Culture Watch

Freedom of the Will

by Keith Miller

Let me treat in this essay one of the great absurdities of recorded thought, something that has befuddled the minds of thinkers, including theologians, philosophers, historians, and even many scientists, all of whom should have known better. What is that absurdity? I will tell you. It is the notion (and that is all it amounts to) that there is no such thing as free will, or, to put it another way, everything under heaven and earth is det

Culture War at a Time of War

by Norman Markowitz

Lynn Cheney and her friends are at it again, listing and baiting academic critics of Bush administration policies in Afghanistan as"the weak link" in the war against terrorism,"blaming America," and short on patriotism and long on self-flagellation." So goes the conservative organization she founded, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, in a recent report which has raised cries of"McCarthyism" from its targets and counter-charges by the council that untenured patriotic professors are he

Are Arabs Anti-Semitic?

by David Greenberg

Since Sept. 11, many Americans have been surprised by the prevalence and depth of anti-Semitism in the Arab world. Rumors that we recognize instantly as fabrications--such as the claim that 4,000 Jews were warned in advance about the World Trade Center attacks--are accepted unquestioningly in Arab countries. Reporters undergoing Middle East crash courses are discovering that even states at peace with Israel, such as Egypt, routinely propagate anti-Semitic propaganda of a virulence not seen in ma

Books: Brett Gary's The Nervous Liberals: Propaganda Anxieties from World War I to the Cold War

by John Owen

Editor's Note: The following review first appeared in March on H-Pol. It is especially timely now.Liberals do not care for propaganda. By definition, propaganda is not simply that which is propagated, but rather false or misleading statements propagated to some political purpose. In the liberal view, politics ought to be based upon tru

Searching for Moral Clarity

by Ruth Rosen

I've always been inspired by the courage -- and moral clarity -- of the civilians who fought the Nazis. When I left for Scandinavia in early September, I knew my vacation plans would allow me to indulge a lifelong interest in the resistance movement that sprang up against the Nazi occupation of Europe.So, in Copenhagen, I rushed to the Resistance museum. Though I already knew the story, I was like a small child who pleads, night after night, to h

Should You Hang Around People Who Blame the Jews?

by Leonard Dinnerstein

Nobody likes the JEWS. That is not exactly true but it is not entirely false either. People have an idea of what Jews are like and even though they may know several individuals who are Jewish, and with whom they have varying degrees of warm relations, they nonetheless have ideas about what"Jews" are like.People's ideas about Jews stem from comments that they heard at home in their early years, occasionally from religious teachings, and perhaps careless remarks from friends, teachers, and

Medical: The Pursuit of a Cure for Breast Cancer

by Barron Lerner

11Breast cancer 100 years ago was not subtle. Well before mammography, pink ribbons and the Race for the Cure, breast cancers often occupied a quarter of the breast by the time they were diagnosed. Doctors often described them in terms of fruit--plums or even oranges. When William Halsted, famed Professor of Surgery at Johns Hopkins University, devised an operation to treat these breast cancers, it was understandably extensive. Halsted removed not only the affected breast but the adjacent un

Three Cheers for the Suburbs at a Time of Terror

by Allan M. Winkler

Where are you safest from a possible attack? That question has been asked over and over in recent weeks, in the aftermath of the devastating terrorist assaults on the World Trade Center towers in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. And it echoes a question that was asked repeatedly in the late 1940s and 1950s, as the United States struggled to deal with the dilemmas of the atomic age.Civil defense has a long history. From the time the United States dropped the fir

Giving Up Freedom for Security

by John H. Barnhill

The United States is in its third week of a war with no name. President George W. Bush has not yet given the people a sense of what America's New War will be. Congress has rallied behind the president and written a $40-billion check for an unspecified military action and recovery in New York City. Another $15 billion has been designated to help the airline industry. Americans back their government overwhelmingly. But that support cannot include unquestioning accepta

Email and the Disinformation Age

by Robert Cook

Not very long ago the Internet was hailed as the single greatest discovery since sliced bread. We were, we were told, living in something called"The Information Age". It would, we were promised, be better than The Iron Age, the Bronze Age and hotter than The Ice Age.The Internet has indeed improved high-speed communication and data transfer. The Internet has made it easier to obtain and to exchange information, but it has in and of itself neit

Books: Harry V. Jaffa’s A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War

by Daniel Justin Herman

Harry Jaffa is many things: a former speechwriter for Barry Goldwater, a critic of William Rehnquist, a disciple of Leo Strauss, a crusader for Truth with a capital T. Fermented together, these elements produce a defense of Abraham Lincoln and the Union that is remarkable for intellectual consistency. More important, Jaffa's book is remarkable for timeliness. Jaffa calls on Americans, and particularly American historians, to return to the doctrine of reason, natural rights, and the Decl

Did Henry Kissinger Slander Christopher Hitchens?

by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

Henry Kissinger came to the National Press Club here in Washington, D.C. last week to give a talk, sell his latest book, Does America Need a Foreign Policy? and take questions from an audience of about 300 people. We weren't as interested in the talk or the book as much as the question period. We figured, correctly as it turned out, that Henry hadn't change over the years -- his unspoken theory of foreign policy was still the same: the corporate state -- including his client co

Letter to the OAH

by Keith Miller

Mr. Miller sent the following letter to the OAH. The lighting of candles Friday night was a wonderful idea, for little children especially. people are trying so hard to cope with our national trauma. We, as historians, can help by integrating our country's history as never before. for the situation is grave indeed, particularly should we experience more terroristic attacks. Surely you would agree. Scholarship as usual will not help us here. we must help this country's spirit.

Fanatics—Theirs and Ours

by Stanley Kutler

Johannes Rau, President of Germany, spoke to over 200,000 people in Berlin at the Brandenburg Gate the other day. It was an incredibly emotional moment. Particularly striking was the older element in the crowd, who probably remembered John F. Kennedy's stirring words nearly four decades ago:"Ich bin ein Berliner." President Rau forcefully and eloquently spoke to the American people, and said:"You are not alone." Moving, indeed. My impression is that Rau was not there to audition for any rhetoric

Time Capsules: Remains of the Day

by Knute Berger

In the wake of terrorism and on the eve of war, it may be difficult to take the long view, but the disaster at the World Trade Center in New York may offer us an opportunity to renew our commitment to the preservation of civilization, or at the very least, its memory. In most major architectural structures there exist what are, in effect, time capsules, usually items preserved for the f

Sports: The Story At Last About What Happened in 1965 at Purdue's Ross Ade Stadium

by George Beres

Tapping a football opponent's game phones is rare and unfair, but not unheard of. In 1985, Lewis & Clark College forfeited a Northwest Conference game in Oregon to Pacific University, after it was learned a Lewis & Clark coach had listened in on the game phones of his opponent. That same year, the Denver Post reported rumors that the University of Texas at El Paso had gained its only victory of the season over heavily favored Brigham Young by tapping game phones of BYU coaches. The imp

Is a Democrat Running the Bush White House Website?

by HNN Staff

After he was impeached, the conventional wisdom was that Bill Clinton would be remembered by history as the president who had an affair with Monica Lewinsky and then lied about it. Not so fast. On the official website of the White House, which provides short histories of every president, Mr. Cli

In Honor of Labor Day: The Top Five Myths About Work

by HNN Staff

MYTH #1The Work Ethic Is DeadThis is true. The work ethic is dead. The myth is that its demise is a recent phenomenon. According to historians, the work ethic actually began dying in the middle of the nineteenth century and finally succumbed entirely by the 1920s. Two developments killed it. The first was industrialism, which made work dreadfully dull. Jewish glove makers in Chicago, Herbert Gutman found, grew morose and spiritless when the owner of the factory where they worked installed an assembly line. Nobody wanted to work all day sewing just one finger of a glove instead of the entire piece. At congressional hearings held in the 1880s clergyman R. Heber Newton noted that the industrial worker"makes nothing," and"sees no complete product of his skill growing into finished shape in his hands." Hence, the worker feels dejected and lifeless."What zest," he asked," can there be in the toil of this bit of manhood?" Add to this the fact that factories exploited many workers and you understand why workers suddenly weren't as thrilled with the work ethic as they once may have been.

Sports: Exorcising the Wrigley Field Curse

by George Beres

It is getting scarry for all Cubs fans, including those of us who keep a low profile in the Northwest. In Eugene, Ore., our faith in the martyrs of Chicago's Wrigley Field was tested last year, when their Eugene farm team, the Ems, made it to the NW League playoffs for the first time in two decades-- then promptly flopped. Could the Billy Goat curse on the parent team in Chicago have infected its innocent affiliate 2,000 miles to the West? Anticipating the worst, I urged Ems general manag

Books: The Marriage that Ended a Political Career

by Rick Perlstein

Following is an excerpt from Mr. Perlstein's Before the Storm. The story picks up with the announcement that Nelson Rockefeller, candidate for the Republican nomination in 1964, had decided to remarry following his divorce. * * * * * Nelson Rockefeller was behaving strangely. As soon as the pundits began declaring his nomination a lock, opportunistic politicians naturally began lining up to endorse him. As soon as they offered, he turned them down. An explanation would arrive soon enough. Among the first to receive it was Rockefeller's friend Barry Goldwater. The Arizona senator was up on his roof high above Paradise Valley puttering with the TV antenna when Rockefeller called. Peggy answered the phone."This is Nelson Rockefeller.""Well, hello yourself," she replied."This is Mamie Eisenhower." (Barry's friends liked practical jokes.)