Roundup: Talking About History

Dori J. Maynard: Mandela and the Gift of Hope

Somewhere in my house are several copies of South Africa's 1994 election ballot. When I bought them, I was seeking more than just a piece of history. I was buying hope because they reminded me that the impossible can be possible if we stay true to our course. By now, Nelson Mandela's journey from prisoner to the presidency of South Africa, from mere mortal to moral icon, has been told so many times that it almost feels preordained. But during his prison days on Robben I

Krista McCracken: Canadian Census Data: A Lost Resource

[Krista McCracken is a public history consultant and is currently working as a Digitization Facilitator for Knowledge Ontario.]Statistics Canada is making significant changes to the way that the Canadian census is conducted.  Beginning in 2011 the long census form will no longer be distributed to Canadians. Previously, this portion of the census collected information on topics such as ethnicity, religion, employment, educa

Charles W. Hayford: Joan Hinton (1921-2010)

[Charles W. Hayford, a Visiting Scholar, History Department, Northwestern University, is Editor of the Journal of American-East Asian Relations and blogs at Frog in a Well. Among his proudest achievements is winning China Beat’s 2009 “Prettiest, Wittiest, Grittiest” Quiz.]Joan Hinton died last month in a Beijing hospital at the age of 88. It was surprising that so many mainstream American newspapers ran detailed obituaries. Hinton had lived in China since 1948, mostly running dairy

Peter Zarrow: Me, Wang Hui, and Liberal Wishy-washy-ness

[Peter Zarrow is a historian at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica. His work focuses on modern China and he is the author, most recently, of China in War and Revolution, 1895-1949 (Routledge, 2005).] Wang Hui is a cultural historian and critic, and professor at Qinghua University in Beijing. He was for several years editor of Dushu, a serious general interest magazine perhaps roughly — very roughly — equivalent to the Atlantic monthly in the US. He is also known as a l

John Amoda: Henry Louis Gates and the Slavery Blame Game, Part 2

[John Amoda is professor emeritus of political science at the City College of New York.] OUR new understanding of the scope of African involvement in the slave trade is not historical guesswork. Thanks to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, directed by the historian David Eltis of Emory University, we know the ports from which more than 450,000 of our African ancestors were shipped out to what is now the United States (the database has records of 12.5 million people shipped to

Heghnar Watenpaugh: Armenian Church and the Getty Should Work Together

[Heghnar Watenpaugh is an associate professor of art history at UC Davis. She is a former Getty postdoctoral fellow and is of Armenian descent.] Seven illustrated pages ripped out of a medieval Gospels manuscript: Who owns them; who should own them? Those who value them as works of art, or those who revere them as religious objects? The seven pages feature beautiful illuminations by Toros Roslin, the most important Armenian miniatures painter of the Middle Ages. Their value is immen

John Turner: Give R.B. Bennett His Place on the Hill

[John Turner was Canada’s 17th prime minister.] As a boy growing up in Ottawa in the 1930s, it was my good fortune to meet Richard Bedford Bennett, Canada’s 11th prime minister, on many occasions. I recall a friendly man with a booming voice who gave me chocolates once in a while. A man with progressive views for his time about women, he was responsible for bringing my late mother, Phyllis Gregory (later Ross), into Canada’s public service during the Great Depression. S

Michael L. Gillette: The War on Poverty

[Michael L. Gillette is the current executive director of Humanities Texas, the state humanities council. Before serving as the executive director, he directed the LBJ Library’s Oral History Program from 1976 to 1991, and then became the director of the Center for Legislative Archives at the National Archives for twelve years after.

Iain Mills: Japan's Notorious Unit 731 Rears Its Ugly Head

[Iain Mills is a Beijing-based freelance writer specializing in the Chinese political economy, who can be reached at sigmills@hotmail.com] Harbin, provincial capital of Heilongjiang province in northeast China, is most famous for its European architecture and ice festival, when huge structures are carved out of frozen blocks and adorned with lights. However, a less pleasant history lurks in the city's southern Pingfang district

Mitsuzane Okauchi: Looted Cultural Property—Who Owns It?

[Mitsuzane Okauchi is Professor, Faculty of Letters, Arts and Sciences, at Waseda University.] An international meeting in Cairo, Egypt concerning the “Return and Protection of Cultural Property” was held for two days from April 7-8, 2010. A total of 21 countries including South Korea, China, India, Greece, Italy, Syria, Egypt, and Peru participated in a discussion which pressed for the return of such famous antiquities as the bust of Queen Nefertiti and the Rosetta Stone.

Dan Gillmor: Saving Our Digital Heritage

[A longtime participant in the tech and media worlds, Dan Gillmor is director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurshipat Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication.] They're trying to save the news. Among other things. No, this isn't yet another thumb-sucking cogitation about the future of journalism, at least not the kind we typically see these days. Rather, this is about a different issue: H

Greg Mitchell: How the First Nuclear Blast, 65 Years Ago Today, Set Truman on Path to Hiroshima

[Greg Mitchell writes the Media Fix blog for The Nation, where this piece first appeared. He is co-author with Robert Jay Lifton of"Hiroshima in American" and author of many other books.]Sixty-five years ago today the Nuclear Age began with the first successful test of an atomic weapon at the Trinity site in the New Mexico desert. Earlier this week I wrote

Frank Mankiewicz and Joel L. Swerdlow: The Days of Presidential Slogans May Be Gone

[Frank Mankiewicz, a former president of NPR, was press secretary to Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. Joel L. Swerdlow is an adjunct professor at the University of Texas. They are co-authors of "Remote Control: Television and the Manipulation of American Life."] This week marks the 50th anniversary of when John F. Kennedy, accepting his party's presidential nomination, first mentioned to a national audience his "New Frontier." The phrase, of course, took hold, and the Ken

Michael Gerson: Virginia Museum's Bust of Stalin is an Atrocity by Any Name

[Michael Gerson is a columnist for the WaPo.] In 1931, during the liquidation of millions of kulaks, Joseph Stalin granted an audience to George Bernard Shaw and Lady Nancy Astor. Astor bluntly asked: "When are you going to stop killing people?" To which Stalin replied: "When it is no longer necessary."... Statues and busts of Stalin were once mass-produced in Russia as icons of a political cult. Few can now be found on public display outside the Sta

Mark Lee Gardner: Billy the Kid ... A Pardon at Long Last?

[Mark Lee Gardner is a professional historian, author, musician and consultant.] "I expect you have forgotten what you promised me," Billy the Kid wrote to New Mexico Territory's governor, Lew Wallace, in 1881. The Kid was writing from a Santa Fe jail cell. He was there because of the dogged efforts of Pat Garrett, who had been elected sheriff of Lincoln County, which comprised the southeastern part of the territory, on the promise that he would put a stop to Billy and his

Eric Foner: Restless Confederates

[Eric Foner, a member of The Nation's editorial board and DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, is the author of Give Me Liberty, an American history textbook.] The bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth has come and gone, and with it a flood of books about the sixteenth president. But the sesquicentennial of the Civil War now looms on the horizon, promising its own deluge of books of every size, shape and description. We will be fortunate indeed if in sheer o

Greg Mitchell: Secrecy and Deadly Radiation: On the Birth of the Nuclear Age 65 Years Ago

[Greg Mitchell is the former editor of Editor & Publisher and author of nine books, including "So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits and the President Failed on Iraq;" "Why Obama Won"; "The Campaign of the Century"; "Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady"; and (with Robert Jay Lifton) "Hiroshima in America" and "Who Owns Death?" He was senior editor at the legendary Crawdaddy during the 1970s.] While most peopl

Matthew Omolesky: The Henchmen of Yesteryear

[Matthew Omolesky specialized in European affairs at the Whitehead School of Diplomacy's graduate program, and received his juris doctor from The Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law.] In the aftermath of the Allied liberation of France, the poet Louis Aragon, mimicking his medieval forebear François Villon while channeling a despondent collaborator in the 1945 ballad "The Snows of Sigmaringen," famously asked not "Where are the snows of yesteryear?" but

Temtsel Hao: Mao Zedong in Video-History's Gaze

[Temtsel Hao is a journalist with the BBC World Service, based in London ] Yuan Tengfei, a 38-year old Beijing middle-school history-teacher, has become both a high-profile and a controversial figure in China’s online public discourse - called the “best history teacher" by his fans, a traitor to his nation and state by critics, all the while remaining a member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). His lively lectures in fluent, Beijing-accented Mandarin - spiced with funny anec

Jordan Michael Smith: From Srebrenica to Baghdad

[Jordan Michael Smith is a writer in Washington, D.C. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, and The New Republic.] The genocide in Srebrenica, Bosnia, 15 years ago this week continues to haunt European consciences. The massacre is frequently in the news, most recently because relatives of the victims are now asking prosecutors in the Netherlands to charge Dutch peacekeepers with war crimes. For Americans, the anniversary of the massacre will mostly go unnoticed