Roundup: Talking About History

Tom Brokaw: Boom! Voices of the Sixties

[Tom Brokaw is the author of four bestsellers: The Greatest Generation, The Greatest Generation Speaks, An Album of Memories, and A Long Way from Home. From 1976 to 1981 he anchored Today on NBC. He was the sole anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw from 1983 to 2004. www.boom-brokaw.com ] In 1962, I had an entry-level reporter's job at an Omaha television station. I had bargained to get a salary of one hundred dollar

Gary Younge: Thieves of Black History (Memphis)

[Gary Younge, the Alfred Knobler Journalism Fellow at The Nation Institute, is the New York correspondent for the Guardian and the author of No Place Like Home: A Black Briton's Journey Through the Deep South (Mississippi) and Stranger in a Strange Land: Travels in the Disunited States (New Press). He is also a contributor to The Notion.] If Beale Street could talk, as James Baldwin famously imagined, then somewhere around Memphis's South Fourth Street it would let out an agonizing

Martin van Creveld: War and Technology (Teaching Military History)

[Martin van Creveld is Professor, Institute of Arts and Letters, Hebrew University and author of Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton (Cambridge, 2004). This essay is based on his address at FPRI’s History Institute for Teachers, “Teaching Military History: Why and How,” held at the First Division Museum in Wheaton, IL and co-sponsored by the Cantigny First Division Foundation. Core support for the History Institute is provided by The Annenberg Foundation; support for this weekend

William J. Bennett: Do you know our heroes?

These are tough times for, and in, America. We are at war, and we find that war highly controversial. Many of our political leaders have record-low approval ratings and too many are held in ignominy. Washington — our nation’s capital — is held in contempt, as a laugh line by comedians. But perhaps a greater tragedy than all of this is that we seem to no longer have any kind of reference point. For indeed, we are not living in the toughest of times, we are not living in the worst of times, nor ar

Media Matters: Limbaugh joins other media in whitewashing Swift Boat Vets' falsehoods, claims "nobody has disproven anything they claimed"

Summary: On his radio show, Limbaugh claimed that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth"were right on the money, and nobody has disproven anything they claimed in any of their ads, statements, written commentaries, or anything of the sort." In fact, most of the allegations the Swift Boat Veterans made about Sen. John Kerry's Vietnam War service during the 2004 presidential campaign have been thoroughly discredited, often by official military records, but also by the Swift Boat accusers themselves, w

Dan Hurley: The dark side of America's frontier history

[Dan Hurley is the assistant vice president for history and research at the Cincinnati Museum Center. He is also the staff historian for Channel 12 News and the executive producer of Local 12 Newsmakers. Reach him at dhurley@cincymuseum.org.] No painting by a Cincinnati artist is more arresting than Henry Farny's "The Song of the Talking Wire." Owned by the Taft Museum of Art, downtown, the painting is on loan to t

Michael Knox Beran: The folly of Congress’s Lincoln Bicentennial Commission

[Michael Knox Beran is a contributing editor of City Journal. His book, Forge of Empires 1861-1871: Three Revolutionary Statesmen and the World They Made, has just been published by Free Press.] In 1859 Abraham Lincoln expressed the fear that the “principles of free government” in the United States would one day be supplanted by those of “classification, caste, and legitimacy.” Lincoln fought a civil war to stave off that threat; if he were alive today, he’d have to fig

David Brooks: Reagan victim of leftwing calumny

[HNN Editor: David Brooks is here taking on fellow NYT columnist Paul Krugman, who charges in his book, The Conscience of a Liberal, that Reagan began his campaign in 1980 near Philadelphia, Mississippi to signal to white Southerners that he was in sympathy with their feelings of deep disaffection.] Today, I’m going to write about a slur. It’s a distortion that’s been around for a while, but has spread like a weed over the past few months. It was concocted for partisan reasons: to

Daniel McCarthy: Goldwater has many claimants to his legacy, but most lack his rebellious spirit

In the years leading up to Barry Goldwater's death, conservatives wondered what had happened to their hero. They had wondered for some time, actually—since at least 1976, when Goldwater endorsed moderate incumbent Gerald Ford over insurgent conservative Ronald Reagan for the Republican presidential nomination. Back then, conservative activist John Lofton suggested Goldwater must not be in his right mind,"still in an ether fog" from recent hip replacement surgery:"Possessed of all his facul

Roya Hakakian: Holocaust Denial and Tehran

[Ms. Hakakian is the author of "Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran" (Three Rivers Press, 2005), a memoir of growing up Jewish in Iran.] Dictatorships bear paradoxes. I came across a set of them 10 years ago, when I hosted a dinner for two female Iranian medical students who'd come to Yale Medical School on a rare academic exchange program. These impressive women had climbed to the top 10th percentile in a man's profession, in a man's count

Oliver Kamm: Paul Tibbets and Enola Gay ... About those Obits

[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

William Hogeland: Critics are misreading Hamilton's legacy to suit their own purposes

[William Hogeland is the author of The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America's Newfound Sovereignty.] ... The once “forgotten founder” [Alexander Hamilton] is now the subject of a PBS American Experience feature, which aired in the spring and is likely to live on in classrooms on DVD. Between scenes of bewigged actors reciting their characters’ written prose in awkward soliloquy, Chernow and a raft of other historian

James R. Russell: Ideology over Integrity in Academe

[James R. Russell is Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies, Harvard University.] Is this Columbia University? A professor of anthropology calls for a million Mogadishus, a professor of Arabic and Islamic Science tells a girl she isn't a Semite because her eyes are green, and a professor of Persian hails the destruction of the World Trade Center as the castrating of a double phallus. The most recent tenured addition to this rogues' gallery is to be an anthropologist, the principal t

Dwight T. Pitcaithley: The National Park Service Begins Explaining the Causes of Our Wars

[HNN Editor: The focus of this article is on the Civil War.] ... Between 1933, when Franklin D. Roosevelt transferred the Civil War battlefields from the War Department to the Department of the Interior, and the late 1990s, the NPS avoided all mention of the causes of the war in its exhibits, films, and publications. Eighty years after the 50th reunion at Gettysburg in 1913, the agency still adhered to Governor William Mann's admonition that "we came here, I say, not to discus

Adam Holland: Oregon "Peace" Group to Mark Kristallnacht with Holocaust Denial Conference

Here's another story concerning what appears to be a trend: purported"peace activists" promoting Holocaust denial and anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. In this case, a University of Oregon peace organization called Pacifica Forum, which was founded and is led by a retired professor and a retired administrator from that university, is marking Kristallnacht with two days of speeches and conferences this weekend conducted by Mark Weber direc

Eric Rauchway: Democrats should welcome the chance to blast Republicans for attacking FDR

[Mr. Rauchway is associate professor of history at the University of California, Davis, is the author of Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America.] This November 8 marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of Franklin Roosevelt's election as president of the United States. Chosen to resolve the worst non-military crisis in the nation's history, Roosevelt led the country through the Great Depression as well as its greatest military crisis since the Civil War. American

Robert Dallek: As Camelot Began ... The Unseen Portraits of the Kennedys by Richard Avedon

When President-Elect John F. Kennedy and his family posed for Avedon in January 1961, it sent a message of youth, vitality, and confidence. As a new book by Shannon Thomas Perich chronicles the session, biographer Robert Dallek, in this exclusive assessment for Vanity Fair, gives the historical backdrop to the photos, many of which appear for the first time. To see the Avedon portraits, pick up the November issue. *** ... To be sure, Kennedy did not discount the importa

Alvaro Vargas Llosa: Who's Buried in Che's Tomb? Hint: Not Che. The Cuban government's most shameless con.

[ALAVARO VARGAS LLOSA, author of Liberty for Latin America, is the director of the Center on Global Prosperity at the Independent Institute.] Thousands of Cubans and foreigners have been flocking to a mausoleum in central Cuba to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Che Guevara's death. For 10 years, the Cuban government has been telling the world that the body inside the mausoleum is that of the famous guerrilla. It's a lie designed to bamboozle the population into wors

Stefan Klemp: The role of the German postwar criminal justice system system in aiding the perpetrators of the Rechnitz massacre

[Stefan Klemp is a historian and journalist. He is author of the book "Nicht ermittelt. Polizeibataillone und die Nachkriegsjustiz" (2005), and is director of historical research in Germany for the Simon Wiesenthal Center. ] The murder of roughly 200 Jews in the night of March 24-25, 1945, in the eastern Austrian village of Rechnitz is now the subject of a heated debate, focussing on the question whether the murder occurred at a party thrown by a "Thyssen countess.&qu

Eric Alterman: Burns's War ... What Is It Good For?

[Eric Alterman is a Distinguished Professor of English, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and Professor of Journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. He is also"The Liberal Media" columnist for The Nation, a senior fellow and"Altercation" weblogger for Media Matters for America, (formerly at MSNBC.com) in Washington, DC, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC, where he writes and edits the"Think Again" column, a senior fellow (since 1985) at