Archives

Quote/Unquote 2006 May

WEEK of May 29, 2006Re: Spelling Bees Education Gadfly ( Weekly Bulletin of News and Analysis from the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation):The winner of the 2006 Scripps National Spelling Bee will be crowned tonight, and all the pomp will be broadcast live on ABC. But it's worth wondering whether the Scripps bee still merits such publicity while the estimable National Geographic Bee

Quote/Unquote 2006 April

WEEK of April 24, 2006Re: MaoMax Boot:... China bears scant resemblance to the one Mao left behind in 1976. But even as a pragmatic philosophy of"market-Leninism" has taken hold, there has never been a real repudiation of Mao. The official line has r

Quote/Unquote 2006 March

WEEK of March 27, 2006Re: Iraq War & HistorySteve Coll in the New Yorker:The President and the members of his war cabinet now routinely wave at the horizon and speak about the long arc of history’s judgment—many years or decades must pass, they suggest, before the overthrow of

Quote/Unquote 2005 July-Aug.

WEEK of August 29, 2005Re: Hurricaine Katrina HNN blogger Ralph Luker:The activist side of me recognizes how pitifully small my taxes and philanthropy are, in comparison to the need, and I'm comforted only a little by the fact that they add up when joined to those of others. What, further, can I do? I have no useful skills to put into the relief effort. I'd only get in the way of it. I can't even envision w

Quote/Unquote 2006 Feb.

WEEK of February 27, 2006Re: Bush in PakistanJuan Cole:Bush has all along made the mistake of playing to Muslim leaders rather than to Muslim publics. Yet he has at the same time undermined authoritarian leaders with his talk of spreading democracy. So a military dictator like Pervez

Quote/Unquote 2006 Jan.

WEEK of January 30, 2006Re: IraqJuan Cole:Christiane Amanpour thinks things are getting"worse and worse" in Iraq. Given that daily attacks are up from 55 per day to 77 per day over a year ago, and given that Baghdad (1/4 of the population) is being starved of fuel

Quote/Unquote 2005 Dec.

WEEK of December 26, 2005Re: President Bush Robert Dallek, on President Bush clearing brush at the Crawford ranch:This is part of his macho image. Obviously this is nothing Bush has to do. He's the son of a rich man who doesn't have to spend his time cutting underbrush.Re: President BushAlexander Cockburn:

Quote/Unquote 2005 Nov.

WEEK of November 28, 2005Re: Bush's Ratings Daniel Henninger: George Bush may be the feistiest president since Teddy Roosevelt. Dubya looks like the kind of guy who'd get in your face real fast if he weren't wound so tight behind that presidential reserve. So why, until this wee

Quote/Unquote 2005 Oct.

WEEK of October 3, 2005Re: What Historians Do Rob MacDougall:The woman cutting my hair asked me what I do for a living. I told her I was about to start a brand new job as a history professor. I still grin every time I say that. No doubt the thrill wears off in time, but after mumble-mumble years of grad school and three consecutive bouts with the job market, I gotta tell you, it feels great to be a

Quote/Unquote 2005 Sept.

WEEK of September 26, 2005Re: Iraq & WW II Juan Cole:Gen. Richard Myers, outgoing chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, warned Wednesday that winning in Iraq was as important to the US as winning WW II had been, and that a withdrawal would lead to another 9/11- style attack. With all due respect, Gen. Myers is wrong on both counts. For the US to stay ma

Quote/Unquote 2005 June

WEEK OF June 27, 2005Re: Iraq and President Bush's Reputation David Ignatieff:If democracy plants itself in Iraq and spreads throughout the Middle East, Bush will be remembered as a plain-speaking visionary. If Iraq fails, it will be his Vietnam, and nothing else will matter much about his time in office. For any president, it must be daunting to know already that his reputation d

Quote/Unquote 2005 May

WEEK OF MAY 31, 2005Re: LincolnJames McPherson, in a interview with the NYT, What Lincoln Believed:The title of this book is incomplete. It should be What Michael Lind Believes Abraham Lincoln Believed. And what Lind believes suffers from a strange case of literary schizophrenia. In the first and last chapters, the author develops the theme that Lincoln was"the champion of lib

Quote/Unquote 2005 April

April 30, 2005 Muhar Altubi, recalling what he told looters trying to steal Iraqi treasures from the dead city of Uruk:When I saw them, I shouted at them to leave, get off this land. What is buried here doesn't belong to any man. It belongs to the world.April 29, 2005 Reagan biographer Edmund Morris, commenting on the president'

Quote/Unquote 2005 March

March 31, 2005 Michael Tomlan, the director of the graduate program in historic preservation at Cornell University, commenting on the support the National Trust for Historic Preservation gave to the decision to tear down a historic building in St. Louis for parking garage: It's morally and in any number of senses ethically inappropriate. It violates preservation's Hippo

Quote/Unquote 2005 Feb.

Feb. 29, 2005 Katsumoto Saotome, the historian who built a museum to commemorate the Tokyo firebombing of 1945:Japanese people haven't fully learned from the past. I think that is the government's intention. In my opinion, they think if people learn about this miserable past then Japan will not be able to go to war in the future. Feb. 29, 2005 Rev. John P. Wauck of Rome's Santa Croce Pontifical University:"The irony is that the

Quote/Unquote 2006 Jan. to March

Roundup Top 10 Archives Jan. 2, 2006 to June 26, 2006

Week of June 26, 2006 #1 Glenn W. LaFantasie: On the vast differences between the world of the Civil War and our ownhttp://hnn.us/roundup/archives/11/2006/6/#27440 #2 Jeffrey Kimball: The 1 Percent Solution http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/27335.html #3 Jim Sleeper: Journalists should be jolting one another and the rest of

Roundup Top 10 Archives July 2006 to September 2006

Week of September 25, 2006 #1 John J. Miller: Is Military History Dead?http://hnn.us/roundup/archives/11/2006/9/#30356 #2 Geoffrey Wheatcroft vs. Carol Gould: Was Israel Born of Terrorism? http://hnn.us/roundup/archives/11/2006/9/#30354 #3 Jonathan Zimmerman: How U.S. goes wrong in education

Pop Culture Archives

Fateless (Film/New Republic Review)Many of us have reservations about the Holocaust as a subject for enacted films. Claude Lanzmann, who made the monumental documentary Shoah, said,"Fiction [about the Holocaust] is a transgression. I deeply believe that there are some things that cannot and should not be represented." Still, even if we too think that we believe this, when a Holocaust

Pop Culture Archives

Reduction and Occupation: The Special Field Orders of General William T. Sherman, May-November 1864 (Atlanta History Center) The words from Union Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman flow across the page in a steady hand. The writing, in graceful penmanship, is clear, and the message is harsh."If the people raise a howl against the barbarity and cruelty, I