Roundup: Talking About History

Victor Davis Hanson: Two recent books on WWII are written from an all-too-comfortable distance

Questioning the past is a good thing, but rewriting it contrary to facts is quite another. In the latest round of revisionism about the Second World War, the awful British and naive Americans, not the poor Germans, have ended up as the real culprits. Take the new book by conservative pundit Patrick Buchanan, Churchill, Hitler and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World. Buchanan argues that, had the imperialist Winston Churchill not pushed poor

Emily Lau: On the nineteenth anniversary of the Beijing massacre

[Emily Lau is a member of the Hong Kong Legislative Council (Legco), representing The Frontier political group.] Today, 4 June 2008, is a fateful anniversary. Nineteen years ago, the authorities in Beijing ordered a bloody crackdown of the peaceful protestors on Tiananmen Square and in other parts of the Chinese capital. The People's Liberation Army turned their guns and tanks on the students and Beijing residents who were demonstrating against corruption, nepotism and suppression o

David Greenberg: Gene McCarthy's response to RFK's death crippled the Dems

[David Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers, has two new books out: Presidential Doodles and Calvin Coolidge.] Forty years ago, Robert F. Kennedy was murdered on the very night he defeated his fellow anti-war insurgent Eugene McCarthy in the California Democratic presidential primary. This week the news media are full of remembrances of RFK, rehearsing how his assassination, echoing his brother's five years earlier, dashed a generation's hopes for a new era

Alvaro Vargas Llosa: The contradictory legacy of France's 1968 student protests

In recent weeks, France has been swamped with events commemorating the student uprising of May 1968--which actually started in March and finished in June. Less attention has been paid to the 40th anniversary of the student revolts in other countries, including the United States. Was the May 1968 French uprising an anarchist attack on all forms of authority, as some libertarians believed? Was it an assault on conservatism, as its most visible leader, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, predicted?

Raúl Zibechi: The Revolution of 1968 ... When the Basement Said Enough!

[Raúl Zibechi is Brecha de Montevideo journal's international analyst, social movements lecturer, and researcher at the Multiversidad Franciscana de América Latina, and consultant to several social groups. He is a monthly contributor to the Americas Policy Program (www.americaspolicy.org).] The four decades that have passed since the "Worldwide Revolution of 68"—a concept coined by Immanuel Wallerstein—seems like sufficient time

Timothy Naftali & Sean Wilentz (Exchange): Have Reagan's Successors Misunderstood Him?

Dear Sean, Congratulations on your excellent new political history of our times. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who first made his name with The Age of Jackson, would appreciate the homage implied in your title. And I suspect he might also agree—and I certainly do—that, like it or not, Reagan was the transcendent figure of fin-de-siecle politics in America. Your first two chapters do a great job laying out the crisis of the old order. In the 1970s the entire American political

SHUR: The Israeli myths debunked by the New Historians

[European research project Human Rights in Conflict: the Role of Civil Society (SHUR). Click here for an explanation of SHUR.] 1.Historical landmarks: In this section, we will not focus on the chronology of the Palestinian-Israeli issue since 1948: such chronological description is easily accessible, whether

Charles Johnson: The End of the Black American Narrative

[Charles Johnson is the S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollock Professor for Excellence in English at the University of Washington (Seattle). A MacArthur fellow, he is author of the National Book Award-winning novel Middle Passage and many other works.] ... To put this another way, we can say that 40 years after the epic battles for specific civil rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma, after two monumental and historic legislative triumphs—the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting R

Ross Douthat: How history might come to view Bush favorably

The idea that history might rehabilitate George W. Bush seems too ludicrous to be seriously entertained. His approval ratings have been so low for so long, it’s hard to remember that he was ever popular. The Iraq War, his signal endeavor, has lasted for more years than America’s involvement in the Second World War and seems likely to last longer; a fragile truce in a wrecked, misgoverned country is the best the next president can hope for. Even many of the president’s ideological al

Dorothy Jenkins Fields: Yearbook a testament to college's Jim Crow era

[Dorothy Jenkins Fields, is a historian and founder of the Black Archives, History and Research Foundation of South Florida Inc. Send feedback, questions or news to djf@bellsouth.net.] Primary sources are original materials that enable the historian to discover what actually happened. More than 30 years ago, my interest in local black history began with a search for original photographs, letters, documents, oral history tape recordings and oth

Clifford D. May: You Must Remember This ... Constantinople fell just 555 years ago

[Clifford D. May, a former New York Times foreign correspondent, is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism.] There’s an anniversary this week we might do well to recall. On May 29, 1453 — just 555 short years ago — troops led by Mehmed II broke through the walls of the ancient Christian capital of Constantinople. Mehmed the Conqueror — as he would be known from that day forward — rode triumphantly into the city o

Roger Cohen: 1968 ... The Year That Changed the World

There are many strands to the annus mirabilis of 1968 — the Prague Spring, the Paris barricades, Flower Power — but all involved an uprising against a stifling postwar order. In what the author Paul Berman has called “an incoherent fraternity,” idealism provided what coherence there was. Roger Cohen Go to Columnist Page » Blog: Passages “It’s forbidden to forbid,” proclaimed Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the French-born German Jew who led the May ’68 Paris uprising.

Mackubin Thomas Owens: Mystic Chords of Memory ... The purpose of Memorial Day

[Mackubin Thomas Owens is an associate dean of academics and professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College in Newport, and is the editor of Orbis. He is a Marine infantry veteran of Vietnam.] This weekend, we mark the 140th anniversary of the first official observation of the holiday we now call Memorial Day, as established by General John A. Logan’s"General Order No. 11" of the Grand Army of the Republic dated 5 May, 1868. This order reads i

Edward G. Lengel: We've neglected WW I. We shouldn't.

[Edward G. Lengel is an associate professor at the University of Virginia and the author, most recently, of "To Conquer Hell: The Meuse-Argonne, 1918."] The last known surviving U.S. veteran of what was once called the Great War, Cpl. Frank Buckles of Charles Town, W.Va., recently toured the World War I memorial in Washington. Accompanied by his daughter and an aide, the wheelchair-bound 107-year-old rolled around the small, temple-like structure, stopping occasionally to

Stephen Mihm: Everyone's a historian now

[Stephen Mihm is a history professor at the University of Georgia and author of "A Nation of Counterfeiters" (Harvard, 2008)] UNTIL RECENTLY, IF you were a historian and you wanted to write a fresh account of, say, the Battle of Leyte Gulf in World War II, research was a pretty straightforward business. You would pack your bags and head to the National Archives, and spend months looking for something new in the official combat reports. Today, however, you migh

Chris Hedges: Daniel Berrigan ... Forty Years After Catonsville

[Chris Hedges, former Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times and a senior fellow at The Nation Institute, is the author, most recently, of American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (Free Press).] Forty years ago this month, Father Daniel Berrigan walked into a draft board in Catonsville, Maryland, with eight other activists, including his brother, Father Philip Berrigan, and removed draft files of young men who were about to be sent to Vietnam. The group

Anne Applebaum: Leave Hitler Out of It

"Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals. … We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared, 'Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.' "—George W. Bush, May 2008 "Moreover, in our time, these threats are not diminishing … [and] in these new threats, as during the time of the Third Reich, are the same contempt for human life

Ramzy Baroud: 60 Years of Denial

[-Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His work has been published in many newspapers and journals worldwide. His latest book is The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People's Struggle (Pluto Press, London).] Don't ask for what you never had,' is the underlying message made by supporters of Israel when they claim Palestine was never a state to begin with. The contentio

Elias Khoury: For Israelis, an Anniversary. For Palestinians, a Nakba.

[Elias Khoury, the editor of the literary supplement of the Beirut daily An Nahar and a professor at New York University, is the author of the novels “Gate of the Sun” and “Yalo.” This essay was translated from Arabic by Michael Scott.] ... No one wishes to hear the Palestinian story. Their history has been written by the victors: Israel has thus succeeded in blotting out its “original sin,” as the French author Dominique Vidal referred to the situation. Were it not for the courageo

Korean Editorial: Teaching a Proper View of History

As he presided over the first meeting of a presidential committee planning for the country’s future, President Lee Myung-bak said Korean society was wasting too many resources fighting with its past, and that this was costing us the future of our country. Chung Ok-ja, the head of the National Institute of Korean History, said the Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun administrations viewed Korea’s history in a disparaging way from a leftwing perspective. She added that we can move on to the future by ta