Roundup: Talking About History

Ray Takeyh: Clerics Responsible for Iran's Failed Attempts at Democracy

[The writer is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.] Thursday marks the anniversary of one of the most mythologized events in history, the 1953 coup in Iran that ousted Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadeq. CIA complicity in that event has long provoked apologies from American politicians and denunciations from the theocratic regime. The problem with the prevailing narrative? The CIA's role in Mossadeq's demise was largely inconsequential. The institution most responsibl

Daniel Pipes: Immanuel Kant vs. Israel

[Mr. Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. ©2010 by Daniel Pipes.] As someone who deeply appreciates what Western civilization, for all its faults, has achieved, I puzzle over the hostility many Westerners harbor toward their way of life. If democracy, free markets, and the rule of law have created an unprecedented stability, affluence, and decency; how come so many beneficiaries, fail t

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: How to Win the Clash of Civilizations

[Ms. Ali, a former member of the Dutch parliament, is the author of "Nomad: From Islam to America—A Personal Journey through the Clash of Civilizations," which has just been published by Free Press.] What do the controversies around the proposed mosque near Ground Zero, the eviction of American missionaries from Morocco earlier this year, the minaret ban in Switzerland last year, and the recent burka ban in France have in common? All four are framed in the Western media as

Vladimir Kara-Murza: Russian History Rewritten, Again

[Vladimir Kara-Murza JR. is the Washington bureau chief of RTVi television network. He was previously a correspondent for the newspapers Novye Izvestia and Kommersant and editor in chief of the Russian Investment Review.] Russia is famously a country with an unpredictable past. With a brief exception of the 1990s, regimes of the day freely rewrote the historical narrative for their own expediency. A famous Soviet-era joke advised that the latest edition of the encyclopedia had a reg

Dore Gold: Debunking the Myth That Israel Is a Colonialist State

[Dore Gold is an Israeli statesman who has served in various diplomatic positions under several Israeli governments. He is the current President of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.] The argument that Israel is a colonialist entity is often marshaled to undermine the Jewish state’s legitimacy. The theme has certainly permeated Western academia, almost uncritically. For decades, it has been employed against Israel in one international forum after another. In 1973, the U.N. Gen

Eric Foner: The History of White People

[Eric Foner is DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University.] In 1855, Abraham Lincoln, then making his living as an Illinois lawyer, represented William Dungey, a dark-complexioned man who was suing his brother-in-law for slander for referring to Dungey as “Black Bill, a Negro.” Lincoln challenged the veracity of defense depositions that claimed that Dungey was known to be of mixed racial ancestry. Dungey was actually Portuguese, Lincoln told the jury. “My client is n

Ross Terrill: Mao Zedong and All That

[Ross Terrill, associate in research at Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, is the author of Mao (currently a bestseller in China), The New Chinese Empire, and Madam Mao.] ...In Shanghai, a high school textbook, History, painstakingly crafted a mile or two from the Expo site and launched at schools in 2006, suggested what reformers think should await the six-year-old. Here Chinese history is less conflicted and more “harmonious” (a tactful nod to President Hu Jintao’s fav

Mark Tooley: Religiously Remembering Hiroshima

[Mark Tooley is president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington, D.C. and author of Taking Back the United Methodist Church.] Somewhat surprisingly, the 65th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki this month passed without many sharp condemnations and calls for repentance by left-leaning church officials. The head of the Two Futures Project, a coalition for left-leaning evangelicals urging a nuclear free world, blogged for the Huffington Post about the atomic anni

Michael Johnson: The Delightful Voltaire

[Michael Johnson spent 17 years at McGraw-Hill, including six years as a news executive in New York. He now writes from Bordeaux in France.] Voltaire, that ultimate freethinker and lifelong iconoclast, has never quite lost his audience. His epigrams are among the favorites of speechwriters and his political writings seem almost contemporary. Indeed he would make a suitable patron of today's U.S. Libertarian Party if its elders cared to look back far enough. (They tend to stop at Th

Rupert Cornwell: If Only America Understood Tony Judt

[Rupert Cornwell is Washington correspondent for the Independent.] I never met Tony Judt but I will miss him, badly. First and foremost of course there's the loss of his historical scholarship, his marvellous books and his evident relish of intellectual combat. Our lives, geographically at least, were also not dissimilar. We both lived for long spells on the continent of Europe before settling, by accident or design, in the US. Then there were the two dozen or so essays

David Pilling: Hiroshima Still Clouds a Postwar Friendship

[David Pilling became the Financial Times' Asia Editor, based in Hong Kong, in September 2008.] As peace doves fluttered across the ghostly skeleton of Hiroshima’s Atomic Bomb Dome last Friday and a sombre Buddhist temple bell tolled, the presence of one man added to the poignancy of what is always a bitter and beautiful ceremony. That man was John Roos, US ambassador to Japan and the first representative of the US government to attend the memorial in the 65 years since the atomic b

Regina Jones: Watts in Retrospect

[Regina Jones, a lifelong resident of Los Angeles, published SOUL Newspaper from 1965 to 1982. Today she is working on the SOUL Legacy Collection, which has been donated to UCLA.] "Officer needs help," an urgent whisper came through my headset. I stopped breathing and tilted my head to listen. There it was again: "Officer needs help." "Officer requesting help, please give your location and identify yourself." My voice was well-modulated --

Gareth Evans: Nuclear Threat Cannot Be Ignored

[Gareth Evans, former foreign minister and president emiritus of the International Crisis Group, is co-chair of the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament.] People sometimes forget that the boy who cried wolf ended up being eaten. True, nobody has been killed by a nuclear weapon since the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 65 years ago this month. And with Cold War tensions long past, it is all too easy for policymakers and publics to resi

Justin McGuirk: Moscow's Architectural Heritage is Crumbling Under Capitalism

[Justin McGuirk is the editor of Icon, the international architecture and design magazine. An award-winning journalist and critic, his writings on design culture range from the architecture of Palestinian refugee camps to the design of electric shavers.] ...Any sightseers embarking on a tour of Moscow's avant-garde architecture from the early 20th century had better brace themselves for a catalogue of degradation. The more hallowed the building in the architectural history books, th

Tony Platt: Bombs Away

[Tony Platt is recently retired from some 40 years of full-time teaching American history, public policy, and social sciences at University of Chicago (1966-1968), Berkeley (1968-1977), and California State University, Sacramento (1977-2007). I completed an undergraduate degree at Oxford University (1960-1963) and received my doctorate from Berkeley in 1966.]I'm traveling around New Mexico for the first time, my eyes opened wide by colors, clouds, and light.  It's all quite wonderful

William Eamon: The Disease Called Curiosity

[William Eamon is Regents Professor of History and Dean of the Honors College at New Mexico State University.] Nowadays we think of curiosity as an emotion necessary for the advancement of knowledge, indeed as the well-spring of scientific discovery. It was not always so. Saint Augustine, in the fourth century, stated the traditional medieval view of curiosity, and it wasn’t favorable. In the Confessions, the Bishop of Hippo made inquisitiveness in general the subject

Joel Mokyr: We Owe Our Modern Prosperity to Enlightenment Ideas

[Joel Mokyr is the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences and a professor of economics and history at Northwestern University. His latest book is The Enlightened Economy: Britain and the Industrial Revolution.] Was the Enlightenment a Good Thing? At first blush, the question sounds almost sacrilegious. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment, after all, taught us to be democratic and to believe in human rights, tolerance, freedom of expression, and many other values that are s

Greg Mitchell: How Press Censorship Hid the Shocking Truth About Nagasaki A-Bomb 65 Years Ago

[Greg Mitchell is co-author of"Hiroshima in America" and writes the popular Media Fix blog for The Nation. He is the former editor of Nuclear Times and Editor & Publisher. Email: epic1934@aol.com Twitter: @GregMitch]Nagasaki, which lost over 70,000 civilians (and a few military personnel) to a new weapon 65 years ago today, has always been The Forgotten A-Bomb City. No one ever wrote a bestselling book called Nagasaki, or made a film titled Nagasaki, Mon Amour. Yet

John Summers: What Politics Does to History

[John Summers is visiting scholar in history at Boston College.] *The Admirable Radical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent, 1945–1970 by Carl Mirra Before Staughton Lynd vanished from intellectual society, he was one of the country’s most recognizable and controversial academics. “I was to be an American Lenin and a tenured professor at an Ivy League university,” he has recalled of the hopes he inherited from his famous parents, Robert and Helen Lynd. By 1970,

Staughton Lynd: The Battle over Radical History

[Staughton Lynd is an historian and activist. He currently lives in Youngstown, Ohio.] In a review essay entitled “What Politics Does to History,” July 19, 2010, John Summers states that my work on the American Revolution “helped initiate the long fashion for sneering at dead white men of ideas, and turned history from a means of understanding to a record of heroes and villains.” Mr. Summers also finds in my work a “refusal to acknowledge the many-sidedness of history" that &qu