Roundup: Talking About History

Krissy Clark: Why didn't it matter in Lincoln's day that he shared his bed with a man?

[Krissy Clark: Western Editor/Reporter for Weekend America/American Public Media.] First, a note about gaydar. You know, radar that detects "gay-ness." The word gaydar, of course, didn't exist back in Abraham Lincoln's time. But if it had, and the facts of Lincoln's life had blipped across its screen, those facts would not have gone unnoticed. Fact number one, explains historian Jean Baker: Lincoln's relationship with Joshua Speed, a shop keeper from Springfi

John Roughan: Stolen generations story a distortion of history

[John Roughan is a columnist.] When you see history being written you realise how much of it is mere legend. Australia hasn't got a particularly exciting history. Once you've read past the convicts it becomes quiet and constitutional. The closest they came to a civil convulsion was a goldfields rebellion by drunken Irish miners, much celebrated today at the "Eureka Stockade", that lasted all of a Sunday morning in 1853. They have noth

Tim Rowse : Australia’s apology .. the shadow on the sun

[Tim Rowse is senior research fellow in the history program at Australian National University (ANU). His books include (with Murray Goot) Divided Nation? Indigenous Affairs and the Imagined Public (Melbourne University Press, 2007)] Wednesday 13 February 2008 was a day heavy with both historical symbolism and political tension in Australia. That day, the Australian government apologised [1] to "the stolen generations", those children of Aboriginal descent who were removed

Oliver Kamm: An open letter to the editors of Media Lens - finis

[ABOUT KAMM: I am an author, columnist and banker. I write regularly for The Times, and have written also for The Guardian, Prospect, The New Republic, Index on Censorship and The Jewish Chronicle. I am an advisory editor of Democratiya. My book Anti-Totalitarianism: The Left-wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy was published in 2005. I was a contributor to Britain's Bomb: What Next?, edited by Brian Wicker and General Sir Hugh Beach, in 2006. I have worked at the Bank of England, HSBC

Tony Judt: The 'Problem of Evil' in Postwar Europe

The first work by Hannah Arendt that I read, at the age of sixteen, was Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.[1] It remains, for me, the emblematic Arendt text. It is not her most philosophical book. It is not always right; and it is decidedly not her most popular piece of writing. I did not even like the book myself when I first read it—I was an ardent young Socialist-Zionist and Arendt's conclusions profoundly disturbed me. But in the years since then I have come to understa

Diana Muir Appelbaum and Paul S. Appelbaum: Genetics and the Jewish identity

[Diana Muir Appelbaum is the author of Reflections in Bullough's Pond: Economy and Ecosystem in New England (University Press of New England, 2000), and is working on a book on nationalism. Paul S. Appelbaum is the Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Psychiatry, Medicine and Law at Columbia University, and writes about the ethics of genetic testing and research.] The Book of Exodus specifies that the male descendants of Aaron, the brother of Moses, should constitute the Jewish priesth

Bryan Appleyard: Reassessing the Seventies

Louis de Bernières’s new novel, A Partisan’s Daughter, is set in the 1970s. Its hero has a car, a “shit-brown Allegro”. The Austin Allegro was a horror, expelled from the death throes of British mass car production. Everything about it was bad, including, in this case, the colour. The moment it is mentioned in the novel, the reader knows exactly what it means – that there was something horribly wrong with the 1970s. For the contemporary historian Dominic Sandbrook, John le Carré’s n

Stephen McGinty: It's time we gave Scotland's history its proper place

IT IS time to blow the dust off an old subject: Scottish History. Or, why we don't know what we should know. Two years ago I wrote a column arguing that BBC Scotland should invest a sum of £2 million – or one tenth of the annual budget of the new BBC Gaelic channel – on a major landmark series that told the history of Scotland. Sure, we've had Professor Simon Schama swagger his way through a 15-part history of Britain for BBC2 and David Starkey rummage through the bed linen of the monarch

Tony Dokoupil: The War We Forgot (WW I)

Of the 2 million American soldiers sent to the trenches during World War I, only Frank Woodruff Buckles is still alive. The retired Army corporal, who turned 107 this month, is all that prevents the first world war from slipping into the secondhand past. Harry Landis, the only other known WWI veteran, died at 108 last week in Tampa, Fla. We're about to "lose a living touchstone of history," says Bob Patrick, director of the Library of Congress's Veterans History Project. Yet the United

Tad Taube: Auschwitz needs gravitas and tourism, not one or the other

[Tad Taube is chairman of the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture, president of the Koret Foundation and honorary consul for the Republic of Poland in California. This piece was written for JTA.] More tourists are arriving at Auschwitz — but what kind of experience are they getting? In the past two years, the number of visitors to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi death camp in southern Poland, has nearly tripled to an unprecedented 1 million people annually. These

Arthur Herman: The Lies of Tet

[Mr. Herman is the author of "Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age," to be published by Bantam Dell in April.] On January 30, 1968, more than a quarter million North Vietnamese soldiers and 100,000 Viet Cong irregulars launched a massive attack on South Vietnam. But the public didn't hear about who had won this most decisive battle of the Vietnam War, the so-called Tet offensive, until much too late. Media misrepor

Edward J. Larson: LIberal Democrats are ashamed of many of their party's past leaders

[Mr. Larson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, is the author most recently of "A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America's First Presidential Campaign" (Free Press, 2007). President Bush read his book, liked it, and told him so in a note in which the president seemed to identify with Thomas Jefferson more than John Adams.] ... At one time, Democrats everywhere staged Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinners to honor their party's founders much like Repub

Andre Vltchek: Indonesia After Suharto – The Last King of Java Forgiven (By Elites)

[Andre Vltchek– novelist, journalist, playwright. Co-founder of Mainstay Press (www.mainstaypress.org), publishing house for political fiction. Editorial director of Asiana Press Agency (www.asiana-press-agency.com). Author of several novels and plays, he also directed a 90 minute documentary on the Suharto dictatorship “Terlena – Breaking of a Nation”. Andre lives and works in Asia and South Pacific an

Oliver Kamm: Getting Hiroshima wrong time and again

[Mr. Kamm is a liberal journalist in the UK.] I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the ventures of the Media Lens organisation in the historiography of the Pacific War. ML is a sub-Chomskyite pressure group that purports to expose right-wing bias in the liberal communications media. To read the organisation's output and endless email campaigns is to enter, as Peter Beaumont of The Observer described it, "a closed and distorting little world that selects and twists its facts to s

David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies: The Ten Most Absurd Statements of 2007 About the Allies' Response to the Holocaust

Authors who last year distorted the Allies’ response to the Holocaust have received their comeuppance, with the publication by The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies of its annual list of the “Ten Most Absurd Statements” about how the U.S. and its allies responded to the Nazi genocide. The list was released in conjunction with last week’s commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day. “Sadly, a number of authors last year misrepresented important

Jack Bass: Still need truth, reconciliation, 40 years after Orangeburg

[Dr. Bass is professor of humanities and social sciences at the College of Charleston. For more information, go to www.orangeburgmassacre1968.com.] Truth and reconciliation combine to provide the theme of this week’s 40th anniversary of the Orangeburg Massacre. The tragedy of Feb. 8, 1968, left three young men dying and more than two dozen wounded by police gunfire on the third night of turmoil that began when black students attemp

Ian Kershaw: How Democracy Produced a Monster

[Ian Kershaw, a professor of modern history at Sheffield University, is the author of the forthcoming “Hitler, the Germans and the Final Solution.”] COULD something like it happen again? That is invariably the first question that comes to mind when recalling that Hitler was given power in Germany 75 years ago last week. With the world now facing such great tensions and instability, the question seems more obvious than ever. Hitler came to power in a democracy with a hig

Cullen Murphy and Todd Purdum: An Oral History of the Bush White House

The threat of 9/11 ignored. The threat of Iraq hyped and manipulated. Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. Hurricane Katrina. The shredding of civil liberties. The rise of Iran. Global warming. Economic disaster. How did one two-term presidency go so wrong? A sweeping draft of history—distilled from scores of interviews—offers fresh insight into the roles of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and other key players. ### January 20, 2001 After a disputed election and bitter recount battl

Jacob Weisberg: Bush Reads History Narcissistically

[Mr. Weisberg is the editor in chief of Slate. His book is February's HNN Book of the Month.] [George W.] Bush is not a historical ignoramus. Contrary to what many assume, he does have an appetite for books, which has grown larger during his White House years. If we take his own claims seriously, re

Gavan McCormack: The Comfort Women, the Asian Women’s Fund and the Digital Museum

INTRODUCTION Six decades have passed since the end of the Pacific and East Asian War and the collapse of the Japanese colonial empire, but responsibility for colonialism, war, and their accompanying atrocities, continues to agitate Japan and East Asia. It is widely believed that Japan refuses to apologize or face the truth of history, much less compensate victims. Such a belief is, however mistaken, although it is true that it took five decades before any such steps were taken and t