Roundup: Talking About History

Charlotte Alston: Tolstoy's Guiding Light

[Charlotte Alston is Senior Lecturer in History at Northumbria University. Lecturer.] Leo Tolstoy, c.1905In October 1910 Leo Tolstoy left his home at Yasnaya Polyana, 120 miles south of Moscow, in a final attempt to separate himself from his wealth, possessions and family. Just over a week after his departure he died of pneumonia in the stationmaster’s house at Astapovo railway station. While his journey lasted, the drama held the attention of the media in Russia and beyond a

William Germano: What Are Books Good For?

[William Germano is dean of the faculty of humanities and social sciences at Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. A longer version of this essay was presented as a talk at the annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses this summer.] I've been wondering lately when books became the enemy. Scholars have always been people of the book, so it seems wrong that the faithful companion has been put on the defensive. Part of the problem is knowing what w

John W. Dean: Releasing Nixon's Grand Jury Testimony: It Could Change History

[John W. Dean, a FindLaw columnist, is a former counsel to President Nixon.] "A key piece of Watergate history that remains shrouded in secrecy -- former President Richard Nixon's grand jury testimony of 1975 -- should be made public, historical experts have told a court," the press release from Public Citizen stated earlier this week. Public Citizen's Litigation Group, representing a number of prominent American historians and archivists, is seeking this information unde

Guy Sorman: Communism’s Nuremberg

[Guy Sorman, a City Journal contributing editor, is the author of Empire of Lies: The Truth about China in the Twenty-First Century and other books. This article was translated by Alexis Cornel.] The four surviving leaders of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime, including the former head of state, Khieu Samphan, have been imprisoned in Phnom Penh since 2007 and will be brought to justice in their own country. On September 16, a United Nations-backed Cambodian tribunal indicted them for ge

Marc Fisher: Remembering Baerbel Bohley, an Artist Who Helped Bring Down the Berlin Wall

[Marc Fisher is The Washington Post's enterprise editor for local news and the author of "After the Wall: Germany, the Germans and the Burdens of History."] On a snowy evening four years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I made a return visit to Baerbel Bohley's apartment on Fehrbelliner Strasse in what used to be East Berlin. The building was a typical relic of World War II shrapnel damage, Communist-era neglect and post-Berlin Wall materialism -- satellite dishes hangin

Pearl Duncan: Ship Entangled in NY Olde Style Real Estate & War-time Drama

[Pearl Duncan covered Newport-Bermuda Yacht Races, Miami-Montego Bay Yacht Races, Caribbean Ocean Racing Circuit (CORC) Races and others, for Sailing, Sail, and Yacht Racing/Cruising Magazines. Now she writes about historic New York and New Yorkers.] When Wall Street was the northern border of New York City, the 18th-century ship found at the World Trade Center saw dramatic colonial real estate and war stories. When Fulton Street was named Partition Street, because everything nort

David R. Stokes: Checkers — The Moment Politics Met Television

[David R. Stokes is a minister, broadcaster, columnist, and author. His current project is a book entitled, Checkers—The Speech That Saved Nixon & Changed Politics at the Dawn of the Television Age. He lives in Fairfax, Virginia.] One day in 1974, as Spring began to give way to Summer, Frank Gannon—wordsmith and White House Fellow—took a walk in Washington, largely to get away from the stress induced by the Nixon White House’s ever-increasing Watergate milieu. He found his way

Oleg Pavlov: Down on the Farm: A History Lesson in Kazan

[Oleg Pavlov is a journalist in the Tatarstan capital Kazan. Local correspondent of the Liberty Radio (Russian Service)] The school is in a busy Kazan street. It’s a massive four-storey school building of standard design, the kind that was built all over the Soviet Union in the 1930s-50s. For some reason all these schools have their facades painted in pale egg powder yellow. The building has big high steps leading up to the main entrance, big windows and doors, and high ceilings. It

Samuel Nicholson: A Most Unlikely Agent: Robert S. Allen

[is the editorial assistant for Washington Decoded.] He is almost totally forgotten now. But for more than 30 years, Robert Sharon Allen was among the most influential columnists of his time, as celebrated as I. F. Stone, Walter Lippmann, or Drew Pearson. Allen rose to prominence in the 1930s as a political liberal, yet by the 1960s,

Oleg Pavlov: Down on the farm ... a history lesson in Kazan

[Oleg Pavlov is a journalist in the Tatarstan capital Kazan. Local correspondent of the Liberty Radio (Russian Service).] The school is in a busy Kazan street. It’s a massive four-storey school building of standard design, the kind that was built all over the Soviet Union in the 1930s-50s. For some reason all these schools have their facades painted in pale egg powder yellow. The building has big high steps leading up to the main entrance, big windows and doors, and high ceilings. I

Daniel J. Flynn: Ted Kennedy, Party Cannibal

[Daniel J. Flynn, the author of A Conservative History of the American Left, blogs at www.flynnfiles.com.]"The fact is that we would have had comprehensive health care now, had it not been for Ted Kennedy's deliberately blocking the legislation that I proposed," former President Jimmy Carter told 60 Minutes last night."It was his fault. Ted Kennedy killed the bill." Carter's observation, fleshed out in his newly published diaries from his presidency, may seem shocking to Dem

Thomas Peace: Are Archaeologists Leading the Way to a New Mode of Public Engagement?

[Thomas Peace is a sixth-year PhD student in history at York University. He is interested in the social and cultural dynamics of community, relationships between peoples with radically different experiences, and connections between geography, environment and community.] I have a confession. As much as I love being a historian, I am not a huge fan of spending most of my day sitting at a desk reading. Some days I am pretty sure that I can feel my fat cells multiplying and the muscle

Peter Preston: When Misery is a Legacy

[Peter Preston is a columnist for the Guardian and the Observer.] Ece Temelkuran is brilliant and beautiful – but, above all, brave. You have to be brave if you're a Turkish journalist covering Armenia, with genocide, cynicism, and truth shredded over 95 years. Temelkuran writes about Yerevan and Ankara and mutual incomprehension, but she could be writing about Cyprus, Kashmir, Korea, Israel; anywhere that is locked in a timewarp of malign remembrance. In 1915 Ottoman T

W. Barksdale Maynard: Debating on Television: Then and Now

[W. Barksdale Maynard is an independent scholar and writer specializing in the history of American architecture.] Half a century ago, American politics stumbled into a new era. In WBBM-TV studios in Chicago on September 26, 1960, presidential candidates Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy stood before cameras and hot lights for the first-ever televised presidential debate. An extraordinary 60 percent of adults nationwide tuned in. This encounter—the first of four—boosted support fo

Rubén Martínez: Bringing "America Tropical" Back to Life

[Rubén Martínez is an English professor at Loyola Marymount University. He is finishing a book about the desert West and borderlands for Metropolitan Books.] Seventy-eight years ago, on Oct. 8, 1932, David Alfaro Siqueiros — at the age of 36 already an important Mexican artist but not yet the icon he would become — sweated shirtless on a cool fall night as he "painted for dear life," The Times' art critic, Arthur Millier, wrote at the time. He was on a deadlin

Anatol Lieven: Reexamining Russian History

[Anatol Lieven, a senior editor at The National Interest, is a professor in the War Studies Department of King's College London and a senior fellow of the New America Foundation in Washington, DC.] One of the main themes of the Valdai Club this year was coming to terms with Russia’s twentieth-century history, or rather the ghastly period between the revolution of 1917 and the death of Stalin in 1953. This forms part of a push by Russian establishment liberals who support President D

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Three Ways of Looking at the PRC’s Latest Campaigns

[Jeffrey Wasserstrom is a professor of history at the 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. His commentaries and reviews have appeared in a wide range of academic journals, as well as in general interest periodicals such as Time and Newsweek.] For someone who’s been dead almost 35 years, Mao Zedong (1893-1976) has been getting a lot of attention latel

Ashley Sayeau: Ella May Wiggins, Southern Labor Activist

[Ashley Sayeau, formerly Nelson, has written on women and politics for a variety of anthologies and publications.] It’s hard not to cheer the end of Pastor Terry Jones’s fifteen minutes of fame, though I regret that whenever the lens is turned on Southerners, it’s always the dumb ones we see. Born in the South myself, I have encountered plenty of shortsightedness there, to be sure. But I have seen other things too: young women who risk physical assault to accompany other women into

Martin Shaw: The politics of genocide ... Rwanda & DR Congo

[Martin Shaw is a historical sociologist of war and global politics, and professor of international relations and politics at the University of Sussex.] Political wars around the history of genocide are most evident in controversies over the Holocaust (see "The Holocaust, genocide studies, and politics", 18 August 2010). But they are also sharpening around Rwanda, where in 1994 the “Hutu Power” regime killed hundreds of thousands of Tutsis as well as moderate Hutus (see Gé

Jeffrey Wasserstrom and Ian Johnson: A Report From the Borderland Between History and Journalism

[Jeffrey Wasserstrom is a professor of history at the University of California at Irvine, and author of "China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know," published this year by Oxford University Press. Ian Johnson is a writer who lives in Beijing and Berlin and the author of "A Mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA, and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West," published this year by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.] A few years ago, one of us was covering Ch