Roundup: Talking About History

McNamara--Does He Feel Guilty?

Tom McNamee, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times (Jan. 18, 2004): In the movies, people change. George Bailey in"It's a Wonderful Life." Phil Connors in"Groundhog Day." All those jerks in those Adam Sandler movies who turn sweet. So thank God for documentaries, where people almost never change. At least that's honest. Watch enough documentaries and it's easy to doubt the transformative powers

The Myth of Pavlik Morozov, Stalin's Poster Boy for Patriotism, Unravels

Julius Strauss, writing in news.telegraph.co.uk (Dec. 27, 2003): Even by the high-octane standards of Stalinist-era propaganda, the storyline was a powerful one. Pavlik Morozov was a handsome 14-year-old schoolboy who lived in a tiny Siberian village, never played truant, always did his homework and was polite to his teachers. He loved communism so much that when his own father

FDR Prolonged the Great Depression

Jason Livingood, writing for Accuracy in Academia (Dec. 2003): Although historians and educators tell us that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ended the Great Depression, in reality, the New Deal prolonged chronic unemployment in the U.S. in the 1930s, Cato Institute scholar Jim Powell said early this month. "The New Deal was substantially financed on the backs of the middle class and the poor,

Top Schools Aren't Requiring History

Jennifer Dekel, writing for Accuracy in Academia (Dec. 2003): Universities today routinely scrap history courses in favor of politically correct attitude-adjustment seminars, witnesses from academia itself told U.S. senators at a congressional hearing last month. Three out of four of the witnesses identified themselves politically as liberal. Anne Neal, J.D., the President of the American Counc

Never Forgetting What Happened at Wounded Knee December 29, 1890

Tim Giago (Nanwica Kciji), a Lakota Indian, writing in the Baltimore Sun (Dec. 28, 2003): On crystal-clear nights, when winter winds whistle through the hills and canyons around Wounded Knee Creek, the Lakota elders say it is so cold that one can hear the twigs snapping in the frigid air. They called this time of the year"the Moon of the Popping Trees." It was on such a winter morning on Dec. 29, 1890, that the crack of a single rifle brought a day of in

Historians in Hong Kong to Debate Role of Catholic Church in the Boxer Rebellion

Ambrose Leung, writing in the China Morning Post (Dec. 29, 2003): Historians and clerics from Hong Kong, the mainland, Taiwan and overseas will gather in the city for the first time next year to discuss the role of Christian churches in China during the Boxer Rebellion. The topic has long been considered sensitive due to the links between foreign missionaries and western nations that were expanding their influence over the declining Qing dynasty.

The Word "Empire" Should Be Honored

Robert Jackson, writing in the London Times (Dec. 29, 2003): It is another dreary sign of present-day historical disconnection that even William Hague should join in the modish campaign against honours referring to the " British Empire ". The idea that empire refers only to one of the most recent episodes of our history -the overseas expansion of England/Britain after 1600 -shows a profound lack of historical insight, information and imaginati

Why The Erection of a Statue to Lincoln in Richmond Caused Such a Storm

Andrew Ferguson, writing in the Weekly Standard (Dec. 29-Jan. 5, 2003): Abraham Lincoln, with his son Tad in tow, walked around Richmond, Virginia, one day 138 years ago, and if you try to retrace their steps today you won't see much that they saw, which shouldn't be a surprise, of course. The street grid is the same, though, and if you're in the right mood and know what t

Why I Discounted Rumors About Strom Thurmond

Nadine Cohodas, biographer of Strom Thurmond, writing in the NYT (Dec. 27, 2003): Now that we all know about Ms. Washington-Williams, there has been much conversation about how such rumors remained unexplored, especially on the part of the many journalists who followed Mr. Thurmond's long career. As one of them, I have to say that things weren't as obvious as they may now seem. If the existence of Mr. Thurm

Jefferson Is Now Underrated

Sean Wilentz, writing in the NYT (Dec. 27, 2003): Recently, Thomas Jefferson has been viciously maligned in ways normally reserved only for modern American presidents and liberals. Jefferson-bashing historians criticize Thomas Jefferson for having a secret affair with a slave, slight his authorship of the Declaration of Independence, compare him badly with John Adams (who mistrusted democracy and signed the Alien and Sedition Acts) and call Jefferson the forerunner of Pol Pot. A

Garry Wills: I Am Astounded!

Garry Wills, in a letter to the NYT (Dec. 27, 2003): I am astounded that Gordon Wood, reviewing my '' 'Negro President' '' (Dec. 14), can defend slavery -- which is what defending the three-fifths clause in the Constitution amounts to. Wood says that the fact that slaves were counted but could not vote is ''irrelevant'' because free women and children were also counted but could

How Major Events of History Can Be Affected by Seemingly Small Decisions

John Schwartz, writing in the NYT (Dec. 28, 2003): History is the story of the mighty oaks; the acorns get little ink. There are too many seeds, and their existence is too transient. So historians, in professional retrospect, tell us which of the acorns got lucky. We go forward armed with the lessons of the past: it's not always the obvious things that change the course of the world. Sometimes t

Jon Meacham: Why Reagan Is So Popular Now

Jon Meacham, writing in Newsweek (Dec. 29, 2003):[T]he reverence in which Reagan's held seems confounding to critics of his administration. Many liberal-leaning people who still can't get over the move to count ketchup as a vegetable in school lunches find themselves flummoxed by Reagan's rising reputation: he is outpolling Washington, Lincoln and FDR in some surveys of great presidents. Presidential hero worshi

Jim Powell: FDR Made the Depression Worse

Jim Powell, writing forNational Review(Nov. 20, 2003): It has been 70 years since Franklin Delano Roosevelt launched his New Deal in an effort to banish the Great Depression — perhaps the most important economic event in American history. The New Deal was controversial then, and still is, because it failed to resolve the most important problem of the era: chronic unemployment, which avera

The Modern Western World ... So It Began with the 16th Century Renaissance?

Richard E. Rubenstein, professor of conflict resolution and public affairs at George Mason University, in Aristotle's Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Dark Ages (rpt. from Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. 9, 2004): The struggle between faith and reason did not begin, as is so often supposed, with Copernicus's challenge to earth-centered cosmology or Galileo's trial by the Inquisition but with

An Alger Hiss Chair in Social Studies?

Robert Fulford, writing in Canada.com (Jan. 3, 2004): The faculty at Bard College , a liberal arts school at Annandale , NY , includes a scholar who glories in the title Alger Hiss Professor of Social Studies. Anyone aware that Hiss was a Washington bureaucrat who spied for the Soviet Union will consider this as sensible as a John Dillinger Chair in Business Ethics or a Jack the Ripper Chair in Criminology. But at Bard College no one is laughing, least of all the occupant o

How Sherman's March Has Been Used by Southerners to Explain Events

From the Chronicle of Higher Education (Jan. 5, 2004): The destructiveness of the Civil War is the subject of many local legends among the narratives of white Southerners collected by Elissa R. Henken, a professor of English at the University of Georgia. Many of the stories involve Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's 30-day March to the Sea, in 1864, and "narratives about hardship and suffering -- and just plain meanness -- on t

Scholars Now Argue that Art Did not Evolve--It was in Evidence from the Beginning of Human Development 30,000 Years Ago

Guy Gugliotta, writing in the Washington Post (Jan. 12, 2004): What does it take to become an artist? Do you need to study it first, or do you just pick up a brush or a knife and do it? This question lies at the heart of a prolonged debate among archaeologists and anthropologists over the origin of figurative art -- drawing, sculpting or otherwise creating recognizable images of figures or objects -- and what it implies about human cultura

Gavin Menzies: What Historians at the AHA Made of His Claim that the Chinese Discovered America

Ken Ringle, writing in the Wash Post (Jan. 12, 2004): If the Chinese discovered America before Columbus , wouldn't they have hungered an hour later to discover someplace else? This is only one of the galaxy of intriguing questions provoked by Gavin Menzies, a former submarine commander in the British Royal Navy, who since retirement has submerged himself in the maps and mysteries of

A Historian Discovers that Students Today Don't Know that AIDS Originally Was Regarded as a "Gay Disease"

[T]his past fall, while teaching an undergraduate course called"Plagues and Politics: The Impact of AIDS on US Culture" at Dartmouth College, I was shocked — profoundly shocked — by the fact that only three of the 34 students in the class had any idea that AIDS was once widely regarded as a gay-male disease. As someone who lived through the AIDS epidemic, who has lost lovers and friends too numerous to count, I was literally stunned: how could this be?