Roundup: Talking About History

Source: Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI)
Aug 17, 2008

Michael Johnson: Teaching About Slavery

[Michael Johnson is Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University. His books include Abraham Lincoln, Slavery and the Civil War and Reading the American Past. This essay is based on his presentation at FPRI’s History Institute for Teachers on America in the Civil War Era, 1829–77, held at and co-sponsored by Carthage College, Kenosha, WI. See www.fpri.org/educat

Source: Observer (UK)
Aug 17, 2008

Helen Womack and Kate Connolly: Prague Invasion ... 40 Years On

[Helen Womack has written articles published in The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Times and The Sunday Telegraph. Kate Connolly is the Guardian and Observer's Berlin correspondent, also covering central and eastern Europe and Scandinavia.] When the refrigerator mechanic and young conscript soldier Anatoly Babi was given the chance in the autumn of 1968 by his military superiors to 'see the world', he leapt at the opportunity. The son of peasant parents born in the Soviet repub

Source: Independent
Aug 17, 2008

Shaun Walker: Ethnic tensions ... War in the Caucasus is Stalin's legacy

[Shaun Walker is the Moscow correspondent of the Independent.] The Georgians are bombing South Ossetia; the Russians have come through the Roki tunnel to take Tskhinvali; a second front has been launched in the Kodori Gorge; the Russians have occupied Gori, Poti and Senaki. It's been a week where names and places that previously didn't register a blip on the Western consciousness have suddenly become headline news. Even most of the journalists covering the conflict, shipped in from

Source: Japan Focus (This excerpt is from a long article entitled: "Myth and Fact in Northeast Asia’s History Textbook Controversies")
Aug 15, 2008

Mikyoung Kim: Why Japan is still struggling to tell its history

[Mikyoung Kim is Assistant Professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute – Hiroshima City University. Before assuming her current position in 2005, she taught at Portland State University as Fulbright Visiting Professor. She previously served with the U.S. State Department from 2000 to 2004, specializing in U.S.-ROK-DPRK relations. Her forthcoming book, Securitization of Human Rights: North Korean Refugees in East Asia, will be published by Praeger in 2009.] ... Post-Cold War Japanese

Source: Science Based Medicine
Aug 15, 2008

Mark Crislip: The History of Vaccines

We live longer than anytime in history. Our long lives are due in large part to good nutrition, sanitation, and vaccines. There have been numerous posts here and elsewhere about the vaccine deniers, primarily focused around the modern myth that vaccines cause autism. That is not the topic of this post. Instead, I am going to take a brief tour of the childhood vaccines and review the morbidity and mortality caused by vaccine preventable diseases and the efficacy of the v

Source: Guardian
Aug 15, 2008

Adam Michnik: Rattling the Kremlin's cage ... 40 years on

[Adam Michnik was one of the leaders of Solidarity and the founding editor of Gazeta Wyborcza.] What was the Prague Spring, or the events of 1968 more generally? Their meaning, it seems, has become more, not less, debatable with the passage of time. My generation was forged by protests and police truncheons, by the hopes generated not only by the Prague Spring, but also by the Polish student movement that March, the Paris events of May, and the first signs of Russian d

Source: America In The World Journal
Aug 14, 2008

Joseph Loconte: American Presidents and the American Creed

[Joseph Loconte is a senior fellow at Pepperdine University's School of Public Policy, where he writes widely about the role of religion in promoting democracy, human rights, and social justice. He is the editor of "The End of Illusions: Religious Leaders Confront Hitler's Gathering Storm."] The American presidency has been described as the most powerful political office in the world. Perhaps in no other Western democracy does the position of president occupy the singularl

Source: NY Review of Books
Aug 14, 2008

Hugh Eakin: The Devastation of Iraq's Past

In May 2003—some eight weeks after the American invasion had begun— Abdul-Amir Hamdani, the archaeology inspector of Dhi Qar province in southern Iraq, traveled to Najaf to call on the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. He had an urgent request. "We needed his help to stop the pillage," Hamdani recalled. The province, which is midway between Baghdad and Basra, covers much of what was once the land of Sumer. In the third millennium BC, it was a fertile plain densely populated by such citie

Source: Times Literary Supplement
Aug 13, 2008

Timothy Snyder: Nazism's dialectic of death

[Timothy Snyder is Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies in European and Russian Studies at Yale University.His most recent book, The Red Prince: The secret lives of a Habsburg Archduke, was published earlier this year.] Can a nationalist found an empire? The United States of George W. Bush invaded Iraq in the name of democracy, though any representative Iraqi government would have to oppose a foreign occupation. Russia under Vladimir Putin tries to impose its will o

Source: Times
Aug 13, 2008

Martin Fletcher: Omagh ... deadliest bombing of the Troubles remembered ten years on

[Martin Fletcher was appointed Associate Editor of the Times at the end of 2006.] Ten years ago on Friday Donna Marie McGillion was shopping in Omagh with her fiancé, Garry, his sister Tracey and Tracey’s daughter Breda, who was to be flower girl at their wedding the following week. At 3.10pm they were yards from a maroon Vauxhall parked in Market Street when it exploded, killing 29 people and two unborn babies in the deadliest atrocity of the Troubles. B

Source: WashingtonDecoded (website run by Max Holland)
Aug 11, 2008

Max Holland: The Ford Files

Gerald R. Ford’s FBI files, released under the Freedom of Information Act this month, will not force an instant reappraisal of America’s 38th president some 20 months after his death.[1] Unlike John F. Kennedy’s bureau file, which documented JFK’s trysts in the 1960s with Judith Campbell (a Mafia moll) and Ellen Rometsch (a suspected East German spy), the FBI files on Ford hold no information about any dangerous liaisons. The files do contain information, though, on

Source: Japan Times
Aug 10, 2008

Roger Pulvers: Engineering a historical oblivion for soldiers of the wrong wars

My dad was a lucky man. Born in 1903, he was just too young for service in World War I and a bit too old for the same in World War II. Not that he couldn't have volunteered for the latter. He certainly could have, but decided not to. Many years ago, he gave me some papers associated with what was then called the Selective Service. I never took a close look at them, until now. There is his registration certificate from Feb. 14, 1942, issued by the Dade County local board

Source: Japan Times
Aug 10, 2008

Roger Pulvers: Engineering a Historical Oblivion for Soldiers of the Wrong Wars

My dad was a lucky man. Born in 1903, he was just too young for service in World War I and a bit too old for the same in World War II. Not that he couldn't have volunteered for the latter. He certainly could have, but decided not to. Many years ago, he gave me some papers associated with what was then called the Selective Service. I never took a close look at them, until now. There is his registration certificate from Feb. 14, 1942, issued by the Dade County local board

Source: Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI)
Aug 8, 2008

Daniel Walker Howe: What Hath God Wrought

[Daniel Walker Howe is Rhodes Professor of American History Emeritus at Oxford University and Professor of History Emeritus at UCLA. His books include What Hath God Wrought (2008 Pulitzer Prize winner) and Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. This essay is based on his presentation at the FPRI Wachman Center’s May 17-18, 2008 history institute on America in the Civil War Era, held at and co-sponsored by Carthage College, Wisconsin.] When I signed on to do m

Source: Daily Mail
Aug 8, 2008

Why Was Saddam Hussein Haunted by the Brutal murder of Iraq's Boy King?

Waiting in a spartan, concrete-lined chamber at Camp Justice, an Iraqi army base in Kazimain, a north-eastern suburb of Baghdad, the 69-year-old fallen dictator Saddam Hussein, dressed in a black overcoat, stood on the trapdoor of the gallows. Found guilty of crimes against humanity during his 24 years as President of Iraq, he had been sentenced to death. But even now, in his last moments, he maintained his old defiance. Spurning the use of a black hood o

Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Aug 8, 2008

Leonard Cassuto: Peyton Place, 50 Years After

[Leonard Cassuto is a professor of English at Fordham University.] Next month marks the 50th anniversary of publication of Grace Metalious's Peyton Place, one of the most notorious novels of its time. The book exposed the petty, sordid, and urgently erotic hidden life of a small town. A best seller of precedent-setting proportions, it was also widely disparaged by the literati of the 1950s, who saw it as little more than a prurient diversion. Today millions of viewers tune in weekly

Source: National Post
Aug 5, 2008

Arch Puddington: Stalin, rebranded

[Arch Puddington is director of research at Freedom House and co-editor of Democracy Web, a curriculum guide sponsored by Freedom House and the Albert Shanker Institute that promotes the teaching of democratic values.] The Russian foreign ministry recently issued an indignant statement that takes issue with President Bush for equating communism with Hitlerism. "In the 20th century," a proclamation issued by Bush said, "the evils of Soviet communism and Nazi fascism we

Source: Sky News
Aug 5, 2008

Jeremy Thompson: Tiananmen Square ... 19 Years On

[Jeremy Thompson is a newsreader on Sky News.] Much of it looks the same. A vast, 99-acre expanse watched over by the stern gaze of the Great Helmsman, Mao Zedong, and flanked by the monolithic, Soviet-style structures of the Great Hall of the People and the National History Museum. But today it was full of flowers and flags, a friendly gathering place for the Olympic visitors. In 1989 fires were still smouldering, wreckage strewn across the concrete slabs,

Source: Accuracy in Academia
Aug 1, 2008

Malcolm A. Kline: Cold War Amnesia

The Cold War between the United States and the former Soviet Union is still being fought, not by unrepentant, unreconstructed anti-communists but by campus leftists born too late to be communist collaborators."In last month's undergraduate elections, a cadre of demagogues, in a disgusting publicity stunt, projected the image of a hammer and sickle onto one of Stanford's most venerable landmarks: Hoover Tower," Jason Dunkel, the business manager of the Stanford Review writes in a June 2008 fundra

Source: American Interest
Aug 1, 2008

John Lewis Gaddis: How history might regard Bush

... Presidential revisionism tends to begin with small surprises. How, for instance, could a Missouri politician like Truman who never went to college get along so well with a Yale-educated dandy like Acheson? How could Eisenhower, who spoke so poorly, write so well? How could Reagan, the prototypical hawk, want to abolish nuclear weapons? Answering such questions caused historians to challenge conventional wisdom about these Presidents, revealing the extent to which stereotypes had misled their