Roundup: Talking About History

Karin Chenoweth: Teaching students to read means teaching them facts

[Karin Chenoweth, author of It's Being Done: Academic Success in Unexpected Schools, is currently with The Education Trust, a national education advocacy organization. Before joining The Education Trust, Chenoweth wrote the Homeroom column for the Montgomery and Prince George’s Extras of The Washington Post, which gained a national readership for its focus on schools and education.] ... For decades there has been a systematic debasement of the role that knowledge plays in an educati

Bill Moyers: FDR, in memory

Bill Moyers gave the following remarks at the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute's twentieth-anniversary Four Freedoms ceremony, where he received the Freedom of Speech award. --The Editors Thank you for this recognition and the spirit of the evening. Thanks especially for giving me the chance to sit here awhile thinking about my father. Henry Moyers was an ordinary man who dropped out of the fourth grade because his family needed him to pick cotton to help make ends meet. T

Peter Riddell: When you are in a hole, history can show the exit

We have been here before. Almost every event has a precedent, never exact, but often revealing. Politicians and the media, however, often behave as if everything is new, risking a repeat of past mistakes. Demonstrating the relevance of history is the goal of the History and Policy website, a collaboration of Cambridge University, the Institute of Historical Research and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. This involves a network of historians and 60 short briefing pa

David McNeill: Look Back in Anger. Filming the Nanjing Massacre

[David McNeill writes regularly for a number of publications including the Irish Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He is a Japan Focus coordinator.] A crop of new movies released to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre is set to again dredge up the controversy about one of the 20th Century’s most notorious events. How will Japan react? One way to learn what happened in one of history’s most noxious but disputed episodes is to ask Mizushima

Gregory McNamee: Christmas, Cash, and Commodities

[Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor for Encyclopædia Britannica, for which he writes regularly on world geography, culture, and other topics. He is also literary critic for the Hollywood Reporter and a regular contributor to many other publications.] Thanksgiving puts a smile on the face of cranberry farmers, poultry farmers, sweet-potato farmers, and bookies.

James Carroll: Why is the Catholic Church praising clergy who were killed during the Spanish Civil War?

[James Carroll's column appears regularly in The Boston Globe.] So the Spanish cardinal says to the young King Juan Carlos, "Your Highness, there is good news and there is bad news." The king naturally asks for the good news first. The cardinal answers, "Generalissimo Franco is dead." The king is pleased to hear it. "What's the bad news?" he asks. "The bad news is — you have to tell him." The assumption in 1975, the year of Franci

Ron Neumunz: Self-discovery in the mysteries of the past

[Ron Neumunz is an American living in London working in the hedge fund industry.] We are all out there, at different times and on different days, always looking. It's a search for information, it's a search for family, and, in the end, a search for self. We know all the Web sites, like ArmyAirforces.com and b24proboards, and a handful of others. We use them to reach out, ask questions, exchange information and hunt again for more information. One is looking

Stephen Brown: "Show Trial" legalist who sent Czech dissident Milada Horakova to the gallows in 1950 gets eight years

[Stephen Brown is a columnist for Frontpagemag.com. Email him at alsolzh@hotmail.com.] “Suffocate the bitch.” It was June 27, 1950, when these savage words were spoken to a hangman behind the thick, grim walls of Prague’s Pankrac Prison in communist Czechoslovakia. The unfortunate soul the executioner was instructed to make suffer as much as possible before her death that day was Czech national heroine and anti-communist disside

Edward Renehan: Strange Bedfellows: Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt and the Woodhull/Claflins

[Mr. Renehan is the author of Commodore: The Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (Basic/Perseus, 2007) and other books including Dark Genius of Wall Street, The Kennedys at War, The Lion's Pride, The Secret Six, and John Burroughs: An American Naturalist. He lives in Rhode Island. Find his blog at http:/renehan.typepad.com.] During September of 1868, barely a month after the death of his wife Sophia, 74-year-old mogul Cornelius Vanderbilt made the acqua

Paul Raffaele: Christians in Ethiopia have long claimed to have the ark of the covenant. Do they?

"They shall make an ark of acacia wood," God commanded Moses in the Book of Exodus, after delivering the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. And so the Israelites built an ark, or chest, gilding it inside and out. And into this chest Moses placed stone tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments, as given to him on Mount Sinai. Thus the ark “was worshipped by the Israelites as the embodiment of God Himself,” writes Graham Hancock in The Sign and the Seal. "Biblical and

Isabella Ginor & Gideon Remez: Why Getting to the Bottom of the Story About the 6-Day War Isn't Easy

[The writers are based in Jerusalem.] Six months ago - on May 16 - The Jerusalem Post featured a report about our book Foxbats over Dimona: The Soviets' Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War. Our book challenged the almost universal consensus on the origins and conduct of the conflict that has shaped the Middle East ever since. We demonstrated that the crisis and war of May-June 1967 were deliberately instigated by the USSR, which jointly with Egypt and Syria planned to pro

Leon Aron: 20 Years after Glasnost

[Leon Aron, resident scholar and director of Russian studies at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of "Russia's Revolution: Essays 1989-2006."] Twenty years after Mikhail Gorbachev initiated glasnost, it is clear that, like every fateful "tipping point" in human history, the change has furnished enough material for scholars to plumb for many years. It may be too early to appreciate what glasnost has contributed, its depth, its passions and, yes, eve

Greg Grandin: Kissinger and Bush Neocons ... two peas in a pod

[Greg Grandin teaches history at New York University. He is the author of The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War.] After Nixon’s resignation, Reagan set his bid to steal the 1976 Republican nomination from Gerald Ford. He attacked Kissinger for bargaining away US interests in the Panama Canal and betraying friends in southern Africa and Taiwan. At the same time, Donald Rumsfeld, Ford’s secretary of defense, and Dick Cheney, the White House chief of staff, joined f

Viktor Yushchenko: What Stalin did to Ukranians 75 years ago was genocide

[Mr. Yushchenko is Ukraine's president.] Seventy-five years ago the Ukrainian people fell victim to a crime of unimaginable horror. Usually referred to in the West as the Great Famine or the Terror Famine, it is known to Ukrainians as the Holodomor. It was a state-organized program of mass starvation that in 1932-33 killed an estimated seven million to 10 million Ukrainians, including up to a third of the nation's children. With grotesque understatement the Soviet authorities dismis

John Sotos: Abraham Lincoln ... Did he have a rare disease (MEN 2B)?

President Lincoln's health has long fascinated medical historians, and now a California doctor has come up with a new theory after exhaustive research that, he argues, explains all of Lincoln's known features and symptoms. He concludes Lincoln had a rare genetic cancer syndrome that might have killed him within six months had he not been assassinated. Read more of the story: Is Lincoln Earliest Recorded Case of Rare Disease? (The Post, Nov. 26) Join Washington Post staff writer Davi

Teresa Goudie: Why weren't Japanese in Hawaii rounded up during WW II as they were on the US mainland?

[Teresa Goudie is Lecturer in Japanese Studies, University of New South Wales. t.goudie@unsw.edu.au.] ... Despite their desire to isolate the Japanese in Hawai’i and the fact that Hawai’i was the most obvious place for a ‘fifth column’ to exist ... only about 1,700 key community leaders were ever evacuated from Hawai’i and interned on the mainland (National Archives, RG210 and Office of the Secretary of War, RG107). Why were the majority of

James Piereson: The Culture of Conspiracy

[Mr. Piereson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of "Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism" (Encounter Books, 2007).] This week is the anniversary of the tragic day in 1963 when John F. Kennedy was assassinated on the streets of Dallas. Looking back, we can see that Kennedy's death marked a turning point, when the political consensus of the time gave way to the confrontational polit

Fujiwara Akira: The Nanking Atrocity ... An Interpretive Overview

This article is slightly adapted from a chapter by the late Fujiwara Akira, an emeritus professor at Hitotsubashi University until his death in 2003, which first appeared in Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, ed., The Nanking Atrocity 1937-38: Complicating the Picture (New York and London: Berghahn Books, 2007). Fujiwara wrote one of two introductory chapters to this volume about the Nanking Massacre, the seventieth anniversary of which will be observed in December. In this essay, Fujiwara p

Mark Schmitt: Baby Boomers are suddenly mad for the fifties

Democrats and Republicans are alike in one respect, according to the libertarian writer Brink Lindsey: their shared nostalgia for the 1950s. Except, he says,"Republicans want to go home to the United States of the 1950s, while Democrats want to work there." Indeed, from television (where Mad Men has faithfully recreated the furnishings, boozy smell, and chronic sexual dishonesty of the New York executive suite circa 1960), to the celebrated 50th anniversary of Jack Kerouac's On the Roa

Sukhdev Sandhu: Black Britain ... A Photographic History

There was a time, not so long ago, when the idea of a photographic history of black Britain would have seemed an absurd proposition. What would be its contents? A picture of the Jamaican passengers disembarking from the SS Empire Windrush in 1948; a few Picture Post covers advertising shock-horror features about high birth rates among impoverished immigrants; riotous inner-city youths on the streets of Brixton and Toxteth; and then, perhaps, a few celebratory shots of Daley Thompson atop an Olym