Roundup: Talking About History

Richard Brookhiser: Inventing America

The Virginia colony had John Smith, Pocahontas, slavery, famine, battles and a great Indian chief. So how come Plymouth Rock gets all the press? An in-depth look at the place where our nation began to take shape They thought they were lost. The Susan Constant, the Godspeed and the Discovery had sailed from London on Dec. 20, 1606, carrying 144 passengers and crew, bound for Virginia. Howling winds pinned them to the coast of England for six weeks. After crossing the Atlantic by a southerly route

Helen C. Rountree: Jamestown, from the Powhatan's perspective

[Rountree, an anthropologist, is the author of Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown.] The view of the people who met the ships was very different from that of the newcomers aboard them--and that of most historical writings since. The native people (collectively called the Powhatan) did not write it because their society was nonliterate, but it can be reconstructed from their actions, recorded by the English. The task is not an easy one, for t

Bob Deans: Pocahontas and John Smith ... The first American love story?

[A national correspondent for Cox Newspapers, Deans is author of The River Where America Began: A Journey Along the James.] It was the first great American love story. Or was it? Neither John Smith nor Pocahontas ever claimed to be an item. There's not a shred of evidence to affirm they were. But the real story of their relationship is more interesting than what the rich canon of American romance literature, or even Hollywood, has made of it. Pocahontas and Smith shared a deep

Mark D. Tooley: The Not Entirely Forgotten War ... Marking the 250th anniversary of the French and Indian War

[ark D. Tooley directs the United Methodist committee at the Institute on Religion and Democracy.] NOT MANY AMERICANS are commemorating the 250th anniversary of the French and Indian War. Outside Washington, D.C., over 100 West Virginians recently assembled for their annual commemoration of their own community's role in the "war that made America." Creditably, PBS aired a documentary with that very title last year. And the Smithsonian Institution currently has an equally c

Bryan Coll: Montmartre resisting city plans to replace old cobblestones in pursuit of the goal of Greening Paris

Auguste Renoir painted them, Edith Piaf sang about them and, most recently, Am?lie did her shopping on them. But icon of Paris though the centuries-old cobblestones of Montmartre may be, they are being removed as part of a council project aimed at turn this historic quarter of Paris into the city's largest "Green Village." To make way for wider sidewalks, cycle lanes and new scooter parks, diggers have torn up chunks of some of Montmartre's most famous thoroughfares, unsentimentally re

Ilan Stavans: PBS and its latest sins of omission

[Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. His latest book is "The Disappearance." His meditation "On Love" will be published in the fall. ] IS PBS REALLY a network for and by the people? A 14-hour miniseries by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick devoted to World War II is scheduled for this fall. Almost no one has seen trailers of it but it has already been causing controversy. Apparently, Burns,

Sasha Abramsky: At last, Philip Zimbardo writes a book about the famous Stanford Prison Experiment

[Sasha Abramsky is a senior fellow at Demos, a nonpartisan, New York-based think tank. His latest book American Furies: Crime, Punishment, and Vengeance in the Age of Mass Imprisonment was published this month by Beacon Press.] ... Now, the world knows who Deep Throat was. And, with the publication of The Lucifer Effect, it also has Zimbardo's behind-the-scenes account of his experiment, a venture that, in many ways, could serve as a precursor to today's omnipresent reality TV sho

Jeffrey Laurenti: Yeltsin and an American Myth

[Jeffrey Laurenti, senior fellow at The Century Foundation.] Among the more durable articles of faith on the American right is the conviction that the Reagan administration's renewal of 1950s-style confrontation with the Soviet Union felled the Communist regime. Boris Yeltsin, who died Monday in Moscow, gave the lie to this myth. Yeltsin was, without a doubt, the political figure most responsible for uncoiling the Communist Party tentacles that gripped every aspe

Laura Miller: How an ancient epic (Gilgamesh) full of sex, violence and a pre-biblical flood got lost and found, and how its legacy lives on in "Lethal Weapon."

There's no better illustration of the fragility and the power of literature than the history of "The Epic of Gilgamesh," the oldest known literary work, composed in Babylonia more than 3,000 years ago. About 400 years later, after one of the ruthless, bloody sieges typical of that time, the epic was buried in the ruins of a Mesopotamian palace. There it lay, utterly forgotten along with the name of the king who once reigned in that palace, until a British archaeologist and his Iraqi as

Zygmunt Dzieciolowski: Boris Yeltsin, history man

[Zygmunt Dzieciolowski is a Polish journalist and writer who has reported on Russia for leading German, Swiss and Polish newspapers since 1989. He is the author of Planet Russia, published in Poland in 2005.] ... At first everything seemed easy. Yeltsin and his closest advisors expected that their radical-reform programme - including expunging the power of the Communist Party, liberating prices, privatising the economy, and securing freedom of speech - would be enough to bring immed

David Satter: Yeltsin's rule was marked by lost opportunities and fearsome political corruption

[Mr. Satter is affiliated with the Hoover Institution and the Johns Hopkins University. His latest book is "Darkness at Dawn: the Rise of the Russian Criminal State" (Yale, 2003).] The era of Boris Yeltsin, who died yesterday, was a time of lost opportunity. Yeltsin led the revolution that overthrew the Soviet Union. But his attempt to build democracy in Russia was a failure, in no small measure because, mesmerized by the success of the West, he was determined to create de

Darrell Laurant: Is it historic, or history?

NEW LONDON, Va. -- Union troops marched through here back in 1864, on their way to capture Lynchburg. Two days later, they came through again, a little faster this time. That capturing thing didn’t quite work out, and David Hunter’s troops were in full retreat. These days, so is New London itself. And the enemy at the gates isn’t a blue-clad regiment, but progress. “It’s something we think about a lot,” said Randy Lichtenberg of Friends of New London, reflecting

Craig Whitlock: Two Hours in a Nazi Death Camp ( Sachsenhausen)

At the end of the peaceful neighborhood street, past the tidy prewar cottages and just beyond the snack bar offering ice cream on a cool spring day, looms what's left of the Nazi concentration camp. It's 10:07 a.m. and birds are trilling in the treetops, the voices of happy schoolchildren echo from a nearby playground at recess. But that's outside the gates of the Sachsenhausen camp. Inside, except for the sound of the rushing wind, it's as quiet as a tomb. The Nazis bu

Rachel Donadio: The closing of the Russian archives

Since the end of the cold war, historians have mined the Russian archives for insights into the nature of the Soviet empire and its global reach. New documents have shed light on such matters as the Alger Hiss and Rosenberg spy cases and also illuminated the relationships between Moscow and revolutionary movements in other countries — sometimes fueling old debates more than settling them. But after a golden age in the early 1990s, archival access eroded. Today, conversations with nearly two doze

Simon Schama: The lost art of great speechmaking

It was well after midnight on February 7 1787 when Richard Brinsley Sheridan MP got up in the House of Commons to flay the hide off Warren Hastings, the impeached Governor of Bengal. The chamber was packed to the rafters, notwithstanding the 50-guinea price for tickets. By the time Sheridan was done it was six in the morning and no one had moved. But virtuoso marathons of oratory weren't at all unusual in that distant golden age of eloquence (and they were a lot more fu

Christopher Hitchens: Jefferson Versus the Muslim Pirates

[Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. His most recent collection of essays is titled Love, Poverty, and War.] When I first began to plan my short biography of Thomas Jefferson, I found it difficult to research the chapter concerning the so-called Barbary Wars: an event or series of events that had seemingly receded over the lost horizon of American history. Henry Adams, in his discussion of our third presid

Allan M. Brandt: How a PR Firm Helped Establish America's Cigarette Century

The following excerpt is from chapter 5 of The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America by Allan M. Brandt, (Basic Books, 2007). The passage starts at the moment that the tobacco industry began to face serious scientific data suggesting the connection between lung cancer and cigarette smoke. The tobacco industry's response to hire a PR firm to fight the scientific evidence gave rise to the approach that industry and ideological

Michael Berenbaum: Holocaust Denial: Iranian Style

[Michael Berenbaum is a leading expert on the Holocaust. He is the former director of the United States Holocaust Museum Research Institute and President of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.] In honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day this week, it’s worthy to wonder: What’s the difference between Holocaust denial in the West and Holocaust denial as practiced by the President of Iran and his followers? In the West, Holocaust denial challenges the fundamen

Garrison Keillor: History teaches you humility

Once when I was teaching a composition class at the university, I flew back from New York for class and neglected to get back on Central Standard Time. I came bustling into the classroom and walked to the front, took off my coat, set my briefcase on the table, smiled at the students assembled, and was about to open my mouth and start talking about the importance of structure in comic writing and then something struck me as Not Right. Familiar faces were missing. I leaned down and said to a girl

Humberto Fontova: The Bay of Pigs -- Anniversary of Heroism and Shame

[Humberto Fontova is the author of "Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him."] "They fought like tigers," writes the CIA officer who helped train the Cubans who splashed ashore at the Bay of Pigs 46 years ago this week. "But their fight was doomed before the first man hit the beach." That CIA man, Grayston Lynch, knows something about fighting – and about long odds. He carried scars from Omaha Beach, The Battle o