Roundup: Talking About History

Vincent J. Cannato: The ‘Military-Industrial Complex’ at 50

[Vincent J. Cannato is an associate professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.] Fifty years ago today, Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his farewell address to the nation. With the exception of George Washington’s speech, most presidential farewell addresses have been unmemorable affairs. But Eisenhower’s has had the greatest impact, all because of one phrase: “the military-industrial complex.” Eisenhower used the term only once in the speech, warni

Alan Frost: Bound to Botany Bay: Putting to Rest an Ancient Imperial Lie

[Frost is emeritus professor of history at La Trobe University in Melbourne. His previous books include The Voyage of the Endeavour, Arthur Phillip, 1738-1814: His Voyaging, Botany Bay Mirages and The Global Reach of Empire.] ...So we come to the central question: why did the Pitt administration decide to establish a convict colony at Botany Bay?... To understand this choice, we have to look to the other factors, at the other historical contexts that I have analysed. Th

Byron York: Flashback ... How Clinton Exploited Oklahoma City for Political Gain

[Byron York is the Examiner’s chief political correspondent.] There are reports Democrats plan an extensive effort to link the Tea Party, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, and Republicans in general to the shootings in Arizona. The idea is to pin blame on those groups much as Bill Clinton was able to pin blame on Newt Gingrich, Limbaugh, and Republicans in the aftermath of the April 19, 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. It's an effort that was previewed last year, on the 15th anniversary of t

Eric Abrahamsen: How Mao Killed Chinese Humor

[Eric Abrahamsen is a freelance translator in Beijing and a contributor to Paper Republic.] "Socialism is great!" Was there ever a statement riper for ironic mockery than this erstwhile catchphrase of the infant Chinese republic? How could a thinking people accept this and a host of other bald statements at face value, without so much as a raised eyebrow or a silently murmured really? And why, 60 years later, when the Chinese government calls the Dalai Lama a "devil w

Robert Schlesinger: How -- and Why -- Ike's Farewell was Written

[Robert Schlesinger, the opinion editor at U.S. News & World Report, is author of White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters.] A farewell message was on Dwight Eisenhower’s mind well before the end of his term. Chatting with chief speechwriter Malcolm Moos in the Oval Office in May 1959, the president mentioned as an aside that there was one speech he particularly wanted to deliver. “I want to have something to say when I leave here,” Ike said. “I’m not interested in

Alexandre Jardin: The Cry of My Conscience about My Family's Nazi Collaboration

[Alexandre Jardin is a French author whose novels include Des gens très bien, Le Zèbre and Quinze ans après.] France is a curious country. You can talk about anything here: about paedophilia, about the most shameful passions, but not about our families' dishonour during the second world war – because that particular past just won't pass. Especially if you argue that to have taken part in the worst atrocities of the Nazi occupation one didn't necessarily have to be a monster.

David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz: OSHA at Forty

[David Rosner, a member of the National Academy's Institute of Medicine, is Ronald H. Lauterstein Professor of Sociomedical Sciences and History at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. Gerald Markowitz is Distinguished Professor of History at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and City University of New York Graduate Center. Together they have authored eight books on the history of public health, occupational health and environmental health.] On July 28, Alex

James W. Loewen: Five Myths About Why the South Seceded

[Sociologist James W. Loewen is the author of"Lies My Teacher Told Me" and co-editor, with Edward Sebesta, of"The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader."] One hundred and fifty years after the Civil War began, we're still fightin

Robert Schlesinger: Fifty Years of the Military-Industrial Complex ... Drafting Ike's Farewell

[Robert Schlesinger, the opinion editor at U.S. News & World Report, is author of White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters.] A farewell message was on Dwight Eisenhower’s mind well before the end of his term. Chatting with chief speechwriter Malcolm Moos in the Oval Office in May 1959, the president mentioned as an aside that there was one speech he particularly wanted to deliver. “I want to have something to say when I leave here,” Ike said. “I’m not interested in

Fareed Zakaria: Remembering Samuel Huntington

[Fareed Zakaria is editor-at-large of Time magazine. This November 2010 speech at Harvard University was adapted for FP with permission from the author.] The first time I met Sam Huntington, I was not yet his student; I was an intern for the New Republic. I was still an undergraduate at Yale, and there was a peculiar campaign being waged by a Yale math professor named Serge Lang to deny Sam Huntington a seat in the National Academy of Sciences. I was intrigued by the whole thing, so

Francis Fukuyama: Samuel Huntington's Legacy

[Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.] Of all of Samuel Huntington's contributions to the study of politics, the most important was his 1968 work Political Order in Changing Societies. This book was probably the last major attempt to write a general theory of political development, and its significance needs to be placed in the context of the ideas that were dominant in the 1950s and

Arnold Reisman: On an Armenian Manifesto Circa 1923, II

[Arnold Reisman is an engineer and a retired professor of operations research at Case Western Reserve University. Born in Lodz in 1934, he came to the United States after World War II and is the author of numerous books about Holocaust refugees in Turkey, including Turkey's Modernization: Refugees from Nazism and Ataturk's Vision (New Academia, 2006).]On December 6, 2010, in its Roundup: Talking About Historysection,HNN posted the ar

Clare Spark: Dirty Little Secrets Exposed by the Radosh-Berlinski Spat

[Clare Spark, an independent scholar, is the author of Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival, and she blogs at http://clarespark.com.] During the last few weeks, an exceptionally portentous fight has broken out owing to a recent long and juicy article in the Spring 2010 edition of City Journal by Claire Berlinski. This essay was angrily dissected in several rebuttals by R

Clare Spark: F.O. Matthiessen: Martyr to McCarthyism?

[Clare Spark, an independent scholar, is the author of Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival, and she blogs at http://clarespark.com.] According to Jennifer Burns, historian and biographer of Ayn Rand, F. O. Matthiessen (1902-1950) was a victim of McCarthyism, hounded to death by zealous anticommunists. She does not provide evidence for this claim. While reading Ayn Rand’s novels and then two recent biographies, I was struck by the represent

Alexander Heffner: What Could Have Been of Impeachment

[Alexander Heffner is a junior concentrating in history at Harvard.] Early American Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase presents us with something of an infamous story in the nation’s early history. Chase, a staunch anti-constitutionalist turned fiery Federalist partisan and John Adams loyalist, is the only justice to be impeached in more than two hundred yesars of Supreme Court jurisprudence. Campaigning for Adams’s re-election, strictly applying the Alien

Andrew J. Bacevich: The Tyranny of Defense Inc.

[Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of international relations and history at Boston University. His most recent book is Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War.] American politics is typically a grimy business of horses traded and pork delivered. Political speech, for its part, tends to be formulaic and eminently forgettable. Yet on occasion, a politician will transcend circumstance and bear witness to some lasting truth: George Wash- ington in his Farewell Address, for exam

Glenda R. Carpio and Werner Sollors: The Newly Complicated Zora Neale Hurston

[Glenda R. Carpio and Werner Sollors are professors of English and African and African American studies at Harvard University.] Last spring began with no hint of any but the usual excitement of a new class. We were team-teaching a course on Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston, writers who represent opposing literary and political tendencies, intellectuals who disliked each other's work and said so in print. Wright found Hurston's prose in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) cloake

Nigel Lawson: Five Myths and a Menace

[This is an edited version of the inaugural Adam Smith Lecture, given by Lord Lawson, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, at Pembroke College, Cambridge, on November 22, 2010.] I wonder whether enough has been made by Adam Smith scholars, which I do not claim to be, of the intellectual connection between Smith and Charles Darwin. Darwin himself records how, during his last year at Cambridge, he spent much of his time studying Smith. And I have long been struck by the parallel be

Edward Rothstein: To Each His Own Museum, as Identity Goes on Display

Me! Me! Me! That is the cry, now often heard, as history is retold. Tell my story, in my way! Give me the attention I deserve! Haven’t you neglected me, blinded by your own perspectives? Now let history be told not by the victors but by people over whom it has trampled. And why, after all, should it be any different? Isn’t that the cry made by most of us? We want to be acknowledged, given credit for our unique experiences. We want to tell our stories. We want to convert you fr

John Lukacs: The Importance of Being Winston

[John Lukacs is a historian. His most recent books are The Legacy of the Second World War (Yale University Press, 2010); Through the History of the Cold War: The Correspondence of George F. Kennan and John Lukacs (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); and the forthcoming The Future of History (Yale University Press, Spring 2011).] In August 1942, Churchill and Stalin met for the first time. That event was the least discussed and yet perhaps the most important among the many “summ