Roundup: Talking About History

John Lee: Why China's 60th birthday is nothing to celebrate

[John Lee is a foreign-policy fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies in the Sydney area and a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington. He is the author of Will China Fail?] On Sept. 16, the blockbuster film The Founding of a Republic was released to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, which occurs Thursday, Oct. 1. Featuring more than 100 big-name mainland and Hong Kong actors including Jackie Chan and Jet Li, one o

Peter Grier: The lobbyist through history: villainy and virtue

[Peter Grier is a staff writer for The Christian Science Monitor.] Lobbyists have besieged the US government for as long as it has had lobbies. One of the first was William Hull, an ex-Revolutionary War officer who in 1792 was hired by fellow veterans from Massachusetts to press a claim for back pay they felt the nation still owed them for winning its liberty. Mr. Hull – a proud-looking sort with luxuriant hair – traveled to Philadelphia (then the nation’s capital) and

Edwin Black: When Zionists made a deal with the Nazis

[The writer is the award-winning best-selling author of IBM and the Holocaust, and his first book, The Transfer Agreement, has now been rereleased in a 25th anniversary edition (Dialog Press), with an afterword by Abraham Foxman. www.edwinblack.com] On the afternoon of August 7, 1933, at 76 Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin, on a day when well-dressed Jews in Germany could not step into the street without fear, when laboring kibbutzniks in Palestine proudly swept the midday perspiration fr

Michiko Kakutani: Presidential Confidential: Bill Clinton After Hours (Book Review)

[Michiko Kakutani is a Japanese-American Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for the New York Times.] In an interview near the end of his two terms in office Bill Clinton talked about wanting to “demystify the job” of being president. “It is a job,” he declared, and “there’s a lot to be said for showing up every day and trying to push the rock up the hill.” His folksy, down-home style of campaigning and his lackadaisical 2004 memoir “My Life” promoted this accessible view of the presidenc

John R. Bohrer: The Time The President Didn't Intervene

[John R. Bohrer is an historian of 1960s American politics.] In the first year of his first elected term, Lyndon Johnson made the presidency look easy. Landmark bills on education, health care and civil rights were flying through Congress. He put a new justice on the Supreme Court, escalated Vietnam and invaded the Dominican Republic. Johnson could do anything. But he stayed out of New York politics. In June of 1965, three-term Democratic Mayor Robert F. Wa

Daniel Okrent: Detroit: The Death — and Possible Life — of a Great City

If Detroit had been savaged by a hurricane and submerged by a ravenous flood, we'd know a lot more about it. If drought and carelessness had spread brush fires across the city, we'd see it on the evening news every night. Earthquake, tornadoes, you name it — if natural disaster had devastated the city that was once the living proof of American prosperity, the rest of the country might take notice. But Detroit, once our fourth largest city, now 11th and slipping rapidly, has had no s

Jonathan Brent: Postmodern Stalinism

[Jonathan Brent is executive director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and was formerly editorial director of Yale University Press. He remains executive editor of the press's Annals of Communism series and director of its Stalin Archive Project.] Visitors leaving Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport today can purchase a box of chocolates in the duty-free shop with a replica of a poster from the 1930s on the back, in which Stalin grasps the great wheel of the ship of

P.D. Smith: Russia's Doomsday Machine was real

[P.D. Smith is a writer. Doomsday Men, his cultural history of science, superweapons and other strangeloves, is published by Penguin in the UK, St Martin’s Press in the US, and by Companhia das Letras in Brazil.] On 13 November 1984, a Soviet missile was launched from Kapustin Yar, east of Stalingrad. About forty minutes later an R-36M intercontinental ballistic missile blasted off from an underground silo in Kazakhstan. Known to Western intelligence experts as the SS-18 Satan missi

Thomas E. Sebrell II: The Charleston-Liverpool Civil War Connection

[Tom Sebrell received his B.A. and M.A. in History from the Virginia Military Institute and Virginia Tech, respectively, before starting work towards a Ph.D at Queen Mary, London.] The Civil War has been heavily studied and written about, though few are aware of the fact that it was not strictly an American affair. Nor was Charleston’s role in the conflict. Before the secession crisis began in 1860, strong ties existed between the Southern ports and Liverpool, England,

Frank Gannon: Taking matters into his own hands, 57th anniversary of the speech that changes RN's life

[Frank Gannon won a White House Fellowship and served in the Nixon White House 1971-4. He accompanied RN to San Clemente aboard Air Force One on August 9th and organized the researching and writing of the President’s memoirs, RN.] Today is the fifty-seventh anniversary of the speech that changed the course of RN’s life and of politics as practiced in America. It was also the first of the remarkable comebacks from defeat or adversity that marked his long career.

Carol Becker: Forty Years Later Calley Speaks Up

[Carol Becker is dean of faculty at Columbia University School of the Arts. She is the author of numerous articles and several books. This essay is adapted from a chapter in her new book, "Thinking in Place: Art, Action, and Cultural Production" (Paradigm Press, November 2009).] On August 19, 2009, former Army Lt. William Calley spoke to a Kiwanis Club meeting in Greater Columbus, Georgia, and for the first time publicly admitted his regret for his role in the My Lai

William Burr: Intelligence and the Detection of the First Soviet Nuclear Test, September 1949

[Dr. William Burr, Senior Analyst, directs the Archive's nuclear history documentation project.] Sixty years ago this week, on 23 September 1949, President Harry Truman made headlines when he announced that the Soviet Union had secretly tested a nuclear weapon several weeks earlier. Truman did not explain how the United States had detected the test, which had occurred on 29 August 1949 at Semipalatinsk, a site in northeastern Kazakhstan. Using declassified material, much of which h

Edwin Black: Coke and Confiscation Coca-Cola Accused of Near-Criminal Collusion in Egypt’s Anti-Jewish Ethnic Cleansing

[Edwin Black is the New York Times bestselling author of IBM and the Holocaust and Nazi Nexus. ] In a stunning new court filing, Coca-Cola has been accused of near-criminal collusion in Egypt’s program of ethnic cleansing and property seizures targeting Jews during the 1960s. The long-standing case involves Egyptian Jewish businessman Refael Bigio and his family against his former partner, Coca-Cola in the illicit takeover of the family bottling business and property ne

Visualization showing reported occupations in the United States Labor Force from 1850-2000

Click here to go to Flash visualization This visualization shows stacked time series of reported occupations in the United States Labor Force from 1850-2000. The data has been normalized: for each census year, the percentage of the polled labor force in each occupation is shown. The data is originally from the United States Census Bureau and was provided by the University of Minnesota Population Center (ipums.org). The ca

Laura Miller: A masterly literary history does justice to our country's best and worst moments

[Laura Miller is the Senior Books Writer at Salon.] You could do a lot worse with the next 220 days of your life than to begin each one by reading an entry from the freshly published "A New Literary History of America" -- the way generations past used to study a Bible verse daily. You could do a lot worse, but I'm not sure you could do much better; this magnificent volume is a vast, inquisitive, richly surprising and consistently enlightening wallow in our national history

David Brooks: Three Cheers for Irving

[David Brooks is Op-Ed columnist at The New York Times.] Irving Kristol was born into a fanatical century and thrust himself into every ideologically charged battle of his age. In the 1930s, as a young socialist, he fought the Stalinists. In the 1940s, as a soldier, he fought fascism. In the decades beyond, as a writer and intellectual, he engaged with McCarthyism, the cold war, the Great Society, the Woodstock generation, the culture wars of the 1970s, the Reagan revolution and so

Mark E. Caprio and Yu Jia: Legacies of Empire and Occupation: The Making of the Korean Diaspora in Japan

[Mark E. Caprio is a professor of history at Rikkyo University in Tokyo and a Japan Focus associate. He is the author of Japanese Assimilation Policy in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945. Yu Jia earned her Ph.D. in history at Rikkyo University and is a post-doctoral fellow at Chung’ang University in Seoul. Her research interests focus on Korean and Japanese militarization during and immediately following the American Occupation of Korea and Japan.] The August 15, 1945 announcement by the

Russell Jacoby: When Freud Came to America

[Russell Jacoby is a professor in residence in the history department at the University of California at Los Angeles. A columnist for The Chronicle Review, he is author, most recently, of Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age (Columbia University Press, 2005).] One hundred years ago, Sigmund Freud arrived in the United States on his first and only visit. As the George Washington pulled into New York Harbor, he supposedly remarked to Carl Jung, who accompanied hi

John Steele Gordon: Don't Bet Against New York

[Mr. Gordon is the author of "Hamilton's Blessing: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Our National Debt," out in a revised edition by Walker & Co. early next year.] The financial collapse of 2008 and the Great Recession have had, not surprisingly, a major adverse impact on the economy of the country's financial center, New York City. There have been over 40,000 job losses in the financial community alone and both city and state budgets are deeply dependent on tax reve

William Wong: Oakland CA Chinatown Makes Aviation History

[William Wong is an author, journalist, and oral historian who was born and grew up in Oakland, California's Chinatown.] A significant piece of U.S. aviation history was made 100 years ago on September 21, 1909, in the skies over my hometown, Oakland, CA, and the small city of Piedmont, which is completely surrounded by Oakland. It's a little known history in Oakland, Piedmont, California, and the United States, but in China, it's a big deal. That's because