Roundup: Talking About History

March 8, 2005

David McNeill: Why the Japanese Have Forgotten the Firebombing of Tokyo in 1945

David McNeill, in Japan Focus (March 2005): [David McNeill prepared this article for Japan Focus. He is a Tokyo-based journalist and teacher, and a coordinator of Japan Focus.] Saotome Katsumoto was 12 when he heard the familiar rumble of B-29 bombers. “It was a midnight air raid, but unlike anything we had experienced before. The planes flew in very low, so low you could see the fires reflected in their undercarriages, and they dropped mostly incendiaries. T

March 7, 2005

David Brooks: What Went Wrong with the Great Society? Just Ask the Scholars Behind the Public Interest

David Brooks, in the NYT (3-5-05):The Public Interest will cease publication next month. This may not seem very important, since the magazine has never had more than 10,000 subscribers. But over the past 40 years, The Public Interest has had more influence on domestic policy than any other journal in the country - by far. It didn't discover as much truth as Moses did durin

March 7, 2005

Bruce Montgomery: Allen Weinstein's Great Challenge as Archivist of the United States

Bruce Montgomery, in the Wa Post (3-6-05): ]Bruce Montgomery is an associate professor and faculty director of archives at the University of Colorado. His writing on presidential papers has appeared in Presidential Studies Quarterly and the American Archivist.] When Allen Weinstein took the oath of office as the ninth archivist of the United States last month, he seemed to allude

March 4, 2005

Diana Muir: What's Wrong with the National Museum of the American Indian

Diana Muir, in the Claremont Review (3-3-05): [Ms. Muir is a historian, book reviewer and winner of the 2001-02 Massachusetts Book Award for Reflections in Bullough's Pond: Economy and Ecosystem in New England (University Press of New England).] The National Museum of the American Indian is an architectural triumph. Walking close to the walls conveys the vertiginous sense of hiking the rock canyons of the America

March 3, 2005

Nevada's Atomic Testing Museum--Why Some Are Critical

Steve Friess, in the Christian Science Monitor (2-25-05): At a time of new focus on nuclear risks, a museum reveals - at least partly - a desert state's role as test site.... On one level, the Atomic Testing Museum here in Las Vegas echoes a past that now seems strangely distant: the duck-and-cover era of the US-Soviet arms race. Yet its centerpiece exhibit Ground Zero Theater - complete with a flash of ligh

March 3, 2005

Peter Popham: Austrians Are Only Now Being Allowed to See a Stage Production of "The Sound of Music"?

Peter Popham, in the London Independent (2-26-05): THE NAZIS will take over a Viennese theatre tonight. An enormous swastika will drop from the flies, a squad of armed soldiers in Nazi uniforms will burst into the auditorium, sirens, whistles, furious orders will ring around the chandeliered ceiling. And as the audience nervously titters, stormtroopers with dogs will fan out in search of those d

March 3, 2005

The Revisionist Attempts to Minimize the Nanjing Massacre Are Appalling

Dr. Yutaka Arai, in a letter to the editor of the London Financial Times (2-26-05): Sir, I was horrified to read Yuko Tojo, granddaughter of the wartime Japanese prime minister Hideki Tojo, denying the existence of the Rape of Nanjing of 1937 ("Let sleeping gods lie", Lunch with the FT, FT magazine, February 19). True, there is a continuing controversy about the number of deaths and the status of those soldiers who were alleged to have discarded uniforms

March 3, 2005

Roger Cohen: The Jewish-American POWS Who Were Sent to Concentration Camps

Roger Cohen, in the NYT Mag (2-27-05): Methodical by nature, disciplined in what he eats, William J. Shapiro is a measured man. He keeps his affairs ordered, his body trim. His airy house, built upon retirement from a career as an obstetrician, is set beside a Florida golf course, and every now and again a ball comes through a screen. But there are few other disturbances. He and his wife, Betty, live in one of the gated communities that fan out across the flatness of Florida.

March 3, 2005

Kirkpatrick Sale: The Collapse of the American Empire Is Coming in the Next 15 Years or so

Kirkpatrick Sale, at Counterpunch.org (2-22-05): It is quite ironic: only a decade or so after the idea of the United States as an imperial power came to be accepted by both right and left, and people were actually able to talk openly about an American empire, it is showing multiple signs of its inability to continue. And indeed it is now possible to contemplate, and openly speculate about, its collapse.The neocons in power i

March 3, 2005

William Rivers Pitt: The 3 Stages of American Empire

William Rivers Pitt, at Truthout.org (3-1-05):[William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books - 'War on Iraq: What

March 2, 2005

Nouritza Matossian: When Its Finest Novelist Attacked Turkey's Bloody Past

Nouritza Matossian, in the Guardian (2-27-05):There is a Turkish saying: 'A sword won't cut without inspiration from the pen.' Orhan Pamuk, wielder of Turkey's finest pen, has spoken and cut a swath through his country's conscience. His most recent novel Snow was set in Kars and peppered with references to the Armenian culture of that formerly Armenian city. Brillian

March 2, 2005

Clifford Coonan: Admiral to Retrace Voyages that Put China on the Map

Clifford Coonan, in the London Times (2-28-05):SIX HUNDRED years after Admiral Zheng He, the intrepid naval explorer, took to the high seas, a modern-day Admiral Zheng has embarked on a mission to retrace seven voyages that reached as far as the east coast of Africa. The original Zheng He, who was known as the "Three Jewelled Eunuch", sailed to South East Asia, India, the Gulf and the Red Sea. Some historians claim that he even made it to America

March 1, 2005

David Kirkpatrick: Putting God Back into American History

David Kirkpatrick, in the NYT (2-22-05):On a recent evening, David Barton, a leading conservative Christian advocate for emphasizing religion in American history, stood barefoot on a bench in the rotunda of the United States Capitol Building with a congressman by his side and about a hundred students from Oral Roberts University at his feet. "Isn't it interesting that we have all been trained to recognize the two least religious founding fathers?" Mr. Barton

March 1, 2005

Jacob Laksin: The Left Leaps to Ward Churchill's Defense

Jacob Laksin, at frontpagemag.com (2-28-05):"Who is defending Ward Churchill, may I ask?" That was the question posed by John Holbo, a philosophy professor and contributor to the leftwing academic blog Crooked Timber, when news broke that the University of Colorado was harboring a leftist extremist in its midst. The gist of Holbo’s question was that no respectable person on the Left could c

February 26, 2005

Sam Wineburg: Shouldn't Teachers of History Have Majored in History?

Sam Wineburg, in the LAT (2-24-05): [Sam Wineburg, author of"Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts" (Temple University Press, 2001), is a professor in Stanford's School of Education.] Imagine this: Nearly a third of the students who apply to Stanford's master's in teaching program to become history teachers have never taken

February 25, 2005

Max Boot: Thomas Wood's Factually Wrong History

Max Boot, in the Weekly Standard (2-15-05): [Max Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a contributing editor to the Weekly Standard, and a foreign-affairs columnist for the Los Angeles Times.]I FIRST BECAME AWARE of Thomas E. Woods Jr.'s Politically Incorrect Guide to American History when the New York Times Book Review took note of its rise on the paperback bes

February 25, 2005

Modern Medicine Would Have Saved GW's LIfe

Virginia Anderson, in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (2-22-05): ... The story of the death of George Washington, who was born on Feb. 22, 1732, gives a chance to ask a health question as pressing now as then: Can you really get sick from being outdoors in bad weather? While in Washington's case the answer was a resounding "yes," the answer for most of us is "no." A little bad weather does not make a person sick. His case

February 25, 2005

Michela Wrong: Belgium's Amnesia About the Congo

Michela Wrong, the author of In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in the Congo, in the Independent ( London) (2-23-05): In the sprawling palace of Tervuren, in a leafy suburb of Brussels, Leopold, King of the Belgians has finally been dethroned. A daunting statue of the hook-nosed monarch has been heaved from centre stage in the royal museum that was his brainchild and built with the proceeds of his African adventure.The avatar of the form

February 25, 2005

Stephen F. Cohen: Gorbachev's Lost Legacy

Stephen F. Cohen, in the Nation (3-14-05):The most important event of the late twentieth century began twenty years ago this month. On March 11, 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union, and within a few weeks the full-scale reformation he attempted to carry out both inside his country and in its cold war relations with the West, particularly the United States, began to unfold. P

February 25, 2005

Bruce Shapiro: Ward Churchill, Scholar

Bruce Shapiro, in the Nation (3-7-05): Rummaging through Yale University's library shelves in early 2001 to prepare a talk on news media and genocide, I came across a study of nineteenth-century Colorado newspapers by Ward Churchill. His research steered me to a chilling 1891 editorial in the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer by L. Frank Baum, future author of The Wizard of Oz, calling for "the total annihilatio