Roundup: Talking About History

Geoffrey Robertson: The diamond anniversary of a golden law

[Geoffrey Robertson QC is the author of 'Crimes Against Humanity' (Penguin) and a distinguished jurist member of the UN's Internal Justice Council.] Sixty years ago this week, on December 10, 1948, Eleanor Roosevelt unveiled a document she described as "the International Magna Carta for Mankind". This was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, an imperishable statement of the elemental liberties that all individuals should enjoy, irrespective of the kind of government

Warren Kozak: The story of World War II varies by country

[Mr. Kozak is the author of the forthcoming book, "LeMay: The Life and Wars of Curtis LeMay," to be published next May by Regnery.] On Dec. 7, 1941, 353 Japanese planes launched from six aircraft carriers destroyed most of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. That morning, 2,402 American servicemen were killed. Until Sept. 11, 2001, this was the highest number of casualties in an attack on the United States. But 67 years and three generations later,

Sam Stein: Rove Defends Bush ... He's Not Worst President of Past 50 Years

George W. Bush is the worst United States president of the last fifty years. In the liberal bastion of New York City's Upper West Side, this rendering of presidential disrepute is generally considered a ghastly understatement. The last fifty years? one resident asked the Huffington Post. How about our nation's history? Why limit it to the United States? And yet, with this crowd as a backdrop, the proposition of Bush's terribleness was debated on Tuesday night. Spicing u

Chris Patten: Three cheers for historical debate, right or wrong

[Chris Patten is a former European Union commissioner for external relations, chairman of the British Conservative Party, and was the last British governor of Hong Kong.] I recently took part in a public debate with Paul Keating, Australia's former prime minister. He is an interesting man, a genuine intellectual driven by his inner demons both to flay those who pay insufficient credit to his transformational role in Australian politics and to expose what he regards as waffle and myt

Joe Gandelman: The "New" Richard Nixon Tapes: A Bad Reputation Deserved

The American press and American public - with the exception of some steadfast loyalists - now have Nixon to kick some more. And for good reason. The release of some 200 hours of Nixon White House recordings is going to provide a treasure chest of inside glimpses into the man who helped usher in the politics of polarization and who helped dismember 1950s-early-1960s consensus politics - a trend that many hope will be reversed with the new, presumably more post-p

Manisha Sinha: How slavery and race are treated in Daniel Walker Howe's magnum opus

[Manisha Sinha, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.] Daniel Walker Howe's magnum opus is more than a sum of its parts. This review, focused only on how the author deals with the issues of slavery and race, might not quite do justice to his achievements. However, most historians recognize the centrality of slavery to nineteenth-century American history and one of the main themes of this book, a critique of Jacksonian Democracy, is based on its proslavery and white supremacist polit

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer: Barry Goldwater's Early Senate Career and the De-legitimization of Organized Labor

In the spring of 1960, a slim 123-page pamphlet grabbed the attention of audiences across the nation with a powerful restatement of the conservative world view: "the radical, or Liberal, approach has not worked and is not working." With this declaration, Senator Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative climbed to the top of best-seller lists across the country. Inside were ideas drawn from a decade's worth of the senator's speeches and writings and the research of the Arizonan's

Charles Homans: Last Secrets of the Bush Administration

n March 2001, U.S. Archivist John W. Carlin received a letter from Alberto Gonzales, then counsel to the newly inaugurated president George W. Bush. It concerned an important deadline that was looming—one that Bush owed to Richard Nixon. In 1974, Congress ordered a lockdown on all records kept by the Nixon White House, afraid that the outgoing president would try to wipe out the paper trail of his disastrous second term and chastened by the recent destruction of decades’ worth of FB

Jerry Bower: Lessons From A Capitalist Thanksgiving

[Mr. Bowyer is chief economist of BenchMark Financial Network and a CNBC contributor.] It's astonishing and a little horrifying that America's elites know so little about their country's history. Case in point: Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute. Jared is an influential left-ish economic polemicist and a sometime adviser to Barack Obama on economic affairs. I've debated with Jared dozens of times over the past several years, but what happened this week was especially d

Robert Fisk: The British should not forget the massive debt they owe the Irish

[Robert Fisk writes for the Independent.] I had almost forgotten what a shit Yeats could be. I don't mean his flirtation with Italian fascism, which Conor Cruise O'Brien first publicised; after all, Churchill was a bit enamoured of the younger Mussolini. And Yeats remains one of my favourite poets. No, what I am recalling – thanks to a wonderful book just published in Dublin – is his outrageous decision to expel the poetry of Wilfred Owen from the 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse.

Ron Rosenbaum: Everything You Need To Know About Hitler's "Missing" Testicle

Somebody make it stop. This incessant fixation on Hitler's sexuality, on his alleged perversity. I think it's fair to say that the very apex of cultural stupidity in our era is the compulsive conjunction of Hitler and sex. He was a "predatory" homosexual. He engaged in excretory practices with his underage half-niece. And, one of the most enduring, a myth I thought I had refuted once and for all but that now rears its head again: Hitler had only one testicle. Isn't it obvi

Douglas Little: Why We Need Diplomatic History

[Douglas Little is a professor of history at Clark University and the author of American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East Since 1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2002), now published in a third revised edition.] When Gallup pollsters asked the American public in January 2000 to list the most important issues facing their country in the new millennium, the respondents relegated federal spending on the military to 20th place; the U.S. role in world affairs ti

John Nichols: FDR's Legacy ... Giving Thanks, Offering Hope

[John Nichols is Washington correspondent for The Nation.] The surrender to corporate greed and Wall Street excess that is the legacy of the Bush-Cheney interregnum left Americans in a difficult spot this Thanksgiving. To a greater extent than at any moment since the days of the Great Depression, our Holiday celebrations are colored by uncertainty, even fear, about an economy that shows every sign of having been badly broken by the wrecking crew from Texas and the scav

Gregory Katz: Recently uncovered documents in the British archives reveal dark secrets from World War II ... One problem: they are forgeries

Nothing is as central to the way the British view themselves as the telling and retelling of their gallant fight against the Nazis. Perhaps the colossal figure of Winston Churchill is taken for granted now, his boozy final years remembered with an indulgent chuckle, his elitist views and nostalgia for Empire taken as a slight embarrassment. But no one pokes fun at the underlying tale: the bull's-eye accuracy of his ignored early warnings about Hitler's intent, the real-time impact of his oratory

John G. West: My Plymouth Pilgrimage ... It was a worthwhile visit, despite the best efforts of the guardians of political correctness.

[John G. West is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and the author of Darwin Day in America.] There must be something deeply ingrained in the human psyche about going on pilgrimages, for when I had a chance last year to take my wife and two small children to visit New England after speaking at a conference, I jumped at the opportunity. What could be more worthwhile than showing my family the cradle of American liberty? I especially wanted to visit Plymouth, Mass

Ira Stoll: The national holiday actually began at a dark hour during our war for independence. Here's the story.

[Mr. Stoll, formerly the managing editor of the New York Sun, is author of "Samuel Adams: A Life," published this month by Free Press.] When was the first Thanksgiving? Most of us think of the Pilgrims at Plymouth in 1621. But if the question is about the first national Thanksgiving holiday, the answer is that the tradition began at a lesser-known moment in 1777 in York, Pa. In July 1776, the American colonists declared independence from Britain. The months th

Kenneth C. Davis: French settlers bested the Mayflower Pilgrims

[Kenneth C. Davis is the author of “America’s Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation.”] TO commemorate the arrival of the first pilgrims to America’s shores, a June date would be far more appropriate, accompanied perhaps by coq au vin and a nice Bordeaux. After all, the first European arrivals seeking religious freedom in the “New World” were French. And they beat their English counterparts by 50 years. That Fren

Humberto Fontova: New York Honors Che Guevara with a Statue

On Friday November 21st, while strolling through Central Park's Doris C. Freedman Plaza, Commentary Magazine's online editor Abe Greenwald noticed a statue and did a double take. "Is that...Che Guevara?" Indeed! There was no mistaking it: a statue of "El Che" by German artist, Christian Jankowski. Upon investigating the matter, Abe Greenwald learned that, "the sculpture is not intended to depict Che Guevara," but rather a street performer from Barcelona

Charles A. Krause: 30 Years Later, Memories of Jonestown Evoke Guilt, Anger and Mistrust

Jackie Speier now represents California's 12th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives. The last time I saw her, 30 years ago, her bloody, bullet-riddled body lay in tall grass at the side of a jungle airstrip in Port Kaituma, Guyana. She had been gunned down by four assassins sent by the Rev. Jim Jones to kill congressman Leo J. Ryan -- and the rest of us who had accompanied him to investigate reports of violence, torture and sexual abuse in a place called Jones

Barton Gellman: Anatomy of a Vice Presidency

[Mr. Gellman is the author of Angler, the new biography of Vice President Cheney.] Let me just say to begin with that it is flattering and daunting, in more or less equal parts, to talk about my new book on Vice President Cheney with four of its published critics: Jacob Heilbrunn in the NYT Book Review, Steve Clemons in the American Conservative, David Greenberg in Slate and Spencer Ackerman on his Attackerman blog. Paul Mirengoff of Power Line, who critiqued excerpts of the book th