Roundup: Talking About History

Robert Dallek: Wrong Turns in Korea

[Robert Dallek, a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for History for Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power (HarperCollins 2007), is author of the new book The Lost Peace: Leadership in a Time of Horror and Hope, 1945–1953 (HarperCollins 2010).] On its 60th Anniversary, the Korean War looks much like Vietnam, a pointless conflict that gained nothing for those who began it: North Korea’s Kim Il-sung and South Korea’s Syngman Rhee, with the consent of the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stali

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: Faces of America: The Yamaguchi Story -- How an Immigrant Farmer Paved the Way for Success

[Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard. He has written twelve books and produced and narrated ten documentaries. His new series, Black in Latin America, airs on PBS in April.] You might say that since ABC aired its most famous mini-series in 1977, that I have had a serious case of Roots envy. Like Alex Haley, I wanted to be able to find the ancestors on my family tree, deep into the depths of slavery. And to find the lost tribal or ethnic id

Samira Kawash: How Candy and Halloween Became Best Friends

[Samira Kawash researches and writes on the cultural and social history of candy in 20th-century America. She is professor emerita, Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ). She blogs on candy history and opinion at CandyProfessor.com.] Wherever you turn this October, candy beckons. Americans will spend an estimated $2 billion on candy during the Halloween season this year, and here's a fun fact from the California Milk Processors Board: "an average Jack-O-Lantern bucket carries

Niels Kraaier: Preserving the 'Factory of Death'

[Niels Kraaier is currently working at Griffith University in Brisbane on a PhD thesis on the impact of advancing communication technology on Australia’s multicultural society. He worked as a Speechwriter and Media Advisor to the Minister of Transport, Public Works and Water Management in The Netherlands before relocating to Australia in 2008.] After almost half a century of communist repression that followed the Second World War, Poland seems to have finally entered a better future

Ian C. Friedman: "We Believe That Peace is at Hand"

[Ian C. Friedman is the author of four books; Manny Ramirez (2010), A to Z of Latino Americans (2007), American Rights: Freedom of Speech and the Press (2005), and Library in a Book: Education Reform (2003; revised 2010.) He is also the co-author of two books; Presidents: A Biographical Dictionary (2010) and American Inventors, Entrepreneurs, and Business Visionaries (2010.)]As President Nixon successfully campaigned for reelection in 1972, many of his goals for Vietnamization were b

D.J. Waldie: Los Angeles in Maps

[D.J. Waldie is a contributing editor for Opinion. He wrote the forward to the just-published book, "Los Angeles in Maps," by Glen Creason with additional essays by Dydia DeLyser, Joe Linton, William J. Warren and Morgan P. Yates, and photography by Julie Shafer.] As a boy, I paged through the old Renie Atlas of Los Angeles streets and later the Thomas Guide. The fact that there was a map linking my Lakewood neighborhood to the vast grid of Los Angeles made my suburban loc

Douglas Feith: Can Israel Be Jewish and Democratic?

[Mr. Feith, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, served as under secretary of defense from 2001 to 2005. He is the author of "War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism".] Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently asked Palestinian peace negotiators to acknowledge Israel as a Jewish state. Some critics have called this move cynical, because Palestinian leaders are unlikely to offer such an acknowledgment. But others oppose it for

Ian Morris: Is the west still the best?

[Ian Morris is Willard Professor of Classics, History and Archaeology at Stanford University, and author of “Why the West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History, and What they Reveal About the Future”.] The west is still the “best”—if by that we mean richest, strongest, and most inventive. True, China now has the second biggest economy in the world and Japan the third; but Europe and north America still generate two thirds of the world’s wealth, own two thirds of its weapons, and sp

Rick Perlstein: That Seventies Show

[Rick Perlstein's most recent book is Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.] I've been calling 1973, as I sort through my research for a political and cultural history of the United States in the '70s, the Year Without Christmas Lights. News of fuel shortages—what would come to be called the "energy crisis"—had begun cropping up in the spring, around the same time the resignations of Nixon confidants John Ehrlichman and Bob Haldeman introduced t

Alexis Madrigal: The Zambian Space Cult of the 1960s

[Alexis Madrigal is a senior editor for TheAtlantic.com. A former staff writer for Wired.com, he's the author of the forthcoming history of clean energy in America, Powering the Dream.]We tend to associate space exploration with hulking rockets and massive R&D budgets, but there's a strange thread through the last fifty years of outsider space exploration. We've seen it recently in people sending

Piers Brendon: Will China seek revenge for its century of humiliation at the hands of the West?

[Piers Brendon is a fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University. His most recent book is The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781–1997.] Among the gifts brought by Lord Macartney, who came to Beijing in 1793 on a historic embassy intended to open China to British merchants, was a map of the world, which the Emperor Ch’ien-lung found unacceptable because the Middle Kingdom was represented on it as too small and not in the middle. As it happened, Macartney’s compatriots h

James Swanson: Was Jefferson Davis Captured in a Dress?

[James Swanson is a senior legal scholar at the Heritage Foundation and author of Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer (William Morrow 2006).] On Sunday, May 14, 1865, Benjamin Brown French, commissioner of public buildings for the District of Columbia, left his home on Capitol Hill to buy a copy of the Daily Morning Chronicle. “When I came up from breakfast I went out and got the Chronicle,” he wrote in his journal, “and the first thing that met my eyes was ‘Capture of Je

James Tuten: The End of Lowcountry Rice Culture

[James Tuten is the author of "Lowcountry Time and Tide: The Fall of The South Carolina Rice Kingdom" and creator of ricekingdom.com. He is an associate professor of history at Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pa.] One hundred years ago South Carolina coastal dwellers, unbeknownst to them, were in the middle of an especially intense set of hurricane seasons. Never has the state felt the sting of three destructive storms in as many years. Storms can bring death and destructio

J.R. McNeill: Malarial Mosquitoes Helped Defeat British in Battle that Ended Revolutionary War

[McNeill is a Georgetown University professor of environmental history and author of many books, including "Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914."] Major combat operations in the American Revolution ended 229 years ago on Oct. 19, at Yorktown. For that we can thank the fortitude of American forces under George Washington, the siegecraft of French troops of Gen. Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, the count of Rochambeau - and the relentless b

Ron Radosh: Claire Berlinski on Soviet Espionage: A Misleading Article Appears in City Journal

[Ronald Radosh is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at The Hudson Institute, and a Prof. Emeritus of History at the City University of New York, Queensborough Community College.]A few days ago, City Journal posted an important article on its website. It was written by Claire Berlinski, an American journalist who lives in Istanbul, and titled “A Hidden History of Evil: Why doesn’t anyone care about

Alexis Madrigal: The Legend of Coal Oil Johnny, America's Great Forgotten Parable

[Alexis Madrigal is a senior editor for TheAtlantic.com. A former staff writer for Wired.com, he's the author of the forthcoming history of clean energy in America, Powering the Dream.] Surely you've heard of Coal Oil Johnny, right? Before J.R. Ewing, or the Beverly Hillbillies, or even John D. Rockefeller, there was Coal Oil Johnny. He was the first great cautionary tale of the oil age -- and his name would resound in popular culture for more than half a century after

Leon Aron: The Russian Masterpiece You've Never Heard of

[Leon Aron is director of Russian studies at the American Enterprise Institute and author of a forthcoming book on the intellectual origins of the Soviet collapse. All translations in this piece are by the author.] Fifty years ago this past October, Vasily Grossman submitted for publication the greatest Russian novel of the 20th century. The KGB immediately destroyed all copies of what Grossman called Life and Fate (Zhizn' i sud'ba in Russian) except for two hidden by his friends, a

Jason Saltoun-Ebin: Six Lessons Mr. Donilon Could Learn From Reagan's Six National Security Advisers

[Jason Saltoun-Ebin is the editor of The Reagan Files: The Untold Story of Reagan's Top-Secret Efforts to Win the Cold War and the creator of the website, http://www.thereaganfiles.com. He can be reached at thereaganfiles@gmail.com.]Having spent the last decade studying the Reagan administration, and the last few years focusing on Reagan's National Security Council, I thought it could be useful for Mr. Donilon to get a quick review (and a few lessons) of where some of his contempora

Jon Wiener: John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Deportation Battle

[Jon Wiener is a professor of history at UC Irvine and author of "Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files." Copies of the letters he obtained protesting Lennon's deportation order are posted online at lennonfbifiles.com.] In 1972, John Lennon had a problem. He and his wife, Yoko Ono, had been living in New York for a year, and they wanted to stay. But it happened also to be the year President Nixon was running for reelection. Opposition to the Vietnam War

Robert Dallek: The Tyranny of Metaphor in U.S. Foreign Policy

[Presidential historian Robert Dallek is author, most recently, of The Lost Peace: Leadership in a Time of Horror and Hope, 1945-1953.] In 1952, British historian Denis William Brogan published a brilliantly perceptive article on "The Illusion of American Omnipotence." In the midst of the Korean War, Brogan was not only commenting on Americans' frustration with their inability to prevail decisively against supposedly inferior Chinese and North Korean forces, but also cauti