Roundup: Talking About History

Eliza Gray: Samuel Johnson and the Virtue of Capitalism

[Ms. Gray was a Bartley Fellow with the Journal this summer.] It was the ultimate gathering of statesmen, thinkers and artists, the likes of which aren't likely to be found in Davos or at any Renaissance Weekend. "The Club," as it was simply known, was founded in 1764 by the moralist and polymath Samuel Johnson, and included the likes of political philosopher Edmund Burke, painter Joshua Reynolds, naturalist Joseph Banks, historian Edward Gibbon and economist Adam Smith.

Tim Harper: Japan's gamble to become a colonial power

[Tim Harper is reader in south-east Asian and imperial history at the University of Cambridge. This article draws on his recent books, with Christopher Bayly, Forgotten Armies: Britain's Asian Empire and the War With Japan (Penguin, 2004) and Forgotten Wars: The End of Britain's Asian Empire (Penguin, 2007)] The far east has too often been seen as a distant and relatively minor theatre of the war in Europe. This perspective needs to be reversed. The great Asian war had a seismic mom

David C. Engerman: How Philip Mosely helped Soviet Studies moderate American policy

[David C. Engerman teaches history at Brandeis University. His book, Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (Oxford University Press) will be published this fall. In 2007, he was awarded a $40,000 NEH research fellowship to work on this project.] When Winston Churchill ominously announced in March 1946 that an “Iron Curtain had descended over Europe,” the United States government employed around two dozen experts on the Soviet Union and even fewer on Central

Meredith Hindley: The Transformation of "Advice and Consent"

[Meredith Hindley is senior writer for HUMANITIES.] In the aftermath of the Senate hearings to consider the president’s nominee to become the next U.S. Supreme Court justice, it’s hard to remember that the process wasn’t always like this. There weren’t always weeks of media coverage, and there weren’t always hearings. Nor did individual senators spend hours calling witnesses, making statements, or cross-examining the nominee. In fact, the first nominee didn’t testify before the Se

Rebecca Solnit: How 9/11 Should Be Remembered

[Twenty years ago this October, Rebecca Solnit was writing about the Kennedy assassination for her first book when the Loma Prieta earthquake struck. She hit save, stood in a doorway until the shaking was over, and marveled in the days after at the calm, warm mood of the people of her city and her own changed state of mind. She's written regularly for TomDispatch since the outbreak of the war in Iraq. Her just published new book,

Tom Engelhardt: 9/11's Living Monuments

On September 11, 2001, a fellow New Yorker and friend of mine, a public health historian who knew instantly what the dangers were, bicycled directly into the smoke, ash, and chemicals that hung over lower Manhattan searching for his daughter whose school was only blocks away from the collapsed buildings. She was, it turned out,"safe" in that same pall of dangerous smoke. She had been evac

Jamie Glazov: The Communist Collapse: Twenty Years On, an Interview with Pavel Stroilov

[Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Russian, U.S. and Canadian foreign policy. He is the author of Canadian Policy Toward Khrushchev’s Soviet Union and is the co-editor (with David Horowitz) of The Hate America Left. He edited and wrote the introduction to David Horowitz’s Left Illusions. His new book is United in Hate: The Left's Romance with Tyranny and Terror.] Twenty years ago, the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe bega

Daniel Brook: What Can We Learn About Mohamed Atta From His Work as a Student of Urban Planning?

[Daniel Brook is a journalist whose writing has appeared in Harper's, Dissent, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Boston Globe, among other publications. Brook was a finalist in the 2003 Livingston Awards for Young Journalists and won the 2000 Rolling Stone College Journalist Competition while a student at Yale. He lives in Philadelphia. He is the author of The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America.] A month after 9/11, Fouad Ajami wrote in the New York Times

Andrew Alexander: In lessons of war, overlearning is often as big a danger as not learning at all

[Andrew Alexander is a Daily Mail columnist.] The surge of memories and commentaries about September 1939 has supposedly offered any number of moral, political and military lessons. But there is another, perverse side to the process - overlearning, often as big a danger as not learning at all. As we slid into World War II, British and French leaders remembered acutely how disaster had built on one minor event. World War I developed from Austria's

Garry Wills: Conservatives ... The Tanenhaus Taxonomy

Much of Sam Tanenhaus's book is given over to the rating of recent presidents. We are told, for instance: "Of the last six Republican presidents, three (Nixon, Reagan, and George W. Bush) had strong ties to movement conservatism, while three (Eisenhower, Ford, George H.W. Bush) did not." He counts the last three superior to the first three. That was not the popular judgment of those men. After all, Nixon and Reagan were reelected, while Ford and Bush I were not. Furthermore, in the lat

Michael Oriard: Footbal and how today's game was shaped by the racial strife of 1969.

College football's centennial year, 1969, also happened to be my senior season at Notre Dame. I played against three teams that year—Georgia Tech, Tulane, and then Texas in the Cotton Bowl—that had not yet integrated their varsity football teams. This was actually a mark of progress. By 1969, the integration of the Southeastern Conference and the old Southwest Conference was finally well underway. It started in the SWC in 1966 at Baylor and SMU and in the SEC with Kentucky in 1967; it ended with

Adam Holland: Buchanan: Churchill caused World War II, fall of western civilization

Pat Buchanan, in a London debate timed to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the British and French declaration of war against Germany, has blamed Winston Churchill for starting the Second World War. (Read about it here: U.S. politician puts blame on Churchill for Second World War.) This follows close on the heels of Buchanan's widely published essay blaming the Poles for provoking the Nazi invasion. The debate was sponsored by Intelligence Squared and took place in London's Me

Special Issue of OAH's Journal of American History: Abraham Lincoln at 200 ... History and Historiography

"'Young Men for War': The Wide Awakes and Lincoln's 1860 Presidential Campaign," by Jon Grinspan Jon Grinspan explores the influence of the forgotten campaign organization the Wide Awakes on Lincoln's 1860 election and the coming of the Civil War. This grassroots movement demonstrates the importance of novice political participants and helps explain how the 1860 campaign inadvertently led to the secession of the South.

Stephen G. Rademaker: Barack Obama As Charlie Wilson?

[Stephen G. Rademaker, senior counsel of BGR Government Affairs LLC, was an assistant secretary of state from 2002 to 2006, with responsibility for arms control, nonproliferation and international security.] Twice in 25 years, Afghanistan has been cast in American politics as the "good" war, worthy of American support, and contrasted with a "bad" war that allegedly was not. The first time, this worked out reasonably well for America and its Afghan allies. It is u

WaPo Editorial: Why the records of Supreme Court justices should be governed by rules -- not individuals

THE CASE of former Supreme Court justice David H. Souter shows why the country needs a sensible and formal policy on how justices preserve and disseminate material they produce while performing their public duties. Justice Souter agreed last month to donate his personal and professional papers to the New Hampshire Historical Society in his home state. But he ordered that they be off-limits to the public, including academic researchers, historians and journalists, for 50 years from t

Naomi Klein: Durban was a critical turning point in reparations debate

... When the World Conference on Racism arrived in Durban [in 2001], many delegates were shocked by the mood in the streets: tens of thousands of residents joined protests outside the conference center, holding signs that said landlessness = racism and new apartheid: rich and poor. South Africa's disillusionment, though particularly striking given its recent democratic victory, was part of a much broader global trend, one that would define the conference, both in the streets and in the assembly

Michael White: The second world war: the honourable road to ruin

[Michael White is assistant editor and has been writing for the Guardian for over 30 years, as a reporter, foreign correspondent and columnist.] Who to blame for the second world war, the nostalgia industry is asking this week. As the hours tick away towards the 70th anniversary of Britain's fateful declaration – Sunday morning, 3 September 1939 – the simplest, most obvious answer remains the right one. Hitler did it, though Bismarck has a lot to answer for. Yet throug

BBC: I was in Hitler's suicide bunker

At his living room table, 92-year-old Rochus Misch shows me some of his old photo albums. Private pictures he had taken more than 60 years ago. There are colour images of Mr Misch in an SS uniform at Adolf Hitler's home in the Alps, snapshots of Hitler staring at rabbits, and photos of Hitler's mistress and future wife Eva Braun. For five years, SS Oberscharfuehrer Rochus Misch had been part of Adolf Hitler's inner circle, as a bodyguard, a courier and telephone operator to t

Rory O'Connor: Happy Birthday, Mr. Internet!

[Filmmaker and journalist Rory O'Connor writes the 'Media Is A Plural' blog, accessible at www.roryoconnor.org.] Four decades ago – on September 2, 1969, to be precise -- Leonard Kleinrock and a handful of associates began tests on what was soon to become the Internet. About forty people gathered in Kleinrock's lab at the University of California, Los Angeles to observe two bulky computers fifteen feet apart send test data to each other acros

Robert A. Slayton: The Most Precious Cargo

[Robert A. Slayton is Professor of History at Chapman University and author of the forthcoming Master of the Air: William Tunner and the Success of Military Airlift from University of Alabama Press.] More than two decades after the end of the Cold War, there can be no question about the significance of the event that crystallized the West’s determination to win the standoff with Communism. The 1948 Berlin Airlift was the West’s first victory on the way to eventual triumph in the lon