Roundup: Talking About History

Boris Johnson: Remember the Fall of the Wall

[Boris Johnson is Mayor of London.] I am thinking champagne. And cake. And fireworks, of course, not just any old fireworks but some of those truly shell-shocking bits of Chinese ordnance called Harmonious Geese or Whispering Swans. Far more important than the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot, far more benign in its consequences for world peace and prosperity, we celebrate next week the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall – the ultimate triumph of simple human

Nir Rosen: Lessons Unlearned ... The 1983 Marine Barracks Bombing in Beirut

[Nir Rosen is a fellow at New York University's Center on Law and Security. He has reported extensively from the Middle East, and his book In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq was published in 2006.] Another October 23rd has come and gone, another anniversary of the 1983 U.S. Marine barracks bombing in Beirut -- and more inane articles written by people drawing the wrong lessons. As usual, the authors perceive the United States as some innocent Little R

Christopher Meyer: The Decline of Britain's Foreign Office

[Christopher Meyer, 2009. Extracted from 'Getting Our Way: 500 Years of Adventure and Intrigue: the Inside Story of British Democracy', published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Meyer was Ambassador to Washington from 1997 until 2003.] Diplomacy rivals prostitution as the oldest profession. Like street-walking, it has never enjoyed a wholly favourable reputation. Often confused with its clandestine cousin, espionage, it has for centuries been associated with deviousness and duplicity. A

Robert Nedelkoff: The Last Of The Watergate Cubans Speaks

[Robert Nedelkoff, a resident of Silver Spring, MD, received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Louisville and his Juris Doctor degree from Monterey College of Law in 1996. From 1997 until March 2009, he worked on behalf of the Richard Nixon Foundation at the National Archives in College Park, MD. He has published articles in several magazines, including GQ and McSweeney’s.] In June I wrote here of the

Doug Ireland: The Century Leading to Wilde

[Doug Ireland is a veteran political reporter covering both sides of the Atlantic. He is currently the U.S. correspondent and columnist for the French political‑investigative weekly Bakchich, and international affairs editor for Gay City News, New York City's largest LGBT weekly newspaper.] Two signal events that would have important and dark consequences for same-sexers occurred within a couple of years of each other early in what is known as the Age of Reform in Queen Vi

Nathan Gardels: The End of History -- 20 Years Later

[Nathan Gardels is Editor of NPQ, Global Services of Los Angeles Times Syndicate/Tribune Media] November 9 will mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which led Francis Fukuyama to famously declare"the end of history" in an essay in the National Interest and later in a book titled The End of History and the Last Man.Twenty years on, what does Fukuyama think about where history has gone since? I asked him for the Global Viewpoint Network. Here i

Adam Davidson and Alex Blumberg: Accidents Of History Created U.S. Health System

[Adam Davidson has reported on international business and economics for NPR's National Desk since December 2004. Alex Blumberg is a contributing editor for NPR's Planet Money. He is also a producer for the public radio program This American Life, and an adjunct professor of journalism at Columbia University.] If you want to understand how to fix today's health insurance system, you'd be smart to look first at how it was born. How did Americans end up with a system in which employers

Tessa Morris-Suzuk: The Forgotten Japanese in North Korea: Beyond the Politics of Abduction

[Tessa Morris-Suzuki is Professor of Japanese History at the Australian National University. She is the author of Exodus to North Korea: Shadows from Japan's Cold War. Her most recent book, Borderline Japan: Foreigners and Frontier Controls in the Postwar Era is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. She wrote this article for The Asia-Pacific Journal.] For the past few years, international travelers

Mikhail Gorbachev: World no fairer 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall

[Mikhail Gorbachev was the last president of the Soviet Union; he was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 1990.] Twenty years have passed since the fall of the Berlin wall, one of the shameful symbols of the cold war and the dangerous division of the world into opposing blocks and spheres of influence. Today we can revisit the events of those times and take stock of them in a less emotional and more rational way. The first optimistic observation to be made is that the anno

Svetlana Savranskaya: Afghanistan Déjà vu? Lessons from the Soviet Experience

[Dr. Svetlana Savranskaya serves as the Archive's director for its cooperative projects with Russian archives and institutes and editor of the Russian and East Bloc Archival Documents Database. She earned her Ph.D. in political science and international affairs in 1998 from Emory University, where she studied under Professor Robert Pastor and worked as a Hewlett Fellow at the Carter Presidential Center in Atlanta.] The debate over U.S. policy in the Afghanistan war features stri

Warren Kozak: The Missiles of October

[Mr. Kozak is the author of "LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay" (Regnery, 2009).] "All war is based on deception." —Sun Tzu In the summer of 1962, the leader of the great Soviet empire, Nikita Khrushchev, faced a serious problem. His huge intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) didn't work. Their launchers were unreliable, their aim was off and the fuel used to rocket them skyward was so volatile that they had to be stored empty. I

Steven M. Gillon: A New Wrinkle in the JFK Assassination Story

[Steven M. Gillon is resident historian of the History Channel] This month will mark the 46th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. A recently declassified oral history by Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh, President Kennedy's military aide on the Dallas trip, sheds new light on the critical hours after the shooting. McHugh makes startling claims about Lyndon Johnson's behavior in the wake of the assassination. The interview with McHugh, original

Daniel Johnson: The Berlin Wall ... Seven Minutes that Shook the World

[Daniel Johnson is a journalist and founding editor of Standpoint magazine.] The Cold War was the first conflict that came close to annihilating Western civilisation — the first but almost certainly not the last. Yet the story of this global 40 Years War ended happily: it concluded almost bloodlessly in the European Revolution of 1989. This was a genuine popular revolution, not a coup by professional subversives and terrorists like the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. It came

Marty Peretz: Killing Kazstner. Killing Who?

[Marty Peretz is the editor-in-chief of The New Republic.] You probably don't know who Rudolf Kasztner was. But, actually, I've know about him since I was a teenager. Was he a Jewish hero? Or was he a traitor to the Jews? I can still hear the familiar piercing locutions of my parents' bad marriage, fought out over politics, Jewish politics, daily, unrelenting, almost viperous. My mother was for him, this Dr. Kasztner who in the late days of the Second World War, while 1

Kenneth C. Davis: Halloween: A Hidden History

[Kenneth C. Davis is author of Don't Know Much About History] When I was a kid in the early 1960s, the autumn social calendar was highlighted by the Halloween party in our church. In these simpler day, the kids all bobbed for apples and paraded through a spooky "haunted house" in homemade costumes -- Daniel Boone replete with coonskin caps for the boys; tiaras and fairy princess wands for the girls. It was safe, secure and innocent. The irony is that our churc

Ben Zimmer: Ms. (a history)

[Ben Zimmer is executive producer of visualthesaurus.com, an online destination for word lovers. He has worked as editor for American dictionaries at Oxford University Press and as a consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary.] In the Nov. 10, 1901, edition of The Sunday Republican of Springfield, Mass., tucked away in an item at the bottom of Page 4, an unnamed writer put forth a modest proposal. “There is a void in the English language which, with some diffidence, we undertake to

Colin Woodard: Academe in Eastern Europe 20 years after the fall of Communism

[Colin Woodard covered Eastern Europe for The Chronicle for many years. His latest book is The Republic of Pirates (Harcourt, 2007).] Today Masaryk University's Faculty of Social Studies occupies a beautifully renovated 19th-century building in Brno's historic center, not far from the tourist crowds on Námestí Míru, or Peace Square. Its founder, Ivo Mozny, and his colleagues enjoy spacious quarters, an exhaustive library, and, most important, freedom of inquiry. Twen

Michael Oriard: How the 60s Changed Big-Time College Football

[Michael Oriard is a professor of English and associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Oregon State University. This essay is adapted from his new book, Bowled Over: Big-Time College Football From the Sixties to the BCS Era, to be published next month by the University of North Carolina Press.] Football has changed enormously since I grew up with the game in the 1950s and 60s. Most broadly, today there seems to be a general sense of a continuous path from youth leagues all t

Steven Plaut: Nazis in the Ivory Tower

[Steven Plaut is a columnist for Frontpagemag.com.] Over the past two decades we have witnessed the emergence of a mass movement of political extremism and support for totalitarianism on Western college campuses. Large numbers of university professors and administrators today advocate politically extremist positions that combine support for totalitarian Islamofascism and its terrorism with deep hatred of Israel and anti-Americanism. The dimensions of the phenomenon vary by campus an

Edwin Black: How Did the Arabs Begin?

[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).] Just who were the Arabs and how did they begin? Mesopotamia’s original peoples were an indistinct amalgam of Sumerian, Semitic, Indo-European, and other groups. The Arabs as a group were generally thought to be the scattered people who spoke a simi