Roundup: Talking About History

Jeffrey Lord: The 1966 Election's Warning to Obama

[Jeffrey Lord is a former Reagan White House political director and author.] It was a historic tidal wave of rejection. Symbolized by, of all things, housewives boycotting supermarkets. And the active participation of seven future presidents of the United States. The 1966 "off year" or congressional elections should also serve as a political warning to the Obama White House as it pursues its strategy of pumping trillions of taxpayer dollars into the economy.

Jessica Pritchard: Women’s History Month

Beginning with International Women’s Day in 1911, progressing to Women’s History Week in 1981, and expanding to an entire month in 1987, Women’s History Month, celebrated every March, has come quite a ways over the last century.Compiled below is a list of a good number of web sites that highlight some of history’s most extraordinary women and give insight to their fight for gender equality.General Interest

Peter Kupfer: The man who made the Wall Street Journal

[Peter Kupfer is a former editor on the National / Foreign desk at The San Francisco Chronicle. His freelance articles on the arts, travel and technology have appeared in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Asian Art News and other publications. He last wrote on The Other Half: The Life of Jacob Riis and the World of Immigrant America for Culturekiosque.com] At a moment in history when both Wall Street and the newspaper industry are undergoing upheavals that threaten their v

Susan Jacoby: Alger Hiss -- a case for our time

[Susan Jacoby is the author, most recently, of "Alger Hiss and the Battle for History."] Fifty-eight years ago today, Alger Hiss -- the defendant in an emblematic Cold War prosecution once called "the trial of the century" -- began serving a federal prison sentence for perjury. Until his death in 1996, Hiss maintained that he had never been a Communist or a spy and had been framed by the U.S. government. When I told my 86-year-old mother that I was

Yehudit Keshet: Neve Gordon's contribution to the Middle East debate

The Israel-Palestine conflict has generated a plethora of literature ranging from personal accounts to precise recordings of abuses and misuses of power, policies and human rights, and from historical surveys to a host of solutions and counter solutions for ending the occupation and/or achieving ‘peace’. In this library of anguish relatively few works provide a theoretical framework for understanding the overall processes of Israeli domination over Palestinians and their land. The focus tends to

Q & A with Stolen-Treasure Hunter Matthew Bogdanos

As the tanks rolled into Iraq in March, 2003, Marine Colonel Matthew Bogdanos and his counterterrorism team followed right behind. Tasked with investigating battle-related criminal activity, the team was soon redirected to Iraq's National Museum when news broke that priceless artifacts were being looted. They camped out in the museum for the remainder of his tour of duty, tallying the artifacts stolen and hunting down the thieves. It was, perhaps, serendipity or kismet, that Bogdanos, who holds

Wendy Doniger: The Battle over Hindu History

[PROFESSOR OF THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO’S DIVINITY SCHOOL. Doniger’s research and teaching center on Hinduism and mythology. Her courses in Hinduism cover mythology, literature, law, gender and ecology.] For years, some Hindus have argued that the 16th century mosque called the Babri Masjid (after the Mughal emperor Babur) was built over a temple commemorating the birthplace of Rama (an avatar of the god Vishnu) in Ayodhya (the city where, according to the anci

Myron Magnet : Alexander Hamilton, Modern America’s Founding Father

We New Yorkers imagine our city’s history begins in earnest with the Gilded Age and the Great Migration that brought many of our forebears sailing under the Statue of Liberty’s torch to supercharge a nascent metropolis with a jolt of new energy. But this summer, when a handful of square-bearded, antique-garbed Pennsylvania German Baptists jacked a yellow clapboard house up over a Harlem church and wheeled it around the corner to a new site in St. Nicholas Park, we recalled that more than a centu

George Bittlingmayer and Thomas Hazlett: FDR's Conservative 100 Days

[Mr. Bittlingmayer is professor of finance at the University of Kansas. Mr. Hazlett is professor of law and economics at George Mason University.] The Obama administration's opening policy sprint -- massive deficits and bailouts, with sweeping health-care and education reform, plus cap and trade to come -- has been likened by the president himself to Franklin D. Roosevelt's famous first 100 days. But FDR did not launch his New Deal with a program that roiled financial m

Max Hastings: Terrifying, chaotic and bloody... but D-Day was one of the greatest chapters in our history (UK)

[Max Hastings is a former editor of the Daily Telegraph and the London Evening Standard.] Anniversaries are mingled festivals and wakes. In family life, we enjoy celebrating children's birthdays, and learn progressively to dislike our own. As for national history, nowadays we make little of events that once echoed proudly through every schoolroom and church in the land. There was October 21, Trafalgar Day in 1805, and June 18, the day of Waterloo in 1815.

Eric Rauchway: Just what was Herbert Croly's legacy?

A while back I was fortunate enough to go to a very pleasant conference at a very pleasant place on the centennial of Herbert Croly’s Promise of American Life. It was for me an unusually thought-provoking conference. I’m putting my paper from it here so I don’t lose it. About a hundred years ago, Herbert Croly told the readers of his Promise of American Life that the titular promise would be fulfilled if the United States could realize democratic ideals by substantially dimini

Jonathan Clayton: John Paul’s 1990 speech ‘sentenced millions to die’

[Jonathan Clayton is The Times’s Africa correspondent.] On a balmy late afternoon in September 1990, John Paul II visited the small town of Mwanza, in northern Tanzania, and gave a speech that many believe set the tone for the Aids crisis in Africa. Battered by conflicts and poverty, those inside the packed church and the huge crowds gathered outside hung on to every word. In particular, the Pope could give answers to this strange “slimming” disease that had seemingly

Jonathan Chait: Quit lying about FDR

A generation ago, the total dismissal of the New Deal remained a marginal sentiment in American politics. Ronald Reagan boasted of having voted for Franklin Roosevelt. Neoconservatives long maintained that American liberalism had gone wrong only in the 1960s. Now, decades after Democrats grew tired of accusing Republicans of emulating Herbert Hoover, Republicans have begun sounding ... well, exactly like Herbert Hoover. When President Obama recently met with House Republicans, the eighty-two-yea

John Summers: How the government is ruining America's most famous battlefield

[John Summers is the author of Every Fury on Earth and a visiting scholar at the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College.] Last winter, I was walking with my wife along Seminary Ridge on the Gettysburg battlefield when an odd detail drew into sight: piles of felled trees, stacked alongside a road. The cuts smelled as fresh as the trees looked strong. What happened to them, we wondered? I grew up in Gettysburg, and my mother still lives in the shadow of L

Gregory McNamee: The Potato: A Blessing—and Otherwise—for St. Patrick’s Day and Beyond

As an American of Irish ancestry, I harbor mixed feelings about the potato. It is an essential foodstuff, of course, and, properly cooked, it can be delicious. Still, it was indirectly responsible for the cruel diaspora that nearly emptied the mother country of its people and sent them off to all corners of the world, where, as onetime

Stephen Moore: That '70s Horror Show

[Stephen Moore is a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board.] Many economists have been warning that the policies of the last few years under the Bush administration followed by the coming economic populism of Barack Obama will lead the U.S. back into a 1930s-style Great Depression. That group includes my friend and coauthor Arthur Laffer. I wouldn't go so far. Our current constellation of policies—bailouts, a weak dollar, rising tax rates, windfall profit taxes, bloated e

Radhika Desai: The Inadvertence of Benedict Anderson ... Engaging Imagined Communities

[Radhika Desai is Professor of Political Studies at the Department of Political Studies, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. She is the author of Slouching Towards Ayodhya: From Congress to Hindutva in Indian Politics (2004), Intellectuals and Socialism: ‘Social Democrats’ and the Labour Party (1994) and numerous articles in Economic and Political Weekly, New Left Review, Third World Quarterly and other journals and edited collections on parties, culture, political economy and nationalism.

Claudia Gazzini: Assessing Italy’s Grande Gesto to Libya

[Claudia Gazzini is a Ph.D. candidate at Oxford University.] Under a tent in Benghazi on August 30, 2008, Silvio Berlusconi bowed symbolically before the son of ‘Umar al-Mukhtar, hero of the Libyan resistance to Italian colonial rule. “It is my duty to express to you, in the name of the Italian people, our regret and apologies for the deep wounds that we have caused you,” said the Italian premier.[1] Eastern Libya was the site of the bulk of the armed resistance to the Italian occup

Andrew Ferguson: If our 16th president were alive today, chances are he wouldn't be Barack Obama

[Andrew Ferguson, a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is the author of Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe's America.] Mario Cuomo has written one book (Why Lincoln Matters) and edited another (Lincoln on Democracy) dedicated to the proposition that Abraham Lincoln is a lot like Mario Cuomo. But he recently revised his view. Lincoln is actually a lot like Barack Obama. Cuomo listed the similarities in an op-ed that appeared in Newsday on Inauguration Day. "Obama

Ervand Abrahamian: Why the Islamic Republic Has Survived

[Ervand Abrahamian is a CUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of History, Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is author of A History of Modern Iran.] Obituaries for the Islamic Republic of Iran appeared even before it was born. In the hectic months of 1979—before the Islamic Republic had been officially declared—many Iranians as well as foreigners, academics as well as journalists, participants as well as observers, conservatives as