Roundup: Talking About History

Michael Ruse: The Sins of Orlando Figes

[Michael Ruse directs the program in history and philosophy of science at Florida State University. His forthcoming book is Science and Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science.]This is all a prolegomenon to what is going on in historical circles in England at the moment. The deservedly distinguished historian of modern Russia, Orlando Figes, has been caught w

Robert Service: The Shame of Orlando Figes

Today I awoke to find that my fellow academic Orlando Figes had admitted responsibility for anonymous negative reviews of my three most recent books posted on Amazon. It's been quite a fortnight. Last week I heard from Rachel Polonsky, whose book had also been negatively reviewed. The strong suspicion, strengthened by a survey of the Amazon data, was that Figes was the author. I sent out an email about this to leading Russian and European historians without specifically naming who I thought was

Oliver Kamm: Figes' Furies

[Oliver Kamm is a leader writer and columnist at The Times. He was previously an investment banker and co-founder of an asset management firm.]This is, to coin a phrase, 

David Nash: The Chartists: Charting a Future Democracy

[David Nash is Professor of History at Oxford Brookes University.] Many contemporary commentators are pessimistic about the nature of British Parliamentary democracy and despair of its future. The voting turnout in local, national and European elections has been in steady decline for decades. Engaged interest in politics has entered the doldrums, evidenced by dwindling levels of both party membership and active involvement in the political system. Most damaging of all is the catastr

T.H. Breen: America's Other Independence Day

[T.H. Breen is William Smith Mason Professor of American History at Northwestern University.] We ought to celebrate April 19 as the anniversary of the founding of our country. To be sure, a formal declaration of independence would come a year after the battles of Lexington and Concord. For ordinary men and women, however, those battles severed the ties that had bound the colonists to Great Britain for almost two centuries. The killing of militiamen at Lexington transformed the chara

Bill Barnhart: John Paul Stevens and the U.S. Navy at War

[Bill Barnhart has been a business writer and editor for the Chicago Tribune since 1979. This article appeared on SCOTUSblog.] Former Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, quoting an unnamed predecessor, said that being nominated to the Supreme Court was largely a matter of standing at the right spot “when the bus went by.” Certainly, political, geographical, sexual and even religious characteristics often have determined who is standing at the right spot at the right time. For that r

Light Townsend Cummins: Commemorating San Jacinto Day

[Cummins is a professor of history at Austin College in Sherman. He is a a sixth-generation Texan whose forebearers fought at the Battle of San Jacinto.] The battle was over in just 18 minutes. The struggle to understand its meaning has never ended. On the afternoon of April 21, 1836, Gen. Sam Houston led a relatively small Texian Army into battle against the much larger force under the command of General Antonio López de Santa Anna. Houston's victory secur

Khaled Diab: Congo's Colonial Ghost

[Khaled Diab is a Brussels-based journalist and writer.] Preparations are under way in the Democratic Republic of the Congo for celebrations to mark 50 years of independence in June. The Congolese government has reportedly set aside $2m for the festivities. Guests of honour will include a high-level Belgian delegation, headed by King Albert II, who will be on his first official visit to the former colony. With these festivities in the air, how has the first half-century

Scott Martelle: America's Dark History of Coal

[Scott Martelle is the author of "Blood Passion: The Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West."] Watching the events unfold around Massey Energy Co.'s Upper Big Branch coal mine the last few weeks created an uneasy sense of deja vu. And it had less to do with 29 miners' bodies below ground than with power plays and corporate hubris above it. The deadly West Virginia mine explosion came four days after the 100th anniversary of the start of a lengthy C

Matthew Pitt: A Civil Rights Watershed in Biloxi, Mississippi

[Matthew Pitt writes for Smithsonian Magazine.] The waters beside Biloxi, Mississippi, were tranquil on April 24, 1960. But Bishop James Black’s account of how the harrowing hours later dubbed “Bloody Sunday” unfolded for African-American residents sounds eerily like preparations taken for a menacing, fast-approaching storm. “I remember so well being told to shut our home lights off,” said Black, a teenager at the time. “Get down on the floor, get away from the windows.”

Jon Meacham: Atticus Finch and Benjamin Hooks

[Jon Meacham is the editor of Newsweek.] On a beautiful autumn morning in 2007, a small but important pageant of American history unfolded in the East Room of the White House. The occasion was a ceremony, hosted by President George W. Bush, to present the Presidential Medal of Freedom to a small group of distinguished Americans: Brian Lamb of C-Span was one, as was the ailing Henry Hyde, represented by his son Bob. Another was Harper Lee, the Alabama-born writer whose To Kill a Mock

John Summers: Henry David Thoreau Stands the Test of Time

[John Summers is the author of Every Fury on Earth. His TNR essay, “Gettysburg Regress,” will be republished later this year in Best American Essays: 2010.]The Journal: 1837-1861by Henry David Thoreau || edited by Damion SearlsNew York Review Classics, 704 pp., $22.95Henry David Thoreau has never been more admired, but in his own time he was widely known as a minor writer, a disciple of R

Clifford J. Levy: Russia and Poland Poland Have a Blood Feud Rooted Deep in the Past

[Clifford J. Levy is the Moscow correspondent for the New York Times.] Until very recently, President Lech Kaczynski of Poland was seen here as an especially disagreeable strain of Eastern European leader, one of those Slavic turncoats who demonized Russia and toadied up to its rivals. Then Mr. Kaczynski was killed in a plane crash on Russian soil this month, and Russia choked up. It was as if estranged relatives suddenly realized that their bad blood was unseemly and p

Lori Allen, Vincent A. Brown, and Ajantha Subramanian: Condeming Martin Kramer's Remarks

[Lori Allen is an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy of International and Area Studies. Vincent A. Brown is a Professor of History and of African and African American Studies. Ajantha Subramanian is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and of Social Studies.] Much has been made of Martin Kramer’s suggestion that Palestinians be denied food and medicine in order to weaken their opposition to the Israeli occupation. We, along with a group of 25 other professors, scholars, and Ha

Paul Martin: Whatever Happened to Lincoln's Bodyguard?

[Paul Martin writes for Smithsonian.com] When a celebrity-seeking couple crashed a White House state dinner last November, the issue of presidential security dominated the news. The Secret Service responded by putting three of its officers on administrative leave and scrambled to reassure the public that it takes the job of guarding the president very seriously. “We put forth the maximum effort all the time,” said Secret Service spokesman Edwin Donovan. That kind of ded

Edward E. Baptist: The Panic of 1837 and the Panic of 2008

[Edward E. Baptist is Associate Professor of History at Cornell University. He is writing a book on how the expansion of slavery in the nineteenth century shaped African America, the United States, and the world.] Early in the last decade, an Ayn Rand disciple named Alan Greenspan, who had been trusted with the U.S. government's powers for regulating the financial economy, stated his faith in the ability of that economy to maintain its own stability: "Recent regulatory reform c

Walter A. McDougall: Shooting the Moon

[Walter A. McDougall, winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (ACLS History 2001), is currently the Alloy-Ansin Professor of International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania.] Gazing up at the Texas night sky from his ranch, Senator Lyndon B. Johnson did not know what to make of Sputnik I, the first artificial Earth satellite launched into orbit by a Soviet missile on October 4, 1957. But an aide’s memorandum sto

Andrei Kolesnikov: Russia-Poland: A History Too Terrible

[Andrei Kolesnikov is an independent journalist and regular contributor to Russia’s leading online newspapers, gazeta.ru and slon.ru] The reactions of the Russian Internet to the anniversary of the Katyn tragedy, and then the air catastrophe, swung in one of two diametrically opposite ways. Either waves of sympathy and anti-Stalin emotions; or an irony shocking in its cynicism and an ignorance of many-times established historical facts. There was the same determined pro

Humberto Fontova: They Fought Like Tigers at the Bay of Pigs

[Humberto Fontova is a Cuban-American writer and commentator. He wrote this article for David Horowitz's FrontPageMag.]“They fought like tigers,” writes the CIA officer who helped train the Cubans who splashed ashore at the Bay of Pigs 49 years ago this week. “But their fight was doomed before the first man hit the beach.”That CIA man, Grayston Lynch, knows something about fightin

Greg Mitchell: Hiroshima and Nagasaki Undermine No-First-Use Policy

[Greg Mitchell, editor and writer of the forthcoming Media Fix on TheNation.com, was editor of the newspaper trade publication Editor and Publisher and is co-author, with Robert Jay Lifton, of Hiroshima in America and Who Owns Death?] More than sixty-four years after the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the bomb is still very much with us, as evidenced by this week's great nuclear summit and new proposals to curtail stockpiles presented by President Obama. But the thousands