported that "Khalidi has thrown his hat into the ring for the Niehaus chair in contemporary

March 22, 2005

Scott Sherman: Columbia University's Middle East Crisis

Scott Sherman, in the Nation (3-16-05): In December 2003 Rabbi Charles Sheer, the director of the Columbia/Barnard chapter of Hillel, the Jewish campus organization, dispatched an e-bulletin to alumni, students and supporters. There was much to report: In 2002 a movement of students and professors had urged Columbia to divest from companies that manufactured and sold weaponry to Isra

March 22, 2005

Serge Schmemann: 60 Years Later and Nations Are Still Fighting Over the History of WW II

Serge Schmemann, in the NYT (3-22-05):There was a lot of talk 10 years ago, when the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II was being celebrated, that the great war was finally over. Europe was one again, Germany and Japan (not to mention Italy) were fully back in the democratic fold, the "greatest generation" was having a grand last hurrah, a new century was

March 22, 2005

Richard Holbrooke: George Kennan, RIP

Richard Holbrooke, in the Wa Po (3-21-05): George F. Kennan, who died last week at 101, was a unique figure in American history. I greatly admired him but disagreed with him profoundly on many critical issues, and, in the 35 years I knew him, I often reflected on this strange paradox. His extraordinary memoirs had made the idea of a life in the Foreign Service seem both exciting a

March 19, 2005

Jacob Heilbrunn: The Neocons and Churchillmania

Jacob Heilbrunn, in the NYT Book Review (2-27-05): Jacob Heilbrunn, an editorial writer for The Los Angeles Times, is completing a book on neoconservatism. Douglas J. Feith was becoming excited. After spending an afternoon discussing the war in Iraq with him, I asked what books had most influenced him. Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy and a prominent neoconservative

March 18, 2005

Frank Rich: Thank Goodness for "Deadwood," the TV Show Brave Enough to Tell History Like It Was

Frank Rich, in the NYT (3-13-05): ... If you can see only one of the shows that he [Sen. Ted Stevens (Alaska)] wants to banish or launder, let me recommend the series that probably has more four-letter words, with or without participles, than any in TV history. That would be "Deadwood" on HBO. Its linguistic gait befits its chapter of American history, the story of a gold-rush mining camp in the Dakota Territ