Roundup: Talking About History

John A. Farrell: Can anyone save some of the Civil War's most important battlefields?

In 1964, Michael Shaara, a frustrated writer of little-known fiction, took his wife and children on a road trip to the World's Fair in New York. On their way home, they stopped at Gettysburg National Military Park, where a fine statue of Robert E. Lee guards the western reach of the famous battlefield. The statue marks the area where, on July 3, 1863, Confederate Gen. George Pickett led some 13,000 men out from the shelter of the woods and up the long slope of Cemetery Ridge. Shaara

Avraham Burg: The deeper we are stuck in our Auschwitz past, the more difficult it becomes to be free of it

[Avraham Burg, former speaker of the Israeli parliament, is a businessman and author, most recently, of "The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From Its Ashes," published this month by Palgrave Macmillan.] Reporting from Nataf, Israel -- Even today, when economic storms are shaking markets around the world, posing a threat to the stability of entire countries and societies, Israel continues to conduct its business far from the turmoil, as if swimming in a private ocean of its

Max Hastings: Two Hundred Years of Foreign Engagement in Afghanistan

I told an American diplomat in Kabul last month that the British are unconvinced that US policy in Afghanistan makes sense, or that the present Afghan government is sustainable. “Given the record of British engagement in this region over the past two centuries,” the American responded irritably, “I do not think you people are well positioned to give anybody else lectures about how to do things here.” Touché. Even at the height of British imperialism, when Victorian proconsuls prided

Nick Turse: A My Lai a Month

[Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of Tomdispatch.com. He is the author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives and a forthcoming history of US war crimes in Vietnam, Kill Anything That Moves (both Metropolitan).] By the mid-1960s, the Mekong Delta, with its verdant paddies and canal-side hamlets, was the rice bowl of South Vietnam and home to nearly 6 million Vietnamese. It was also one of the most important revolutionary strongholds during the

Jonathan Kirsch: 5 Things You Didn't Know: The Inquisition

[Jonathan Kirsch is the author of The Grand Inquisitor's Manual: A History of Terror in the Name of God, published by Harper One and available on book shelves everywhere as of September 9, 2008.] Nowadays, we tend to make a parody of the Inquisition, as in the set-up line of a famous Monty Python sketch: "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!" But the Inquisition is no joke. An unbroken thread links the friar-inquisitors of the Holy Inquisition to more recent torturers a

Greg Sheridan: I come to hail chief, not bury him

[Greg Sheridan is Foreign editor at The Australian.] In 1963, South Vietnam's president Ngo Dinh Diem was assassinated in a military coup backed by the Americans, though they didn't back his murder. To cover the assassination, the slander was put out that Diem, a devout Catholic, had committed suicide. Santa was torn. He wanted to defend Diem and denounce the Americans for the most foolish thing they did in Vietnam. But with a federal election looming he worried that he might dimin

Robert McHenry: “Great Books” — Hah!

According to this review published the other day in the Wall Street Journal, a fellow named Alex Beam has written a book about the Great Books of the Western World, the 54-volume collection of major writings that

Bret Stephens: 'Tolerance' Is Not the Lesson of Kristallnacht

Sunday was the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass. With some notable exceptions, Europe has opted to mark the occasion by missing its point. "We must not be silent," said German Chancellor Angela Merkel at a memorial ceremony in Berlin's renovated Rykestrasse synagogue, one of the few that was not burned down that night by the Nazis -- though 2,200 others were, as crowds of German or Austrian citizens looked on. "There can be no tolerance, fo

Max Holland & Kenneth R. Scearce: 11 Seconds in Dallas Redux ... Filmed Evidence

In March 2007, the inaugural issue of Washington Decoded posited a radical new description of the shooting sequence in Dealey Plaza. “11 Seconds in Dallas, Not Six” argued that the Zapruder film did not capture in full the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy. Rather, the iconic movie recorded an assassination that had already commenced. Lee Harvey Oswald’s errant first shot was fired about 1.4 seconds before Abe Zapruder started his camera, or just after the president’s li

Editorial in the Telegraph: Remember those who fought in the Great War

It is hard to think of an event since the Reformation that changed the civilised world so much as the Great War, in which the guns fell silent 90 years ago today. Almost every aspect of the world in which we now live was shaped by that conflict. It can be seen as only the first act in a drama that lasted until 1945: but the world after the Versailles Treaty, that saw the rise of Nazism and the Axis, was made by the concatenation of events that started in Sarajevo in June 1914.

Thomas D. Fallace: Did the Social Studies Really Replace History in American Secondary Schools?

[THOMAS D. FALLACE is an assistant professor of education at the University of Mary Washington and a lecturer at the University of Virginia.] In recent years, it has become conventional wisdom among many historians to blame the emergence of the social studies for the demise of history in American secondary schools. This interpretation has not only become the default explanation in the academic discourse, but it has also had an influential effect on educational policy. Historians’ di

Alexander Watson: A Holiday to End All Wars

[Alexander Watson is a research fellow at Cambridge University and the author of “Enduring the Great War.”] TODAY is the 90th anniversary of the armistice that ended the First World War, and it will be commemorated very differently on each side of the Atlantic and across the borders of Europe. It’s a reminder that not all “victors” experience wars in the same way, and that their citizens can have almost as much difficulty as those of the vanquished states in coping with the collecti

Deborah Lipstadt: The Mormons are at it Again ... Posthumous conversions of Holocaust victims

Years ago I went with Ernie Michel, an Auschwitz survivor, to meet with Sen. Orrin Hatch. Hatch had stepped in to tell Michel that the Mormon church would not continue converting Holocaust victims who had died in camps. [The reason I was there was because Hatch had said that he wanted to pass a Congressional resolution affirming that the Holocaust happened as a response to deniers. I had told Michel, when I learned of this, that I did not think it was a good idea. "We don't ha

Laurence Rees: The whitewashing of Stalin

A few months ago, when I was visiting one of our leading universities, I happened to see a poster prominently displayed in one of the students' halls of residence. It was of Joseph Stalin. Perhaps it was meant as a kind of ironic reference to something. Perhaps it was simply covering a damp patch on the wall. But, in any event, no one seemed to take much notice of it. But imagine if instead of a picture of Stalin, there had been a picture of that other horrendous tyrant

Herbert Bix: Japan's Top Soldier Reignites Conflict Over the Past

[Herbert Bix, author of Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, which won the Pulitzer Prize, teaches at Binghamton University, New York, and writes on issues of war and empire. He is a Japan Focus associate. He told Japan Focus: "I wish to thank Gavan McCormack and Mark Selden for sending materials used in this essay."] On October 31, 2008, General Tamogami Toshio, Japan’s Air Self-Defense Force [ASDF] Chief of Staff was abruptly dismissed from his post in the Defense Mi

Gordon Taylor: What Obama should do about the resolution to commemorate the Armenian genocide

[Mr. Taylor is a former teacher in Turkey and the author of Fever and Thirst: An American Doctor Among the Tribes of Kurdistan. Academy Chicago Publishers, 2005.] Talking heads agree: Barack Obama will be tested soon after taking office. One of his lesser problems--thorny enough, however, to become a major issue--is the nonbinding resolution, pending in Congress seemingly forever, which officially labels as gen

Jennifer Lind: Why do apologies for history sometimes work and sometimes don't?

[Jennifer Lind is Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. Her work has been published in International Security, Atlantic, and Foreign Policy. This essay is based on her book Sorry States: Apologies in International Politics (Cornell University Press, Sept. 2008).] Apologies are not only the domain of scandal-ridden politicians and CEOs; they have become a staple of international politics. States routinely offer or seek apologies for past atrocities. Many analysts ar

Dan Todman: How we remember them: the 1914-18 war today

[Dan Todman is senior lecturer in history at Queen Mary College, University of London. He is the author of The Great War: Myth and Memory (Hambledon, 2005).] The annual commemoration of the fallen in the world wars and small wars Britain has been involved in takes place on the nearest Sunday to "Remembrance Day", 11 November. On that day i

James Buchan: When Keynes went to America

[James Buchan's latest novel is "The Gate of Air", published by the MacLehose Press.] The night the Mount Washington Hotel opened in 1902, its builder, the New Hampshire coal and railroad magnate Joseph Stickney, raised a glass to “the damn fool who built this white elephant”. With its octagonal towers and 300 yards of wooden verandah, its 234 rooms each with its own bath, its telephone and mail system, and its interminable corridors, set in endless New Hampshire wildernes

Eric Rauchway: Stop lying about Roosevelt’s record

Oh for pity’s sake. Some real news outlet needs to publish a nice short piece on conservative falsehoods about the New Deal. Amity Shlaes’s Liberty League retread has got a new lease of life, thanks to the Daily Show of all outlets (Jon Stewart, you should be ashamed) and now in the Wall Street Journal’s