Roundup: Talking About History

Robert Fisk: Malaya 1948 ... another shameful episode in Britain's colonial past

[Robert Fisk is a columnist at the Independent.] Tham Yong died 11 days ago. I bet there's not a single reader who remembers that name, unless they happen to live in Malaysia or, like me this week, happened to be in Kuala Lumpur and to read the disgracefully weak-kneed report of Tham Yong's demise in the capital's equally disgraceful daily newspapers. A more grovelling, politically neutered, slovenly form of journalism outside Malaysia it would be difficult to discov

Max Boot: When suicide bombing is simply strategic suicide

[Max Boot is a senior fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributing editor to Opinion. He is writing a history of guerrilla warfare and terrorism.] The entire world was spooked by the March 29 attack by two Chechen "black widow" suicide bombers who killed 38 people in the Moscow subway. As far away as New York, police squads armed with assault weapons were deployed to prevent a copycat strike. There is no doubt tha

Newt amd Callista Gingrich: John Paul II an Inspiration to Mankind

[Former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Newt Gingrich and his wife, Callista, are hosts and executive producers of the documentary film Nine Days that Changed the World, which will premiere in the United States on April 9 and will be screened in Poland and Italy in June. This article first appeared in Wprost, a Polish weekly magazine.] Following Pope John Paul II’s death five years ago, the world prayerfully reflected on a life that had transformed the lives of millions

Anne Applebaum: Why Is Vladimir Putin Going to Katyn?

[Anne Applebaum writes a column for the Washington Post.] In this era of commerce and trade, it often happens that countries that might once have gone to war play out their antagonisms through other means.... In Central Europe, the outstanding example of this phenomenon is the ongoing discussion of the Katyn massacre, the memory of which continues to shape the relationship between Poland and Russia. At stake is an event that took place exactly 70 years ago: the Soviet U

Michael Lind: Glenn Beck's Partisan Historians

[Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation.] "Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back," John Maynard Keynes observed in 1936. And not only madmen in authority; lightweights in mass media, too.Behind Glenn Beck's televised crusade against progressivism and Jonah Goldberg's bestselling tract "Liberal Fascism" is more than

David E. Hoffman: Four Minutes to Armageddon

[David E. Hoffman is a contributing editor to the Washington Post and the author of The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy.] Just one week into his presidency, on Jan. 27, 1969, Richard M. Nixon got an eye-opening briefing at the Pentagon on the nation's secret nuclear war plans -- the Single Integrated Operational Plan, as it was known then. "It didn't fill him with enthusiasm," Henry Kissinger, the national security advisor, s

Raffi K. Hovannisian: Armenia’s Stand: Justice At Home, Justice Abroad

[Raffi K. Hovannisian, Armenia’s first foreign minister, currently represents the Heritage Party in parliament.] We are at the brink of a pair of wars, civil and regional, and it is better to speak now. Armenia, that ancient civilization deprived by the tragedies of yore of its capacity for contemporary statecraft, needs immediately to put its house in democratic order. Finally responsible for its own record, it also has legitimate expectations of the international par

Joshua Brown: MLK's Unfulfilled Dream

  Joshua Brown, co-director of the New Media Lab, is also Executive Director of the Center for Media and Learning/American Social History Project (ASHP) at the CUNY Graduate Center. Before assuming those duties in 1998, Brown serv

Jeremi Suri: The Promise and Failure of American Grand Strategy after the Cold War

[Jeremi Suri is E. Gordon Fox Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This essay is condensed from the Fall 2009 issue of Orbis, which featured five papers on American Grand Strategy originally prepared for the 50th anniversary of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies in cooperation with Duke University’s Program in American Grand Strategy and the Strategic Studies Institute at the Army War College.] Like so many things, it began and it ended in New York.

Bill Moyers and Michael Winship: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Economic Dream Still Unfulfilled, 42 Years Later

[Bill Moyers, a broadcast journalist and former host of the PBS program "Now With Bill Moyers," is president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy. Michael Winship writes for Salon.com] Forty-two years ago, on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr., was assassinated, gunned down in Memphis, Tenn. To those of us who were alive then, the images are etched in painful memory: One day, King is standing with colleagues, including Ralph Abernathy and Jesse Jackson, on the

Paul Kengor: Buchenwald and the Totalitarian Century

[Paul Kengor is professor of political science at Grove City College. His books include The Judge: William P. Clark, Ronald Reagan's Top Hand and The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism.] This spring marks some sordid anniversaries: 65 years since the discovery of the Nazi concentration camps that facilitated the slaughter of six million Jews and four million various others deemed "misfits" and "undesirables" by Hitler and his henchmen. It is a most

Donald Worster: Historians and Nature

[Donald Worster is a visiting professor at Yale University. He is the author of two biographies of John Muir and John Wesley Powell, and he won a Bancroft Prize for his 1979 book, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s.] If ever there was a scientific theory that is fundamentally historical, that purports to explain change over time, it is evolution through natural selection and its corollary, humankind’s dual inheritance. Yet I have to admit that my fellow historians, teaching

Victor Davis Hanson: Remembering the Pacific War

[Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and editor, most recently, of Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome. © 2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc.] Sixty-five years ago, on April 1, 1945, the United States Marines, Army, and Navy invaded Okinawa. The ensuing three months of combat resulted in the complete defeat and near destruction of imperial Japanese forces on the island, just 340 miles from

Nathaniel Popper: A Conscious Pariah: On Raul Hilberg

[Nathaniel Popper is a reporter with the Los Angeles Times.] Raul Hilberg was known for cultivating enemies. During faculty meetings at the University of Vermont, where he was a professor of political science from 1956 to 1991, the renowned historian of the Holocaust would unfailingly denounce the consensus position, whether it concerned faculty appointments or vacation policy. "He was an intensely stubborn and contrary person," one of his old colleagues told me. In The Po

Michael C. Scott: Healthcare Disagreements in Ancient Greece

[Michael C. Scott is the author of From Democrats to Kings - The Brutal Dawn of a New World from the Downfall of Athens to the Rise of Alexander the Great.] America has just voted through its biggest health-care reform in decades. But what was medical treatment like in ancient Greece? Ancient Greece was, first and foremost, a world full of gods - gods who determined much of people's lives. So, it will come as no surprise that when ancient Greeks were ill, they often bel

Jerry Z. Muller: Why Do Jewish People Succeed? Study Their History

[Jerry Z. Muller is a professor of history at the Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C., and author, most recently, of "Capitalism and the Jews" (Princeton University Press).] In recent decades, economists have been struggling to make use of the concept of human capital, often defined as the abilities, skills, knowledge and dispositions that make for economic success. Yet those who use the term often assume that to conceptualize a phenomenon is a first step to m

John Willingham: Alamo Remembered; Goliad Often Forgotten

[John Willingham is a former election official in Texas. He now writes about history, culture, and election issues. He holds an MA in American history from the University of Texas at Austin. Mr. Willingham can be reached at john.texport.willingham@gmail.com.] The Goliad massacre occurred on Palm Sunday, March 27, 1836, three weeks to the day after the fall of the Alamo. About three weeks later Sam Houston led Texian forces to a

Chris Bowlby: Was There Ever a Golden Age for Retirement?

[Chris Bowlby is a presenter on BBC radio, specialising in history. This feature was first published in the October 2009 issue of BBC History Magazine] Is this a bad time to grow old? On the face of it, longer life expectancy and better health care should mean an ever increasing distance from our ancestors’ shorter and more miserable lives. Yet headlines referring to unaffordable pensions and “the end of retirement”, as The Economist recently put it, suggests not an improvement but

Holger Nehring: The Cold War ... the forgotten impact of a war that didn't happen

[Holger Nehring is Lecturer in Contemporary European History at the University of Sheffield.] In his great novel Rabbit at Rest, John Updike’s protagonist Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, a retired car salesman, bemoans the end of the Cold War: 'The cold war. It gave you a reason to get up in the morning. … Without the cold war, what’s the point of being an American ?' If anything, the nostalgia for the Cold War has been even more pronounced in Europe. The shape of contemporary East and Wes

Dara Horn: What Do Southerners and Jews Have in Common? Reenactment!

[Dara Horn is a novelist whose third book, All Other Nights (Norton 2009), has just been released in paperback.] I went into a ladies’ room last fall and saw a ghost. I had just arrived at a synagogue in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to give a lecture on All Other Nights, my novel about Jewish spies during the Civil War. As I hurried to the restroom before greeting my hosts, I opened the door and stopped short. In the mirror, next to my 21st-century reflection, was a woman wearing a 19t