Roundup: Talking About History

Jon Meacham: The Price of Forgetting

[Jon Meacham is the editor of Newsweek.] The beginning of the end of War, wrote the novelist Herman Wouk, lies in Remembrance. But what happens if Americans know so little of war that they have nothing to remember? Today, in the spring of 2010, nine years into one war in Afghanistan and seven years into another in Iraq, we are trapped in a strange moment: America is a country at war, but hardly anybody notices. This Monday is Memorial Day. It is an editorial commonplace

Michael Kinsley: Cut the Boomers a Break

[Michael Kinsley is an editor at the Atlantic.] The basic story line is this: The "greatest generation" answered the call and proved their patriotism by winning World War II and thereby saving the world from the Nazis. Then came the boomers, who evaded the draft and spat at soldiers and generally have been a huge disappointment. Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut attorney general and senate candidate who "misspoke" about having served in Vietnam has given us a n

Kathy Olmsted: California... Yesterday and Today

[Kathy Olmsted is a history professor at UC Davis.]Wallace Stegner famously said that California is like the rest of America, only more so.  But when did he say it, and in what context? Yesterday I tracked down the original quote, which appeared in an editorial Stegner wrote for a special Golden State edition of Saturday Review magazine in 1967.The references to Max Rafferty, Ronald Reagan, and Gary Snyder may seem dated, but in many ways the essay describes the Cal

Andrew B. Wilson: Rolling Back the Socialist Tide

[Andrew B. Wilson, a former Business Week bureau chief in Dallas and London, is a writer living in St. Louis, Missouri. He is working on a book on the rise and fall of socialism in Britain between the Churchill and Thatcher eras.] Talk about a swift reversal in fortune. Consider how quickly British Prime Minister Winston Churchill went from winning a war to losing the peace. On V-E Day -- May 8, 1945, the day after the surrender of Nazi Germany -- Churchill stood on a balcony overlo

Dr. Douglas Fields: Michelangelo's Secret Message in the Sistine Chapel

[R. Douglas Fields, Ph. D. is the Chief of the Nervous System Development and Plasticity Section at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Most recently, he is the author of The Other Brain.] At the age of 17 he began dissecting corpses from the church graveyard. Between the years 1508 and 1512 he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Michelangelo Buonarroti, known by his first name the world over as the singular artistic genius, sculptor, and arc

Eric Rauchway: When and Why Did the Parties Switch Places?

[Eric Rauchway is Professor of History at UC Davis.] Students Frequently Ask this Question: when did the major US parties switch places, and why? Which is to say, when and why did the Democrats, who had been the party of limited federal government, begin to favor expanding Washington’s power? When and why did the Republicans, who had favored so strong a central government in Washington that they would accept a civil war rather than see its power curbed, become the party rhetorically

Sydney Schanberg: My Four-Decade Fight to Report the Truth

[Sydney Schanberg won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the war in Indochina] From the beginning, nearly 40 years ago, the evidence was in plain sight. For reasons unexplained, however, the mainstream press did not acknowledge it and has continued to ignore it to this day. I’m referring to the evidence that North Vietnam—after the peace treaty had been signed on Jan. 27, 1973 in Paris—held back hundreds of American prisoners, keeping them as bargaining chips to ensu

Alexander Cockburn: Sometimes Conspiracy Theories are True

[Alexander Cockburn co-edits CounterPunch. He is a regular columnist for The Nation and also writes a weekly syndicated column. Among his books are Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs, and the Press, End Times: The Death of the Fourth Estate (both co-authored with Jeffrey St. Clair) and Washington Babylon, co-authored with Ken Silverstein.] Unlike the French or the Italians, for whom conspiracies are an integral part of government activity, acknowledged by all, Americans have been temperamenta

Jon Wiener: Art Linkletter and Richard Nixon: Alcohol vs. Pot

[Jon Wiener teaches US history at UC Irvine.] Art Linkletter, who died May 26 at 97, was important not only for getting little kids to say the darndest things, but also as a crusader against the counterculture of the 1960s, and especially against drugs. Nixon appointed him an adviser on drug policy, and on May 8, 1971, Linkletter went to the White House and met with the president. The transcripts show Linkletter telling Nixon, “There's a great difference between alcohol

Sheldon Richman: Rand Paul was Right about the Civil Rights Act

[Sheldon Richman is the editor of The Freeman. He lives near Little Rock, Arkansas.] Fresh from his victory in last week’s Kentucky Republican senatorial primary, Rand Paul found himself caught in a whirlwind when MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow asked whether the 1964 Civil Rights Act properly outlawed racial segregation at privately owned lunch counters. Speaking circuitously if not evasively, Mr. Paul finally said: “[O]ne of the things freedom requires is that we allow people t

Jeff Biggers: President Obama and the Unlearned Lessons of 1924: Oil Spills, Coal Disasters and Immigration Hysteria

[Jeff Biggers is the American Book Award-winning author of The United States of Appalachia, and In the Sierra Madre. His next book, Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland, is forthcoming in January 2010 (The Nation/Basic Books).] Here are the news headlines in 1924: Oil spills, coal mining disasters and immigration hysteria. On the orders of President Obama, the 1,200 National Guard troops en route to the US-Mexico border will arrive just i

Judith Miller: When Germ Warfare Happened

[Judith Miller is a contributing editor of City Journal, an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and a FOX News contributor.] Jiang Chun Geng’s poisoned right leg, with its suppurating wounds, hangs limply over the gray wooden bench in the medical clinic here in Dachen, a village in China’s province of Zhejiang. Twice the size of his left leg, the limb is too tender to touch during my visit. Instead, Dr. Zhu Jian Jun gently dabs the putrid wounds with an alcohol-drenched swab.

Afi-Odelia Scruggs: The Miseducation of Texas School Kids

[Afi-Odelia E. Scruggs is a writer in Cleveland.] See, a bunch of guys needed something to do in 1865 and 1866, right after the Civil War. It wasn't like they could go back to their plantations; Northerners had seen to that. So these good ole boys amused themselves by dressing up in sheets and riding through the countryside pulling pranks. Just good, clean hijinks, until they discovered their antics terrorized former slaves. Then, things turned naughty and nasty. But in

Carlo Strenger: Liberal Zionism

[Carlo Strenger is Chair of the Clinical Graduate Program of the Department of Psychology at Tel Aviv University.] Zionism didn't begin as a unitary ideology. There was Theodor Herzl's liberal Zionism; Ahad Ha'am's and Judah Magnes' cultural Zionism. Socialist Zionism initially carried the day, dominating Israeli politics for the country's first three decades. In the remaining decades revisionist Zionism took over, fused with the messianic Zionism that gave religious significance to

Algis Valiunas: The Playboy [Hugh Hefner] and His Western World

[Algis Valiunas, a frequent contributor, last wrote a consideration of Arthur Koestler for our February issue.] Most every man in the known world has at least glimpsed a Playboy centerfold, and thereupon has vowed to go out and get himself something similar in a real live girl, or perused the luscious goods until the magazine has fallen into tatters, or run to confess his pollution to unsympathetic religious personnel, or cried “Death to America” and placed his hope in the eternal s

Michael B. Sauter, Ashley C. Allen, and Douglas A. McIntyre: The Net Worth of the U.S. Presidents: Washington to Obama

[Michael B. Sauter, Ashley C. Allen, and Douglas A. McIntyre are editors of 24/7 Wall St.] Having examined the finances of all 43 presidents (yes, 43; remember, Cleveland was president twice), we calculated the net worth figures for each in 2010 dollars. Because a number of presidents, particularly in the early 19th Century, made and lost huge fortunes in a matter of a few years, the number for each man is based on his net worth at its peak. We have taken into account h

Ronan Thomas: Korean War ... A Conflict That Won't End

[Ronan Thomas is a British correspondent. He was based in Seoul during the 1990s.] "It was the cold, the intense cold, that's what I remember. At the time we really felt we had been forgotten". Interviewed in London's National Army Museum, a septuagenarian British army veteran both smiles and winces at the memory of his military service in Korea. June marks 60 years since the start of The Korean War of 1950-1953, a bitterly-contested conflict inspired by inte

Glenn Frankel: Israel's Most Illicit Affair

[Glenn Frankel, who teaches journalism at Stanford University, was Southern Africa, Jerusalem, and London bureau chief for the Washington Post and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. The Unspoken Alliance: Israel's Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa by Sasha Polakow-Suransky will be published May 25 by Pantheon Books.] History is a great teacher, but sometimes it packs a nasty sense of irony. A case in point: South African Prime Minister John Vorst

Barbara D. Metcalf: History with Controversy, and History Without

[Barbara D. Metcalf (professor emerita, University of California at Davis; and Andrew W. Mellon Emeritus Fellow, University of Michigan) is president of the AHA.] Recently, popular television personality Stephen Colbert invited the distinguished U.S. historian and former president of the AHA, Eric Foner, to appear on his nightly Comedy Central cable channel program, The Colbert Report, a rollickingly satirical talk show.1 The subject for “debate” was the annual review and revisions

Craig Fehrman: Ghostwriting and the Political Book Culture

[Craig Fehrman is an English PhD student at Yale and is working on a book about presidents and their books. In the spring of 1949, Eleanor Roosevelt turned in the manuscript for her second memoir — this one on the White House years — to her editors at Ladies' Home Journal. "You have written this too hastily," came the reply, "as though you were composing it on a bicycle while pedaling your way to a fire." Roosevelt's editors asked her to revise the