Roundup: Talking About History

February 25, 2005

Deborah E. Lipstadt: Online Chat About Her Holocaust Case

From the Washington Post Online, 2-24-05: In 1993, Deborah E. Lipstadt's "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory" dissected a fringe, relatively isolated phenomenon of hard-core deniers. By the time she walked into a British court in 2000 to defend herself against a libel suit filed by one of those deniers, David Irving, Holocaust denial had been so transformed as

February 25, 2005

Richard Parker: Galbraith, JFK and Vietnam (Nation Mag.)

Richard Parker, in the Naton (3-15-05):In the fall of 1961, unknown to the American public, John F. Kennedy was weighing a crucial decision about Vietnam not unlike that which George W. Bush faced about Iraq in early 2002--whether to go to war. It was the height of the cold war, when Communism was the "terrorist threat," and Ho Chi Minh the era's Saddam Hussein to many in Washington. But th

February 23, 2005

Harold Bloom: The 3 Books You'd Want on a Desert Island

Harold Bloom, in the WSJ (2-23-05): The Desert Island Question ("If just one book, which?") has no universal answer, but most readers with authentic judgment would choose among the Authorized English Bible, Shakespeare complete, and "Don Quixote" by Miguel de Cervantes. Is it an oddity that the three competitors were almost simultaneous?The King James Bib

February 23, 2005

Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?

From the Toronto Star (2-20-05): More questions about the authorship of the Dead Sea Scrolls are being asked today than any time since the documents were discovered 57 years ago. The ruins of Qumran, where many scholars theorized that a Jewish monastic brotherhood known as the Essenes copied the books of the Old Testament, have yielded new evidence that casts doubt on the Essene theory. Itzhak Magen and Yuval Peleg, Israeli archaeologists who spent 10 season

February 23, 2005

A Dutch Historian Explains Why Jews Fared Worse in the Netherlands than Denmark

Hans Blom, in the Financial Times ( London, England) 2-20-05): When Simon Kuper wrote that proportionately many more Jews survived in Denmark than in the Netherlands during the last war, he was right ("Delivered from Evil", FT Magazine, January 22). The differences are striking. As the German occupiers of Denmark prepared to round them up and deport them, the Jews were first hidden and then ferried over the Sound t

February 23, 2005

Brad Crouch: In a Puff the Greatest Warship of Its Day Was Gone

Brad Crouch, in the Sunday Telegraph (Sydney) (2-20-05): It was the greatest weapon of mass destruction of the time, built by the leading superpower of the era. Then, in a puff of wind, it was gone. The sinking of the Swedish supership Vasa within minutes of its launch in front of assembled dignitaries in 1628 was a monumental disaster. In terms of Great Duds Through History, it has to rank in the top 10. But almost 400 years after the embar

February 23, 2005

Who Owns Islamic Law?

David Glenn, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscribers only) (2-25-05):If all goes according to plan, Iraqi political leaders will gather this year to forge a new national constitution. It is easy to imagine many things that might shipwreck the process. Near the top of that list: Will Iraq's political forces manage to find a consensus about what role, exactly, Islam should play in the public sp

February 22, 2005

Michael Hill: Malcolm X's Surprisingly Thin Legacy

Michael Hill, in the Baltimore Sun (2-20-05): It has been 40 years since gunmen killed Malcolm X as he was about to address supporters in a Harlem ballroom.His assassination on Feb. 22, 1965 - just before his 40th birthday - was part of a season of violence that sent many national leaders and civil rights workers to early graves, and also a m

February 22, 2005

An Interview with Manning Marable About Malcolm X

An interview with Manning Marable, biographer of Malcolm X, at the website of Democracy Now! (2-21-05):Today commemorations are scheduled across the country. In New York, the Center for Contemporary Black History and the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University are sponsoring "Malcolm X: Life After Death -- the Legacy Endures" an educational for

February 21, 2005

The Tulsa Race Riot ... An Old Man Remembers

Andrew Meier, in the London Financial Times (2-19-05): Otis Granville Clark is a wonder. At 102, the former butler of Joan Crawford - who served Clark Gable and Charlie Chaplin - still drives, lives on his own and twice a week attends church in his home city of Tulsa, Oklahoma. He has been a church-goer for decades, ever since he heard the call and, surprising Crawford and himself, became an evangelist

February 19, 2005

Historical Society: The Place of African History

From the introduction to a Forum on the place of African history in world history sponsored by the Historical Society: THANKFULLY, HISTORIANS HAVE COME A LONG WAY from the late Hugh Trevor-Roper’s dismissive barb made in 1963: “Perhaps in the future there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none, or very little: there is only the history of Europe in Africa.” Despite an avalanche of scho

February 18, 2005

Catesby Leigh: Louis I. Kahn's Splendid Design for an FDR Memorial

Catesby Leigh, in the Weekly Standard (2-14-05): THREE DECADES AGO, TWO designers came up with ideas for memorials for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The concepts shared a common core: an outdoor room, open to the sky and enclosed by primitive stone walls. To date, only one of these has been built: Lawrence Halprin's abysmal Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C., finally completed in 1997. The other, Louis I. Kahn's memorial for the southern tip of Roosevelt Island in New York City, ha

February 18, 2005

Justin Ewers: Fresh Takes on Lincoln's Boyhood

Justin Ewers, in US News & World Report (2-21-05): He was an up-by-his-bootstraps man of the frontier. Born in a log cabin, he taught himself to read and hacked his way out of the Kentucky backwoods into the national spotlight. At political rallies, posters showed him splitting rails with ax in hand. He was the prairie lawyer who would become the Great Emancipator: Honest Abe--the man who freed the slaves and won the Civil War. When an interviewer asked him about his early

February 18, 2005

Tristram Hunt: Historians Are in Cahoots with the Bush Administration

Tristram Hunt, in the Guardian (2-16-05): [Tristram Hunt is the author of 'Building Jerusalem: the Rise and Fall of the Victorian City']... Heroic biography has become the bestselling history brand of Bush's America. Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Abraham Lincoln are all speaking from the grave with new-found loquaciousness. Barely

February 17, 2005

Edwin Black: Why Surviving the Holocaust Was Historically Significant

Edwin Black, in a syndicated column (2-14-05): [Edwin Black is the author of award-winning five books and scores of articles, including the New York Times bestseller IBM and the Holocaust, all of which dealt with the Holocaust, all predicated on his parents’ experience.]A few days ago, a 79-year old Polish Holocaust survivor died in West Palm Beach after a long illness. Born in Bialystok with the name Ethel Katz, her story was known all over the world, having bee

February 17, 2005

Peter Steinfels: A. Lincoln, Theologian

Peter Steinfels, in the NYT (2-12-05): Today is the birthday of a man thought by many to be the nation's greatest president. It is also the birthday of a man whom many believe to be if not the nation's greatest theologian, at least to come close. That is no coincidence, because they are the same man. Abraham Lincoln seems an unlikely candidate for the Theological Hall of Fame. He belonged to no church. He had read little theology. The exact nature of his religious

February 17, 2005

Max Hastings: The Japanese Mistreatment of POW's--And Still They Don't Apologize

Max Hastings, in the Sunday Telegraph (London) (2-13-05): IT IS INTERESTING to compare codes of massacre among the nastier participants in the Second World War. Throughout the struggle, the Soviets continued to kill their own people, as well as their enemies, in hundreds of thousands for supposed failures of courage or loyalty. The Germans murdered captive Russians, Poles, Jews and other "sub-humans" in millions, yet treated uniformed Western allied prisoners with

February 17, 2005

Jason Horowitz: Italy Finally Takes Notice of the Massacre of Thousands of Italians by Yugoslav Partisans During WW II

Jason Horowitz, in the NYT (2-13-05): After decades of willful amnesia, Italy turned its attention this week to the thousands of Italians who were massacred by Yugoslav partisans and dumped into mountain crevices at the end of World War II. The killings occurred in and around Trieste, in the north, when, in 1943 and 1945, Communist partisans from neighboring Yugoslavia rounded up Italians in anti-Fascist raids and condemned them to execution by firing squads. Betwee

February 17, 2005

Charles M. Sennott: Dresden's Changing Story Line

Charles M. Sennott, in the Boston Globe (2-13-05):     ... The late W.G. Sebald, a German-born writer who has been regarded as one of Europe's greatest modern intellectuals, has described the silence over the destruction and civilian deaths from Allied bombing as "a kind of taboo, like a shameful family secret."    For at least a half-century after World War II, the bombing raids were seen as a "just punishment, even an act of re

February 14, 2005

Brooke Allen: Our Godless Constitution

Brooke Allen, in the Nation (2-21-05):[Mr. Allen is the author of 2 collections of essays including, Twentieth-Century Attitudes.] It is hard to believe that George Bush has ever read the works of George Orwell, but he seems, somehow, to have grasped a few Orwellian precepts. The lesson the President has learned best--and certainly the one that has been the most useful to him--is