Roundup: Talking About History

Edward Luttwak: A Truman for our times

[Edward Luttwak's The Middle of Nowhere: Why the West Should Get Out of the Middle East (Atlantic) is forthcoming.] That George W Bush's foreign policy has been a total failure is now taken for granted by so many people that one usually hears it stated as a simple truth that need not be argued at all. It has happened before. When President Harry S Truman said in March 1952 that he would not seek re-election, most Americans could agree on one thing: that his foreign pol

Neil Faulkner: Hadrian and the Limits of Empire

[Neil Faulkner is Research Fellow at Bristol University and Features Editor of Current Archaeology.] President Bush’s failure to impose his imperial vision on Iraq and the rest of the Middle East may come to be seen as one of the great turning points in history. He would have been wise to have studied and learned lessons from the experiences in the region of two Roman emperors, Trajan and Hadrian, over 2,000 years ago. Trajan – Marcus Ulpius Traianus – was one of Rome’s

Geoffrey Gunn: Closed Book or Open Book on Indonesia and Timor-Leste? The Commission of Truth and Friendship Report on 1999 HR Violations

[Geoffrey Gunn, former advisor to CAVR on “international actors”, Is a coordinator of Japan Focus.] Officially received by Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Timor-Leste President Jose Ramos-Horta at a ceremony on the Indonesian island of Bali on 15 July, the long awaited report of the joint Timor Leste-Indonesian Commission of Truth and Friendship (CTF), set up in 2005, has received mixed reviews. On the one hand, by offering words of remorse the Indones

Kenneth T. Walsh: The Most Consequential Elections in History ... Abraham Lincoln's Victory in 1864 Led to the End of the Civil War

[Kenneth T. Walsh is the chief White House correspondent for U.S. News & World Report.] On April 12, 1861, about five weeks after Abraham Lincoln's inauguration for his first term, Southern forces began bombarding Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, starting the Civil War. On April 13, the Union forces surrendered, prompting jubilation in the new Confederacy and anger and disappointment in the North. The election of Lincoln, an antislavery moderate, had been the last

Jane E. Schultz: Ten Common Myths about Women in the Civil War and How to Dispel Them

[Jane E. Schultz is Professor of English, American Studies, and Women’s Studies at Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis and author of Women at the Front: Hospital Workers in Civil War America (2004). This essay is based on her 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.] Twenty-five years ago, when I began to contemplate a dissertation topic concerni

Will Fitzhugh: High school students should be assigned the reading of history books

Katherine Kersten tells me that at Providence Academy in Plymouth, Minnesota, high school history students are required to read James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom [946 pages] and Paul Johnson’s History of the American People [1,104 pages] in their entirety. It seems likely to me that when these students get to college and find reading lists in their courses in History, Political Science, Economics, and the like, which require them to read nonfiction books, they will be somewha

Harriet A. Washington: Apology Shines Light on Racial Schism in Medicine

[Harriet A. Washington is the author of “Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present” (Doubleday, 2007).] Organized medicine has long reflected that most American of obsessions: race. For well over a century, the American Medical Association has been the nation’s largest and most powerful physicians’ group — and an overwhelmingly white one. Black physicians have their own, lesser-known group, the National Medic

Bruce Bartlett: Reagan and Neshoba

[Mr. Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan, is the author of “Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past,” recently published by Palgrave Macmillan.] Right after receiving the Republican presidential nomination in 1980, Ronald Reagan gave his first campaign speech at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi on August 3. This is where three civil rights workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—had been murdered by l

Edwin Black: Infamous Auschwitz Tattoo Began as an IBM Number

[Edwin Black is the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of IBM and the Holocaust, and the forthcoming book, The Plan--How to Save America the Day after the Oil Stops— or Perhaps the Day Before (Dialog Press, September 2008). This essay was adapted from a 2001 article which originally appeared in the Village Voice and syndicated thereafter, which received the award for Best Investigative Article of the Year by American Society of Journalists and Authors.] In August 1943, a t

Editorial in the Independent: Tudor terror ... John Guy is on a mission to bring history to the masses

It is the summer of 1535, just weeks after the execution of Sir Thomas More. A small rowing boat makes its way along the Thames from Chelsea to London Bridge. The oarsman's passengers are a 29-year-old gentlewoman, Margaret Roper, and her maid, who carries a basket. A horrific sight meets their eyes as they approach the bridge: a dozen or more skulls on poles protruding from the parapet, which have been boiled and tarred to prevent them being fed upon by circling gulls. As new heads arrive, the

John L. Allen Jr.: The Pope vs. the Pill

[John L. Allen Jr. is the senior correspondent for The National Catholic Reporter and the author of “The Rise of Benedict XVI.”] FORTY years ago last week, Pope Paul VI provoked the greatest uproar against a papal edict in the long history of the Roman Catholic Church when he reiterated the church’s ban on artificial birth control by issuing the encyclical “Humanae Vitae.” At the time, commentators predicted that not only would the teaching collapse under its own weight, but it migh

Seth C. Bruggeman: Don't build on a cherry-tree myth--again

[Seth C. Bruggeman is an assistant professor of history and American studies at Temple University, and the author of "Here, George Washington Was Born: Memory, Material Culture, and the Public History of a National Monument."] Earlier this month The Free Lance-Star joined media outlets across the country in reporting on the discovery of George Washington's boyhood home by archaeologists working at Ferry Farm. This is the iconic home made famous by Parson Weems' ubiquitous

Doug Ireland: Turns out Norman Thomas's Socialist Party Came Close to Breaking the Gay Taboo in 1952

[Doug Ireland, who served as the media critic of the Village Voice for 7 years, can be reached through his blog, DIRELAND, at http://direland.typepad.com .] Recovering our hidden gay history has been a critically important byproduct of the modern gay movement, and in its current Summer 2008 issue, the 46-year-old independent socialist review New Politics has published a significant discovery that restores to us a lost moment of our political

Victor Davis Hanson: The Sixties Won’t Go Away ... What more can anyone say about the 1960s and all its legacies?

[Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a recipient of the 2007 National Humanities Medal and the 2008 Bradley Prize.] Those who protested some 40 years ago often still congratulate themselves that their loud zeal alone brought needed “change” to America in civil rights, the environment, women’s liberation, and world peace. Maybe. But critics counter that the larger culture that followed was the most self-absorbed in memory. Everyone can at

Danielle Gonzales: Protect Mesa Verde cliff dwellings

In seventh grade, I visited the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings in Southern Colorado for the first time. The beautiful and ancient Puebloan structures were awe-inspiring for me and awakened my interest in Native American history, particularly those in Mesa Verde. From that day on, I wanted to know everything I could about the previous inhabitants of Mesa Verde, how they lived, worked, ate, socialized. In my opinion, the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings are Colorado's greatest landmarks,

Randy Alfred: Hiram Bingham 'Discovers' Machu Picchu

1911: Exploring in Peru, Yale archaeologist Hiram Bingham locates Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Incas. The event will set off a century of controversy. Bingham was born in Honolulu, the son and grandson of Protestant missionaries in the Pacific. He graduated from Yale University and did graduate work in history and politics at the University of California and Harvard. Bingham had already made two expeditions to South America -- and published a book on each -- when he ret

Barbara Day: Forty years later, there are still lessons to be learned

[Barbara Day is a senior fellow and founding member of The Prague Society for International Cooperation.] Conferences on 1968 are stretching back-to-back across Europe this summer, offering retrospectives on the meaning of that year — what was gained, what was lost. I know what I lost. A scrap of tri-colored ribbon, pinned to my jacket as a talisman to see me through a train ride across occupied Czechoslovakia. I had spent 1965-66 as a student in Prague on a bilateral

Charles J. Hanley & Jae-Soon Chang: Summer of Terror ... The massacre of 100,000 by South Korea

[Charles J. Hanley and Jae-Soon Chang write for The Associated Press.]This is the first of a multi-part article on the South Korean massacres of 1950, the US direct and indirect involvement in those massacres, and the subsequent cover up of the events in South Korea and the United States. Grave by mass grave, South Korea is unearthing the skeletons and buried truths of a cold-blooded slaughter from early in the Korean War, when this nation's U.S.-backed regime killed unto

Bruce Cumings: The South Korean Massacre at Taejon ... New Evidence on US Responsibility and Coverup

[Bruce Cumings teaches in the History Department and the Committee on International Relations at the University of Chicago and is the author of the two volume work The Origins of the Korean War and North Korea: Another Country.] In July 2008 the world media heralded the arrest of “the world’s most wanted war criminal,” Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic. He had been in hiding for thirteen years, ever since he was charged with genocide by the United Nations war crimes tribunal in T

James Rodgers: Resurgent Reds in Russia

Stalin is back. For a while, it looked like Nicholas II, Russia's last tsar, might resist the Bolshevik threat - achieving in death a victory which eluded him in life. Now the Reds have seized control once again. Stalin has first place, the Tsar is still holding on to second, but then Lenin comes in third, like a second revolutionary wave waiting to sweep away the monarchy once more. A Russian woman carries a portrait of Soviet leader Josef Stalin in a Victory Day celebration in Mos