Roundup: Talking About History

Thomas Rosica: A Martyr to Solidarity

[Basilian Father Thomas Rosica, chief executive officer of the Salt and Light Catholic Media Foundation and Television Network in Canada, is a consultor to the Pontifical Council for Social Communications.] For Catholics and Christians, the Eucharist is truly the sacrament of non-violence: The way of Jesus to conquer evil and violence must be the Christian way. This reality was lived out in the life of a young Polish priest, Rev. Jerzy Popieluszko who was beatified as a

J.D. Dolan: Anniversary of a Disaster: Edison's Mohave Generating Station Explosion

[J.D. Dolan, who lives in Michigan, is the author of "Phoenix: A Brother's Life."] On a blue-sky afternoon 25 years ago today, just as the second-shift crew was about to begin work at Southern California Edison's Mohave Generating Station in Laughlin, Nev., a massive re-heat pipe exploded, unleashing high-pressure, superheated steam into the plant's control room with such force that it knocked down a wall and sealed the exit doors shut. Sixteen people were severely burned

Matthew Duss: Inconvenient Alliance ... Israel and South Africa

[Matthew Duss is a research associate with the Center for American Progress Action Fund, and a blogger at CAPAF’s Wonk Room.] To say that Sasha Polakow-Suransky's new book The Unspoken Alliance: Israel's Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa comes at a particularly inconvenient time for the Netanyahu government would be an understatement. Israel is resisting calls for an independent investigation of the May 31 flotilla attack -- in which Israeli naval commandos killed nine

Scott Carlson: Happy Birthday, F.H. King, Professor and Pioneer of Sustainable Agriculture

[Scott Carlson is a senior reporter at The Chronicle, covering architecture, sustainability, and energy.] The Writer's Almanac notes that Franklin Hiram King was born on this day in 1848. He was an early advocate of sustainable agriculture and a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he studied soil and soil fertility. Last year I happened to pick up a copy of Farmers of Forty Centuries, which documents King's travels through Japan, China, and Korea

Nicholas Griffin: How Soccer Defeated Apartheid

[Nicholas Griffin, a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, is writing a book on sports and foreign policy.] Imagine an alternate reality of the United States in the 1960s, where the collective experience of the political elite had been formed in all-black baseball leagues. The country is led by President Jackie Robinson, Vice President Satchel Paige, and Secretary of State Willie Mays. Sounds crazy? Replace baseball with soccer, and you've got South Africa, a country that

Thomas Rid: The State of Strategy Today

[Thomas Rid works at The Shalem Center in Jerusalem and at the Richard Koebner Minerva Center for German History at the Hebrew University.* He also is a non-resident fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations in the School for Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, in Washington, DC.] Who produced the greatest strategists of all time, dead and alive? America or Europe? Before wading into that minefield, we need some criteria, some points of orie

Eliot Spitzer: Read the Gettysburg Address

[Eliot Spitzer is the former governor of the state of New York.] How quickly we forget. Just days ago, on Memorial Day—a day of gratitude, respect, and celebration—the words of President Lincoln's Gettysburg Address were read at ceremonies across the nation. The phrase from that speech that always sticks with me is the challenge President Lincoln set forth for us: "[R]esolve that these dead shall not have died in vain." He implored us not to shy away from the sacrifices we

Jay Mathews: The Myth of Tiananmen

[Mathews is an education reporter for The Washington Post. He was the paper’s first Beijing bureau chief and returned in 1989 to help cover the Tiananmen demonstrations. With his wife, Linda Mathews, he is the author of One Billion: A China Chronicle. This piece originally ran in the September/October 1998 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review.] President Clinton’s precedent-setting visit to China filled the front pages of American newspapers and led the evening television news fo

Nick Foulkes: Racing Through History at Britain's Epsom Derby

[Foulkes is the author of Gentlemen and Blackguards: Gambling Mania and The Plot To Steal The Derby Of 1844, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.] As the colorful 19th-century Whig politician Lord Palmerston put it, “Epsom week is our Olympic Games.” That was back in 1847, when both houses of Parliament adjourned for most of the week of the Derby, then the world’s most famous horse race. The way Palmerston saw it, the holiday was “part of the unwritten law of Parliament.”

Ilan Stavans: The Novelists and the Dictators

[Ilan Stavans is a professor of Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst College. His latest book is Gabriel García Márquez: The Early Years (Palgrave Macmillan). He is general editor of The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, due out in September.] Does the current crop of left-wing caudillos in Latin America, like Hugo Chávez, inspire the type of animosity their military counterparts once did? And will its members be turned into larger-than-life dictators in novels, as they

Richard V. Allen: Reagan’s Secure Line

[Richard V. Allen, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, was the national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan from 1981 to 1982.] WITH a controversial Israeli attack in the news, I have thought back to another controversial Israeli attack, one that took place 29 years ago today: the strike on the Osirak nuclear reactor under construction in Iraq. The daring, risky bombing dealt a fatal blow to Saddam Hussein’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon. I was then President Ronald Rea

Rodolfo F. Acuña: The Meaning of Occupation

[Rodolfo F. Acuña, PhD, teaches at California State University Northridge[ Dear Steve Nuñez, I just read the print version of your interview and it is precisely why I am reluctant to grant interviews. I attempted to be candid; however, I forgot that we are living in the age of Fox News which almost makes civil discourse impossible. This is disconcerting because there can be no resolution without people listening to each other. The first distortion is your o

Interview with Greg Robinson: The Japanese Internment Camps

[Greg Robinson, a native of New York City, is associate professor of history at l'Université du Québec à Montréal and author of By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans.] The following is an interview with Greg Robinson, author of A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America Q: Is there any need for a new book on Japanese Americans and World War II? Many have already been written, including one by you. Hasn’t everything im

Martin Kettle: With No Common Culture in Britain, a Common History is Elusive

[Martin Kettle is an associate editor of the Guardian and writes on British, European and American politics, as well as the media, law and music.] ...[W]arnings surely apply to a labelling in the Guardian this week of Professor Niall Ferguson as a rightwing historian. Ferguson may or may not be usefully described as rightwing. "Irritating" is his own word for that. But he is certainly a historian – author of some formidable books with an occasional weakness for arresting o

John Havelock: Germany's Past Has Led to a More Equal Present

[John Havelock is a former Alaska attorney general and served as director of Legal Studies for the University of Alaska.] For Americans, history is casual reminiscence. History is smash in your face for those who live along the Elbe. An Icelandic volcanic explosion extended the pleasures of a vacation cruise on this major German river, lending more time to ponder why Europeans differ so from Americans in character, economics and politics. The Elbe flows through what wa

Christian Caryl: Why the 1970s Are Still Haunting Us Today

[Christian Caryl is a contributing editor to Foreign Policy. His column, "Reality Check," appears weekly on ForeignPolicy.com.] Those were the days: Economic upheavals wiped out long-established institutions and jolted self-satisfied elites. Terrorists declared war on the West in the name of eccentric utopias. New technologies collapsed geographical distance, bringing far-flung regions closer together and undermining the power of the traditional nation-state.

Mohammad Qayoumi: Once Upon a Time in Afghanistan...

[Mohammad Qayoumi is president of California State University, East Bay. He grew up in Kabul and came to work in the United States in 1978. Since 2002 he has volunteered his time in reconstruction efforts, serving on the board of directors to the Central Bank and as senior advisor to the minister of finance.] On a recent trip to Afghanistan, British Defense Secretary Liam Fox drew fire for calling it "a broken 13th-century country." The most common objection was not that h

Jonathan Tremblay: History Shows that Sex is Much Better than Torture

[Jonathan Tremblay is a historian and is a Breaking News editor for the History News Network] News has trickled out of Russia that several dissidents against Moscow’s government have been taped with prostitutes and or while engaging in some ‘unconventional’ behaviour. Ilya Yashin is amongst these dissidents and describes the ploy as a ‘honey trap’ set up by Russian officials to discredit him and the ideals of his protest movement. He claims he was simply getting involved in a ’summe

Toby Miller: Soccer Conquers the World

[Toby Miller is a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California at Riverside. Among his books is Globalization and Sport: Playing the World (Sage, 2001), which he wrote with Geoffrey Lawrence, Jim McKay, and David Rowe.] Why are the Ivory Coast soccer player Didier Drogba and the Portuguese star Cristiano Ronaldo featured in underpants on a recent cover of Vanity Fair? Why was Drogba just named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time mag

William R. Forstchen: A Tale of Two Americas On Memorial Day 2010

[William R. Forstchen is a professor of history at Montreat College and is a specialist in military history. He has co-authored seven books with Newt Gingrich, the latest “To Try Men’s Souls” about Washington’s crossing of the Delaware. He is also the author of “One Second After,” a novel warning about the dangers of an EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) attack on the United States.] Memorial Day. Those of us old enough to remember might recall a parent or grandparent who referred to it a