Roundup: Talking About History

Jim Guirard: The Two Vietnam Wars

[A DC-area attorney and national security strategist, Jim Guirard was longtime Chief of Staff to former U.S. Senators Allen Ellender and Russell Long. His TrueSpeak.org website focuses on truth-in-language and truth-in-history in public discourse.]On Friday of last week, much of the establishment media reminded us of the awful 35th anniversary of the so-called "End of the Vietnam War" -- on April 30, 1975. This is only partly true, and now we need to know wha

Roger Cohen: The Banality of Good, Explored in a German Novel from 1947

[Roger Cohen writes for the New York Times.] What was it like? I would ask myself, the years I lived in Berlin. What was it like in the leafy Grunewald neighborhood to watch your Jewish neighbors — lawyers, businessmen, dentists — trooping head bowed to the nearby train station for transport eastward to extinction? With what measure of fear, denial, calculation, conscience and contempt did neighbors who had proved their Aryan stock to Hitler’s butchers make their accomm

Marek Dabrowski: Remembering My Friend Yegor Gaidar

[Marek Dabrowski is President of Polish think tank CASE (Centre for Social and Economic Research)] The sudden death of Yegor Gaidar on December 16, 2009 came as surprise to many of his friends, myself included, well aware though I was of his serious health problems. Over some twenty years, I was fortunate to collaborate with Yegor very closely: before he came to government; when, in late 1991, he became the Deputy, and then Acting Prime Minister; and when he came back to academia. I

The Myth That Congress Cut Off Funding for South Vietnam

by Ken Hughes

Since partisans have turned the April 30, 1975, Communist takeover of South Vietnam into a political weapon, I’m going to spend the anniversary doing a little myth-busting. 

Charles Kenny: Thomas Malthus was Wrong About the Population Bomb

[Charles Kenny, a development economist, is author of the forthcoming book The Success of Development: Innovations, Ideas and the Global Standard of Living.] Ever since Parson Thomas Robert Malthus wrote his 1798 essay on population, it has been trotted out by millenarians and self-styled Cassandras as the basis for predicting famine and global woe. Malthus's arguments were resurrected as a best-seller for the modern era in the 1968 overpopulation-panic classic The Population Bomb.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: What is Skip Gates Thinking?

[Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor for The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues for TheAtlantic.com and the magazine. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle.] Better people than me have tackled this really weird piece in the Times on Friday, by Henry Louis Gates arguing against reparations.... Gates' contention that "there is very little discussion" of the African role in the slave trade is interesting. Among Af

Kwabena Akurang-Parry: Some Perspectives on Henry Louis Gates's Reparations

[Kwabena Akurang-Parry is Professor of History at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, USA.] LET me state some caveats that my effort at interrogating the conclusions of Professor Henry Louis Gates do not mitigate the marginality and chattel nature that reconfigured the lived-experiences of enslaved Africans worldwide, nor does it exonerate slave-holding societies in Africa as well as some African states’ participation in the Atlantic slave trade. Second, I do understand Gates t

Seth Perry: The Geography of the Book of Mormon

[Seth Perry is a PhD candidate in History of Christianity at the University of Chicago Divinity School. This article originally appeared in Sightings, published by the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.] The Book of Mormon is widely viewed as the quintessentially American scripture of a quintessentially American faith, but in strictly geographical terms this designation is more complicated than it might first appear. The Book’s modern manifestation i

Amartya Sen: Adam Smith Wasn't a Free-Market Fundamentalist

[Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998. He is the Thomas W Lamont University Professor and professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard University. His latest book is "The Idea of Justice" (Allen Lane, £25).“The Theory of Moral Sentiments" by Adam Smith is published by Penguin (£10.99)] The 18th-century philosopher Adam Smith wasn’t the free-market fundamentalist he is thought to have been. It’s time we realised the relevance of his ideas to today’s

George Wolf : A Different Observation of Yom Hashoah at Congregation Habonim

[George Wolf is the marketing director of The Blue Card, the only Jewish charity in the U.S. to actively aid destitute Holocaust survivors. Wolf was born in Brno Czechoslovakia and is a survivor himself . He has served in US Army intelligence during the Cold War. As a retired businessman, and an amateur writer, he is on his "second career." By his own admission that has changed his outlook on life. Having been involved in several observations of Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Observance Da

Thomas Sowell: Misusing a History of Slavery

[Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.] If the history of slavery ought to teach us anything, it is that human beings cannot be trusted with unbridled power over other human beings — no matter what color or creed any of them are. The history of ancient despotism and modern totalitarianism practically shouts that same message from the blood-stained pages of history. But that is not the message that is being taught in our schools and colleges, or dra

Thomas Dreyer: The Ugly History of Afrikaans

[Thomas Dreyer is a South African writer living in Cape Town and the author of three Afrikaans novels. This essay was written in 2007 while he was a participant in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.] I am an Afrikaans writer. I write in a language that is Dutch but not Dutch, European but not European, African but not African -- even though it is the only language named after this (or any other) continent. I write in a language that has little to do with tu

Michael Feldberg: How the Credo of American Jewry Took Hold

[Michael Feldberg is Director of Research for the American Jewish Historical Society.] The earliest collective action by American Jews on behalf of their overseas brethren came in 1840, in response to a false "blood libel" charge in Damascus. That spring, in the ancient capital of Syria, an Italian friar and his Muslim servant mysteriously disappeared. The Capuchin order of monks charged that Jews had kidnapped and ritually murdered the two men to fulfill a supposed Jewish

Vicken Cheterian: Armenian Genocide and Turkey -- Then and Now

[Vicken Cheterian is a journalist and political analyst who works for the non-profit governance organisation CIMERA, based in Geneva.] For Armenians everywhere, 24 April is a day of special commemoration. It marks the beginning of the genocide of 1915: the uprooting or killing by the leading figures of the Ottoman state of almost all the 2.2 million Armenians who lived in historic Armenia, using the circumstances of Europe’s “great war” as a pretext. The ninety-fifth an

Elena Godlevskaya: Russian History Doesn't Explain Why Russia is Great

[Elena Godlevskaya is a Russia columnist for openDemocracy.] While scholars dispute the epistemological foundations of the discipline known as history, educationalists are working to solve a task of national importance – how to use the past to glorify the present. In the Russia that was conquered by the Bolsheviks, this was a problem that took many years to solve, and so for a long time history was not taught in school at all – it only appeared as a subject in 1934. From that time o

Robert McHenry: H.L. Mencken: Prohibition, the War on Drugs, and the Dead Hand of Puritanism

[Robert McHenry is a former editor-in-chief of Encyclopaedia Britannica and author of How to Know.]It is neither his birthday nor an anniversary of his death, which are my usual weak pegs on which to hang a little note about some writer, but I could not wait for one of those to roll by to share this. Henry Louis Mencken, usually known as H.L. Mencken, was a journalist of unusual breadth of knowledge and unde

Nicholas Carr: Luddites, According to Thomas Pynchon

[Nicholas Carr is a member of Britannica’s Editorial Board of Advisors, and posts from his blog Rough Type will occasionally be cross-posted at the Britanncia Blog. He is the author, most recently, of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.] I would like to direct the Internet’s attention (when the Internet pays attention, servers fail and nodes collapse, and a rictal grin spreads across Ned Ludd’s bony face) to an

James F. Brennan: Personal Lessons From the Kent State Tragedy

[James F. Brennan is provost of the Catholic University of America.] When I was 9 years old, my dream job was to be the person who calls off school when it snows. Now that I have that job, it stinks. Over my 10 years of canceling classes because of snow, my decisions have rarely met with universal approval: Without fail, some loud constituency is fast to complain. This past winter, the Washington area was hit with an extraordinary three blizzards, two of which occurred

Jerry Lembcke: The Times, They Changed

[Jerry Lembcke is an associate professor of sociology at College of the Holy Cross. He is the author, most recently, of Hanoi Jane: War, Sex, and Fantasies of Betrayal, due out from the University of Massachusetts Press in June, and The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York University Press, 1998). In the spring of 1970, he had just returned from 13 months in Vietnam as a chaplain's assistant assigned to an artillery unit.] School's out. That was the news

George F. Will: Japanese American Heroes, Bereft of Bitterness

[George F. Will is a columnist for the Washington Post.] Hearing about a shortage of farm laborers in California, the couple who would become Susumu Ito's parents moved from Hiroshima to become sharecroppers near Stockton. Thus began a saga that recently brought Ito, 91, to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, where he and 119 former comrades in arms were honored, during the annual Days of Remembrance, as liberators of Nazi concentration camps. While his Japanese American