Roundup: Talking About History

Akash Kapur: India's Path Was Paved by Soviet Fall

[Akash Kapur is a writer, living mostly in South India, outside Pondicherry. His work has been published in The Atlantic, The Economist, Granta, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Yorker, among other places. He also writes a fortnightly “Letter from India” column for the International Herald Tribune.] With all the attention being paid this month to the fall of the Berlin Wall, I’ve found myself thinking of how much India has changed over the last 20 years. Most of the media

Dick Meister: The Man Who Didn't Die, Joe Hill and the Industrial Workers of the World

[Dick Meister is a San Francisco-based writer who has covered labor and politics for a half-century as a reporter, editor, author and commentator. You can contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com.] It's November 19, 1915, in a courtyard of the Utah State Penitentiary in Salt Lake City. Five riflemen take careful aim at a condemned organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Joe Hill, who stands before them straight an

Eric Stoner: A Conversation About Nonviolence

[Eric Stoner wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit magazine that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Eric is an adjunct professor at St. Peter’s College and an editor at Waging Nonviolence. His articles have appeared in The Guardian, Mother Jones, and The Nation, among other publications.] Eric Stoner responds to Stephen Zunes: Yes, nonviolent movements have achieved important democratic and political reforms. But if they fail to address the divide bet

Leon Wieseltier: Unmending Wall

[Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor of The New Republic.] The absence of Barack Obama from Berlin on the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall may be explained in many ways, and one of the explanations may be his view of the world. He is kein Berliner. No, he is not soft on communism, not least because there is no longer any communism, at least of the classical kind, to be soft on. In the video message that was broadcast to the commemoration--it allowed him once again to ha

Kang Jian, Arimitsu Ken and William Underwood: Assessing the Nishimatsu Corporate Approach to Redressing Chinese Forced Labor in Wartime Japan

[William Underwood, a Japan Focus coordinator, is an independent researcher of reparations for forced labor in wartime Japan. ]Introduction: Wartime forced labor and the future of Japan-China-Korea Relations WILLIAM UNDERWOODThe Nishimatsu Settlement Controversy Xinhua News Agency reported in October 2009 that Nishimatsu Construction Co. “secured a reconciliation” by voluntarily agreeing to compensate Chinese victims of wartime forc

Ben Gelber: Ben Franklin on Global Warming

[Ben Gelber is a meteorologist at WCMH-TV in Columbus, Ohio, and the author of “The Pennsylvania Weather Book.”] FEW would argue that the debate on global warming engenders a lot of emotion. What else are we to make of comments that “within the last 40 or 50 years there has been a very great observable change of climate,” that “a change in our climate ... is taking place very sensibly” and that “men are led into numberless errors by drawing general conclusions from particular facts”

Mark Bowden: How Iran's Revolution Was Hijacked

[Mr. Bowden, a national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, is the author of "Guests of the Ayatollah" and, more recently, "The Best Game Ever," both published by Atlantic Monthly Press.] It has been three decades since Iranian college students overran and occupied the American Embassy in Tehran, and we are still dealing with that country's revolution. Americans at the time were understandably preoccupied with the fate of 66 countrymen who were h

Thomas Omestad: Remembering the twitchy, terrifying final days of communist rule in Czechoslovakia

[Thomas Omestad is a senior fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. He covered the Velvet Revolution in Prague for the December 25, 1989, issue of TNR. Read his piece here] The opening moments of what became known as Czechoslovakia’s “Velvet Revolution” did not feel so velvety. Nor did the outcome of those events--a largely peaceful trium

Robert McHenry: The (Editorial) Cost of Political Change: 1989 and Britannica

[Robert McHenry is a former editor-in-chief of Encyclopaedia Britannica and author of How to Know.] The 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, celebrated here last week as everywhere around the globe, was a highlight of the astonishing transformation that came over Eastern Europe in the years 1989-90. Many less dramatic but perhaps more substantial events preceded and helped make possible the fall, among them the remarkable changes that occurred in Hungary earlier in 1989.

Drake Bennett: Did we learn the wrong lessons from the fall of the Berlin Wall?

[Drake Bennett is the staff writer for Ideas. E-mail drbennett@globe.com.] With the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall earlier this week, the news was filled with images of that epoch-ending night, and of the equally historic events that led up to and followed it. Those images, for the most part, are of crowds: strikers in Poland, the multitudes at the reburial of Hungary’s former prime minister Imre Nagy (executed in 1958 on or

Richard Halloran: Will Obama Apologize for Hiroshima & Nagazaki?

[Richard Halloran, a free lance writer in Honolulu, was a military correspondent for The New York Times for ten years. He can be reached at oranhall@hawaii.rr.com.] Within a couple of hours of landing in Japan on Friday, President Barack Obama walked into a political minefield by implicitly promising someday to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the targets of American atomic bombs in 1945. After meeting with Prime Minister Yukio

Marc Cooper: Tthe Fate of Cesar Chavez's Dream (review of 'The Union of Their Dreams')

[Los Angeles-based writer and author Marc Cooper is director of Annenberg Digital News at the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California. ] In the midst of a searing heat wave in the summer of 2005, three Mexican-born California farmworkers succumbed to the relentless sun within a few weeks of each other. Outraged local community groups, some with roots in but no longer affiliated with the legendary United Farm Workers union, organiz

Michael Socolow: Agnew speeches sparked move toward soft news

[Michael Socolow is an assistant professor in the department of communication and journalism at the University of Maine.] It remains the most influential indictment of American journalism ever made. Forty years ago today, this famous figure began railing against the corporate media. “A broader spectrum of national opinion should be represented among the commentators of the network news,” he argued, explaining that “men who can articulate other points of view should be brought forwar

Patrick J. Buchanan: Polk: Forgotten Great

[Pat Buchanan has been a senior adviser to three presidents, twice a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and the presidential nominee of the Reform Party in 2000. Buchanan has written eight books, including four New York Times best-sellers. He is married to the former Shelley Ann Scarney, a member of the White House staff from 1969 to 1975.] As America debates whether to send tens of thousands more troops to Afghanistan, in the ninth year of a war for ends we cannot

Duncan Currie: 1989 and All That

[Duncan Currie is deputy managing editor of National Review Online.] In retrospect, the ending of the Cold War may seem inevitable. Of course the Berlin Wall eventually came down. Of course the long-subjugated peoples of Central and Eastern Europe eventually threw off the shackles of totalitarianism. Of course the chronically dysfunctional Soviet economy eventually plunged into a terminal crisis. Communism depended on lies and terror to survive; it produced miserably poor living sta

Ron Radosh: A Glimpse at Life in East Germany 20 Years After the Wall Fell

[Ronald Radosh is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at The Hudson Institute, and a Prof. Emeritus of History at the City University of New York.] Perhaps because this was the very week of the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago, attendance at the one year old Museum of the DDR (German Democratic Republic- the official name of the East German Communist government) was way above average. Virtually every space was packed this afternoon wi

Samuel J. Redman: Dog Skeletons, Bigfoot, and American Intellectual History

[Samuel J. Redman is a Doctoral Candidate, Department of History, University of California, Berkeley] This evening I finished reading a book by an anthropologist named Grover Krantz (1931-2002). The book, Only a Dog, is somewhat of a rare volume. I only learned of it from an intern at the National Anthropological Archives, where I am currently working on my dissertation. Krantz is most well-known for being one of the only professional scientists who supported the belief in the exist

Jordana Timerman: What Karadzic Did to Bosnia

[Jordana Timerman is a researcher at Foreign Policy.] Busted: Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic is being tried on charges of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity during the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, during which 150,000 to 200,000 people, mostly Muslims, died. He is accused of ethnic cleansing in eastern Bosnia, driving hundreds of thousands from their homes; a 44-month siege of the capital, Sarajevo, which left 10,000 dead; a massacre at Srebrenica, where about

Adam Kirsch: The November Pogrom

[Adam Kirsch is a senior editor at The New Republic.] In our collective memory of the Holocaust, Kristallnacht occupies a central but ambiguous place. If you look simply at the statistics, there is little reason why the events of November 9-10, 1938, should loom so large. According to the Nazis themselves, 91 Jews were killed in the nationwide pogrom that became known as the “Night of Broken Glass.” That figure, as Alan Steinweis points out in his illuminating new study Kristallnach

Mark D. Tooley: Revisionism from the Religious Left

[Mark D. Tooley directs the United Methodist committee at the Institute on Religion and Democracy.] Leftist church elites are fondly remembering the Fall of the Berlin Wall as though they could claim some credit for its fall. Conveniently, they forget their own complicity with the former tyrants of East Europe and the Soviet Union. “Christian hope and perseverance contributed significantly to the fall of the Berlin Wall”, World Council of Churches (WCC) chief Samuel Kob