Roundup: Talking About History

John B. Judis: Barack Obama, You Remind Me of Herbert Hoover

[John B. Judis is a senior editor at The New Republic.] Barack Obama has been compared to almost every American President of the last hundred years--favorably to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan; and unfavorably to Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush. I want to put another name in the hat: Herbert Hoover. It might seem ludicrous, or unfair, to compare Obama to one of the most vilified presidents of the last century, but that’s because Hoover’s re

Ben Macintyre: Heroes of the moral resistance against Hitler

[Ben Macintyre is Writer at Large for The Times and contributes a regular column.] The anti-Nazi resistance within Germany took different forms: some fought against Hitler, and some thought against Hitler; some defied the horror physically, and others intellectually. Chief among the latter group was Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, the Christian thinker and jurist, who used the power of his mind and the strength of his beliefs to oppose fascism, and was executed by Hitle

Edwin Black: Mesopotamia: Robbing the Cradle

[Edwin Black is the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of IBM and the Holocaust. This article is adapted from Banking on Baghdad: Inside Iraq's 7,000-Year History of War, Profit, and Conflict (Dialog Press)]. Mesopotamia—now known as Iraq--enjoyed a 2,000-year head start on Western civilization. What happened?Part of the answer lays millennia before our current turbulent times. Understanding this pivot

Mark Franchetti: Can the West avoid Russia's fate in Afghanistan?

[Mark Franchetti is the Moscow correspondent of the Sunday Times of London.] The white flashes of explosions and red traces of artillery fire filled the moonlit sky on the night of October 7, 2001, as Britain and the US launched the war in Afghanistan against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. From the roof of a mud-caked house in Tobdara, a mountainside village high above the Shomali valley, 30 miles north of the Afghan capital, Kabul, I watched as allied war planes and cr

Edward P Djerejian: The Radical Legacy of 1979

[Mr. Djerejian is the author of "Danger and Opportunity—An American Ambassador's Journey Through the Middle East" (Simon & Schuster Threshold Editions, September, 2008.) A former ambassador to Syria and to Israel, he is the founding director of the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University.] If ever one year in recent times was a catalyst for change in the broader Middle East and Muslim world, it was 1979. One ray of bright light in that year of darkness was

Jeremy Warner: We forget the lessons of the past at our peril

[Jeremy Warner is assistant editor of The Daily Telegraph.] 'Prediction is always difficult," Niels Bohr, the atomic physicist, famously remarked, "especially when it's about the future." Few decades provided better proof of the perils of prediction than the Noughties. The past three years of financial turmoil, for example, made fools of most economic forecasters. From the September 11 attacks to the worst banking crisis in history, the century has begun

Kishore Mahbubani: Can America Fail?

Kishore Mahbubani is dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore and is the author most recently of "The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East". In 1981, Singapore’s ­long-­ruling People’s Action Party was shocked when it suffered its first defeat at the polls in many years, even though the contest was in a single constituency. I asked Dr. Goh Keng Swee, one of Singapore’s three founding fathe

Kim Long: Rare Moons (On the Occasion of the Year-Ending Blue Moon of 2009)

[Kim Long is a Denver-based author and illustrator. He created the Moon Calendar in 1980, the first publication to show accurate depictions of the moon phases for every day of the year.] Tonight marks that rarest of events, not just the opening of a new year and a new decade but also the heralding of those events by a blue moon. A blue moon is defined as a full moon that occurs twice in the same calendar month. When the date for one full moon falls on or near the beginn

Daniel Martin Varisco: Grinding a Greater Axis of Evil

[Daniel Martin Varisco is Chair, Anthropology Department at Hofstra University.] Terrorism takes a toll far beyond the lives lost everyday, even when a plot is thwarted. On Christmas day a 23-year-old Nigerian named Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab attempted to set himself off as a human bomb on a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. On the surface he hardly fit the profile of a crazed militant fresh out of a training camp in the hills of Pakistan. His father was a recentl

Jordan Michael: What the Soviets Learned in Afghanistan

[Jordan Michael Smith is a writer based in Washington.] Thirty years ago today, on Dec. 24, 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The United States saw the invasion as unmistakable evidence that the Soviets were committed to aggression in the Middle East and the Third World. It was “the greatest threat to peace since the Second World War,” President Jimmy Carter announced. But archival documents released since the cold war’s end show that the Soviet’s actions were

David Stokes: Christmas Coming In From The Cold

On Christmas day 20 years ago, Nicolae Ceausescu – long time dictator of Romania – was, along with his wife Elena, executed by firing squad just days after fleeing Bucharest, while his tyrannical regime unraveled before the eyes of a watching world. His demise and the surrounding events are etched in the memory of those of us who watched it all unfold via various news reports. The look on the once strong-man’s face as a massive crowd began to boo during a speech on December 21st, w

Martin Wolf: How the noughties were a hinge of history

[Martin Wolf is chief economics commentator at the Financial Times.] The only truly global power was in rapid relative decline. Not long before, it had won a pyrrhic victory in a costly colonial war. New great powers were on the rise. An arms race was under way, as was competition for markets and resources in undeveloped areas of the world. Yet people still believed in the durability of the free trade and free capital flows that had nurtured prosperity and, many believed, had also u

Maziar Bahari: The Legacy of the People's Ayatollah

[Maziar Bahari is a Canadian/Iranian filmmaker and Newsweek correspondent.] "If you're going to ask me questions about my regrets, plan to spend the next month or so in my house!" Those were the words with which Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri greeted me when I interviewed him at his home in the holy city of Qum four years ago. He was then 83 years old and could look back on a life in which he'd served as a founding father of the Islamic Republic only to become its most vo

Michael Meyer: Death of Ceausescu, 20 Years On

[Michael Meyer is author of “The Year That Changed the World.” © Project Syndicate.] Nicolae Ceausescu liked to hunt bears. With his retinue, he would retreat to a lodge in Transylvania and sally forth, locked and loaded. He was accustomed to good fortune, for his huntsmen took precautions. They would chain some poor beast to a tree, drug it to keep it still and conceal themselves around the blind from which the great man would shoot. One day, they did their job haphaz

Cristian Segura: China's Rehabilitation of Chiang Kai-shek

[Cristian Segura is a European journalist based in Beijing.] The Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei, Taiwan's capital city, doesn't look very different from monuments devoted to communist icons in mainland China. The Kuomintang (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) both create propaganda scenarios that mix ideological fanfare, a lack of historical rigor and the colossal architecture commonly used to worship dictators. Maybe because they find it familiar, hun

Jordan Michael Smith: How Panama Invasion Paved the Way for Iraq

[Jordan Michael Smith is a writer in Washington, D.C.] On Dec. 20, 1989, nearly 30,000 U.S. troops invaded Panama and captured the country's military dictator, Gen. Manuel Noriega. The invasion lasted just over a month, and the U.S. military suffered just 23 casualties. Thomas Pickering was the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the conflict, and a key advisor to President George H.W. Bush as the United States solidified its position in Central America and ushered in a new

Martin Fletcher: Somalia is greatest victim of President Bush’s War on Terror

[Martin Fletcher is associate editor and former foreign editor of The Times.] Afghanistan and Iraq have monopolised the headlines but Somalia is arguably an even greater victim of George W. Bush’s ill-conceived and lamentably executed War on Terror. America’s interventions have proved so catastrophic that its best hope of salvaging something from the wreckage is a president it chased from power three years ago, who controls a few square miles of a country three times the size of Bri

Jack D. Elliott Jr.: Should American Heritage be Preserved?

[Jack D. Elliott, Jr. is a historical archaeologist with the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, and a Lecturer at Mississippi State University.] Today we are bombarded with allusions to the “culture war,” the conflict over the basic values that govern public life in the West. The war is grounded in a clash between the traditional West with its roots in the Christian heritage and a growing disillusionment with truth and meaning itself arising from a materialistic and s

Clare Spark: Assimilation and citizenship in a democratic republic

I have just finished reading a recent book by Eric P. Kaufmann, The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America  (Harvard UP, 2004). If Kaufmann’s reading of U.S. history is correct, then almost everything on this website is either mistaken or misguided. But I don’t think so. What his book  does is replicate the same Harvard line that I experienced there in the Graduate School of Education: that “sub-cultures” were the unit for sorting out people. Moreover, it promotes the “multiculturalis

Keith Livesey: What's Wrong with "Positive History"

[The author has a BA in British History from Birbeck College .] John Sweeney reports Stalin’s Return: This World, BBC Two, Wednesday, December 2, 7pm. Having been unfortunate to stumble across this programme while channel surfing I must say that this was the worst piece of journalism and history I have seen for a long time. It also shows that the BBC is also responsible for a gross dumbing down of history. The subject matter is a legitimate one the attempt to reh