Roundup: Talking About History

March 18, 2005

Steven Aftergood: Missing Files in the Age of Information

Steven Aftergood, in Slate (3-17-05):The government does a remarkable job of counting the number of national security secrets it generates each year. Since President George W. Bush entered office, the pace of classification activity has increased by 75 percent, said William Leonard in March 2 congressional testimony. His Information Security Oversight Office oversees the classification system and recorded a rise from 9 mi

March 18, 2005

Jeffrey Rosen: Why Liberals May Miss Chief Justice Rehnquist

Jeffrey Rosen, in the Atlantic Monthly (April 2005): [Jeffrey Rosen is a law professor at George Washington University and the legal-affairs editor of The New Republic. He profiled the former attorney general John Ashcroft for The Atlantic last April.] In his thirty-four years on the Supreme Court, William Rehnquist participated enthusiastically in the annual Christmas party for the justices and their clerks. &qu

March 17, 2005

Max Boot: Imagine If Ward Churchill Had Referred to the Victims of AIDS as "Little Perverts"

Max Boot, in the LAT (3-17-05):To see where the balance of power lies in American academia, look no further than the University of Colorado, where the Ward Churchill scandal has claimed its first victim. No, not Churchill, the professor who gained national notoriety for describing the victims of the World Trade Center attack as"little Eichmanns" who basically deserved what they go

March 17, 2005

Thomas Fleming: Why Election Day Meant More to the Irish in My Youth than St. Patrick's Day

Thomas Fleming, in the NYT (3-17-05): [Thomas Fleming is the author of "The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I" and the forthcoming "Mysteries of My Father: An Irish-American Memoir." He is a member of HNN's board of directors.]In Jersey City, Election Day was a lot more important than St. Patrick's Day. The voting booth was where we learned to tell the Protestant establishmen

March 17, 2005

Interview: Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin on Anti-Americanism

From FrontPageMag.org (3-16-05):Frontpage Interview’s guests today are Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin, co-authors of the new book, Hating America: A History. Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center of the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) in Herzliya, Israel. He is also editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journ

March 16, 2005

Martin Kramer: The Michigan Vice Provost Who Misled USA Today

Martin Kramer, at his blog (3-16-05): A little over a year ago, USA Today ran an editorial against H.R. 3077, the Title VI reform bill for the program that lavishes federal subsidies on area studies in universities. (Readers of this space know that I've been an ardent supporter of Title VI reform, and particularly of an advisory board that would match the program's priorities with national needs.) The premise of t

March 16, 2005

Edward Rothstein: We Hate the French, The French Hate Us

Edward Rothstein, in the NYT (3-14-05):... The accumulated evidence of France's flaws can be compelling, but what pale stuff this is compared with Francophobia's French counterpart! Next month, the University of Chicago Press will publish a book that attracted much attention when it first appeared in France, in 2002: "The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism" by Philippe Roge

March 16, 2005

Richard Cohen: C-Span's Idea of Balance Is to Feature Holocaust Denier David Irving?

Richard Cohen, in the WA Po (3-15-05): You will not be seeing Deborah Lipstadt on C-SPAN. The Holocaust scholar at Emory University has a new book out ("History on Trial"), and an upcoming lecture of hers at Harvard was scheduled to be televised on the public affairs cable outlet. The book is about a libel case brought against her in Britain by David Irving, a Holocaust denier,

March 16, 2005

Can You Really Learn About the History of the Atomic Bomb by Listening to Country Music?

Cornellia Dean, in the NYT (3-15-05): Some scholars study the atomic age by researching the bomb makers. Others delve into the physics of the nucleus, or the relations between East and West in the cold war.Dr. Charles K. Wolfe listens to country music. In fact, he is a leading scholar of the country music of the atom bomb, a genre that flowered almost immediately after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a

March 15, 2005

Roger Makhlouf: Stop Calling It “The Arab World”

Roger Makhlouf (3-15-05): [Roger Makhlouf is an American-Lebanese Linguistic scholar, with an BS &MS in Electrical Engineering, an MBA and an MA in International Relations.]One has to be attentive to details in order to get closer to the truth.The widespread custom of the media in referring to the Middle East as “the Arab World” only contributes to solutions that are incompatible with the region’s history. In reality the region comprises man

March 15, 2005

David Greenberg: The Nixon Library Can't Be Trusted

David Greenberg, in the LAT (3-15-05): [Mr. Greenberg is a professor at Rutgers University. His book, Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image, was recently published in paperback by W.W. Norton.] It's rare for a scholarly conference to make the newspapers. It's rarer for a conference to make the papers when it never takes place. But that's what happened recently when the Richard M. Nixon Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda canceled a symposium on Nixon and the Vietnam War

March 14, 2005

Homi K. Bhabha: Is Frantz Fanon Still Relevant?

Homi K. Bhabha, in the Chronicle of Higher Ed (3-14-05): [Homi K. Bhabha is a professor of English and American literature, and chairman of the program in history and literature, at Harvard University. This essay is adapted from his introduction to a new edition of Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, to be published next month by Grove Press.]... Is The Wretched of the Earth now only a historical and sch

March 11, 2005

An Open Letter on the Controversy at Columbia

The following statement is circulating at Columbia University. It was forwarded to HNN on 3-9-05.During the past several months, Columbia University has been subjected to an extraordinary series of attacks impugning its reputation as a center of learning that welcomes students and scholars with a diverse range of points of view and similarly diverse backgrounds, loyalties, and commitments. Many of the allegations that have been made during this campaign--allegations that have

March 11, 2005

Jim Gilcrhist: Was Stalin Murdered?

Jim Gilcrhist, in the Scotsman (3-11-05): SITTING on historian Simon Sebag Montefiore's desk in London is a medical report which describes, minute by minute, the last hours of a sick 73-year-old man. They detail his incontinence, his spasms, his last gasps - and also severe stomach haemorrhaging. Normally, such a document would be of little significance except to immediate family, a record of just another tired old human's messy terminal moments. But the collapsed

March 11, 2005

Steven Levy: When Computers Are History

Steven Levy, in Newsweek" (3-14-05): Almost 30 years ago I came to possess a little piece of computer history. At the time, it seemed to me a fairly straightforward handwritten letter acknowledging my request to terminate an apartment lease, with instructions on how I could recover my security deposit. What I did not know then was that my landlord, a fellow with t

March 10, 2005

Anne C. Bailey: It's Time We Research What the Slave Trade Meant to Africans

Anne C. Bailey, assistant professor of African history at Spelman College, in African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame, published by Beacon Press, as excerpted in the Chronicle of Higher Education (3-10-05):.]In southern Ghana along the stretch of land off the Atlantic coast formerly known as the old Slave Coast, now known as Eweland, on many a night the striking rhythms of the drums can be heard from many miles away. They are so sure, so in

March 10, 2005

Larry Berman's Suit to Obtain Select PDB's from the CIA

Mike McKee, in the Recorder (3-9-05):As a renowned expert on the Vietnam conflict, Larry Berman knows volumes about opposition to U.S. government policies. Now, he's leading a fight of his own.For more than a year, the UC Davis professor has been seeking access to president's daily briefs, or PDBs, for three scattered days during Lyndon B. Johnson's administration.Berman says the documents would shed light on the Tet offensive and other lingering mysterie

March 10, 2005

James G. Hershberg: JFK's Secret Attempt to Defuse the Missile Crisis with the Help of Brazil

James G. Hershberg, in the Journal of Cold War Studies (Vol. 6, No's. 2 & 3, Spring and Summer, 2004): What options did John F. Kennedy consider after his aides informed him on 16 October 1962 that the Soviet Union was secretly deploying medium-range nuclear-capable missiles in Cuba? In most accounts, his options fell into three categories:1. military: an attack against Cuba involving a large-scale air strike against the missile sites, a full-scale invasion, or the ªrst followed by the second;2. political-military: a naval blockade of Cuba (euphemistically called a “quarantine”) to prevent the shipment of further “offensive” military equipment and allow time to pressure Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev into withdrawing the missiles; or3. diplomatic: a private overture to Moscow to persuade Khrushchev to back down without a public confrontation.

March 9, 2005

FrontPageMag: Indoctrination at Colorado's Afroamerican Studies Program

Thomas Ryan and Steven Vincent, at frontpagemag.com (3-9-05):[Thomas Ryan is a FrontPage Magazine contributor. (E-mail him.) Journalist Steven Vincent is a regular contributor to FrontPag

March 8, 2005

Bret Stephens: Why Journalists Often Make a Mush of the First Draft of History

Bret Stephens, in the WSJ (3-8-05): [Mr. Stephens is a member of the Journal's editorial board.]Remember Japan Inc.? If you were a semi-sentient consumer of news in the 1980s, it was hard to avoid the impression that Japan would soon overtake the U.S. in global economic clout, if its corporations didn't just purchase the country outright. They've got Rockefeller Center! They