Roundup: Talking About History

March 19, 2004

Poll: Americans Don't Remember Who Herbert Hoover Was

From CBS News (March 19, 2004): Unemployment and outsourcing are big issues in Campaign 2004, but Democrats hoping to make political hay out of them might want to be a bit more original than Democrats of yesteryear. They've traditionally been fond of pointing to the Republican Party as the party of Herbert Hoover, on whose watch the nation sunk into the Great Depression of the 193

March 19, 2004

World History Textbooks Biased Against Israel

Lee Kaplan, contributing editor to frontpagemag.com (March 19, 2004): Militant Islamists in the United States and their allies have set their sights on our American children. They seek to provide an education similar to that taught in the controlled regimes of the Arab world. So far, American textbook suppliers are more than wil

March 19, 2004

Brown V. Board of Education: 50 Years Later

Justin Ewers, in U.S. News & World Report (March 22, 2004): Brown v. Board of Education is remembered as a case of simple justice. In the fall of 1950, the story goes, Linda Brown, a 7-year-old girl living in Topeka, Kan., had to travel 21 blocks each day, by foot and by bus, to get to her all-black elementary school. Yet only seven blocks from her home was another elementary school--a school for whites only. Her father, Oliver Brown, asked that she

March 19, 2004

Remembering Tiananmen, 15 Years Later

From the NYT (March 14, 2004): In one sense the June 4, 1989, crackdown on dissent that caused hundreds and perhaps thousands of deaths and injuries around Beijing is a distant memory. China's economy has since grown at a double-digit annual pace. Most top leaders directly responsible for ordering the bloodshed have retired or died. But as the 15th anniversary approach

March 18, 2004

Why Did Sandra Day O'Connor Agree to Be Celebrated in the One-Sided "Hall of Great Westerners"?

Eric L. Muller, George R. Ward Professor of Law at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in his blog, isthatlegal.org (March 14, 2004): [In an email to HNN Mr. Muller wrote: "I thought you might be interested in the below blog post about the 'Hall of Great Westerners' run by the National Cowboy and Western History Museum. (By the way, living people can't

March 15, 2004

Mel Gibson's Movie Will Set Christianity Back 500 Years

David Templeton, in filmthreat.com (March 4, 2004): That’s his word for it. As the end credits finally roll on Mel Gibson’s much-hyped The Passion of the Christ, I turn to gauge the reaction of Dr. Funk, a renowned biblical scholar, historian, and author, best-known as the founder of the controversial Jesus Seminar, and as Director of the Westar Institute, a nonprofit advocacy group devoted to encourag

March 15, 2004

Did Female Saints Suffer from Anorexia?

Hilary Mantel, in the Guardian (March 4, 2004): Anorexia is seen as a modern illness. But is it really so different from the suffering that female saints throughout history have put themselves through. We are living in a great era of saint-making. Under John Paul II an industrial revolution has overtaken the Vatican. Saints are fast-tracked to the top, and there are beatifi

March 15, 2004

Women's History Month: Links to Websites

Click here for a guide to websites celebrating Women's History Month.

March 12, 2004

Papers of U.S. Grant Reveal a President Who Dabbled in Real Estate

Virginia Extra, in the Wash Post (March 11, 2004): Ulysses S. Grant, the general, is usually recalled as a tough, driven man who saved the Union on the battlefield. Grant, the president, is often remembered as an inept, disengaged and possibly corrupt politician. The most recent seven of the 26 volumes of "The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant" may not redeem his presidential reputation, but they do show the human side of Grant as reflected in his

March 12, 2004

Historian Claims in New Book that More than a Million White Europeans Were Captured by North African Slave Traders

Rory Carroll, in the Guardian (March 11, 2004): North African pirates abducted and enslaved more than 1 million Europeans between 1530 and 1780 in a series of raids which depopulated coastal towns from Sicily to Cornwall, according to new research. Thousands of white Christians were seized every year to work as galley slaves, labourers and concubines for Muslim overlords in

March 12, 2004

Why Are History Textbooks So Dull?

Columnist Denise Smith Amos, in Cincinatti.com (March 8, 2004): QUESTION: Why do so many history books in grade school and high school leave out so much history, even of recent events? They seem bland. Can't history books tell a story, instead of just conveying facts and dates? ANSWER: Bland is in the eye of the beholder, but at least one education think

March 12, 2004

Princeton Scholar Elaine Pagels Gives Mel Gibson a Low Grade for Accuracy

David Remnick, in the New Yorker (March 8, 2004): Last week, while the critics, the clergy, and the professional opinion-providers were caught up in the opening, on Ash Wednesday, of "The Passion of the Christ," it seemed a good idea to ask Elaine Pagels, a renowned historian of the early Christian period, to see the film and offer her reaction. Scholarship on the quick, admittedly. Professor Pagels, who teaches at Princeton and is the author

March 12, 2004

The 45th Anniversary of Tibet's Bloody Rebellion Against Chinese Rule

From an anonymous correspondent in Dharamsala, India, as published by the Australian(March 10, 2004): TODAY marks the 45th anniversary of Tibet's bloody rebellion against Chinese rule that led to the exile of the Dalai Lama, who enjoys a worldwide following but can only hope that he will ever see his homeland again. Since taking up residence in India in 1959, the Dalai Lama has toured 44 countries, been received by three US presidents

March 12, 2004

Arnold Beichman: From Sovietology to Putinology

Arnold Beichman, a Hoover Institution research fellow, in the Washington Times (March 8, 2004): In the dear old days of the Soviet Union, there grew up two subdisciplines in Western political science. One was called Kremlinology, the other Sovietology. These disciplines were developed because the Soviet Union was pledged to the overthrow of democratic countries, it had be

March 12, 2004

What Defenders of the Confederate Flag Don't Know Is that the Emblem's Creator Almost Certainly Would Want to Hide It If He Were Alive Today

Joshua Green, in the Atlantic Monthly (March 2004): The [Confederate] flag's fiercest critics, in Georgia as elsewhere, have been black leaders angered by its association with segregation and slavery and white businessmen hurt by the economic dislocations that accompany such strife. In an effort to extinguish the controversy and celebrate a New South of tolerance and prosperity, in 2001 [Georgi

March 11, 2004

The Spanish Civil War: A New Take

Myles Kantor, in FrontPageMag.com (March 11, 2004): Stanley Payne is Hilldale-Jaume Vicens Vives Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. An eminent scholar of Spain and fascism, his books include The Franco Regime , Spain's First Democracy: The Second Republic, 1931-1936 , and A History of Fascism, 1914-1945 . Payne's The Spanish Civil War, the So

March 11, 2004

Scholars Need to Begin Studying Islamic Anti-Semitism

Neil J. Kressel, in theChronicle of Higher Education(March 11, 2004):For many decades, social scientists of every disciplinary stripe have placed themselves in the forefront of the battle against bigotry. On the basis of that record, one might expect to find psychologists, sociologists, and others hard at work studying the dynamics of Jew-hatred in the Muslim world.

March 11, 2004

Jon Butler: The Overlooked Factor of Religion in American History for the Last 150 Years

Yale historian Jon Butler, in the Journal of American History (subscribers only) (March 2004): It has seldom been possible, much less wise, to assess American history before the Civil War without taking religion seriously. The Puritans fascinated nineteenth-century historians and novelists alike, although the portraits left by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville easily outlasted

March 11, 2004

Does History Make Students Better Citizens? (And How Do We Measure that?)

Richard Rothstein, research associate for the Economic Policy Institute, in the Journal of American History (subscribers only) (March 2004): Americans have never considered learning history to be an end in itself. Instruction about history and the development of political institutions (civics) has always been justified as an exercise that would produce better citizens, however blandly

March 11, 2004

There's No Evidence Students Today Are More Ignorant About History

Sam Wineburg, professor of education at Stanford, in the Journal of American History (subscribers only) (March 2004): Results from the 1987, 1994, and 2001 administrations of the National Assessment of Educational Progress ( NAEP , known informally as the"Nation's Report Card") have shown little deviation from earlier trends. In the wake of the 2001 test came the same stale headlines (