Roundup: Talking About History

William Gaines and Max Holland: Deep Throat 3.0

[William Gaines won two Pulitzer Prizes, in 1976 and 1988, for investigative reporting during a 27-year career with the Chicago Tribune. Since 1999, he has held the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Chair in Investigative & Enterprise Reporting at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. In June, CQ Press will publish his latest book, Investigative Journalism: Strategies for Reporting the Story. Max Holland is the editor of Washington DeCoded.] June 17, 2007 will mark

David Brooks: What drove Blair?

... [Tony] Blair’s decision to support the invasion of Iraq grew out of the essence of who he is. Over the past decade, he has emerged as the world’s leading anti-Huntingtonian. He has become one pole in a big debate. On one side are those, represented by Samuel Huntington of Harvard, who believe humanity is riven by deep cultural divides and we should be careful about interfering in one another’s business. On the other are those like Blair, who believe the process of globalization compels us to

Daniel Gross: Why bubbles are great for the economy

[Daniel Gross (www.danielgross.net) writes Slate's "Moneybox" column. You can e-mail him at moneybox@slate.com. He is the author of Pop! Why Bubbles Are Great for the Economy.] In my new book, Pop! Why Bubbles Are Great for the Economy, I explain why Americans have misunderstood the frenzies, manias, and stampedes that periodically seize us. ... ... once you gain a little histor

Shlomo Avineri: The Nakba?

[Shlomo Avineri is a professor of political science at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.] The Palestinians will mark the annual Nakba Day on May 15, as they have done in previous years. We must listen to their voices. As human beings and as Jews we must listen and be attentive to the other's pain, even if the other is - at the moment - our enemy. However, we must listen critically. First and foremost we may ask, why May 15? It was on this day that the British Mandate on

Martin Wainwright: History is in the telling by ordinary folk

Famously, everyone has a story to tell, but it is thanks to a poem and a letter in the New Statesman that we know how brilliantly "ordinary" people can turn into historians. Seventy years ago, contributions to Kingsley Martin's magazine by Tom Harrisson (the poem) and Charles Madge and Humphrey Jennings (the joint letter) started the enormous "people's chronicle" called Mass Observation (MO). It was comical to begin with, as London intellectuals eavesdropped in

Tony Platt: Northern Ireland's past has a future

[ TONY PLATT was a visiting professor at the Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Queen's University, Belfast, in March. He is author, with Cecilia O'Leary, of "Bloodlines: Recovering Hitler's Nuremberg Laws, From Patton's Trophy to Public Memorial."] TUESDAY MARKED the historic restoration of power-sharing between Catholics and Protestants, Irish republicans and British loyalists in Northern Ireland — and the beginning of a new set of difficult challenges, inclu

Alexander Hamilton and the Creation of the United States (Online Exhibit)

Alexander Hamilton has been enjoying a renaissance. Indeed, Americans in the twenty-first century may admire Hamilton more than any generation since the founders themselves. An immigrant from the Caribbean, a disadvantaged orphan who became a war hero, a self-made man who rose to become a framer of the Constitution and architect of the American financial system, and ahead of his time in his opposition to slavery, Hamilton offers the modern reader much to admire. This exhibition was

Steven Plaut: The Khazar Myth and the New Anti-Semitism

[Steven Plaut, a frequent contributor to The Jewish Press and the new Jewish Press Blog (www.thejewishpress.blogspot.com), is a professor at the University of Haifa. His book "The Scout" is available at Amazon.com. He can be contacted at steveneplaut@yahoo.com.]

David Brooks: Where History Reigns

... Britain is a nation with the soul of a historian. Its society is studded with institutions that keep the past alive, of which the monarchy is only the most famous. Its press is filled with commemorations, anniversaries and famously eloquent obituaries. Britain has always produced politically engaged celebrity historians, from Gibbon, Macaulay and Trevelyan down to Simon Schama, John Keegan, Andrew Roberts and Niall Ferguson today. In short, Brits live with the constant presence

Amy Dockser Marcus: Jerusalem Before Israel

Editor's note: The roots of Arab-Israeli enmity are usually traced to Palestine's administration as a British Mandate (1920-48). But in "Jerusalem 1913," Wall Street Journal reporter Amy Dockser Marcus--the paper's former Middle East correspondent (1991-98) and the winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for her coverage of improving cancer-survival rates--finds that the conflict's origins lie deeper in the past, in the Ottoman Empire before World War I. She begins by noting a long period o

Edwin Black: Why we shouldn't be celebrating the propsect that the Bad Arolsen archives may be sent to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum

[Edwin Black is The New York Times' best-selling author of the award-winning"IBM and the Holocaust" and is responsible for a series of investigations revealing the contents of the ITS archives at Bad Arolsen. His stories on the subject can be viewed at http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com.] The International Tracing Service's secret Holocaust archive at Bad Arolsen, Germany, is preparing to transfer millions of images of

Lee Kaplan: ISM Brings Fake “Holocaust Survivor” to UC Irvine

[Lee Kaplan is an undercover investigative journalist and a contributor to Front Page Magazine. He is also a regular columnist for the Israel National News and Canada Free Press and a senior intelligence analyst and communications director for the Northeast Intelligence Network.] The International Solidarity Movement never misses a beat when it comes to propaganda against Israel on US college campuses. In December of 2003, I attended their third national conference where one seminar

David Wise: A fundamental change in the agency means more intelligence officers are spilling the beans, but the CIA still gets the last word

[David Wise writes frequently about intelligence and espionage. He is the author of "Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America."] WHEN "The Invisible Government," the book about U.S. intelligence I coauthored with Thomas B. Ross, was published in 1964, the CIA considered buying up all the copies to keep them out of bookstores. The book upset the agency because it was the first serious study of the CIA's activities, about which the pub

Nicolas Shump: Time editors practice bad history

[Nicolas Shump is a doctoral student in American studies at The University of Kansas. ] When I received my copy of the May 7, 2007, issue of Time magazine, I found myself both angered and amused by the cover. It reads, “America at 400: How Jamestown colony made us who we are.” Doing the quick math, I realized this particular origin myth places the beginning of America at the founding of the Jamestown colony in 1607. Although I doubt this is their intention, the Time edi

Daniel Cornwall: Army History Center Author Says Domestic Spying Unproductive

One of the great things about living in a country that still has a significant commitment to government openness are publications which admit past mistakes on the government.A case in point is the book The Role of Federal Military Forces in Domestic Disorders, 1945-1992 by Paul J. Scheips and published by the Army's Center of Military History's Army Historical Series.

Tom Holland: Scrapping A-level classical history in British schools is lunacy

[Tom Holland is the author of Rubicon and Persian Fire.] ... In modern schools, of course, history tends to mean Hitler. A simple lesson is served up to students on a plate: fascism is bad. The political and moral ambiguities of classical history, which inspired Machiavelli and Shakespeare, Jefferson and Marx, barely intrude upon the classroom. Students who wish to study Greece and Rome - no less the bedrocks of our own civilisation now than in previous centuries - already find it d

William Dalrypmple: Mutiny! The uprising that shook the world

[William Dalrymple's The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857, which won the 2007 Duff Cooper Prize for History and Biography, has just been published in paperback by Bloomsbury (£8.99)] On the evening of Sunday 10 May 1857, 150 years ago next week, 300 mutinous sepoys from Meerut rose up against their officers. They shot as many as they could, then rode through the night to the old Mughal capital of Delhi, where there they massacred every Christian man, woman and child, a

Mother Jones Magazine: 30th Anniversary of Mass Arrests at Seabrook, NH, Anti-Nuclear Rally

On April 30th, 1977, a rag tag army of 2,400 people descended, marching and singing, on Seabrook, New Hampshire, to protest the building of a new nuclear power station. Inspired by the civil rights movement and mentored by the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group, the "Clamshell Alliance," a small group of local activists, had trained the crowd to express their collective frustration with the powerful nuclear lobby. The tactic was non-violent civil disobedien

Robert D. Kaplan: Foreign Policy ... Munich Versus Vietnam

[Robert D. Kaplan, a national correspondent for The Atlantic, is the Class of 1960 Distinguished Visiting Professor in National Security at the United States Naval Academy.] For decades now, two analogies have battled for supremacy in American foreign policy circles: those of Munich and Vietnam. At the moment, Vietnam has the upper-hand. But don’t count Munich out. The appeasement of Nazi Germany at the Munich Conference in 1938—when British Prime Minister Neville Chamb

Alan Dershowitz: Finkelstein's Bigotry

In her 1951 best seller, "The Groves of Academe," Mary McCarthy fictionalized a failed academic who, realizing he wouldn't get tenure, became a communist so that he could claim that he was being denied tenure because he was a Red rather than a lousy scholar. A version of that ploy is being used today. Norman Finkelstein brags that "never has one of [his] articles been published in a scientific magazine." By his own account he has been fired by "every school