Roundup: Talking About History

Robert Mackey: An army is a grand exercise in group loyalty and cooperation. Understanding what holds it together provides lessons beyond the military.

The American Civil War has long been a staple of the publishing industry. Hundreds of books come out each year, ranging from yet another biography of Robert E. Lee to "drums and bugles" hard-core military histories of specific battles and campaigns. Very few break new ground or bring to light any new discoveries, and even fewer have any relevance beyond the four years of fratricidal homicide. Dora L. Costa and Matthew E. Kahn's Heroes and Cowards is a rarity -- a book about the Civil W

Steve Coates: Myths of Vesuvius

In Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s popular 19th-century novel “The Last Days of Pompeii,” a scrumptious multicourse dinner of the stereotypically Roman sort is served in the superbly appointed house of the hero, Glaucus. With its peristyle garden, luxurious furnishings, nimble attendants and anatrium filled with paintings that “would scarcely disgrace a Raphael,”Glaucus’ Campanian bachelor pad might serve as “a model at this day for the house of ‘a single man in Mayfair,’ ” Bulwer- Lytton wrote.

Times of London Editorial: The teaching of history, as it unfolds, should be a higher priority in schools

Edward Gibbon once said: “I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know no way of judging of the future but by the past.” It is a lesson that the British nation needs to learn again. In a recent report on the teaching of history in schools, Ofsted pointed out that, too often, British children had no clear sense of chronology and no vantage point on historical change. For too long, the idea of a story unfolding in real time has given way

James Buchan: Ayatollah Khomeini's funeral

[James Buchan was a Financial Times correspondent in the Middle East and is the author most recently of “The Gate of Air: a Ghost Story”.] The unarmed city crowd first emerged as a force in Iranian politics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in protests against the growing influence of European commerce and, later, in the struggle for constitutional government in Iran. Cruelly suppressed under the two Pahlavi shahs, the crowd returned to the political stage during the revolu

Jack Niedenthal: The world's debt to Bikini

Bikini Atoll, a small necklace of islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, is a miraculous place. Unfortunately, the only people who can truly understand how beautiful it is are those who have been there. In January, the Republic of the Marshall Islands and the Bikini Atoll local government submitted an 83-page application to UNESCO to make Bikini a world heritage site. The application seeks to ensure that humanity will remember for all time the devastation unleashed by the most powerful weap

Brenda Wineapple: Sallow, Queer, Sagacious ... Lincoln Through the Ages

[Brenda Wineapple's most recent book is White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Knopf), a finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for biography.] It was "interesting," said Gertrude Stein of the Civil War, although she was far more intrigued by General Grant than Abraham Lincoln, whom she virtually ignored. She's the only one, so it seems, especially now with the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth, duly touted by committe

Mary Chapin: Alice Paul a fitting figure to remember during Women’s History Month

[Mary Chapin lives in New Hartford. She wrote and produced the first play written about Alice Paul and the quest for women’s rights. It was performed July 16, 1998, in Seneca Falls by members of the League of Women Voters and later that year at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute and Utica College. Two years ago, it was presented by the New Hartford Players at Utica Monday Nite.] Women’s History Month, celebrated in March, could easily recognize a number of women, but Alice P

William Safire: Did Hoover use "depression" as euphemism?

Word has been bruited about that President Herbert Hoover used the word depression after the market crash of 1929 as a euphemism to avoid the more alarming panic. That does not check out. His earliest use of the word that the historian George Nash, author of a three-volume biography of Hoover, can find is in a speech in Colorado in 1928, near the end of his presidential campaign: “If you will study the consumption of meat, dairy products and fruit during the great depression and unemployment of

Richard Reeves: How Kennedy Won the House and Lost the South

It happened to John F. Kennedy just days into his presidency. It will happen to President Obama, too. Probably it already has. The bad news was delivered to Kennedy at breakfast with Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, Democrat of Texas, who said: “Mr. President, I don’t believe we have the votes …” The new president, a former member of the House, was shocked. Even presidents believe what they read in the papers, and the conventional wisdom in 1961 was that “Mister Sam” c

Edwin Black: American Corporate Complicity Created Undeniable Nazi Nexus

[Edwin Black is the New York Times best selling investigative author of IBM and the Holocaust, and his just released book, Nazi Nexus: America's Corporate Connections to Hitler's Holocaust (Dialog Press 2009), which can be see at www.nazinexus.com.] Adolf Hitler was c

Philip Hensher: The legend of Arthur must leave no legacy

[Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Exeter, Philip Hensher was among Granta 20 Best of Young British Novelists in 2003.] In 1972, during one of a long series of skirmishes between the National Union of Mineworkers and Conservative governments, a Communist leader of the South Wales miners, Dai Francis, trying to organise flying pickets, had a call from Arthur Scargill. According to Francis's son Hywel, Scargill said: "Look, Dai, we need pickets up a

James Mann: Did Reagan Try to Convert Gorbachev?

[James Mann is the author of several books, including "Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet." He is author-in-residence at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.] It was the question that preoccupied President Ronald Reagan: Was Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev a religious believer? Reagan held a series of summits with Gorbachev from 1985 to 1988, and as their meetings proceeded, Reagan sometimes speculated to his aides that Gorbachev'

Adam Kirsch: Some revolutions fail when the enlightened misread the national mood

Certain years in history carry a nearly sacred halo, so deeply are they associated with the idea of democratic revolution. Say 1848, and you summon up the springtime of nations, the rise of barricades in Paris and Frankfurt and Venice; say 1989, and it’s the Velvet Revolution, the collapse of Communism in East Berlin and Prague and Warsaw. Few people have such fond memories of the years between 1905 and 1915, which we more commonly associate with the various crises leading up to the First World

Bill Steigerwald: Who really belongs on Mount Rushmore?

No matter what party partisans say, no American president is perfect -- to say the least. But when historians get around to ranking our greatest presidents, the top spots invariably go to the usual titans -- Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and the Roosevelts, Teddy and Franklin. Ivan Eland, a senior fellow at The Independent Institute (independent.org) and an expert on defense issues, begs to differ with the standard consensus -- by about 180 degrees. In his

Theodore Dalrymple: The Persistence of Ideology

[Theodore Dalrymple, a physician, is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His new book is Not with a Bang but a Whimper.] In 1960, the sociologist Daniel Bell published The End of Ideology, in which he argued that ideology—understood in the sense of a coherent, single-minded philosophical outlook or system of abstractions intended as much as a lever to change society as a description to explain it—was dead, at least in th

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

[Myron Magnet is City Journal’s editor-at-large and was its editor from 1994 through 2006. He is the author of The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties’ Legacy to the Underclass and a recipient of the National Humanities Medal.] 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 sum

Conrad Black: Roosevelt revisionists

[onrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom and Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full.] ... The key to evaluating Roosevelt’s performance at combating the Depression is the statistical treatment of many millions of unemployed engaged in his massive workfare programs, which were called “internal improvements” in Jackson's time, and are called “infrastructure” now. The government hired about 60 percent of the unemployed in public-works and conservation proj

Robert Kuhn and Thomas Thiel: The Prehistory of Adidas and Puma

During World War II, industries big and small all over Germany became part of Hitler's massive war machine. The change even affected the predecessor of footwear legends Adidas and Puma, which -- oddly enough -- manufactured Germany's version of the bazooka. When the starting shot rang out, the athletes surged forward. Jesse Owens dug his spikes deep into the racing track of Berlin's Olympic Stadium -- and the best sprinter of his day dominated the 100 meters race to win a gold medal

David A. Hounshell: Innovation and the Growth of the American Economy

[David A. Hounshell is the David M. Roderick Professor of Technology and Social Change at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the author of From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932 (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1984) and co-author of Science and Corporate Strategy: Dupont R&D, 1902-1980 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988). This essay is based on his presentation at “Teaching the History of Innovation,” a two-day history institute for teachers held October 18-19, 2008. The Institute was hoste

Ritchie Robertson: Was Hitler a bookworm?

[Ritchie Robertson edited A History of Austrian Literature 1918–2000, 2006, and the Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann, 2002. He teaches at St John’s College, Oxford.] We think of Hitler as ranting rather than reading. But August Kubizek and Rudolf Häusler, who shared lodgings with him in pre-war Vienna and post-war Munich, recall him as immersed in books. A surviving list of books Hitler borrowed from the National Socialist Institute in Munich between 1919 and 1921 includes not onl