Roundup: Talking About History

December 10, 2004

Former Mussolini Driver Exposes IL Duce's Love Life

Paddy Agnew, The Irish Times, 12/09/04"Every now and again 'R' would have a fit of jealousy and indeed I personally witnessed one such occasion. One morning, she waited for us in the grounds of Villa Torlonia the Mussolini residence in Rome , hidden amongst the trees. All of a sudden, there she was in front of the car signalling to me to stop."She was in her dressing gown and she appeared upset. With a dramatic gesture, she flung open the car door, in the process d

December 10, 2004

1914 Christmas Truce Reconsidered

Jim Regan, Christian Science Monitor (Boston, MA), 12/09/04 This Christmas will mark the 90th anniversary of one of the truly remarkable events in the history of modern warfare: when soldiers from the world's most powerful armies, locked in a conflict that would eventually cost millions of lives, decided that they wanted to take a few days off from killing each other in honor of the season. Surprisingly, there doesn't seem to be a single all-encompassing site dedicated to the

December 10, 2004

19 CEOs Named To Black History Museum Council

Jacqueline Trescott, The Washington Post, 12/08/04 The Smithsonian Institution has selected a roster of high-profile corporate leaders, including media empress Oprah Winfrey and the chairmen of American Express, Merrill Lynch, IBM and Time Warner, to lead the effort to establish the country's first comprehensive museum on African American life. The Smithsonian Board of Regents yesterday appointed 19 executives to the founding Council of the National Museum of Af

December 10, 2004

Exhuming Franco's Enemies Stirs Emotions

Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times, 12/08/05 By noon, a small crowd gathers at the roadside. They peer down into the wide, shallow pit where Angel Fuentes leads a team of young scientists crouched on their hands and knees, carefully unearthing the bones and secrets of Spain's wartime past. Maxima Perez, 71, clutching a black handbag, is waiting for the body of her father, Pablo, to be exhumed."Que pena, que pena," she says over and over, holding a hand to the sid

December 10, 2004

Exhumation of Garcia Lorca Engenders Controversy

Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times, 12/08/04 Where is my grave? In my tail, answered the Sun. In my throat, answered the Moon. -- Federico Garcia Lorca Lorca, Spain's greatest 20th century poet, was dragged from a home here in the dead of an August night in 1936, and shot dead by Fascist forces loyal to Gen. Francisco Franco. The bodies of Garcia Lorca and three other men killed with him -- two bullfighters and a teache

December 10, 2004

Prison Notebooks Reveal Mandela's Pain

Unsigned, Courier Mail (Queensland, Australia), 12/08/04 The contents of two notebooks written by former South African president Nelson Mandela when he was jailed on Robben Island have been revealed. The letters were made public at the same time as news broke of Mr Mandela's only surviving son being in a critical condition in a Johannesburg hospital. A spokeswoman from the Nelson Mandela Foundation said Makgatho Mandela's illness was a private family

December 10, 2004

9/11 As Window To Understanding 12/7

Joel Rubin and David Haldane, Los Angeles Times, 12/7/04 To most sophomores in Cora Peck's history class at Irvine High School, today is just another Tuesday. There are no ceremonies scheduled. No moments of silence planned. And only a few students recalled the date as the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which drew the U.S. into World War II. When you're a teenager, 1941 may as well be ancient history. Perhaps it's p

December 10, 2004

Henry VIII's Romantic Side Found In Margins Of Books

Unsigned, The Independent (London), 12/07/04 Clandestine love notes between King Henry VIII and his future wife, Anne Boleyn, have been discovered in the margins of books found during the first comprehensive investigation of the king's library. In a 16th-century Book of Hours, Henry wrote, in French, to the then woman of his desires: "If you remember me according to my love in your prayers I shall scarcely be forgotten, since I am your Henry Rex for ever." An

December 10, 2004

Efforts To Recognize 'Rosie the Riveters' Picks Up Momentum

Jeffry Scott, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 12/7/04 The nation was at war and Eloise Strom, a young mother of two young boys, rose every morning before dark and rode an hour and a half in a car pool with five other women to work at the aircraft plant in Marietta. At the end of a 10-hour day, she would hurry home to fight the war on another front: the grocery store. It was World War II. Food was rationed. First come, first served. Get there late a

December 10, 2004

Was Twentieth-Century Australian Racism A Myth?

Keith Windschuttle, The Australian, 12/06/04 Unless they have taken a university course in history in recent decades, most Australians would be surprised to learn they inhabit one of the world's most shamefully racist countries. The academic consensus today is that the White Australia Policy -- a series of restrictions on non-white immigrants dating from the gold rushes of the 1850s and culminating in the commonwealth's Immigration Restriction Bill of 1901 -- mad

December 10, 2004

Queensland Canefield Trade a 'Myth Perpetuated'

Peter Shadbolt, The Australian, 12/6/04 Historian Keith Windschuttle has turned his critical eye on the 19th-century trade in Kanakas to work the Queensland cane fields and has concluded it is a myth."And it's still on the school curriculum and the ABC's website, even though it has been disproved," Mr Windschuttle said. Contrary to oral histories about the practice known as 'blackbirding', a term borrowed from the African slave trade that referred to

December 8, 2004

Ronald Reagan: Budget Cutter

Veronique de Rugy, at AEI Online: Everyone talks about the Reagan tax cuts, yet there is more to President Reagan's legacy than tax cuts. There is also his courageous and largely unappreciated willingness to fight for reductions in domestic spending.Ronald Reagan sought--and won--more spending cuts than any other modern president. He is the only president in the last forty years to cut inflation-adjus

December 8, 2004

America Was Born in Paris

Susan Spano, in the LAT (12-5-04): Author Daniel Jouve likes to peer through an iron fence outside the Hotel de Coislin in Paris, where Benjamin Franklin emerged as a citizen of an independent nation. It was Feb. 6, 1778, and across the Atlantic, American colonists were fighting a bloody revolution that would last five more years. But in terms of foreign relations, the United States was born that day in Paris, when Franklin, his diplomatic colleagues and a represent

December 8, 2004

Who Won the French and Indian War?

Len Barcousky, in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (12-4-04): When in 1754 the French built Fort Duquesne, a sturdy log fort at the Forks of the Ohio, the British perceived a deadly threat to their coast-hugging colonies. But what seemed like French aggression to royal governors in Williamsburg and Philadelphia was more a panicky defensive move, according to historian Jonathan Dull. Dull, who has been

December 8, 2004

Why Academics Were Right to Pick Clement Attlee as the Best Prime Minister of the Last 100 Years

Anthony Sampson, in the London Independent (12-4-04): Does a prime minister today really have to say something every day, to have a policy about everything, to keep flying round the world, to appear charismatic always? Wouldn't he be more effective if he said less, and kept in the background? My question follows the results of the survey this week by academics at the University of Leeds, who asked 139 historians and political scientists to give marks to the most suc

December 8, 2004

Australia's Version of the Boston Tea Party?

Kathy Marks, in the London Independent (12-4-04): IT WAS Australia's version of the Boston Tea Party when a ragtag band of gold-miners rose against their British colonial masters in protest at unfair taxation, igniting a chain of events that heralded the birth of democracy and independence.Now a country in perpetual quest for a national identity is seizing on that short-lived rebellion, known as the Eureka Stockade, as the embodiment of Australia's defining moment.Yest

December 8, 2004

French Anti-Americanism ... And American Anti-Frenchism

John Thornhill, in the London Financial Times (Dec. 4, 2004): Stroll into any Parisian bookstore and you will immediately appreciate one of France's great national obsessions: America. The display shelves are crammed with books on almost every aspect of American life. In the run-up to the US presidential election it seemed as though every opportunistic French writer with any connection to America had a theory to propound or a story to sell about the world's sole hyperpuissance. Ther

December 7, 2004

John Lukacs: When Did Liberalism Become a Dirty Word?

John Lukacs, in the Chronicle of higher Ed (subscribers only) (12-6-04):The history of politics -- more, the history of human thinking -- is the history of words. Consider what happened to the word"liberal" in the United States. It has become a Bad Word for millions of Americans. Confident that a large majority of the American people have come to regard, see, or hear the adjective"

December 3, 2004

German Opera Honours Nazi Resisters

William Littler, The Toronto Star, 11-30-04 The names of Hans and his sister Sophie Scholl do not occupy much space in histories of World War II. Theirs was scarcely a moment in time. Students at the University of Munich, they belonged to a small resistance movement known as White Rose. Caught distributing anti-Hitler propaganda, they were turned in by the superintendent of the university and decapitated in February, 1943. That their names are remem

December 3, 2004

Knights Templar Ask Vatican For Apology

Ruth Gledhill, The Times (London), 11-29-04 The Vatican is giving"serious consideration" to apologising for the persecution that led to the suppression of the Knights Templar. The suppression, which began on Friday, October 13, 1307, gave Friday the Thirteenth its superstitious legacy. A Templar Order in Britain that claims to be descended from the original Knights Templar has asked that the Pope should make the apology. The Templars, ba