Roundup: Talking About History

August 21, 2004

About Brown University's Conversation on Slavery

Kathleen Durand, in the Herald News (Fall River, MA) (Aug. 21, 2004): Children growing up in this part of the country aren’t usually taught about it, but James T. Campbell of Brown University said New England, Rhode Island in particular and old institutions like Brown University are deeply implicated in the history of slavery. Campbell, an associate professor of American civilization, African studies and history at Brown, was the guest speaker Thursday at a meet

August 20, 2004

Jimmy Carter's Mistakes Helped Islamic Extremists

Robert Spencer at frontpagemag.com (Aug. 20, 2004): [Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and the author of Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West (Regnery Publishing), and

August 20, 2004

Niall Ferguson: The Western Roots of Islamic Extremism

Niall Ferguson, in the Daily Telegraph (London) (Aug. 14, 2004):Orientalism - Edward Said's scathing critique of the way European scholars portrayed what used to be called "the Orient" - has spawned a host of imitators. In university libraries the world over, there are whole shelves of "post-colonial" tomes, each dedicated to laying bare the wicked, racist assumptions of this or that early anthropologist. Devoted though one may have bee

August 19, 2004

Even New Hampshire's Having a Hard Time Celebrating Franklin Pierce

Betty Lowry, in the St. Petersburg Times (Aug. 15, 2004):He was the "Young Hickory of the Granite Hills," and at age 48, the youngest and handsomest U.S. president up to that time. He had rapidly climbed the political ladder, although it took 49 ballots before he was nominated at the deadlocked 1852 Democratic Convention. If today he seems to have been a nonentity, never mind. A liberal arts college (with 1,500 undergraduates plus six graduate

August 19, 2004

New York City's First Blackout

Jill Jonnes, in the NYT (Aug. 13, 2004):[Jill Jonnes is the author of "Empires of Lights: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse and the Race to Electrify the World.'']Last year's blackout - when we were rudely reminded that electricity is the lifeblood of our civilization - still holds the dubious honor as America's biggest blackout. The nation's first struck Manhattan on Oct. 14, 1889, when New Yorkers stepped out into a bleak, rainy dusk to find what was ca

August 13, 2004

Martin Kramer: Dare to Be Different as You Design Your Middle East Studies Reading List

Martin Kramer, at his blog (Aug. 9, 2004): Balance your syllabus, with a Kramer supplement.  It's that time of year again, when my professorial friends are scrambling to put together their syllabi. You can usually tell a professor by his or her syllabus. That's because, as every mandarin of Middle Eastern studies knows, balance is a false god."University teaching is not about 'balance',"

August 13, 2004

Neither Britain Nor Russia Could Have Saved the Warsaw Uprising

Eve-Ann Prentice, in the Guardian (Aug. 6, 2004): [Eve-Ann Prentice reported from Poland in the 1980s; she is the author of One Woman's War.] The commemoration of cataclysmic events of the second world war has become a sorry business. Not just because today's leaders seem to feel the need to apologise - or demand apologies - for unspeakable deeds perpetrated by long-dead compatriots. But also because accounts of the events are distorted by the tunnel vision of time a

August 13, 2004

Was the Founder of Wahhabi Islam Tolerant and Peace-Loving?

John Kearney, in the Boston Globe (Aug. 13, 2004): SINCE 9/11, THERE HAS been no shortage of calls for an "Islamic reformation" to counter religious extremism in Muslim societies and lift them out of economic and political stagnation. Reform boosters often target Saudi Arabia's state-sponsored creed, known as Wahhabi Islam, claiming that Wahhabism's alleged repression of women

August 12, 2004

Shostakovich: Was He a Soviet Dissident?

Vadim Prokhorov, in the Moscow Times (Aug. 12, 2004): Leon Trotsky once wrote that anyone with a hankering for the quiet life had made a mistake to be born in the 20th century. For some public figures who made that mistake, the 21st century has been no more tranquil.One such person is Dmitry Shostakovich, whose life and output have once again become the subject of heated debate in anticipation of hi

August 12, 2004

Europeans Were Sent to U.S. Internment Camps During WW II, too

Michelle Malkin, author of the new book, In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror; at frontpagemag.com (Aug. 12, 2004): I recently spoke with a group of bright, young law students and undergrads from the best schools in the country, including Yale, Georgetown, the University of Chicago and William and Mary. We discussed my new book, In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror.

August 12, 2004

Famous Beheadings

From ABC News (Aug. 11, 2004): Throughout history, kings, commoners and even slaves have resorted to beheadings as a method of punishment, a weapon of vengeance and sometimes even a path to emancipation. Here is a look at some of history's most famous beheadings. Judith Beheads General Holofernes: The Bible is replete with decapitations. Severed

August 10, 2004

WSJ: Kerry, Like Clinton, Hopes to Campaign as a Centrist and Govern Like a Liberal

Brendan Miniter, in the WSJ (Aug. 10, 2004):With a wink and a nod John Kerry is running for president. He says he'll keep the troops in Iraq, even as he calls the war they are fighting optional. He promises to aggressively fight the war on terror, even as he promises to work better with France and his supporters rally to repeal the Patriot Act. And he's running as a fiscal conserv

August 10, 2004

Greg Mitchell: The Inferior A-Bomb City

Greg Mitchell, in Editor & Publisher (Aug. 8, 2004): Hiroshima did not matter much this year, but then it rarely does, except in anniversary years ending in "0." Alas, this year marked merely the 59th anniversary of the first use of an atomic weapon over the center of a city, on Aug. 6, 1945. If Hiroshima barely made the press this year, Nagasaki di

August 10, 2004

Nixon's Tapes--Neglected Now, But Still Immensely Vauable

James Warren, in the Chicago Tribune (Aug. 8, 2004): Exhausted by the self-absorption of Bill Clinton, I turned late one recent night to the exhilarating self-deception of Richard Nixon. A switch from Clinton's $12 million memoir to Nixon's mostly forgotten, secret audiotapes was timely. Baby Boomers may feel very moth-eaten when realizing that Monday marks the 30th anniversary of his resignation as president amid the nation's greatest political scandal, Watergate. While Clin

August 10, 2004

Watergate Myth: The Media Brought Down Nixon

Mark Feldstein, in the American Journalism Review (Aug./Sept. 2004): ... Even conservative critics have accepted the notion that Woodward and Bernstein were instrumental in Nixon's downfall."[T]he Washington Post.. decided to make the Watergate break-in a major moral issue, a lead followed by the rest of the East Coast media," Paul Johnson wrote in his book"Modern Times: A History of the World from the 1920s to the Year 2000." T

August 10, 2004

Thomas Cahill: The Greeks Invented Sports

Thomas Cahill, in the NYT (Aug. 9, 2004): The ancient Greeks were the world's first sports fans. They loved games of all kinds, which they called"agones.'' That's how we came by our words"agony'' and"antagonist,'' which should give us a good idea of how the Greeks viewed their games: as agonies in which antagonist is pitted against antagonist until one comes out on top. A better English term for what they had in

August 9, 2004

A Very Brief History of the Olympics

From About.com:According to legend, the ancient Olympic Games were founded by Heracles (the Roman Hercules), a son of Zeus. Yet the first Olympic Games for which we still have written records were held in 776 BCE (though it is generally believed that the Games had been going on for many years already). At this Olympic Games, a naked runner, Coroebus (a cook from Elis), won the sole event at the O

August 9, 2004

The Hundred Head Contest: Reassessing the Nanjing Massacre

Suzuki Chieko, in an article published by Japan Focus:Japan Focus IntroductionIn late 1937, a Tokyo newspaper reported on a "hundred head contest" in which two Japanese imperial army officers competed to see who could lop off one hundred Chinese heads first during the campaign to take the Chinese capital city of Nanjing. The contest is symbolic of the perversion and loss of military discipline durin

August 9, 2004

Will Fitzhugh: Students Need to Learn How to Write History Term Papers

Will Fitzhugh, founder of the National History Club, in a newsletter (Aug. 9, 2004): The College Board is about to add a writing test to the SAT, making the new possible score 2400 instead of 1600. The writing part will provide thirty minutes for the candidate to give an opinion in response to a prompt, and these responses will be scored at the rate of thirty an hour, or no more than two minutes each. This is the sequel to the SAT II writing test, for which

August 7, 2004

Jonathan Aitken: My Personal Watergate Memory

Jonathan Aitken, in the Sunday Times (London) (Aug. 1, 2004):...By coincidence I had a ringside seat at the ensuing drama of America's only presidential resignation on August 9, 1974. That summer I was the house guest of a well-known Georgetown hostess, Kay Halle. Kay's basement was occupied by a White House aide, Frank Gannon, and his girlfriend Diane Sawyer. She is now a CBS television presenter but in those days she worked for Ron Ziegler, Nixon's p