Roundup: Talking About History

Deborah Lipstadt: The lies and obfuscations of Bishop Williamson

[Ms. Lipstadt is Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University and author of History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving.] [The following provides links to various articles and sources which explicitly expose the lies and obfuscations of Holocaust denier Bishop Williamson. We hope they are helpful to you. My profound thanks to Dan Leshem and Maureen McLaughlin for helping prepare this material.]1. Williamson says: “I believe there were no

Greg Wilsbacher: The value of newsreel libraries

[Greg Wilsbacher is director of the Newsfilm Library and curator of the Fox Movietone News Collection at the University of South Carolina.] ... American newsreels have been treated rather dismissively by most historians. If they are remembered, they are regarded as a collection of staged, somewhat hokey stunts featuring a seemingly endless series of animal stories, dance crazes, and posing politicians. On occasion, the newsreel cameramen would get lucky and catch a dirigible explodi

Michael Bazyler: Japan Should Follow the International Trend and Face Its History of World War II Forced Labor

[Michael J. Bazyler is Professor of Law and The"1939" Club Law Scholar in Holocaust and Human Rights Studies at Chapman University School of Law in Orange, California.Bazyler is a leading authority on the use of American and European courts to redress genocide and other historical wrongs. His book on the subject, Holocaust Justice: The Battle for Restitution in America’s Courts (New York University Press, 2003; soft cover, 2005), was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court and reviewed in the Harvard La

Fred Kaplan: The urgent need to fix federal archiving policies

President Barack Obama's decision last week to revive the Freedom of Information Act was a good first step toward fulfilling his campaign pledge for a"new era of open government." Here's an idea for a good second step: Force the federal agencies to file and maintain all the records they're creating now, so that in the future when citizens file FOIA requests to declassify documents, they won't receive a form letter that reads,"Sorry, no such documents exist." A 2005 report by

Steve Jones: Darwin's brilliant ideas evolved far beyond the origin of species

[Steve Jones is Professor of Genetics at University College London. His new book is Darwin's Island.] Anniversaries are the last refuge of the journalist and 2009 is no exception. Happy 40th, then, to the Moon landings, felice quattro centesimo compleanno to Galileo's telescope, and glücklich vier Hundertstel Geburtstag to Kepler and his laws of planetary motion. One birthday boy gets two slices of cake, for Charles Darwin is 200 this year and his best-known book is 50 years younger

Cornelia Rabitz: On Holocaust Day, Europe Needs a Common Memory

About 1 million people from around the world visit the Auschwitz memorial each year to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. It's a significant number of people, who still come to the museum to get an idea of living and dying in this former antechamber of hell -- and to learn from history. Memorial officials recently rang sounded an alarm, saying that the buildings are in danger of collapsing and that a lot of money is needed for their restoration. Germany reacted quickly and said

Tom Sutcliffe: Will time ease the pain of the Holocaust?

[Tom Sutcliffe writes for the Independent.] When, I wonder, will the Holocaust no longer hurt? Today, Holocaust Memorial Day, might not be thought to be the most tactful date on which to put this question – which assumes, in its phrasing, that such a state of affairs will eventually come about. Today, after all, is dedicated to postponing such a state of affairs, a day which exists because of the belief that remembering (and hurting) shouldn't have an expiry date. So I

Cornelia Rabitz: On Holocaust Day, Europe Needs a Common Memory

[Cornelia Rabitz covers culture for DW-RADIO.] About 1 million people from around the world visit the Auschwitz memorial each year to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. It's a significant number of people, who still come to the museum to get an idea of living and dying in this former antechamber of hell -- and to learn from history. Memorial officials recently rang sounded an alarm, saying that the buildings are in danger of collapsing and that a lot of money is

Jonathan Lyons: The Crusades are Over ... The West needs to Engage with the Muslims

[Jonathan Lyons is author of The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization, just released by Bloomsbury Press. A former Reuters correspondent and editor, he is completing his PhD in sociology of religion at Monash University, in Melbourne, Australia, and teaching at George Mason University, in Fairfax, Va. Details of the book, including an image gallery and notes on the leading figures, can be found here.]

Gene Healy: Activist and warrior president dominate historians’ polls

[Gene Healy is a vice president at the Cato Institute and author of The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power (Cato 2008). www.cato.org.] As he prepared to head back to the ranch, President George W. Bush embarked on a sort of "Legacy Tour," granting numerous interviews. Asked how his presidency will be remembered, Bush typically insisted that "history" will be the judge. He’s right

Lawrence Repeta: Aso Revelations on Wartime POW Labor Highlight the Need for a Real National Archive in Japan

[Lawrence Repeta is a professor at Omiya Law School in Japan, a director of Information Clearinghouse Japan, and a Japan Focus associate. He is presently serving as Garvey Schubert Barer Professor of Asian Law at the University of Washington in the United States.] Prime Minister Aso Taro’s admission that his family company employed prisoner-of-war labor during the final months of World War II may one day be seen as a milestone in Japan’s struggle to contend with its own national hi

Dan Payne: The national hero dividing Germans

[Dan Payne is a BBC correspondent.] If you are getting off a train while on your way to meet a contact in an historic part of Stuttgart, it is a good idea not to graze your right hand against a door hinge so hard that you lose most of the skin from your middle knuckle. I know, because this is just what happened as I was struggling to reach an appointment with Christopher Dowe. Luckily, he was very understanding when we met, and even helped to dress the wo

John Garnaut: Learning to forget Tiananmen

[John Garnaut is a Beijing based reporter.] It is minus 12 degrees on a Beijing dawn and a line of 32 soldiers raise their bayonets to a rising red flag. Perhaps a thousand pilgrims have gathered to express their national pride at Tiananmen Square, the sacred heart of Communist China. Ahead is the Gate of Heavenly Peace, from where Mao proclaimed the new People's government about 60 years ago. Behind lies the Monument of the People's Heroes and a mausoleum for Mao's emb

Alonzo Hamby: The Hundred Days ... What Worked, What Didn't, What Never Happened

The phrase "hundred days" came to mind so easily in 1933 because it already had been used to refer to the period after Napoleon's triumphal return from Elba. Alas, that ended with Waterloo. Franklin Roosevelt's hundred days still appear to many scholars a triumph of presidential leadership, but the end result was not much better. We all know that the New Deal did not end the Great Depression in the United States; it was an ambitious mixture of failure and accomplishment. One way to app

Donald Ritchie: Who Moved the Inauguration? Dispelling an Urban Legend

[Donald Ritchie, author of Reporting from Washington: The History of the Washington Press Corps, Our Constitution, and The Congress of the United States: A Student Companion, looks at how the Presidential Inauguration moved from the East Front of the Capitol to the West Front. Ritchie, who has been Associate Historian of the United States Senate for more than three decades, reveals that it was not Reagan’s decision.] When Barack Obama took the oath as President of the United States

Dominic Sandbrook: After the revolution (Iran)

[Dominic Sandbrook is a British historian and writer.] On the first day of February 1979, an Air France plane landed at Tehran Airport. It was carrying an elderly Islamic cleric from Iran’s rural hinterland who had not been in his native land for 15 years. As he stepped down from the plane, dressed entirely in black, supported by a French flight officer, a thousand waiting admirers began to chant his name: Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini. As a Mercedes van carried him towards

Ted Widmer: What all fifty-four inaugural addresses, taken as one long book, tell us about American history

[Ted Widmer directs the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. He is a contributing editor of the THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR.] By tradition, January 20 is the feast day of Saint Fabian, a third-century pope who was appointed in a most unusual way. Before 236, he was a simple layperson, leading an utterly obscure life, even by third-century standards. That year, Fabian came to Rome and found himself unexpectedly in the middle of a crowd choosing the successor to Pope Anteros, recen

David Garrow: An Unfinished Dream

[Garrow, a senior fellow at Homerton College, University of Cambridge, is the author of "Bearing the Cross," a Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of King. He is researching a prepresidential biography of Barack Obama.] Very few people remember the first speech that Martin Luther King Jr. gave from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. It wasn't "I Have a Dream," and it took place more than six years before the famous 1963 March on Washington. The date was

Ivan Eland: From Van Buren to Bush, a better way to rank US presidents

We need a new way to rank presidents.

Francis X. Clines: The unsettling ghosts of America past on the Mall

There are unsettling ghosts of America past all about the National Mall. Hundreds of thousands of people will gather there Tuesday for the inauguration of the nation’s first African-American president. Three blocks from where Barack Obama takes the oath, there was once the Saint Charles Hotel, a popular accommodation on Pennsylvania Avenue before emancipation ruined business for slave traders. It proudly advertised that down below its first-rate restaurant, guests could avail themselves of six,