Roundup: Talking About History

Warren Kozak: Remembering JFK in an Age of Terror

[Mr. Kozak is the author of "LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay" (Regnery, 2009).] For many Americans over the age of 55, Nov. 22 rarely passes without a wistful sense of sadness and the thought: What if? But today, 47 years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the initial feeling of shock and disbelief has long since been replaced by the sense that the world took a very bad turn on that day in 1963—one that we have never quite been able to correct.

Charles Moore: Margaret Thatcher's resignation ... A career that did not die in vain

[Charles Moore covers politics with the wisdom and insight that come from having edited The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph and The Spectator.] Twenty years ago this morning, having slept on the matter, Margaret Thatcher got up and decided to resign. At 7.30, she rang her principal private secretary and got the process rolling. At 9am, in a tearful session, she announced her resignation to the Cabinet. The news was put out at 9.25, and the Cabinet then turned to

Glenn W. LaFantasie: And If Gen. Lee Hadn't Surrendered at Appomattox

[Glenn W. LaFantasie is the Richard Frockt Family Professor of Civil War History and Director of the Institute for Civil War Studies at Western Kentucky University. His most recent book is "Gettysburg Heroes: Perfect Soldiers, Hallowed Ground" (Indiana University Press, 2008).] There was a time in the not so distant past when Americans could safely assume that the Civil War, which claimed 620,000 Northern and Southern lives, resulted in two immutable outcomes: It forever s

Rebecca Taylor: Rebecca Taylor: When I Grow Up I Want to Be... an Art Historian?

[Rebecca Taylor is a Senior Communications Specialist at the J. Paul Getty Trust, a contemporary art history instructor at UCLA extension, an arts writer, and an active member of the Los Angeles art scene.]When I grow up I want to be a...Children often fill in the blank with a myriad of respectable positions -- doctor, lawyer, police officer, teacher, etc. -- but few proclaim their intent to be an art historian. I was that rare exception -- a fourteen year-old irrevocably cap

Andrew Leonard: Chinese of a Certain Age...

[Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon.] BEIJING -- It's open-mic night at an expat bar called Paddy O'Shea's located in the embassy district in central Beijing. While an American newly arrived to to the country warbles The Stylistics' "You Make Me Feel Brand New" to an appreciative audience, Dionysius, a half-Greek, half-Albanian expat is telling me of his adventures teaching English in China. Dionysius has been stunned to discover that some of the older Beijingers he

Allen C. Guelzo: The Douglas Debate--No Lincoln This Time

[Allen C. Guelzo, a prominent Lincoln scholar, is William Garwood Visiting Professor of Politics at Princeton.] What's in a name? A great deal, if it happens to be Stephen A. Douglas. A hundred and fifty years ago, Stephen Arnold Douglas was the most powerful politician in America. He had begun his political career as a hyper-loyal Andrew Jackson Democrat, snatched up one of Illinois' U.S. Senate seats in 1846, and rose from there to the heights of Congressional stardom

Sherrilyn A. Ifill: What Impunity Looks Like

[Sherrilyn A. Ifill, who teaches at the University of Maryland, writes about the law for The Root.] It's been almost two years since the end of the administration of George W. Bush. Nine years since 9/11. Nine years since the massive roundup of Muslim and Arab men without probable cause. Seven years since the invasion of Iraq on false pretenses. Eight years since lawyers at the Department of Justice published the torture memos, and government interrogators received approval to engag

John McWhorter: Kanye West: Bard or Bully?

[John McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and lecturer at Columbia University, specializing academically in language change and language contact.] Kanye West yelling that George Bush didn’t care about black people in the wake of Hurricane Katrina was not, in itself, interesting. He had a CD to plump for (Late Registration), as well as just plain himself to plump for, as he was a newer phenom then than the source of regular episodes of galumphing megalomania that

George Scialabba: The Critic as Radical

[George Scialabba is the author of What Are Intellectuals Good For?] Simone de Beauvoir wrote of the 20th-century conservative thinker: “Gloomy or arrogant, he is the man who says no; his real certainties are all negative. He says no to modernity, no to the future, no to the living action of the world; but he knows that the world will prevail over him.” That T.S. Eliot at least partly resembled this portrait he himself acknowledged. As he wrote to a friend in 1921: “Having only cont

Sarah E. Mendelson and Theodore P. Gerber: Coming to Terms With the Soviet Past

[Sarah E. Mendelson is deputy assistant administrator in the Bureau for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance at the U.S. Agency for International Development. Theodore P. Gerber is professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This comment appeared in Vedomosti.] On Oct. 30, Russia commemorated the victims of political repression, including tens of millions of innocent Soviet citizens arrested, brutalized, sent to labor camps or executed under Stalin. Unt

Timothy Snyder: Stalin, Our Contemporary

[Timothy Snyder is Professor of History at Yale University. His most recent book is Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.] NEW HAVEN – Eighty years ago, in the autumn of 1930, Joseph Stalin enforced a policy that changed the course of history, and led to tens of millions of deaths across the decades and around the world. In a violent and massive campaign of “collectivization,” he brought Soviet agriculture under state control. Stalin pursued collectivization de

James Vernon: School History Gets the TV Treatment

[James Vernon is professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, and author, most recently, of Hunger, A Modern History (2007).] Michael Gove's appointment of Simon Schama to restructure history teaching in schools offers a little reassurance that it is now acknowledged there is some public value to the teaching of history, despite the removal of funding for it at university level. Nonetheless, it remains an announcement that tells us more about the contradictions of

Jane Addams: The Nancy Grace of Her Time?

Jane Addams.Jane AddamsThe Chicago social reformer Jane Addams is safely ensconced in the pantheon of liberal heroes, and for good reason. She had a hand in almost every early-20th century progressive cause, from suffrage to the labor movement. She co-founded the ACLU and the NAACP, helped lead the Progressive Party, and became the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. As every schoolchild once knew, she also founded Hull House, one of the most influential social-service organizatio

Antony Beevor: In Defense of History

[Antony Beevor is a best-selling historian. His latest book is "D-Day: The Battle for Normandy."] Is history as good as finished? Our school system seems to think so. Often it seems that the teaching of history is treated by the educational establishment as the rough equivalent of the teaching of dead languages: an unnecessary luxury of a bygone age, and something the modern world no longer requires. In the most recent debates about the national curriculum, history has bee

Adam Garfinkle: An Innocent Abroad

[Adam Garfinkle is the editor in chief of American Interest.] If, as Winston Churchill declared on 1 October, 1939, Russia is “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”, then the foreign policy of the Obama administration is an ambivalence wrapped in a mentality inside a perplexity. The latter is not as inclined to malignity as was the former in Joseph Stalin’s time, but it is just as difficult to decipher as we approach its first term halfway mark. The fact that

Alexei Bayer: Russia Could Have Been China

[Alexei Bayer, a native Muscovite, is a New York-based economist.] A recent radio feature by Anne Garrells, a U.S. correspondent with National Public Radio in Moscow, quoted a Russian engineer who described the Moscow-Volga canal: “The Moscow River, which often dried up, could not supply the capital’s growing needs. Now, 90 percent of water for this city of 10 million comes from the Volga. Many died building this canal. I have no love for Stalin. But there was no other way to do it,

James S. Robbins: Vietnam Vets Betrayed Again

[James S. Robbins is senior editorial writer for foreign affairs at The Washington Times and author of "This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive" (Encounter Books, 2010).] The 50th-anniversary commemoration of the Vietnam War should be a time of reflection and redemption, when a grateful country pays a long-standing debt to veterans who nobly fought in the conflict but came home to scorn and spit. But if a Pentagon bureaucrat has his way, the Viet vets will be denied

Jennifer Lind: Can the U.S. and Japan Finally Reconcile Over Hiroshima?

[Jennifer Lind is Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College and the author of Sorry States: Apologies in International Politics. She has worked as a consultant for RAND and for the Office of the Secretary, U.S. Department of Defense; lived and worked in Japan; and written previously for The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy.] Ever since this past August when Ambassador to Japan John Roos became the first U.S. diplomat to attend Hiroshima's annual memorial ce

Greg Beato: What Happened After JFK Told America to Take a Hike

[Greg Beato is contributing editor to Reason magazine.] Fifty years ago this month, in the pages of Sports Illustrated, president-elect John F. Kennedy told the country that its “growing softness” and “increasing lack of fitness” were a “menace” to U.S. security. “Our struggles against aggressors throughout our history have been won on the playgrounds and corner lots and fields of America,” Kennedy exclaimed. But a 15-year research study showed that Austrian, Swiss, and Italian scho

Michael Barone: Bush’s Decision Points

[Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner.] George W. Bush is sitting on a hotel sofa in front of a south-facing window on a sunny November morning. His presidential memoir, Decision Points, is No. 1 on Amazon and is expected to be No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list. “I’ve got a very comfortable life,” he says. Decision Points, as the title suggests, does not purport to be the full story of Bush’s life or his administration. It “pr