Roundup: Talking About History

John McWhorter : Why Juneteenth's Not My Thing

[John McWhorter is a columnist for the New York Sun and author of"Losing the Race." He is a culture and politics Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.] Sure, black people need to celebrate winning their freedom, but is this really the right day for the picnic? I am John Hamilton McWhorter, the fifth. The first John Hamilton McWhorter was a slave. This Thursday is Juneteenth, when I might be inclined to celebrate the emancipation of John Hamilton McWhorter, the first. O

The Daily Beast: An oral history of the last plane rides of presidents leaving town

From Reagan’s tears to Jimmy Carter’s hostage power plays, the final flight Bush will take tomorrow is an occasion that inspires tall tales, Champagne toasts, and, occasionally, looting. An oral history of the last five final flights. When George W. Bush steps aboard Air Force One on Tuesday, beginning the journey back to Texas, his presidency will officially be in the past tense. But during those few hours in the sky—the last ride of the leader of the free world—strange things tend

David Greenberg: The Riddle of Herbert Hoover

[David Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers and author of three books of political history, has written the "History Lesson" column since 1998.] In 1932, the parents of a 4-year-old went to court to change his legal name. Christened Herbert Hoover Jones in 1928, when the commerce secretary and Republican presidential nominee was a national hero, the boy deserved relief, said his parents, from "the chagrin and mortification which he is sufferi

Anthony Lewis: MLK's Dream

[Mr. Lewis is the former NYT columnist.] Barack Obama’s election as president had a thousand fathers in the long history of the struggle against American racism. But three events stand out as decisive in creating the possibility of an African-American president. The first, in 1863, was Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which promised freedom but was followed by a century of harsh discrimination. The second was the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Boa

Peter Kupfer: Jacob Riis, First Generation Immigrant

[Peter Kupfer is a former editor on the National / Foreign desk at The San Francisco Chronicle. ] As the son of an African immigrant prepares to assume the highest office in the land, Tom Buk-Swienty’s portrait of muckraking journalist and reformer Jacob Riis is both instructive and inspiring. Through his ground-breaking articles, lectures, books and — most famously — photographs, Riis exposed the abysmal living conditions suffered by tens of thousands of immigrants in New York in t

100 Years Ago: William Howard Taft's Disgraceful Inaugural Address

What may well have been the most disgraceful inaugural address of any president--which, by sheer coincidence, happened to have been delivered one hundred years ago--was William Howard Taft's 1909 speech, much of which concerned race relations. The key paragraph was his claim that the federal government was powerless to intervene in the South to protect black voting rights"so long as the statutes of the States meet the test of [the Fifteenth] amendment and are not otherwise in conflict

A N Wilson: She's hailed as this country's saviour. So why, 30 years on, do the Left still hate Maggie so?

[A N Wilson writes for the Daily Mail.] Want to know what Britain would be like if ruled by extreme Left-wingers? Then you would only have had to visit Liverpool while Derek Hatton was deputy leader of Liverpool City Council in the early Eighties. He was expelled from the Labour Party as a member of Militant Tendency, but not before turning Liverpool, once the proud port of the mightiest empire in the world, into a bankrupted, slum-ridden, crimeridden dump.

Nazenin Ansari: Remembering Iran's revolution

[Nazenin Ansari is diplomatic editor of Kayhan (London), a weekly Persian-language newspaper, and president of the Foreign Press Association.] Life for me as I had come to understand it ended on 15 November 1977. Standing next to a group of young elementary school children from one of Washington DC's inner-city schools on the Ellipse facing the South Lawn of the White House, I was one of a thousand greeting the visit of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi and his Queen to the United States.

Simon Heffer: Charles Darwin reminds us not to squander the great legacy of the Victorians

[Simon Heffer is associate editor at the Telegraph.] On the Origin of Species remains a stunning intellectual achievement. It widened the boundaries of knowledge and changed society and the world. Yet there are also less obvious, but perhaps more instinctive, reasons for remembering Darwin. We still live in a society that was in large part made by the Victorians. We may affect to despise them, ridicule them, even condemn them. We certainly misunderstand them. Part of t

Timothy W. Ryback: Hitler's Private Library

[Mr. Ryback is the author of Hitler's Private Library.] FOR HIM THE LIBRARY represented a Pierian spring, that metaphorical source of knowledge and inspiration. He drew deeply there, quelling his intellectual insecurities and nourishing his fanatic a

Thomas Craughwell : #9: Deport Blacks to Santo Domingo (The 10 Worst Decisions by U.S. Presidents)

[Thomas Craughwell is the author of, with M. William Phelps, Failures of the Presidents: from the Whiskey Rebellion and War of 1812 to the Bay of Pigs and War in Iraq.] The evening after New Year’s Day, 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant wrapped himself in his winter cloak, strode out of the White House, and walked across Lafayette Square, alone, to call on Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. Sumner had first come to Congress in 1851; now, 19 years later, he was not only one of t

Julia Ioffe: The surprisingly shallow influence of Deep Throat

Last month, far from his old D.C. stomping grounds, a very old W. Mark Felt, Sr., died quietly in Santa Rosa, California. The press, who had known him as the dashing, silver-haired spook dubbed Deep Throat, portrayed this as a major event, the passing of one of the late 20th century's most influential figures. The New York Times remembered him as the man who "helped bring down President Richard M. Nixon by resisting the Watergate cover-up and becoming Deep Throat, the most famous anonymous

Thomas Craughwell : #10: The Whiskey Rebellion (The 10 Worst Decisions by U.S. Presidents)

[Thomas Craughwell is the author of, with M. William Phelps, Failures of the Presidents: from the Whiskey Rebellion and War of 1812 to the Bay of Pigs and War in Iraq.] In 1790 the federal government was saddled with an $80 million debt, the cost of America’s war for independence from Great Britain. It was a staggering sum; President George Washington’s secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, insisted that the only way to pay off the liability was to raise taxes. Thomas Jeffe

Jill Lepore: Have inaugural addresses been getting worse?

Barack Obama has been studying up, reading Abraham Lincoln’s speeches, raising everyone’s expectations for what just might be the most eagerly awaited Inaugural Address ever. Presidential eloquence doesn’t get much better than the argument of Lincoln’s first inaugural and the poetry of his second. Reading Lincoln left James Garfield nearly speechless. Garfield undertook to read the Inaugural Addresses of every President who preceded him. “Those of the past except Lincoln’s, are dreary reading,”

Brian Latell: Was Castro involved in JFK's death?

[Brian Latell is a senior research associate and adjunct professor at the University of Miami. A career Latin America specialist for the CIA and National Intelligence Council, he served as National Intelligence Officer for Latin America from 1990-1994. He is the author of After Fidel.] Fidel Castro looms large in fewer than a dozen books among the hundreds written about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Two of them are the work of irrepressible conspiracy theorist and researche

Christopher Hitchens: Lincoln ... The Man Who Made Us Whole

Lincoln, himself, was paradoxical—as is the way we see him now. To really know the 16th president, look past the ways in which we remember him. Here's the view from the White House as the new president gazes gloomily out of its windows in 1861. The Washington Monument is an abandoned stump, surrounded by scattered blocks of stone. The Capitol has no dome. Slaves toil in the stinking heat, and the Potomac is an open sewer. The Union itself is dissolving like sugar in water. Furious m

Tom Palaima: The first modern terrorist

[Tom Palaima is Dickson Centennial Professor of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches seminars on the human response to war and violence.] ... In The Dynamite Club, Yale historian John Merriman describes the historical setting and background of what he argues is the first modern act of true terrorism. At 9:01 on the evening of Feb. 12, 1894, 21-year-old French anarchist Émile Henry, who earned his baccalauréat in science from the Sorbonne in 1888, threw a d

Nothing to Fear: Adam Cohen on “FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America”

... We’re joined now by Adam Cohen. He’s an assistant editorial page editor for the New York Times and author of a new book called Nothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America. This is his first interview since the book’s publication. Welcome to Democracy Now! ADAM COHEN: Thank you, Amy. AMY GOODMAN: It’s great to have you with us. Well, you say in this book it’s not just FDR himself. ADAM COHEN: That’s r

Andrew Buncombe: After 90 years, the victims of Amritsar are being recognised as martyrs

[Andrew Buncombe is The Independent's Asia correspondent.] On a sweltering afternoon 90 years ago in April, a squad of Gurkha and Baluchi troops under the command of British officers marched into an enclosed park in the city of Amritsar and levelled their weapons. The park was densely crowded and there was only one way in and out. The officer in charge – General Reginald Dyer, whose name will forever be cloaked in infamy – then gave the order to fire. Within 10 minutes

Peter Walker: Back to 1694 ... Britain at the birth of the Bank of England

[Peter Walker has been a reporter for guardian.co.uk since late 2006.] A country paying a heavy financial price for war in foreign lands, while at home people complain about duties on wine and beer and indulge their love for tea… Britain in 1694, the year the Bank of England was formed, might sound familiar, but it was an utterly different place. It was overwhelmingly agricultural, and the population was less than 6 million – an estimate, as the modern census did not b