Roundup: Talking About History

Michael Ballard: Deep in Mississippi’s piney woods, Confederate deserters fought a different sort of war

The idea is beguiling: a ­region in the South during the Civil War where the inhabitants, disgusted by slavery and unwilling to support the Confederate cause, take up arms as Union loyalists. Better still, for storytelling purposes, would be a charismatic leader who organizes the resistance. Such is the legend of what became known as the “Free State of Jones,” a county deep in Mississippi’s piney woods. The area was one of many pockets in the state where dissatisfaction with the Con

Doug Ireland: A Truly Queer History

[A complete collection of the Gay Liberation Front’s newspaper, ComeOut!, has just been posted on the excellent OutHistory website, founded by pioneering gay historian Jonathan Ned Katz, at outhistory.org/wiki/Come_Out%21_Magazine%2C_1969-1972 along with a collection of the original police reports on the Stonewall riot. Tommy Avicolli Mecca’s web site is at avicollimecca.com/

Elliott J. Gorn: The Meanings of Depression-Era Culture

[Elliott J. Gorn is a professor of history and American civilization at Brown University. He is author of Dillinger's Wild Ride: The Year That Made America's Public Enemy Number One, published this month by Oxford University Press.] ... There are major differences between the calamities that became apparent in 1929 and in 2008. After the stock-market crash that ended the 1920s, the economy had more than three years to stagnate, as President Herbert Hoover and Congress did what Repub

Eboo Patel: When Muslims Saved Jews

"As Muslims we welcomed them all. We welcomed them with bread, salt, and our hearts." We hear many accounts of what happened during the Holocaust. The atrocities committed; the times and places in which unspeakable acts against humankind occurred; the millions of lives stolen too soon. But the story told above by Nazlie Alla, whose Albanian Muslim family sheltered Jews from Greece, Slovakia, and Germany, is less well known. It's hard to imagine th

Fred Sargeant: It was the second night at Stonewall that pointed the way to gay liberation

[Fred Sargeant is a retired lieutenant from the Stamford, Conn., police department.] I WAS 19 years old when I met Craig Rodwell. He was 26. It was just after Thanksgiving in 1967, shortly after he’d opened the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop on Mercer Street near the New York University campus. One day in the shop — considered to be the first literary gay bookstore — the beat cop stopped by to tell us we needed to pay him off each week. Craig told him we wouldn’t pay; a

Lucian K. Truscott IV: The Real Mob at Stonewall

[Lucian K. Truscott IV, the author of “Dress Gray,” is writing an online novel, “General Bongo’s War.”] ... A prominent Stonewall myth holds that the riots were an uprising by the gay community against decades of oppression. This would be true if the “gay community” consisted of Stonewall patrons. The bar’s regulars, though, were mostly teenagers from Queens, Long Island and New Jersey, with a few young drag queens and homeless youths who squatted in abandoned tenements on the Lower

David Nasaw: A search for American identity after the Civil War led to a surge of machismo and bloodlust

[Review of: Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 by Jackson Lears, Harper, 448 pages, $27.99.] ... The cornerstone of Lears' history is what he identifies in his introduction as "regenerative militarism," the pursuit of regeneration -- for the nation and the individual -- through violence. There were other instruments of revitalization but none as important. One might have thought that the bloodletting of the Civil War would have cured the nation o

Frank Gannon: Historians And Partisans

The Nixon Library has just released some 30,000 pages of new presidential records and 150 new tapes from January and February 1973.   Among the many subjects covered are the end of the war in Vietnam.  The New York Times, Politico, and the Los Angeles Times all turned to Ken Hughes, of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, for explanation and explication. &nb

Doug Ireland: Queer studies matter

[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.] Sad to say, much of what comes out of university gay studies programs these days is altogether too precious, artificial and written in an academic jargon that is indigestible to most LGBT

Steven R. Ward: A History of Violence in Iran

[Steven R. Ward is a senior Middle East analyst for the U.S. government. He is the author of Immortal: A Military History of Iran and Its Armed Forces (Georgetown University Press, 2009).] On the eve of the centennial of Iran's first modern revolution, the country is experiencing the latest in a series of popular eruptions against an oppressive government. It was 100 years ago this month that Iranian freedom fighters were marching on Tehran to depose an autocrat they could no longer

Ann Gibbons: Ötzi Finders Hit Pay Dirt, and Scientists Fret

When I visit researchers in the field, they always bristle when writers compare their search for fossils or antiquities to treasure hunting. Few modern researchers ever profit personally from their discoveries, and in fact they often tell local people that fossils and mummies are worthless in monetary terms. “If you start buying and selling fossils, it will ruin our work,” says paleoanthropologist Elwyn Simons of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who has spent decades uncovering early p

Tim Rutten: The fascinating story of Henry Ford's venture to build an American utopia in the Brazilian rain forest

... By the late 1920s, [Henry] Ford was feeling many kinds of pressure: Socially, America was closing in on him. The long boom was tottering toward the abyss of 1929; his various social experiments were increasingly rejected, including a plan that in many respects anticipated the Tennessee Valley Authority; at the same time, an Anglo-Dutch attempt to monopolize the production of rubber in Southeast Asia seemed to directly threaten Ford Motor's future. The Southeast Asian plantation

Christian Caryl: 1979 ... The Great Backlash

[Christian Caryl is a contributing editor of Newsweek.] If you want to understand the surge of politicized religion, post-communist globalization, and laissez-faire economics that has defined our modern era, forget 1968. Forget even 1989. It's 1979 that's the most important year of all. A remarkable chapter in international affairs—and intellectual history—began that year, and it had the strangest group of authors imaginable. It was in 1979 that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khome

Alexei Bayer: Russia, Captives of History

[Alexei Bayer, a native Muscovite, is a New York-based economist.] While in Central Europe, I got a sense of how much work awaits the Commission to Combat Attempts to Falsify History to the Detriment of Russia's Interests, which President Dmitry Medvedev set up in May. In Budapest, a Hungarian friend kept pointing out bullet holes and shrapnel scars where Soviet tanks fired on apartment buildings in 1956. Then, in Lithuania, I visited two museums. The first, Stalin's World near the

Thomas Childers: A Father’s Day meditation on the invisible costs of war - and their family legacy

[Thomas Childers is the Sheldon and Lucy Hackney Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. His latest book is “Soldier from the War Returning: The Greatest Generation’s Troubled Homecoming from World War II” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). ] My father Tom Childers and Willis Allen, my best friend Gary’s father, were veterans of the Second World War, prototypes of what we have come to call “the Greatest Generation.” Raised in modest circumstances during the Great Depressio

The New Nixon Blog: John Dean's Appearance at the Nixon Library

Join Frank Gannon, Robert Nedelkoff, Bob Bostock, and others as they weigh in on John Dean's recent visit to the Nixon Presidential Library and the re-issue of his 30-year old book Blind Ambition. #### Jonathan Movroydis: Blind Ambition Not Absolutely Accurate In his Wednesday lecture at the Nixon Presidential Library, disgraced and former Nixon White House Counsel John Dean devoted a portion of his time to address his lawsuit against the authors of

Masha Lipman: Russia, Again Evading History

[Masha Lipman, editor of the Carnegie Moscow Center's Pro et Contra journal, writes a monthly column for The Post.] The Russian government has intensified its attempts to perfect the nation's past. The Defense Ministry posted an academic article on its Web site arguing that Hitler's territorial claims on Poland were "moderate" and "can hardly be referred to as unsubstantiated." After Poland rejected these claims, seeking "to gain a great power status,"

Maurice Isserman: Michael Harrington, Warrior on Poverty

[Maurice Isserman is a professor of history at Hamilton College and the author of “The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington.”] If there is a heaven, and it has a place for virtuous skeptics, I imagine Michael Harrington is looking down, amused by the recent cover of Newsweek proclaiming, “We Are All Socialists Now,” not to mention Newt Gingrich’s lament that the United States is seeing “European socialism transplanted to Washington.” Back in the 1960s, Harrington had some

William Anthony Hay: Conservatism's got a real history

[Mr. Hay, a historian at Mississippi State University, is the author of "The Whig Revival, 1808-1830." ] ... Richard Hofstadter and other thinkers in the postwar years saw conservatism as a morally compromised project in which vested interests played on populist fears to thwart progressive reforms. Lionel Trilling dismissed conservative thinking as "irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas." His Harvard contemporary Louis Hartz loftily claimed that

Fred Kaplan: 1959 I swear, it really is the year everything changed.

I have a new book out called 1959: The Year Everything Changed, which I suppose puts me in the ranks of authors lampooned in a story in the June 16 New York Times about books with "titles that make extravagant, impossible declarations." The piece pokes particular fun at titles with "exorbitant claims" about "things that changed the world"—and still more at writers who "claim to have found the single year that changed the world." Times reporter