Roundup: Talking About History

Jeremy Kotkin: R.I.P. Mr. Wilson, Father of the Taliban

[Major Jeremy Kotkin is an Army officer who specializes in Afghanistan and Pakistan.] “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” This proverb which has become a mainstay of foreign policy courses of action has, in fact, pushed the United States to make horrifically misguided and ignorant decisions about how to view challenges across the globe and the ways and means used to confront them. With this proverb in mind, and often with the best of intentions in tow, organs of U.S. national secu

HDS Greenway: Charlie Wilson’s war and the politics of blowback

[HDS Greenway leads the Opinion and Analysis section for GlobalPost.] Charlie Wilson, the high-living Texas Congressman who did so much to support America’s covert resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, is dead. But “Charlie Wilson’s War,” the title of a book and film about his exploits, lives on. The Soviets are gone. Indeed the Soviet Union is gone, but the war in Afghanistan rolls on, with no clear end in sight. In one of the ironies of histor

Jen Paton: Europe and Its Cannibals

In the fourteenth century Romance of Richard the Lionheart, the crusader king falls ill outside of Acre: the food he needs to recover, he claims, is pork. Since rumor has it Saracens taste of pork, his men cook and feed him human flesh without his knowledge. Demanding to see the head of the “pig” he has just eaten, the cooks bring in the human head. Richard reacts with amusement, laughing aloud. Gnawing

Martin Rees: The Royal Society's Unstoppable Thirst for Inquiry

[Martin John Rees, Baron Rees of Ludlow, OM, PRS, is president of the Royal Society, a Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and an cosmologist and astrophysicist.] The Royal Society began in 1660. At its regular meetings, experiments were performed. Samuel Pepys became a Fellow in 1665: he recorded in his diary that at his first meeting he enjoyed demonstrations on "the nature of fire, and how it goes out in a place where the ayre is not free, and sooner out where the ayre is

RedState: Who Wrote Your History Textbook?

I recently wrote about the US history that is not taught about some famous American market entrepreneurs. That really is just the tip of the iceberg. In every period of our history there are statist biases being taught to students in classes. Larry Schweikart has written a book that includes a list of lies that can l

Kenneth J. Cooper: Revising the Black Combat Record in the Civil War

[Kenneth J. Cooper, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, is a freelance journalist based in Boston.] Though it has the movie Glory and an exquisite memorial on Boston Common, the Massachusetts 54th regiment does not have Civil War history on its side.... Black regiments from three other states—Louisiana, South Carolina and Kansas—have stronger claims to being the first organized. The 1st Kansas Colored Infantry, military historians seem to agree, engaged the enemy on the

Doug Ireland: ACT UP's Contribution to Gay Awareness

[Doug Ireland can be reached through his blog, DIRELAND.] At the end of the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, in a 1989 essay in October, the avant-garde quarterly he edited, noted gay intellectual and activist Douglas Crimp recalled what a younger gay man in ACT UP had said to him after seeing an early ’70s gay erotic film: “He was very excited about what seemed to me a pretty ordinary sex scene in the film, but then he said:

Kent Ewing: Tomb Warriors Battle in China

[Kent Ewing is a Hong Kong-based teacher and writer. He can be reached at kewing@hkis.edu.hk.] The warlords Cao Cao and Liu Bei were fierce rivals in life, with their exploits vividly described in the classic historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, one of the most revered classical novels in Chinese literature. Now, 1,800 years later, that rivalry has been renewed in death. In a game of archaeological one-upmanship, two teams of tomb warriors claiming to have found th

Martin Shaw: Britain and Genocide

[Martin Shaw is professor of international relations at the University of Sussex and delivered the annual war-studies lecture at King's College, London on 26 January 2010.] The date of the liberation of the Nazi concentration-camp at Auschwitz, 27 January 1945, has since 2001 been marked in Britain as a moment for the remembrance of the victims of the Nazi holocaust – and, by gradual extension, of all those subjected to genocidal assault over the last century. The annual commemorati

William H. Chafe: A Protest That Changed History

[William H. Chafe teaches history at Duke University and is the author of “Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina and the Black Struggle for Freedom.”] Fifty years ago tomorrow, four black freshmen at A and T College in Greensboro, N.C., helped change American history. They walked into the Woolworth’s department store, purchased school supplies and toothpaste, then sat down at the lunch counter and asked for a cup of coffee. “We don’t serve Negroes,” they were told.

Howell Raines: The Counter Revolution

[Howell Raines, a former executive editor of The New York Times, covered the civil rights movement in the 1960s and ’70s.] In the pre-digital America of 1960, “viral” was still a medical term. So it was written in countless news articles that the student sit-in movement had “spread like wildfire” on black campuses across the South. On the morning of Feb. 1, 50 years ago today, four black freshmen at North Carolina A&T State University seated themselves at the all-white lunch co

Andrew B. Lewis: The Sit-Ins That Changed America

[Andrew B. Lewis is the author of"The Shadows of Youth: The Remarkable Journey of the Civil Rights Generation."] The "sixties" were born on Feb. 1, 1960, 50 years ago this week, when four African American college students staged the first sit-in at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C. Since then, the mythology of the '60s has dominated the idea of youthful activism. Of the three big events of the early civil rights movement -- the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Educa

Dee Dee Myers: Bill Clinton’s Narrow Victories

[Dee Dee Myers was press secretary for President Bill Clinton] Barack Obama, reeling from the Democratic defeat in the Massachusetts Senate race, isn’t the first president to get an unwelcome anniversary gift a year after taking office. On Jan. 20, 1994, Attorney General Janet Reno announced that, at President Bill Clinton’s request, she had appointed Robert Fiske as special counsel to investigate the Whitewater case. What we didn’t know then was that seven months later, Mr. Fiske w

Richard V. Allen: Ronald Reagan, a Man With a Plan

[Richard V. Allen is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and was national security advisor to President Ronald Reagan.] ...Coupled with the basic policy framework, Reagan’s was one of the most carefully planned presidential transitions in modern political history, replete with teams of “Reaganauts” dispatched to each department and agency in the days following the election. Staffing lists were compiled, and presidential and subcabinet appointments were made swiftly, background

James Fallows: Carter's Sunny Day

[James Fallows was chief speechwriter for President Carter.] Things were tough as Jimmy Carter prepared for his 1978 State of the Union address, one year into his term. But they seemed, strangely, hopeful. The president’s big domestic initiative that year was a national energy policy. The gas-station lines and first-ever spike in fuel prices in the mid-1970s made this a genuine emergency. He hadn’t yet gotten the whole plan through, but the previous summer he had signed legislation

Leonard Garment: For Nixon, All That Jazz

[Leonard Garment was a White House counsel during the Nixon Administration.] In April 1969, three months after his inauguration, President Richard Nixon hosted a party at the White House to celebrate Duke Ellington’s 70th birthday and award the Duke the Medal of Honor. Great American jazz figures were there. Musicians played Ellington songs arranged by Gerry Mulligan. Joe Williams and Mary Mayo sang. Ellington danced with Rose Mary Woods. After dinner, the president had a nightcap w

Andrew Baker: The Holocaust's Untended Graves

[Andrew Baker, a rabbi, is director of international Jewish affairs for the American Jewish Committee.] World leaders, Holocaust survivors and World War II veterans gathered at Auschwitz on Wednesday to mark the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp. Poland has long shouldered responsibility for preserving this tragic site, which has become a virtual synonym for the Holocaust. Its gas chambers and crematoria, rail platforms and endless rows of wooden barr

Laurence Rees: Raped by their saviours ... How the survivors of Auschwitz escaped one nightmare only to face another

[Laurence Rees wrote Auschwitz: The Nazis And The Final Solution, and wrote and produced the BBC TV documentary series of the same name.] When liberation came, it came quickly. One night in January 1945, as ten-year-old Eva Mozes Kor and her twin sister Miriam lay in their bunks at Auschwitz-Birkenau, they were suddenly awoken by a huge explosion. Outside, the winter sky was red with flames. The Nazis had blown up the crematoria where the bodies of hundre

John Ferling: Myths of the American Revolution

We think we know the Revolutionary War. After all, the American Revolution and the war that accompanied it not only determined the nation we would become but also continue to define who we are. The Declaration of Independence, the Midnight Ride, Valley Forge—the whole glorious chronicle of the colonists’ rebellion against tyranny is in the American DNA. Often it is the Revolution that is a child’s first encounter with history. Yet much of what we know is not entirely true. Perhaps more tha

Edward Serotta: A Book's Inscription and Jewish Tragedy

[Edward Serotta directs the Jewish historical institute Centropa in Vienna (centropa.org).] During a trip to Israel earlier this month, I stopped in Stein's secondhand bookshop on King George Street in Jerusalem.... A visit to Stein's always provides a glimpse of another era. It was while perusing the books there a couple of weeks ago that I came upon a volume of essays by Leo Baeck, who was Germany's most famous reform rabbi during the early 20th century.