Roundup: Talking About History

January 29, 2005

Martin Gilbert: Should the Allies Have Bombed Auschwitz?

Martin Gilbert, in the London Times (1-27-05):SHOULD WE have, could we have, bombed Auschwitz? Some believe that if the Allies had acted some of the horrors could have been prevented. On the 60th anniversary it is worth examining the historical evidence. Apart from anything, it reveals the identity of an overlooked heroine. From the summer of 1942 until the spring of 1944 more than a million Jews were deported to Auschwitz, where they were either murdere

January 29, 2005

What Many People Don't Realize About the Holocaust Death Camps

John Lichfield, in the London Independent (1-27-05):... In truth, the story of the Holocaust is imperfectly understood, even by many of us who think we know what happened. (I was astonished by my own ignorance when I visited Auschwitz, even though my father was Jewish, even though some of my distant, Slovakian-Jewish relatives almost certainly died there.) The details are imperfectly known, even to honest, specialist historians, because so much of the e

January 29, 2005

Melanie Phillips: About the Muslim Boycott of the Auschwitz Anniversary in Britain

Melanie Phillips, at frontpagemag.com (1-28-05):[Melanie Phillips is a British social commentator and author and a columnist for the Daily Mail. Her articles can be found on her website, www.melaniephillips.com.]Countries around the world marked the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz yesterday – but the Muslim Council of Britain did not take part in the commemo

January 29, 2005

Weekly Standard: C.A. Tripp's Support for Child Molestors

From the "Scrapbook," in the Weekly Standard (1-31-05):'A Rigorous Scholar Who Cannot Defend Himself' That's how blogger Andrew Sullivan has now described the late Clarence Arthur Tripp in the course of a long, serial complaint against The Weekly Standard's recent "hatchet-job" review of Tripp's posthumous book, The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln

January 28, 2005

Tom Palaima: MLK, Tony Bennett and Truth

Tom Palaima, in the Austin American-Statesman (1-27-05):[Palaima teaches classics and war and violence studies in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.]Every Martin Luther King Day, I make sure to reread a few speeches and sermons by this great man of God. His words remind me that a great political figure can stand bravely for peace and justice. This year I also rented the just-released DVD of Abby Mann's classic docu-dram

January 27, 2005

Why Was Public Acknowledgement of the Suffering of the Jews Delayed Until the 1960s?

Olivia Ward, in the Toronto Star (1-26-05):... The Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals brought the murder of Jews to international attention after World War II. But, points out Yale University historian Jay Winter, the full impact of their revelations was delayed. The complexities of memory in a war that traumatized and exhausted millions - while forging a new geopolitical order - allowed the Holocaust to recede from the foreground of history. &qu

January 27, 2005

How Censorship Shielded the Neutral Irish from Knowledge of the Holocaust

Joe Carroll, in the Irish Times (1-26-05):[Joe Carroll is the author of Ireland in the War Years 1939-1945 and is former Washington correspondent of The Irish Times.]The mass extermination of Jews revealed as concentration camps such as Auschwitz were liberated could not be reported in Irish newspapers until after the war. Despite photographic evidence, such horrific scenes were regarded as "propaganda" and banned under the official censorship system.

January 26, 2005

James Sheehan: What We Learn from History Depends on How We Do It

James Sheehan, in AHA Perspectives (January 2005): [Mr. Sheehan is president of the AHA 2005.]... It seems to me that one of our primary responsibilities as professionals is to subject the alleged lessons of the past to persistent critical scrutiny. Let me illustrate what I have in mind with two contemporary examples. First, a relatively easy and straightforward one: the lessons d

January 26, 2005

David Horowitz: Why I Am Not Celebrating John Hope Franklin's Birthday

David Horowitz, in a communication to HNN (1-25-05): I will be one of those not celebrating John Hope Franklin's 90th birthday. Four years ago this spring I attempted to place an ad challenging the proposal to pay reparations 135 years after the fact to black Americans who had never been slaves. A massive effort to suppress this ad wa

January 26, 2005

Stephen Hess: 3 Great Books About the Presidency

Stephen Hess, in the Globe & Mail (1-15-05): Choosing just three books that might best explain the U.S. presidency as George W. Bush takes his second oath of office is a formidable if irresistible challenge. We cannot expect much enlightenment from the self-serving memoirs of ex-presidents, as anyone who waited in line last year in Toronto to buy Bill Clinton's big mess of a book should now be able to attest. The one former president -- George H. W. Bush -- w

January 26, 2005

Adam Cohen: Now a Bestseller ... A Rightwing History book that Celebrates Politically Incorrect History

Adam Cohen, in the NYT (1-25-05): If you're going to call a book "The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History," readers will expect some serious carrying on about race, and Thomas Woods Jr. does not disappoint. He fulminates against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, best known for forcing restaurants and bus stations in the Jim Crow South to integrate, and against Brown v. Board of Education. And he of

January 26, 2005

Martin Kramer: Columbia University's Darkest Hour

Martin Kramer, at his blog (1-26-05): On Sunday, I posted an entry at my weblog Sandbox, on a conference scheduled for tomorrow, Thursday, at Columbia University. The conference was to deal with the Arab-Israeli peace process, and the advertised speakers include

January 25, 2005

Rewriting American History from the Pacific

From the newsletter of the Chronicle of Higher Ed (1-25-05):Some historians are approaching American history from a new direction -- from the West, via the Pacific Ocean. From that perspective, the cast of characters in the nation's past is less familiar, say Edward G. Gray, an associate professor of history at Florida State University, and Alan Taylor, a professor of history at the University of California at Davis, in an introduction to an issue on

January 24, 2005

Casualty of War ... Iraq's Historic Treasures

From the South China Morning Post (1-23-05):The occupation of Iraq has compounded the looting of historically priceless sites and artefacts, literally trampling the roots of western history. Peter Kammerer reports The longer the war in Iraq grinds on, the more worried historians are becoming. Western civilisation's roots are disappearing at an ever-increasing pace because of the conflict and they are powerless to do anything about it. Beneath Iraq

January 24, 2005

Why Did Denmark Jews Survive While Dutch Jews Died in the Holocaust?

Simon Kuper, in the London Financial Times Weekend Magazine (1-22-05):[Two responses to the Nazis.]... Tens of thousands of Danes - politicians, pastors, fishermen, ambulance drivers - helped smuggle 7,300 of the country's 7,800 Jews into Sweden. Many more helped by not betraying the operation. Only 116 Danish Jews, or 1.5 per cent of the total, died in the Holocaust. The other extreme in western Europe was the Netherlands. More than 100,000 Du

January 24, 2005

Did We Fight World War II Fair?

David Pugliese, in the Ottawa Citizen (1-23-05):For the last 60 years, most history books on the Second World War have concentrated on the battles, tactics and leaders of that global conflict. But now, some historians are turning their attention to the war's social impact and are examining such controversial topics as sex, alcohol, patriotism and crime, on the battlefield and at home.The result is a worm's eye view of the lives of the Allied t

January 24, 2005

So We Live in an Age of Violence? Compared with When?

Kelly Patterson, in the Ottawa Citizen (1-23-05):It is past midnight. A forbidding house bathed in moonlight looms in the background. At the centre, a grisly scene -- a glowering psychopath stands over the body of a pregnant woman he has just killed and mutilated. Hannibal II? Halloween? Friday the 13th? The possibilities are endless: After all, gory movies are still all the rage. And that's hardly surprising: These are violent times, so they say. We liv

January 22, 2005

Roger Pulvers: The Japanese Have Never Taken Responsibility for Their History

Roger Pulvers, in Japan Times (12-19-04):[Roger Pulvers -- who translated all the Japanese writings quoted in this article -- is an American-born Australian author, playwright and theater director, and a professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology. A collection of his fiction and nonfiction writings,"Half and More," will be published by Shinchosha in March 2005. His website is:

January 22, 2005

Jon Wiener: The Chemical Industry Attack on 2 Historians

Jon Wiener, in the Nation (2-7-05) (subscribers only):Twenty of the biggest chemical companies in the United States have launched a campaign to discredit two historians who have studied the industry's efforts to conceal links between their products and cancer. In an unprecedented move, attorneys for Dow, Monsanto, Goodrich, Goodyear, Union Carbide and others have subpoenaed and deposed five academics who reco

January 22, 2005

John Tierney: Bush's Speech Reflected the Main Themes of America's Civil Religion

John Tierney, in the NYT (1-21-05):A week before Mr. Bush's inaugural speech was delivered, Rick Shenkman had a good idea of what he would say. Professor Shenkman, a historian at George Mason University and editor of the History News Network Web site, had concluded that inaugural addresses sound so muc