Roundup: Talking About History

Dan Todman: How We Remember Them: The 1914-18 War Today

[Dan Todman is senior lecturer in history at Queen Mary College, University of London. He is the author of The Great War: Myth and Memory (Hambledon, 2005).] The annual commemoration of the fallen in the world wars and small wars Britain has been involved in takes place on the nearest Sunday to "Remembrance Day", 11 November. On that day in 1918, at 11 o'clock in the morning, the guns fell silent on the western front for the first time since August 1914. The fact that this

Ruby Bridges: 50 Years Later, I'm Still Trying to Integrate My School

[Ruby Bridges lives in New Orleans and runs the Ruby Bridges Foundation, dedicated to educating children on social justice issues.] On the morning of my first day of first grade at a new school, 50 years ago Sunday, U.S. marshals knocked on my family's door. They had been sent by the president of the United States, they said, to take me to school. I was 6 years old, and I had no idea who these men in uniform were. Nor did I know what would happen that day as I became the first black

Doyle McManus: GWB Plays Defense

[Doyle McManus, Washington columnist for the Los Angeles Times, has reported on national and international issues from Washington for more than 25 years. His weekly Op-Ed column delivers original reporting and analysis on a wide range of national issues.] Spare a moment of sympathy, if you can, for George W. Bush. The former president has spent much of his life assuming an air of frat-boy insouciance, as if he didn't much care what people said about him. Bu

Brendan Nyhan: The Misleading Story of Harry Truman's Comeback

[Brendan Nyhan is a political scientist currently serving as a RWJ Scholar in Health Policy Research at the University of Michigan] It's boring to point out that divided government is bad for President Obama, so journalists and commentators have been trying to make silly up-is-down arguments about why GOP control of Congress might help him politically. These pundits frequently invoke the examples of Bill Clinton and Harry Truman, who both campaigned against an oppositio

John McWhorter: Back in the Day, They Didn't Seek Closure

[John McWhorter is a regular contributor to The Root. He is the author of Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English.]The main message from The Grace of Silence, the new memoir from Michele Norris of NPR, is that all of us can be black historians -- and that we need to hop to it with all deliberate

Peter Linebaugh: Laying Down Arms

[Peter Linebaugh teaches history at the University of Toledo. The London Hanged and (with Marcus Rediker) The Many-Headed Hydra: the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. His essay on the history of May Day is included in Serpents in the Garden. His latest book is the Magna Carta Manifesto. He can be reached at: plineba@yahoo.com] On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month the Great Powers of the World signed the armistice layin

Patrick Logan: On Veterans Day, Recalling Dreams Sacrificed

[Patrick Logan, a freelance writer in New Hampshire, is writing a book about his relationship with his father.] The third conditional in English grammar is used to imagine a hypothetical past. It's a structure I've thought about a lot recently while reading the letters my father sent my mother during World War II. Italian King Victor Emmanuel III handed over power to Mussolini on Oct. 28, 1922, one week after my father was born. Two decades later he and the men of his g

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom: Looking at China from Across the Pacific and Across the Himalayas

[Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is a professor of history and department chair at University of California Irvine and the author, most recently, of “China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know,” published this year by Oxford University Press.]

Anne Applebaum: Why George Bush is trying to do a Truman

[Anne Applebaum is a weekly columnist for The Post, writing on foreign affairs.] To hear George W. Bush tell it, he isn't bothered whether we like him or not. He doesn't care that he was hailed as the least popular American president in history, and he doesn't read opinion polls anyway. "I really don't care about perceptions at this point," he declared during a television interview this week, the first he has given since leaving office. "I served, I gave it my all and

Stephen M. Walt: Delusion Points ... 14 Reasons Why You Shouldn't Miss George W. Bush

[Stephen M. Walt, the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international affairs at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and a contributing editor at Foreign Policy, is the author of Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy and, with coauthor J.J. Mearsheimer, The Israel Lobby. He blogs at http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/.] Two years into Barack Obama's presidency, it has become a cliché to observe that the ne

Walter Russell Mead: Lincoln ... The Weakest President Yet?

[Walter Russell Mead is Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. He blogs at The-American-Interest.com.] As election returns drifted in from the nation’s far-flung precincts on November 6 and 7 of 1860, three solid, inescapable facts were clear. First, according to the law of the land, Abraham Lincoln has been elected President of the United States, with a term to beg

CS Monitor Editorial: Will the Civil War Speak to America Again?

Nov. 6 marks 150 years since Americans elected a little-known lawyer from Illinois as president of the United States. The anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s victory also serves as the informal kickoff to the sesquicentennial of the Civil War. Ahead lie five years of commemorations, from the firing on Fort Sumter that began the conflict (April 2011) to the Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves in the Confederate states (January 2013) to the military turning point (Gettysburg, July 2

David R. Stokes: The Night Nixon Moved America

[David R. Stokes is a minister, broadcaster, columnist, and author. He is currently writing a book titled, Checkers—The Speech That Saved Nixon & Changed Politics at the Dawn of the Television Age. He lives in Fairfax, Virginia.]On Monday, November 3, 1969, President Richard M. Nixon sat at his desk in the Oval Office as the clock crawled toward 9:30 p.m. He was reviewing the words he would momentarily share with the American people. There wasn’t a Teleprompter in sight. Nixon insti

Dominic Tierney: 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic': America's Song of Itself

On April 3, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. rose to speak in support of striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. "I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land," King announced. "And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man." And then he closed in his lyrical voice: "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord." The next day he lay dying on the second floor of the Lorraine M

Bill Moyers: Welcome to the Plutocracy

[Bill Moyers is an acclaimed American journalist, author, documentarian and public commentator.]Bill Moyers speech at Boston University on October 29, 2010, as a part of the Howard Zinn Lecture Series.I was honored when you asked me to join in celebrating Howard Zinn’s life and legacy. I was also surprised. I am a journalist, not a historian. The difference between a journalist and an historian is that the historian knows the difference. George Bernard Shaw once com

Scott McLemee: Shrub Studies

[Scott McLemee writes for Inside Higher Ed.] Next week, Crown Publishers will issue President George W. Bush’s memoir Decision Points, covering what the former president calls “eight of the most consequential years in American history,” which seems like a fair description. They were plenty consequential. To judge from the promotional video, Bush will plumb the depths of his insight that it is the role of a president to be “the decider.” Again, it’s hard to argue with his point -- th

Eden Naby and Jamsheed K. Choksy: Is This the End of 2,000 Years of Christianity in the Middle East?

[Eden Naby is a cultural historian of the Middle East. Jamsheed K. Choksy is professor of Iranian and international studies at Indiana University.] Screaming "kill, kill, kill," suicide bombers belonging to the Islamic State of Iraq, a militant organization connected to al Qaeda in Iraq, stormed a Chaldean church in Baghdad on Sunday. A spokesman for the group subsequently claimed they did so "to light the fuse of a campaign against Iraqi Christians." The assaila

Adam Goodheart: The Last Ordinary Day in 1860

[Adam Goodheart is the author of “1861: The Civil War Awakening,” to be published in April by Alfred A. Knopf. He lives in Washington, D.C., and on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where he is the Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.] Seven score and 10 years ago, a little Pennsylvania town drowsed in the waning light of an Indian summer. Almost nothing had happened lately that the two local newspapers found

Dalton Conley: Making Sense of the 'Me Decade'

[Dalton Conley is vice provost and dean of the social sciences and a professor of sociology at New York University. The paperback edition of his latest book, Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety, was published this year by Vintage.] Does anyone really understand the 1970s? My excuse is that I was only 11 when they passed from the scene. What's yours? Even those folks 10

Tony Horwitz: The 150-Year War

[Tony Horwitz is the author of “Confederates in the Attic” and the forthcoming “Midnight Rising: John Brown’s Raid and the Start of the Civil War.”] MY attic office is walled with books on Lincoln and Lee, slavery and secession. John Brown glares from a daguerreotype on my desk. The Civil War is my sanctum — except when my 7-year-old races in to get at the costume box. Invariably, he tosses aside the kepi and wooden sword to reach for a wizard cloak or Star Wars light saber.