Roundup: Talking About History

Conrad Black: The Decline of Liberalism

[Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom and Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, both published by PublicAffairs Books.] American liberalism, synonymous today with big government, the exact opposite of the liberalism of Edmund Burke and other British champions of individual liberty, arose essentially from the use of the state to alleviate the most severe economic inequalities in society. In Great Britain this began in the competition between the Li

Scott Casper: Rebranding Mount Vernon

[Scott Casper, a professor of history at the University of Nevada, Reno, is the author of “Sarah Johnson’s Mount Vernon: The Forgotten History of an American Shrine.”] MOUNT VERNON, George Washington’s bucolic estate in Northern Virginia, has been an American shrine since his death in 1799. But after the Civil War, when its historic restoration began, the image of the first president began to be outshone by that of the 16th, Abraham Lincoln. True, Washington’s portrait

Michael Bavalsky: Why We Celebrate Presidents' Day on Mondays

[Mr. Bavalsky is an HNN intern and a student at Brooklyn Studio Secondary School.] In 1885, President Chester Arthur established Washington's Birthday as a day to honor "the father of our country." But Washington was far from the only president to make a lasting mark on the United States. So, in the 1950s, a reformer named Harold Stonebridge Fischer created the Presidents' Day National Committee and proclaimed himself its executive director. Over the next two decades, h

Mai Der Vang: For the Hmong, an Enduring Sense of Exile

[The writer, a commentator for New America Media, lives in Fresno, Calif.] Buried in a closet is a suitcase where my mother hides an heirloom from the war. I have seen it only once, by chance when she was reorganizing. It is a traditional Hmong jacket. Instead of being pristine and vibrant like the ones I wear to the Hmong New Year, it is thin, tattered and faded. This is the jacket my mother wore as a girl, growing up in the mountains of Laos. It is what she wore the night her fami

Heather McRobie and Anes Makul: Yugoslavs in the twenty-first century: ‘erased’ people

[Heather McRobie is studying human rights in South East Europe at the University of Sarajevo, and previously worked at the Amman Center for Human Rights Studies in Jordan. Anes Makul is a Bosnian journalist and researcher working on nationalism. He has worked for over two years as a journalist on Bosnian daily newspapers, recently spending a year researching Bosnia's economic crisis.] Earlier this month, the Slovenian Parliament adopted a Declaration on Yugoslav communities,

Lisa Fabrizio: American Love

[Lisa Fabrizio is a columnist who hails from Connecticut (mailbox@lisafab.com).] I have a sister who's around a decade younger than me. One day, a few years ago, we were discussing the presidency of Ronald Reagan when she made a most interesting comment. "When Reagan was president," she said, "I always felt safe." While I didn't think much of it at the time, I did so later on and most recently with the commemoration of Rea

Peter Hannaford: The Day That Isn't

[Mr. Hannaford is a former member of the Mount Vernon Advisory Committee.] Next Monday, February 21, will be the Washington's Birthday Holiday. That is what it's been ever since an Act of Congress created it in 1880 to honor the nation's first president. Forty years ago, however, it metamorphosed into "Presidents' Day." How did this happen? Beginning in 1951 a fellow named Harold Stonebridge Fischer created the Presidents' Day National Committee. He became its

Sophia Deboick The Battle for Valentine's Day

[Sophia Deboick is a historian and writer on popular culture.] The development of Valentine's Day into the orgy of commercialised sentimentality we know today has been a long process, with Roman paganism and the poets of the middle ages both making a contribution to the day's current associations with romance, love and sex. But the reclaiming of the day by fundamentalist Christians to further the agenda of the religious right has added a new chapter to this long history.

Dan Senor and Roman Martinez: Donald Rumsfeld's Iraq Revisionism

[The writers were based in Baghdad in 2003-04 as officials of the Defense Department and the Coalition Provisional Authority.] What went wrong in Iraq? According to Donald Rumsfeld's memoir, U.S. difficulties stemmed not from the Pentagon's failure to plan for the war's aftermath - or Rumsfeld's unwillingness as defense secretary to provide enough troops to secure Iraqis after the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime. Rumsfeld pins most of the blame on the Coalition Prov

Gennady Burbulis: Honoring the Yeltsin Legacy

[Gennady Burbulis was secretary of state under Boris Yeltsin from 1991-92.] Feb. 1 marked what would have been the 80th birthday of Boris Yeltsin, the first president of the Russian Federation and the first popularly elected leader in the country's long history. In Yekaterinburg, President Dmitry Medvedev laid a wreath at a new monument dedicated to Yeltsin and called on the nation to be grateful for his service to his country. In Moscow at a concert to honor Yeltsin, Prime Minister

Mark Tooley: Eisenhower's Religion

[Mark Tooley is president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington, D.C. and author of Taking Back the United Methodist Church.] Often, America's religious life in the 1950s is dismissed as sterile and conventional. Supposedly President Dwight Eisenhower typified generic, superficial religion with his oft quoted quip: "Our government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don't care what it is." The quote actu

Pedro Noguera and Robert Cohen: Remembering Reagan's Record on Civil Rights and the South African Freedom Struggle

[Pedro Noguera is the Peter L. Agnew Professor of Education at New York University. Robert Cohen is a professor of history and social studies in NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.] Sentimental 100th birthday tributes to Ronald Reagan rolling out this month would have us believe that the “Great Communicator” led America into a bright conservative era of prosperity, ended the cold war by getting tough with the Soviets and restored America’s confidenc

Lawrence D. Hogan: The Negro Leagues Discovered an Oasis at Yankee Stadium

[Lawrence D. Hogan is a senior professor of history at Union County College in Cranford, N.J.] On July 5, 1930, about 20,000 fans filed into seven-year-old Yankee Stadium for a baseball doubleheader. What made this day special was that the teams, the New York Lincoln Giants and the Baltimore Black Sox, were the first Negro leagues clubs to play at the Stadium, which was essentially for whites only, like so many other public places in the United States at the time. Jaco

Robert J. Samuelson: The Real Reagan Legacy

[Robert J. Samuelson is a weekly columnist for The Post, writing on political, economic and social issues.] We are deluged with Ronald Reagan celebrations and retrospectives, but most are misleading. They omit Reagan's singular domestic achievement and the wellspring of his popularity: the defeat of double-digit inflation. In 1979 and 1980, inflation averaged 13 percent; by 1984, it was 4 percent - and falling. Without subdued inflation, the economy would have remained a mess and Re

Nathaniel Zelinsky: V for Victory: A Timeless Symbol

Media commentators remain divided about the hope for a democratic Egypt in light of the protests that have rocked the country. Some fear an Iran-like Muslim theocracy, while others have been cautiously optimistic that a secular order can take hold. Those who predict a positive outcome argue that Egyptians (and the broader Arab world) have internalized liberal-Western norms, which can provide a foundation for sweeping reform. While it is too early to predict the results of these even

Myron Magnet: James Madison and the Dilemmas of Democracy

[Myron Magnet is City Journal’s editor-at-large and was its editor from 1994 through 2006. He is the author of The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties’ Legacy to the Underclass and a recipient of the National Humanities Medal.] In the roster of famous last words—from Goethe’s “More light!” to Nathan Hale’s “I regret I have but one life to give for my country” to John Maynard Keynes’s debonair “I should have drunk more champagne”—surely the final utterance of James Madison deserves

John Tierney: Shame on RFK's Family

[John Tierney is former Professor of Political Science at Boston College .] In yesterday's Boston Sunday Globe, Bryan Bender reported on the Kennedy family's tight-fisted and iron-willed efforts to keep the official papers of Robert F. Kennedy secret. Those papers, spanning Kennedy's public career, are housed under close guard at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. The papers of greatest interest to historians and researchers are those from Kennedy's ye

Arthur B. Laffer: Reaganomics ... What We Learned

[Mr. Laffer is the chairman of Laffer Associates and co-author of "Return to Prosperity: How America Can Regain Its Economic Superpower Status" (Threshold, 2010).] For 16 years prior to Ronald Reagan's presidency, the U.S. economy was in a tailspin—a result of bipartisan ignorance that resulted in tax increases, dollar devaluations, wage and price controls, minimum-wage hikes, misguided spending, pandering to unions, protectionist measures and other policy mistakes.

Jane Eisner: ‘From Hell to Paradise’

[Jane Eisner is editor of the Jewish Daily Forward.] It was 25 years ago, and I still remember the deep, sharp cold as we stood on the Glienicke Bridge that winter morning. The day before, journalists from around Europe were brought to the bridge that separated the outskirts of West Berlin from the East German town of Potsdam. Something important was to happen the next day, we were told. I quickly realized that the footwear I brought from London, where I was based as a correspondent

Lincoln Mitchell: Remembering Reagan

[Lincoln Mitchell is an Associate at Columbia University's Harriman Institute. From 2006-2009, he was the Arnold A. Saltzman Assistant Professor in the Practice of International Politics at Columbia University.] A few days before the 1988 election between George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis, I attended a rally on the University of California campus where I was enrolled in my last year of college. Although it was reasonably clear by then that Bush was going to win the election, we s