Roundup: Talking About History

Jørgen Johansen: Hitler and the Challenge of Non-Violence

[Jørgen Johansen is a freelance lecturer in conflict studies, a nonviolent trainer with six books on the subject, and an activist with experience of more than 100 countries in the last 40 years.] ”What effect could nonviolence have had against Hitler?” This is one of the most frequent questions I get when I lecture on nonviolence. And it is a good one. To answer we need to look at different phases of the conflict and recognise the complexity of a world war. I see no good arguments w

Robert O'Neil: Lord Baden-Powell Must Have Been a Nazi Piece of Work

[Robert O'Neil writes for the Belfast Telegraph.] I don't know how to tell you this, but I am the owner of several books by Lord Baden-Powell. “For shame!” I hear you cry. I agree. He was a man who ought to have been poked in the eye more often by those around him. But there you are. So why I have Baden-Powell's books I have no idea. I got them in second-hand bookshops. They're in the company of other curious volumes such as Difficulties: An Attempt To Help, by fully qu

John J. Pitney, Jr.: As Lincoln Never Said, And Other Famous Quotes

[John J. Pitney, Jr. is the Roy P. Crocker Professor of American Politics at Claremont McKenna College. With Joseph M. Bessette, he is the author of American Government: Deliberation, Democracy, and Citizenship.] In his remarks to Democratic lawmakers the day before they passed the health care bill, President Obama said: "And I was tooling through some of the writings of some previous Presidents and I came upon this quote by Abraham Lincoln: 'I am not bound to win, but I'm boun

Damon Linker: Liberalism and the American Exception

[Damon Linker is a Senior Writing Fellow at the Critical Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania. He writes for the New Republic.] ...The first thing to note about American exceptionalist thinking is how crude it often is. The problem is not just, as Rieff rightly points out, that it presumes and encourages historical ignorance or amnesia. More fundamentally, those who espouse the rhetoric of exceptionalism often haven’t even figured out what they mean by the concept. Do t

Malcolm A. Kline: History Makes Partial Recovery

[Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.]A paper from the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) displays some of the sharpest insights from academia in many a year but fails to offer perspectives that need to be considered for our history to be based on perception rather than reality. “In the subsequent American-led war to turn back Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait, and U.S. interventions in Panama and Somalia, the Bush

Mickey Edwards: Patrick Henry's Speech is an Anniversary Worth Noting

[Mickey Edwards spent 16 years in Congress and 16 years teaching at Harvard and Princeton. He is a director of The Constitution Project and wrote Reclaiming Conservatism.] On March 23, 1775, Patrick Henry rose in St. John's Church in Richmond, Virginia and, aware of the risks inherent in undertaking a rebellion against the British crown, chose the principle upon which he would stand. "Give me liberty," he said, "or give me death." It was not a rheto

Molly M. Wood: Thinking about Remembrance of Past Wars

[Molly M. Wood is Associate Professor of History and Department Chair at Wittenberg University in Springfield, OH, where she teaches U.S. history, U.S. foreign relations history and women's history.] I grew up in Richmond, Virginia, and even though I have not lived there for many years, I still visit regularly. I often think that my decision to become a historian stems in part from the stories of my family history told to me by grandparents and other relatives. I learned from my gra

Tevi Troy: Health Care ... A Two-Decade Blunder

[Tevi Troy is a visiting senior fellow at the Hudson ­Institute and was deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services from 2007 to 2009. Julius Krein assisted with the research for this article.] In 1991 the political world was rocked by the unlikeliest of victories. Harris Wofford, a former aide for John F. Kennedy, upset two-term Republican Governor Richard Thornburgh in a special election to fill the seat of the late Pennsylvania Senator John Heinz. Wofford

Richard Pells: The Peculiar Generation Born During World War II

[Richard Pells is a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. His books include Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture Since World War II (Basic Books, 1997). His book Modernist America: Art, Music, Movies, and the Globalization of American Culture will be published by Yale University Press in spring 2011.] We've all heard about the "greatest generation," which lived through the Depression of the 1930s and won World

Elesha Coffman: The History of Glenn Beck's 'Social Justice'

[Elesha Coffman is assistant professor of history at Waynesburg University in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania. She regularly contributes to the Christian History blog.]Setting off waves of debate in recent weeks, conservative radio host Glenn Beck advised his listeners on March 2 to leave their churches if they found signs of commitment to “social justice” or “economic justice.”

Sophal Ear: Khmer Rouge Tribunal and a Miscarriage of Justice

[Sophal Ear is an assistant professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He is writing a book on the unintended consequences of foreign aid in Cambodia.] When my mother — who saved me and four siblings from starvation under the Khmer Rouge in 1976 — passed away in October 2009 at the age of 73, I realized that for her justice delayed had become justice denied. (I’m embarrassed to admit it, but the words “justice delayed is jus

Francis A. Boyle: The Irish Famine was Genocide

[Francis A. Boyle is Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois - Champaign. He wrote this letter to the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education.]Dear Friends:As I understand it, your Commission was created by the New Jersey Legislature in 1991 to prepare curriculum materials on the Holocaust for use in the state's public schools.  In 1994, your mandate was expanded "to study and recommend curricular material on a wide range of ge

Joshua Frank: A Trip to America's First Nuclear Reactor

[Joshua Frank is the author of Left Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush (Common Courage Press, 2005), and along with Jeffrey St. Clair, the editor of Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland (AK Press, 2008). Frank is also the co-author with St. Clair of the forthcoming Green Scare: The New War on Environmentalism (Haymarket Books, 2010)]I spent a weekend last fall sitting inside an old nuclear reactor, gazing up at a wall that holds over 2,000 cyli

Jonathan Zimmerman: Let's End Black History Month

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author, most recently, of Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory (Yale University Press, 2009).] So here’s a quick quiz, culled from recent headlines: What do O.J. Simpson, Dennis Rodman, and RuPaul have in common? By now, you’ve surely heard the answer: They were all featured in a Black History Month parade at a Los Angeles elementary school on Feb. 26.

Martha Cooper: Lusting for Old Shanghai

[Marta Cooper is a British-Italian writer and student based in Shanghai. She currently writes for Shanghaiist and Global Voices Online, and keeps a blog titled …in Shanghai.] Shanghai is a city where one has to work particularly hard to find simple, unadulterated culture. So, when the blue moon opportunity comes to bask in it for two weeks, I do just that. Most recently, that’s meant heading to the sophisticated Glamour Bar, overlooking the curve of the Bund and the sci-fi lights of

Michael Scott: Was Ancient Greek Democracy Really Similar to Our Own?

[Dr Michael Scott is the Moses Finley Research Fellow at Darwin College and an affiliated lecturer at the Faculty of Classics, Cambridge. His first book, From Democrats to Kings is out now and his second, on the sanctuaries of Delphi and Olympia, is published in April 2010. For more information, visit www.michaelcscott.com.] Ancient Greece’s most famous export to this day is arguably democracy. America, alongside many nations, recently ce

William F. Gavin: "McCarthyism" is a Bigoted Term Offensive to the Irish

[William F. Gavin is a former assistant to Sen. James L. Buckley.] As we celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day, it is useful to remember the Irish definition of a true Irishman: someone who will go fifty miles out of his way to receive an insult. Yes, grudge-bearing is among the traits we are known for, no less than charm, wit, and loquaciousness. We believe in forgiving our enemies the same way the unconverted Augustine believed in chastity: a fine goal, Lord, but not yet. I’v

Dana Milbank: Dick Armey's "Tea Party' History is a Strange Brew

[Dana Milbank is a columnist for the Washington Post.] Dick Armey is intellectually versatile: The former leader of House Republicans went from being a rainmaker for a Washington lobbying firm to being the unofficial leader of the anti-Washington "tea party" movement. But his latest avocation, historian of early America, may be his most intriguing role yet. As head of FreedomWorks, the group that helps to fund and coordinate tea party activists, Armey went to

Mary Dejevsky: Illusions that the anniversary of perestroika should dispel

[Mary Dejevsky is chief editorial writer and columnist at The Independent.] It seems like only yesterday and, at the same time, like a hundred years. In fact, it is a quarter of a century since Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union – and set in train the changes that brought the end of both the system and the country. For many Russians, though, the accession of 54-year-old Gorbachev after a string

Jonathan Tremblay: Slovakia's Wall to Keep out Gypsies Will Fail - Just Like These Others

[Jonathan Tremblay is a historian and works as a Breaking News Editor for the History News Network] The town of Ostrovany in eastern Slovakia has a problem with their society’s undesirables. The heavy minority of Gypsies (Roma) living in ghettos throughout the town has led to an endemic of minor theft and a general disdain by private citizens who have to see the gypsy hovels every day. This minority is even getting out of hand, having grown to constitute two-thirds of Ostrovany’s po