Roundup: Talking About History

Slate: Slide show on the disappeared in Latin America

How do you memorialize people who vanish? [Click on the SOURCE link to watch a slide show.]

Martin A. Davis, Jr.: What the New History Report Card Tells Us

[Martin Davis is Senior Writer and Editor for the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. A former adjunct professor of medieval history at the University of South Carolina, he made the jump to journalism in 2000.] The venue selected for the release of the 2006 NAEP results in U.S. history and civics was Boston's Old State House. Delicious

Economist: The burden of history in the new EU

Javier Solana, the European Union's top foreign-policy honcho, recently offered a neat turn of phrase to explain the importance that Europeans attach to the past. Ponder the phrase “that's history”, and what it implies on either side of the Atlantic, he suggested. When Americans say something is “history”, they mean it is no longer relevant. When Europeans say the same thing, “they usually mean the opposite”. Is this mere wordplay? If only. History lies at the heart of many disputes

Judith Pascoe: Napoleon's Penis

[Judith Pascoe, a professor of English at the University of Iowa, is the author of “The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors.”] THE owner of Napoleon’s penis died last Thursday in Englewood, N.J. John K. Lattimer, who’d been a Columbia University professor and a collector of military (and some macabre) relics, also possessed Lincoln’s blood-stained collar and Hermann Göring’s cyanide ampoule. But the penis, which supposedly had been severed by a pri

Leslie Susser: Was the Six-Day War a blessing or a curse for Israel's place in the Middle East and its long-term survival?

Was the Six-Day War a blessing or a curse for Israel's place in the Middle East and its long-term survival? Forty years on, the jury is still out. In the war's immediate aftermath, it seemed Israel's sweeping victory would guarantee the Jewish state's future and set the stage for a grand regional peace. But the war also unleashed powerful new forces that militated against a settlement of the core Israeli-Palestinian conflict and left simmering the overarching Israeli-Ar

Sen. Fred Thompson: Why military history needs to be restored to school curriculums

If you went to college in the Sixties, like I did, you might not know how much higher education has changed since then. Universities today are different places. At Vanderbilt, where I got my law degree, I hear you can take courses in third wave feminism or colonial governmentality. Your guess is as good as mine. On the other hand, some of the courses that we took for granted aren’t around at all. One area of study that’s almost disappeared from universities today is mi

Jim Barksdale and Francine Berman: Saving Our Digital Heritage

[Jim Barksdale is the former chief executive of Netscape Communications Corp. and is an executive member of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program Advisory Council. Francine Berman is director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California at San Diego. She holds the High Performance Computing Endowed Chair at UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering.] It is commonly agreed that the destruction of the ancient Library of Alexandria

Mark Safranski: Historians ought to help policy makers set policy

[Mr. Safranski is an educational consultant to secondary schools. He frequently writes about the military.] Last week, HNNran a somewhat critical piece by John Elrick on Colonel H.R. McMasterand Frederick Kaganentitled"The Two Historians

Peter C. Mancall: What Really Began at Jamestown

[Peter C. Mancall is a professor of history and anthropology at the University of Southern California and author of Hakluyt's Promise: An Elizabethan's Obsession for an English America, published this year by Yale University Press.] President Bush, Queen Elizabeth, Bill Clinton, and Sandra Day O'Connor are among the notables helping to mark the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, the once-struggling little outpost on the edge of a swamp that gave the English a permanent

Steven Shapin: How uses, not innovations, drive human technology

The technologies that we have available substantially define who we are. The nineteenth-century Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle didn’t much like the new industrial order, but he did understand the substantive relationship between human beings and their technologies: “Man is a Tool-using Animal. . . . Nowhere do you find him without Tools; without Tools he is nothing, with Tools he is all.” Seen in this light, my kitchen is a technological palimpsest. Even the older items were once innovations—l

Ruben Navarrette Jr.: Latinos give PBS a history lesson

[Ruben Navarrette Jr. is a member of the editorial board of The San Diego Union-Tribune and a nationally syndicated columnist.] SAN DIEGO, California (CNN) -- There is an ongoing battle between filmmaker Ken Burns and a coalition of Hispanic veterans, organizations and lawmakers over plans by Burns and the Public Broadcasting System to release a documentary on World War II that ignores the 500,000 Hispanics who fought in the war. Now there could be a truce. After initially

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom: China's changing views of its past

[Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom's latest book, "China's Brave New World – And Other Tales for Global Times," will be published in June. He's a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine.] It is obvious that China is a radically different place than it was 20 years ago. But it is equally clear that not everything about the country has been transformed. The tricky part is figuring out which things deserve to be put in the "dramatically altered" category a

Evan Thomas: In a new book, Robert Dallek details the deeply weird relationship between Nixon and Kissinger

Richard Nixon was nearing the end. It was Aug. 7, 1974, and the president had just told congressional leaders he planned to resign. Shortly after 6 p.m., Nixon's secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, found the chief executive sitting in the Oval Office, staring into the Rose Garden. The relationship between the men was, to say the least, ambivalent. As Kissinger was well aware, Nixon suspected him of self-aggrandizement. Kissinger, for his part, told reporters (privately, of course) that Nixon wa

Walter Issacson: Is America the New Rome?

[Walter Isaacson, the president of the Aspen Institute, is the author of “Einstein: His Life and Universe” and “Benjamin Franklin: An American Life.”] The only sure thing that can be said about the past is that anyone who can remember Santayana’s maxim is condemned to repeat it. As a result, the danger of not understanding the lessons of history is matched by the danger of using simplistic historical analogies. Those who have learned the lessons of Munich square off against those wh

George Bisharat: For Palestinians, memory matters

[George Bisharat is professor of law at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. He writes frequently about the Middle East.] Why do some people have the power to remember, while others are asked to forget? That question is especially poignant at this time of year, as we move from Holocaust Remembrance day in early spring to Monday's anniversary of Israel's declaration of independence on May 14, 1948. In the months surrounding that date, Jewish forces expelled, or

Karen Ordahl Kupperman: America's Founding Fictions (Jamestown vs. Plymouth)

[Karen Ordahl Kupperman is a professor of history at New York University and the author of "The Jamestown Project."] The colonists landed, short of food and supplies, after a long and harrowing transatlantic voyage. The initial exploring party stole a large quantity of corn that the Indians had carefully stored away for the hard winter. They then dug up some graves, looted items that had been buried with the dead and ransacked Indian houses. Furious fighting with the nativ

Christopher Shea: New scholarship on the origins of 'total war,' from the French Revolution to World War II, helps explain the war on terror

[Mr. Shea is a Boston Globe columnist.] ... Two scholars have just published studies -- one on Napoleon's Europe, the other on the annihilation from the air, by German bombers, of the Basque city of Guernica in 1937 -- that trace the roots of total war. These works, and others, argue that total wars have been, in part, a product of modern technology (poison gas, bombs, etc.) and the modern economies that can produce these weapons on a mass scale. But, this burgeoning work suggests,

WaPo Editorial: Making the U.S. citizenship test more 'meaningful'

WHAT IS or should be required to become an American? According to U.S. law, the criteria include basic knowledge of English and U.S. civics. What "basic knowledge" means, however, varies from region to region. Citizenship applicants must answer 10 of the 96 civics questions produced by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. But which 10 questions, whether the hardest 10 or the easiest 10, and whether they are written or oral, is determined by the office or the pers

Kirkpatrick Sale: From Jamestown to us

[KIRKPATRICK SALE is the author of 12 books, including "After Eden: The Evolution of Human Domination."] AS WILLIAM STRACHEY, later secretary to the little colony of Jamestown, put it in his account of the settlement, "Captain [Christopher] Newport … had sight of an extended plaine & spot of earth, which thrust out into the depth, & middle of the channel…. The Trumpets sounding the admiral stoke saile, and … the Colony disembarked, and every man brought his pa

Martin A. Davis Jr.: More people cared about the queen's visit than about the event she was celebrating ... Jamestown's 400th birthday

[Martin A. Davis Jr. is senior writer and editor at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.] In a battle of celebrity versus substance, substance almost always loses. Such was the case this past week in D.C. and Virginia, where the Queen Mother set hearts a-flutter. Wherever she went, people clamored for tickets to see her, fretted about protocol should they actually meet her, and gleefully endured traffic snarls and cool weather to greet her. The principal reason for her visit, how