Roundup: Talking About History

May 22, 2004

A Mob Museum?

Harriet Baskas, National Public Radio (May 21, 2004): After a brief attempt at selling itself as a family vacation land, Las Vegas is restaking its claim as America's most decadent destination. Unidentified Man: Yeah, hi. I was wondering, could I get a wake-up call tomorrow morning please? Could I get that to go to my cell phone instead of my room? Well, here's the thing. I--I'm not quite sure if I'm going to be in my room tomorrow so... BASKAS: A new national ad cam

May 22, 2004

Was There a Trojan War?

Manfred Korfmann, in Archaeology Magazine (May 2004):Recorded sometime in the eighth century b.c., the Iliad represents the culmination of several centuries of oral epic poetry that wove a complex story of the relationship between mortals and gods. This narrative takes place against the bloody backdrop of the ten-year-long Greek siege of the city alternatively called Ilios or Troy, a war launched over

May 22, 2004

World War II Was the Seminal Event of the 20th Century

Scott Galupo, in the Wash Times (May 21, 2004):... The World War II Memorial, sober and sunk low in a long frame of elms, rests between the two structures that anchor the Mall.The monument to America's first great warrior, George Washington, towers over it on one side. The statue of America's great uniter, Abraham Lincoln, looks on from the other. In such company, the location an

May 22, 2004

What Accounts for the Renewal of the New York Review of Books ? Vietnam

Scott Sherman, in the Nation (June 7, 2004):... In the wake of the Vietnam War, the [New Yok Review of Books] became a formidable--and, in some sense, unique--journalistic institution. Many of its readers reside in academia, but the paper has a devoted following in the upper reaches of media, politics and philanthropy, which gives it an influence vastly out of proportion to its circu

May 21, 2004

Tina Brown: History Is Hot Right Now

Tina Brown, in the Wash Post (May 20, 2004):History is hot. And not just because of Brad Pitt's flying thighs. There's such an outpouring of books from historians at the moment, you can't throw a canape in Manhattan after 6 p.m. without hitting a tweedy scholar wearing the dazed expression that comes with a sudden release from the past.The city has been cra

May 21, 2004

Lewis & Clark Aren't Celebrated Among Indians

Kris Axtman, in the Christian Science Monitor (May 14, 2004):When Meriwether Lewis and William Clark pushed off from the banks of the Mississippi River near St. Louis on May 14, 1804, along with a group of skilled botanists, zoologists, and survivalists, the two had little idea of what lay ahead. Their only directive, given by President Thomas Jefferson: Reach the Pacific Ocean. The journey, which lasted two years and four months, is widely taught

May 21, 2004

Did William Rehnquist Embrace Plessy v Ferguson?

Cass Sunstein, in the LAT (May 17, 2004):When the Supreme Court decided Brown vs. Board of Education on this day in 1954, it overruled Plessy vs. Ferguson, one of the most infamous decisions in the history of the court. In that case, which dated back to 1896, the court ruled that the Constitution allowed the prosecution of a 30-year-old African American shoemaker named Homer Plessy for refusing to sit in the "colored" car on the train. The

May 19, 2004

Anne Applebaum: Blanding-Down History

Anne Applebaum, in the Wash Post (May 18, 2004):... [A]lthough a lot of angst has been focused on the dark forces of political correctness in education, the larger problem in many schools is an apolitical one: Nowadays, history is too often drained of any meaning, left- or right-wing, whatsoever. Partly this is because history, unlike math or science, doesn't lend it

May 18, 2004

Eric Foner & Randall Kennedy: Brown at 50

Eric Foner and Randall Kennedy, in the Nation (May 4, 2004): Prior to the landmark Supreme Court rulings in Brown v. Board of Education and Bolling v. Sharpe, the US government and the states were permitted to segregate students racially in primary and secondary public schools. The official rationale for this arrangement was that students--black as well as white--would all fa

May 18, 2004

Michael Klarman: The Supreme Court Has Never Been in the Vanguard of Social Reform

Michael Klarman, in the NYT (May 17, 2004): The Supreme Court has never been in the vanguard of social reform. Few people would credit it with playing a pivotal role in the women's movement, the environmental movement or the gay rights movement. Yet many people, citing the court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, insist that it played a crucial role in the civil rights movem

May 18, 2004

The Hispanic "Brown" Case

Editorial in the NYT (May 15, 2004): Fifty years ago this month, the Supreme Court handed down a landmark civil rights decision, the first under the newly seated Chief Justice Earl Warren. Brown v. Board of Education, involving African-Americans and segregated schools, came two weeks later. Unlike Brown, the case called Hernandez v. Texas has been mostly relegated to legal footnotes. But this decision, which protected Mexican-Americans and the right to fair trials and helped w

May 18, 2004

Was a Tyrant Prefigured by Baby Saddam?

Elisabeth Bumiller, in the NYT (May 15, 2004): It is no surprise to Jerrold M. Post, the founder of the Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior at the C.I.A., that Saddam Hussein grew up to be one of the world's most dangerous dictators and a member of President Bush's axis of evil."Of all of the leaders I've profiled, his backg

May 14, 2004

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Anti-Semite?

Cathy Young, in Reason magazine (May 2004):Controversy rages as charges of anti-Semitism dog a beloved cultural icon. No, not Mel Gibson: The man at the center of this debate is the Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago, was once a revered symbol of moral resistance to the Soviet state. He probably deserves more credit than any other

May 14, 2004

Harvard Poet Helen Vendler's Rebuke of History

Harvard poet Helen Vendler, in the course of her Jefferson Lecture (May 6, 2004):When it became useful in educational circles in the United States to group various university disciplines under the name "The Humanities," it seems to have been tacitly decided that philosophy and history would be cast as the core of this grouping, and that other forms of learning--the study of languages,

May 13, 2004

Evolution: Still Controversial (Teaching It Is Banned in Islamic Countries)

Craig McDonald, inThisWeek(May 13, 2004):In 1998, Mansfield native Edward J. Larson earned the Pulitzer Prize in history for his book, Summer of the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion. On May 20, Larson will come to Columbus to discuss Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Sc

May 13, 2004

Newsweek: Why Brown Seems a Bust

Ellis Cose, in Newsweek (May 17, 2004):Sometimes history serves as a magnifying mirror—making momentous what actually was not. But Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, is the real thing: a Supreme Court decision that fundamentally and forever changed America. It jump-started the modern civil-rights movement and excised a cancer eating a hole in the heart of the Constitution.So why i

May 13, 2004

D-Day Mistakes

Euan Ferguson, in the Guardian (May 9, 2004):THERE ARE THIMBLES. Lighters. Coasters. Ashtrays. Key-rings, of course. Tea-towels and T-shirts, penknives and paperweights, rucksacks and shoehorns and tankards and teacups: a sourly impressive amount of laminated plasticky tourist dreck, drenched in memorabilia of red, white, blue and gaudy. D-Day, they say; and 6 Juin 1944. Le Debarquement. Welcome To Our Liberators. Normandy Landings. Aux Heroiques!

May 13, 2004

Troy: Truth and Fiction

Bill Eichenberger, in the Columbus Dispatch (May 9, 2004:Let's get one thing straight: The Trojan horse is not mentioned in The Iliad and only alluded to in The Odyssey. In fact, the bulk of the Trojan War -- which lasted 10 years -- isn't covered in Homer's epic poems.Whether someone named Homer even wrote The Iliad and The Odyssey is open to debate.So, in the upcoming film Troy, the words "based on" in reference to The I

May 13, 2004

Thomas Sowell: We Are Still Paying the Price for the Faulty Reasoning in Brown

Thomas Sowell, in the WSJ (May 13, 2004): In all the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court's historic decision in Brown v. Board of Education, there has been remarkably little critical examination of the reasoning used in that decision. Indeed, much of what has been said about that decision over the past half-century has

May 13, 2004

Christopher R. Waldrep: Why It Matters How Many People Murdered Emmett Till

Christopher R. Waldrep, a professor of history and the Jamie and Phyllis Pasker Endowed Chair in history at San Francisco State University, in the San Francisco Chronicle (May 13, 2004): The Justice Department announced this week that it intends to work with Mississippi authorities in re-investigating the murder of Emmett Till, hoping to identify suspects other than the two who were identified in 1955 and who have since died. One