Roundup: Talking About History

Kimit Muston: The Bridge at Lodi

[A freelance writer, for six years KAMuston wrote a weekly column for the Los Angeles Daily News and has been published by the Los Angeles Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Oklahoma Oklahomian, and the San Francisco Chronicle. He is a regular contributor to the web site Daily Kos and Politico.com, and now lives in Indiana.] I begin with the event, as described by John Cabot. “The line wheeled instantly into a dense and solid column, crowding the street with its i

Robert Fisk: Will Obama honour pledge on genocide of Armenians?

[Robert Fisk is an English journalist and author.] It's all supposed to be about campaign promises. Didn't Barack Obama promise to deliver an address from a "Muslim capital" in his first 100 days? It's got to be in a safe, moderate country, of course, but where better than Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's secular/Islamist nation of Turkey, whose rulers talk to Syria as well as Israel, Iran as well as Iraq? But when the Obama cavalcade turned up in the heart of the old Ottoman Empir

Gwynne Dyer: NATO at 60 faces growing pains that could threaten its survival

[Gwynne Dyer is a London-based journalist.] The questions that nobody will ask out loud about the North Atlantic Treaty Organization: How much is enough? How many new members can NATO afford to take on? If Georgia had already been a member last August, would NATO have gone to war with Russia in its defense? And how far beyond Europe should it try to operate? When U.S. President Barack Obama asks NATO countries to send more troops to Afghanistan, few member

Michael Slackman: For Egypt, Promise of 1979 Peace Still Unfulfilled

[Michael Slackman is New York Times correspondent.] In the past week, Egypt marked the historic 30-year anniversary of its peace treaty with Israel without any public celebration and only the barest public mention. It is not surprising, really, that there was no cheering here. The timing could hardly have been worse, with memories still fresh of the Israeli offensive in Gaza. But mention of the anniversary also served as a reminder of promises unfulfilled.

Sean L. Malloy: Four Days in May ... Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb

[Sean L. Malloy is an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Merced and the author of Atomic Tragedy: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Bomb Against Japan. This is a revised and expanded version of a chapter of Atomic Tragedy. Reprinted material from “The Ordeal of Henry L. Stimson,” in Atomic Tragedy: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Bomb against Japan,” by Sean L. Malloy. Copyright © 2008 by Cornell University. Used by permission of th

Adam Schiff: Time to Recognize the Armenian Genocide

[Mr. Schiff is a Democratic member of the U.S. Congress from California.] When President Barack Obama visits Turkey tomorrow, millions of Americans hope that he will fulfill a campaign promise by preparing the Turkish government for official American recognition of the Armenian genocide of 1915-23. No American president since World War II has come into office with a stronger understanding of the facts about this terrible chapter in history. And no president has a greate

Ellis Cose: Rwanda 15 Years After Genocide

[Ellis Cose is executive producer, host and writer for AGAINST THE ODDS, a multimedia documentary series that debuts on public radio stations this April 2009 with four hour-long radio documentaries. Public Radio International (PRI) is the distributor.] Next week will mark the 15th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda. It was on April 6, 1994, shortly after 9 p.m., that the plane carrying Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana went down in flames. Habyarimana , President Cyprian Ntay

Adam Kirsch: Did the Armenian genocide have its own Primo Levi?

[Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor at The New Republic. This article originally appeared in Nextbook.] A week before Germany's invasion of Poland, Hitler reportedly urged his generals to slaughter civilians--Slavs and Jews, the two most hated groups in Nazi ideology--without mercy. "After all," he flippantly asked, "who remembers the Armenians?" In fact, the attempted genocide of the Armenians by the Turks during the First World War was very well documented, a

George White Jr.: The Congo's tragic story

[George White, jr. is an Assistant Professor of History at York College, CUNY. He is the author of the book Holding the Line: Race, Racism, and American Foreign Policy Toward Africa, 1953-1961 and the article “Little Wheel Blues: John Lee Hooker, the Eisenhower Administration and African Decolonization” in the French interdisciplinary journal Cercles.] These words are difficult to write. Fifty years ago, the people of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo drifted in a purgato

Robert McHenry: Encarta, R.I.P.

In the wake of the news that Encarta, Microsoft’s electronic encyclopedia, is to be euthanized, the question of the day seems to be, Is Wikipedia to be blamed or thanked?This assumes that Wikipedia had anything to do with it, an assumption that many observers and futurepundits are very, very eager to make.In the comments a fellow name

Oliver Kamm: Wikipedia's nonsense

In conception and characteristics, Wikipedia is distinctively a creature of the internet: vast, sprawling and of dramatically variable quality. It is also, by design, an anti-intellectual project. Wikipedia recognises no intrinsic value in competence or knowledge; its guiding principle is agreement rather than truth. Intellectual inquiry involves testing ideas against the canons of evidence. Wikipedia's 'community' offers members a different route to recognition - one shorn of the burden of earn

Suzannah Lipscomb: The truth behind Henry VIII's reign

We all think we know Henry VIII (r. 1509-47) and all there is to know about him. The Holbein portraits, the profusion of television dramas and films, the novels and histories set in his world make him ubiquitous. A whole set of clichés, truisms and fallacies accompany that famous silhouette. As a character, the king both repulses and fascinates us. His vast girth, larger than life persona, grandeur, pomp, arrogance and appetites make us strangely proud of this hyper-masculine, fabled monarch

Jason Maoz: Ike and Israel

[Jason Maoz is the senior editor of The Jewish Press. Jason Maoz can be reached at jmaoz@jewishpress.com.] Much has been written in recent weeks of the Obama administration's possible tilt toward a more evenhanded U.S. Middle East policy. Contrary to popular perception, however, if such a change were indeed implemented, it would constitute not so much a new and revolutionary approach as it would an old and reactionary one.

Jeff Madrick: Was the New Deal a Bust?

[Jeff Madrick is a contributor to the New York Review of Books and a former economics columnist for the New York Times. He is editor of Challenge magazine, visiting professor of humanities at Cooper Union, and senior fellow at the New School's Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis. He is the author of Taking America, The End of Affluence (Random House) and The Case for Big Government.] Nothing better illustrates the tenacity of the political right in America than the attentio

Errol Morris: Whose Father Was He? (Part One)

[Errol Morris is a filmmaker whose movie "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara" won the Academy Award for best documentary feature in 2004.] The soldier’s body was found near the center of Gettysburg with no identification — no regimental numbers on his cap, no corps badge on his jacket, no letters, no diary. Nothing save for an ambrotype (an early type of photograph popular in the late 1850’s and 1860’s) of three small children clutched in hi

Will Kinmount: Is David Starkey the reincarnation of Henry VIII?

[Will Kinmount writes for the Telegraph.] The more you read about David Starkey and his latest subject, Henry VIII, the more you start to wonder: are they related? Is there some kind of morphic resonance between biographer and subject? Could reincarnation be at work here? Because in so many ways, David Starkey could actually be Henry VIII. Consider the similarities. While researching his new book and Channel 4 TV series on the Tudor king – all neatly timed to coincide

John Feffer: On Trial 60 Years Later (re: Tokyo War Crimes Trial)

[John Feffer is co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus.] The deliberations that took place in Tokyo after World War II, which led to 25 guilty verdicts and the execution of seven Japanese, helped shape the international law around war crimes. The arguments made in the proceedings against Slobodan Milosevic and the instigators of the Rwanda genocide, as well as the recent indictment of the International Criminal Court against Sudanese leader Omar Hassan al-Bashir, can be

Bob Thompson: Profile of James Mann, author of a new book on Reagan

James Mann got interested in writing about Ronald Reagan when he discovered that, while Reagan was president, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld used to sneak off to undisclosed locations to prepare for Armageddon. A longtime Los Angeles Times reporter, Mann left the paper in 2001 to write books full time. First up was "Rise of the Vulcans," a historical portrait of President George W. Bush's foreign policy team. Mann spent a couple of years asking Washington notables what th

Daniel Pipes: Palestinians Who Helped Create Israel

Palestinians have so loudly and for so long (nearly a century) rejected Zionism that Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, Yasir Arafat, and Hamas may appear to command unanimous Palestinian support.But no: polling research finds that a substantial minority of Palestinians, about 20 percent, is ready to live side-by-side with a sovereign Jewish state. Although this minority has never been in charge and its voice has always been buried under r

Jehan Sadat: The Lessons of Camp David ... What Anwar Sadat can teach us about peace

[Ms. Sadat, a fellow at the Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, is the author of "A Woman of Egypt" (Simon and Schuster, 1987) and "My Hope for Peace" (Free Press, 2009).] Thirty years ago today, Anwar Sadat, Menachem Begin and Jimmy Carter signed the Camp David Peace Accords. It was a culmination of a journey Anwar Sadat, my husband, began in October 1970 following the sudden death of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser.