Roundup: Talking About History

January 21, 2005

King Juan Carlos Snubs Moorish Plea For Apology

Isambard Wilkinson, THE DAILY TELEGRAPH(LONDON), 1/20/05 Descendants of the Moors expelled from Spain 500 years ago failed to receive an apology from King Juan Carlos as he toured Morocco yesterday. Residents of Tetouan, many of whose ancestors were driven from the Iberian peninsula by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, said an opportunity had been lost to heal an historic wound, which has become all the more sensitive in recent years. Osama bin Lade

January 21, 2005

Hitler's Mentally Ill Cousin Killed In Nazi Gas Chamber

Kate Connolly, THE DAILY TELEGRAPH(LONDON), 1/19/05 Adolf Hitler's cousin was gassed under the Nazi policy of eliminating mental health patients, according to recently discovered documents. The woman, identified only as Aloisia V, died in a room pumped full of carbon monoxide in December 1940 at a medical institute in Austria. A stamp on her file was proof of her killing, said Timothy Ryback, an American historian. Historians say the discovery may ex

January 21, 2005

Move Afoot To Reopen Case Against Sirhan Sirhan

John Hiscock, The Independent (London), 1/18/05 Robert Kennedy lies dead in the Ambassador Hotel, main picture, after being shot by Sirhan Sirhan, who was immediately arrested, top. Right: a recent picture of Sirhan, whose case has been taken up by the actor Robert Vaughn, above It happened nearly 38 years ago, but doubts and suspicions have lingered on. Now the circumstances surrounding the assassination of Robert Kennedy are being resurrected and re-examined in

January 21, 2005

Napoleon Anniversary Renews Debate Over Legacy

John Thornhill, Financial Times (London, England), 1/18/05 In 1882, Ernest Renan, the French historian, gave a lecture at the Sorbonne university in which he posed the question: what is a nation? His answer was that nations were about far more than customs posts or geographical frontiers, or even races, religions or languages. They were, he claimed, the accumulation of shared glories and sacrifices and a common desire to achieve future goals."A heroic past, great

January 21, 2005

Hitler Ordered Pope's Kidnapping

Unsigned, Courier Mail (Queensland, Australia), 1/17/05 Adolf Hitler ordered one of his generals to kidnap Pope Pius XII but the officer did not obey, Italy's leading Roman Catholic newspaper reported yesterday. Avvenire, which is owned by the Italian Conference of Roman Catholic bishops, said new details of the plot had emerged in documents presented to the Vatican in favour of putting the controversial wartime pontiff on the road to sainthood. Avvenire sai

January 21, 2005

Painted Cave In France Could Force Rewriting Of Human History

Dietlind Lerner, The Irish Times, 1/15/05 Deep within the limestone hills of the Auvergne in south eastern France lies the secret entrance to Chauvet, the 34,000-year-old grotto known as"the Sistine Chapel of Prehistoric art". For the lucky few who have been allowed inside Chauvet since a trio of amateur speleologists first discovered it in late 1994, almost everything is off limits. Nothing may be touched - not the 447 animal paintings on the walls, nor the 83 bear skulls li

January 21, 2005

France Agonizes Over How To Remember World War I Veterans

Jo Johnson, Financial Times (London, England), 1/15/05 They are known as the ders des ders, the last of the last, and they will soon be gone. Aged between 105 and 110 and with a life expectancy measured in months not years, 14 soldiers are all that remain of the vast French armies of the first world war. In the hills above Verdun, the fortress town near the German border, a sense of impending loss is palpable as the last guardians of living memory of the fighting that scarred

January 21, 2005

Memories Of Auschwitz

Jonathan Webber, The Guardian (London), 1/13/05 Auschwitz is far and away the largest single site of the mass murders committed during the second world war. It is the largest cemetery in the world, containing the last remains of well over a million human beings - men, women and children, murdered in the name of a state ideology. The corpses were pushed into giant incinerators and their ashes dumped into nearby rivers and ponds, or simply strewn over neighbouring fields. The s

January 21, 2005

Poland's Communist Sympathizers

Richard Bernstein, The New York Times, 1/14/05 During the heady days a decade and a half ago when democracy first came to Poland, few faces were more visible, or more emblematic of the democracy movement than the movie star-like spokeswoman for Solidarity, Malgorzata Niezabitowska. Certainly, she would be the last person anybody would suspect of having collaborated with the Communist government. But in the past few weeks, Ms. Niezabitowska -- like numerous other

January 21, 2005

The Search For Closure In a Mississippi Town

Patrick Jonsson, Christian Science Monitor (Boston, MA), 1/14/05 With Edgar Ray Killen back on trial after four decades, a state struggles - again - with vestiges of its segregationist past. Surrounded by tabby cats, under a canopy of oaks on his porch overlooking muddy cow country, Edgar Ray Killen grew old. His contemporaries remember gangs with sling blades and men in pointy white hats with holes for eyes. But most people in this town of 8,000 had forgotten the orda

January 21, 2005

Spain To Honour British Sea Wolf

Isambard Wilkinson, THE DAILY TELEGRAPH(LONDON), 1/14/05 Spain is to honour one of Britain's greatest maritime heroes, Lord Cochrane, almost two centuries after he helped to defeat Napoleon's armies in the Peninsular War. The town of Roses in Catalonia is to dedicate a plaque to the celebrated sea captain who was the inspiration for both Patrick O'Brian's Jack Aubrey and CS Forester's Horatio Hornblower, to commemorate his audacious defence of the town in 1808.

January 21, 2005

Louis A. Pérez Jr.: Castro ... Political Rorschach Test

Louis A. Pérez Jr.in the Chronicle of Higher Ed (1-19-05): [Louis A. Pérez Jr. is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The most recent of his many books about Cuba is On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 1999). His next book, To Die in Cuba: Suicide and Society, will be published by the University of No

January 20, 2005

Michael Barone: Why Bush Will Sound Like Wilson

Michael Barone, in the WSJ (1-19-05):Tomorrow George W. Bush will deliver his Second Inaugural speech, the 16th Second Inaugural delivered by an American president over the last 212 years. It will be the first time that one president has delivered a second inaugural just eight years after another since William McKinley in 1901. It can safely be predicted t

January 19, 2005

Adam Hochschild: How the British Inspired Dr. King's Dream

Adam Hochschild, in the NYT (1-17-05): ACROSS the country today, parades, rallies and church services will mark the legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Participants usually think of this national holiday - created against considerable opposition two decades ago - as this country's first widely celebrated commemoration of the long struggle for racial justice. Not so. For many decades, beginning well over 150 years ago, both black and white Americans celebrated another

January 19, 2005

Jon Meacham: What Presidential Leadership Means

Jon Meacham, in Newsweek (1- 20-05): The inauguration was a quiet affair. Sixty years ago this week, on Jan. 20, 1945—a cold Saturday in Washington—Europe had been at war for nearly six years, America for just over three. Three months away from death (he privately remarked that he felt like "boiled owl" much of the time), Franklin Roosevelt decided the fewer the festivities, the better.

January 19, 2005

Thurston Clarke: Why JFK's Inaugural Succeeded

Thurston Clarke, in the NYT (1-15-05):[Thurston Clarke is the author, most recently, of"Ask Not: The Inauguration of John F. Kennedy and the Speech That Changed America."]AMERICANS watching John F. Kennedy's 1961 inauguration on television saw a scene worthy of Currier & Ives. The marble facade of the Capitol gleamed in the sun, dignitaries wore top hats and dark overcoats and the cold air turned

January 19, 2005

Eric Hobsbawm: The Great Need Now for Marxist Interpretations of History

Eric Hobsbawm, in the Guardian (1-15-05):"The philosophers so far have only interpreted the world: the point is to change it." Marxist history has developed along parallel lines, corresponding to the two halves of Marx's famous thesis. Most intellectuals who became Marxists from the 1880s on, including historians, did so because they wanted to change the world in association with the la

January 19, 2005

The Human Condition after Hiroshima:

Roger Pulvers, in Japan Focus (January 2005): [Roger Pulvers is an American-born Australian author, playwright and theater director, and a professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology. He translated all the Japanese writings quoted in the five-part Japan Times series"Revealing the Japanese Sensibility," that included the present article. A collection of his fiction and nonfiction writings,"Half and More," will be published by Shinchos

January 19, 2005

The Best and the Worst of Inaugural Addresses

Bob Dart, for the Cox News Service (1-16-05): The best have spawned the phrases that defined an American president for the ages. "With malice toward none, with charity for all ..." "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself ..." "Ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country." When Presi

January 19, 2005

Are There too Many Historians?

From the newsletter of the Chronicle of Higher Education (1-14-05): A glance at the current issue of "Historically Speaking": The professionalization of history The field of history suffers from "mass professionalization," Bruce Kuklick, a professor of American history at the University of Pennsylvania, writes in the lead essay in "The American Historical Profession in the 21st Century: an Exchange," a section based on pa