Roundup: Talking About History

Herbert London: On D-Day, the U.S. saved Europe from itself

[Mr. London is president of the Hudson Institute and professor emeritus at New York University. He is the author of "Decade of Denial" (Lexington Books, 2001) and "America's Secular Challenge" (Encounter Books, 2008).] The skies over Normandy are invariably filled with dark rain clouds. But on one day in late April the sky was cloudless and the English Channel tranquil. Youngsters built sand castles on Omaha Beach and dogs romped in the surf. It was a vastly diff

Scott Saul: Off Camera ... Civil Rights in the North

[Scott Saul, an associate professor of English and American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties. He is writing a critical biography of Richard Pryor. ] The year 1943 seemed, to contemporary observers, "1776 for the Negro"--a revolutionary time in which the promises of full citizenship for African-Americans were finally to be redeemed. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had desegregated the

Melinda Liu: When We Talk About Tiananmen

[Melinda Liu was named Newsweek Beijing bureau chief in late 1998, returning to the bureau she herself opened in 1980... Her coverage of the Hong Kong handover in 1997 and Sino-U.S. relations in 1996 helped win the magazine the Overseas Press Club's Ed Cunningham Memorial Award for best magazine reporting from abroad....Liu was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota and is a magna cum laude graduate of Radcliffe College, Harvard. She is President of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China, and in Octo

Anouar Majid: Why we should remember the 400th anniversary of the expulsion of Spain's entire Muslim population

[Anouar Majid is the author of We Are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades Against Muslims and Other Minorities (2009). He is director of the Center for Global Humanities at the University of New England in Maine.] This year, a few scholars are commemorating the 400th anniversary of one of the darkest episodes in history, an event that should be widely known and discussed, but which, alas, has remained buried in the archives of memory. In April 1609, King Philip III of Spain and

Todd Crowell: The Hidden Truth About Tiananmen

[Todd Crowell covered Tiananmen as Chief of Correspondents for Asiaweek.] The 1950 Japanese film Rashomon owes its enduring appeal to director Akira Kurosawa’s superb treatment of an ancient and universal theme: What is the truth? A samurai and his bride come upon a bandit in a forest grove, where the traveler dies and his wife is ravished. The only witness is a woodcutter. The story turns on the magistrate’s efforts to extract the facts from completely different yet equally plausib

Yevgeny Kiselyov: When Interpreting History Becomes a Crime

[Yevgeny Kiselyov is a political analyst and hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.] I would be fascinated to know if Westerners can fully appreciate the political significance behind President Dmitry Medvedev's decision to create a special commission "for counteracting attempts to falsify history to the detriment of Russia's interests." Most foreigners would probably say, "This is very strange. Doesn't Russia have more pressing problems it needs to tackle,

Lübeck: The town that said no to Hitler

Flying Ryanair is a pretty horrible thing to do at any time, but there is one advantage of flying it to Hamburg. With its customary reliability, the airline does not make too much noise about the fact that its Hamburg airport is in fact five minutes in a taxi from the centre of Lübeck (and not quite so near the centre of Hamburg, which is a mere 40 miles down the road). However, Lübeck is a sight – or rather a collection of sights – well worth seeing. Like its much bigger neighbour,

Jared Farmer: Extralocal History

[Remarks to the Society of American Historians upon accepting the 2009 Francis Parkman Prize, 17 April 2009, New York City, for the book On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Harvard University Press, 2008).] What a pleasure to be here tonight among people who care about the craft of history! I feel honored to share this award with such a distinguished list of writers. Most meaningfully to me, the register of past winners includes my mentor, Richard White. R

Klaus Wiegrefe: Who Ordered the Construction of the Berlin Wall?

[Klaus Wiegrefe is a Spiegel editor.] They met in Stalingrad, where they fought on the same side in 1942. One of them, the son of a miner from Ukraine, organized the city's defenses against the German Wehrmacht forces, while the other, a German exile, used a bullhorn to encourage infantrymen to change sides. This much is certain, and it is also certain that the two men -- the impulsive Kremlin dictator Nikita Khrushchev and the calculating founder of the German Democratic Republic,

Johann Hari: The Ghosts of the Empire Are Returning to Haunt Britain - and the U.S.

[Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent.] In a few weeks, a group of quiet, dignified elderly men and women will arrive in London to explain how the forces of the British state crushed their testicles or breasts with plyers. It was part of a deliberate policy of breaking a civilian population who we regarded as "baboons", "barbarians" and "terrorists." They will come bearing the story of how Britain invaded a country, stole its land, and imprisoned

Donald Ritchie: How the New York Times (and Almost Everyone Else) Missed the Watergate Scandal

[Donald Ritchie, author of Reporting from Washington: The History of the Washington Press Corps, Our Constitution, and The Congress of the United States: A

Sarah Ruden: Beyond the Myth of Mandela

[Sarah Ruden was born and raised in rural Ohio and educated at the University of Michigan, Harvard and Johns Hopkins. She has lived and worked in Africa for 10 years, and her fifth book, a translation of Vergil's Aeneid, was recently published by Yale University Press.] In the December 2008 edition of Harpers magazine, the South African poet in exile Breyten Breytenbach published a 90th-birthday letter to the former President, Nelson Mandela. The letter is replete with despair, grie

Jonathan Mirsky: The Long Shadow of Tiananmen

[Jonathan Mirsky is a journalist and a historian of China who lives in London.] The Tiananmen Square killings of 4 June 1989, 20 years ago, remain the most deadly events in the People's Republic of China since the death of Mao in 1976. Merely mentioning them can lead to arrest and detention. More than a dark shadow, the Tiananmen nightmare still hovers over the country. Here are the essential details of what is officially still called "the incident" or "t

Vladimir Ryzhkov: The Kremlin's War on History

[Vladimir Ryzhkov, a State Duma deputy from 1993 to 2007, hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy.] The Kremlin opened a new front against its "internal and external enemies" on May 19, when President Dmitry Medvedev created a presidential commission "for counteracting attempts to falsify history to the detriment of Russia's interests." The 28-member commission includes Kremlin-friendly conservatives such as State Duma deputies and United Russia members Konsta

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Tiananmen at Twenty

[Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a professor of history at UC, Irvine, is a co-founder of The China Beat (a group blog) and the author, most recently, of the forthcoming China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know.] In April and May of 1989, people around the world were inspired by the protests in Tiananmen Square, then horrified when the June 4 massacre turned Beijing streets into urban killing fields. China has changed enormously in the twenty years since then, but the Communist Pa

Robert Skidelsky: We Can Still Learn from Thatcher

[Robert Skidelsky, a member of the British House of Lords, is Professor emeritus of political economy at Warwick University, author of a prize-winning biography of the economist John Maynard Keynes, and a board member of the Moscow School of Political Studies.] Thirty years ago this month, Margaret Thatcher came to power. Although precipitated by local conditions, the Thatcher (or more broadly the Thatcher-Reagan) revolution became an instantly recognizable global brand for a set of

Ian Buruma: The ghosts of Tiananmen

[A new edition of Ian Buruma’s “Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing” (Atlantic) is published on 1st June.] Ten years after the Tiananmen massacre of 1989 I wrote a book, Bad Elements, about the fate of the protesters, dissidents and free-spirited Chinese who had wanted to change their country. Much had changed in those ten years, and even more has changed since. New buildings, ever taller, ever bigger, have made cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing virtua

William Leuchtenburg: The Wrong Man at the Wrong Time (Re: Herbert Hoover)

[From the book HERBERT HOOVER from The American Presidents Series by William E. Leuchtenburg; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. and Sean Wilentz, General Editors. Copyright © 2009 by William E. Leuchtenburg. Reprinted by arrangement with Times Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.] ... Hoover never declared that prosperity was “just around the corner” (that fatuous statement came from his vice president, Charles Curtis), but he did refuse to face reality. In May 1930 he announc

Todd Gitlin: I.F. Stone, Journalist -- and Spy?

[Todd Gitlin is a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University and the author of Letters to a Young Activist. He is currently working with Liel Leibovitz on a book about chosen peoples.] ... [D.D. Guttenplan's scrupulous, spirited biography [ American Radical: The Life and Times of I. F. Stone] is plainly a labor of love. Rightly, Guttenplan views Stone as a radical who happened to be a journalist and who thought that the mission of journalism was to nudge the arc of

Anton Espira: Missing Link ... Too much about Ida

[Dr. Anton Espira is a young research zoologist based in Kuala Lumpur. He holds a Ph.D. from Oxford University in Tropical Ecology and writes on science, culture and politics. Dr. Espira last wrote The Evolution of Charles Darwin's Reputation for Culturekiosque.com . ] A scientific career is a dreary affair, offering little opportunity for social recognition. Some fields, though, offer more chances of redemption than others, engendering the occasional superstar scientist or blockbus