Roundup: Talking About History

Ray Fisman: The Persistence of Hate

Professor Fisman received his PhD in Business Economics at Harvard University.From Rosa Parks' refusal to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Ala., to the "Little Rock Nine," who defied school segregation in Arkansas, most of the civil rights clashes of the 20th century played out on the turf where the Confederacy had fought to preserve slavery 100 years earlier.

Jacob Heilbrunn: How Bad Was Franco?

Jacob Heilbrunn, a senior editor at the National Interest, is the author of They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons.

Glenn W. LaFantasie: Why the Presidency Aged Lincoln So Dramatically

Glenn W. LaFantasie is the Richard Frockt Family Professor of Civil War History at Western Kentucky University. He is working on a book about Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. GrantNo face in American history is more recognizable than Abraham Lincoln's.

Christopher Hitchens: Mladic the Monster

Christopher Hitchens' Kindle Single, The Enemy, on the demise of Osama Bin Laden, has just been published.

Janine di Giovanni: Ratko Mladic ... The Making of a Monster

Janine Di Giovanni’s next book, Ghosts by Daylight: Love, War, and Redemption, will be published by Knopf in September.

Gil Troy: Jogging Memories of 1947 and 1967 on Jerusalem Day

Gil Troy is Professor of History at McGill University and a Shalom Hartman Research Fellow in Jerusalem.

Glenn W. LaFantasie: The Changing Face of Abraham Lincoln

Glenn W. LaFantasie is the Richard Frockt Family Professor of Civil War History at Western Kentucky University. He is working on a book about Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant.

Walter Russell Mead: Memorial Day: The War in Iraq

Walter Russell Mead is the Henry Kissinger senior fellow for US foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. He also writes a blog for the American Interest....The Americans who served, suffered and died in Iraq — and who still serve there today — changed the world and won a great and a difficult victory.  No account of their service, no commemoration of the dead that ignores or conceals this vital truth is enough.

John Nichols: Gil Scott-Heron's Revolution

John Nichols, a pioneering political blogger, has written the Beat since 1999When the role of media as not just an observer but as shaper of our politics was barely discussed outside academic circles, Gil Scott-Heron gave us, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” still the savviest critique of the disengaged and disengaging character of broadcast news—and the crisis of commercialism....

LA Times Editorial: The Truth About WWII Internment

In one sense, the U.S. solicitor general's recent admission of his office's wrongdoing wasn't really news.

Andrea Wulf: Digging the Founding Gardeners

Andrea Wulf's book "Founding Gardeners — The Revolutionary Generation, Nature and the Shaping of the American Nation" is published by Knopf.

James D. Hornfischer: The Things They Buried

Mr. Hornfischer is the author of three works of World War II history: "The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors," "Ship of Ghosts" and, most recently, "Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal."

Rick Perlstein: Hubert Humphrey: America’s Forgotten Liberal

JANUARY was the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth, and the planet nearly stopped turning on its axis to recognize the occasion. Today is the 100th anniversary of Hubert H. Humphrey’s birth, and no one besides me seems to have noticed.That such a central figure in American history is largely ignored today is sad. But his diminution is also, more importantly, an impediment to understanding our current malaise as a nation, and how much better things might have been had today’s America turned out less Reaganite and more Humphreyish....

Susan Hattis Rolef: The Armenians, the Jews and Israel

The writer is a former Knesset employee. In 1915-16, during World War I, the Turks were responsible for the massacre of as many as 1.5 million Armenian inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire.

Peter Dreier: The Political Bob Dylan

Peter Dreier teaches politics at Occidental College.When the makers of Hollywood movies, documentary films, or TV news programs want to evoke the spirit of the 1960s, they typically show clips of long-haired hippies dancing at a festival, protestors marching at an antiwar rally, or students sitting-in at a lunch counter, with one of two songs by Bob Dylan—“Blowin’ in the Wind” or “The Times They Are a-Changin’”—playing in the background.

Charles Lachman: America's Forgotten Presidential Sex Scandal

Charles Lachman is executive producer of Inside Edition and the author of The Last Lincolns: The Rise & Fall of a Great American Family. His new book, A Secret Life: The Sex, Lies and Scandal of President Grover Cleveland, will be published August 1.Arnold Schwarzenegger. John Edwards. Grover Cleveland?

William McGurn: An Arab for Ground Zero

William McGurn is a Vice President at News Corporation who writes speeches for CEO Rupert Murdoch. Previously he served as Chief Speechwriter for President George W. Bush. Today Ameen Rihani and the Little Syria neighborhood of lower Manhattan have largely been forgotten. That's a pity. In his day, the Lebanese-born author and activist was a world figure—and the New York neighborhood where he once lived was a vibrant testament to America's immigrant experience.

David Hayes: Bob Dylan at 70: Revolution in the Head, Revisited

David Hayes is deputy editor of openDemocracy, which he co-founded in 2000. He has written textbooks on human rights and terrorism, and was a contributor to Town and Country (Jonathan Cape, 1998). His work has been published in PN Review, the Irish Times, El Pais, the Iran Times International, the Canberra Times, the Scotsman, the New Statesman and The Absolute Game.

David Hajdu: Forever Young? In Some Ways, Yes

David Hajdu, an associate professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author of Positively Fourth Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña.BREAK out the guitar-shaped cake pans.Today is Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday, an occasion that essayists, bloggers and magazine writers have been celebrating for weeks. Mr. Dylan surely deserves the attention, but he’s only one in a surprisingly large group of major pop-music artists born around the same time.

Kate Culkin: Promoting an Academic Book to a General Audience

Kate Culkin is an assistant professor of history at the Bronx Community College in New York City.