Roundup: Talking About History

Shane Schick: Will today's text files be tomorrow's stone tablets?

When I started writing this column in Microsoft Word, I was making a choice, whether I wanted to or not. And if you've written anything on a computer today, you've done the same thing. We usually create electronic documents for two reasons: So that we can store them for future reference and so that others may read them. However, neither of those outcomes are guaranteed. The software we use to create a document might one day become outdated, or a document might become impossible to r

Stephanie Robinson and Cornel West: 400 years after Jamestown ... For African Americans, an Abundant Harvest From an Imperfect Democracy

[Stephanie Robinson is the founding president and chief executive of the Jamestown Project. Cornel West is a professor of religion at Princeton University and a member of the Jamestown Project Advisory Board. The writers will be panelists at the 2007 State of the Black Union on Saturday.] To think of America in 2007, it is impossible not to consider the contributions of African Americans -- many of whom have laid the foundation for American culture, democracy, freedom and equality.

Interview with Paul Kengor, author of a new book on Reagan

[Bill Steigerwald is the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review's associate editor.] In his second book on Ronald Reagan, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, Grove City political science professor Paul Kengor documents Reagan’s lifelong crusade against communism and how hard he worked as president to dismantle the Soviet Empire. Kengor, who earlier wrote God and Ronald Reagan, relied on Soviet media archives, declassified presidential papers and interviews with administration

George Ploss: Black History Month is too narrowly focused--Carter Woodson would be appalled

[Mr. Ploss is a student and a columnist at the U. of Illinois student newspaper.] Black History Month has become a tool to marginalize and demean our great historical contribution to this country and the world into a month focused on just the Civil Rights Movement and a handful of disproportionately focused events in black history. Carter G. Woodson would be ashamed if he compared, what was first Negro History week in 1926, to what we have know. When Carter G. Woodson a

James Castagnera: Truth Mimics Fiction Where DaVinci and Company Are Concerned

[Jim Castagnera is a Philadelphia lawyer and writer, and the Associate Provost/Associate Counsel at Rider University, Lawrenceville/Princeton, NJ.] The best-seller and movie The DaVinci Code revolved around a mystery hidden in Leonardo’s masterpieces. Code is a fun story, if not great fiction or film-making. For my money, though, real-life art mysteries hold much more interest. Let’s begin with Leonardo himself. Last week Italian engineer and art expert Maurizio Seracini

Harvey Sicherman: Saddam Hussein ... Stalin on the Tigris

[Harvey Sicherman, Ph.D., is President of the Foreign Policy Research Institute and a former aide to three U.S. secretaries of state.] The hanging of Saddam Hussein on December 30, 2006, ended the life of a tyrant extreme even by Middle Eastern standards. Shaping himself consciously after Stalin, he ran Iraq for twenty-four years, earning the hatred of most of his people for his murderous methods. Saddam also spent half that time waging war against Iran and then Kuwait. He put Iraq

DeWayne Wickham: Virginia finally shows contrition for slavery

I think you can say I've got a horse in this race. On Friday, the Virginia House of Delegates unanimously approved a resolution that expressed a "profound regret for slavery." The vote came a little more than two weeks after Republican Del. Frank Hargrove Sr., objected to a call for the state to apologize for slavery, saying Virginia's "black citizens should get over it." He also said asking Virginia to apologize for slavery would be like asking Jews to say they

Jack Shafer: Vietnam Vets Were Spit On, say angry readers of Slate

The idea that Vietnam veterans returning from the war were spat upon by protesters is fixed in many minds, notably the score of readers who e-mailed me to dispute my Jan. 30 column that declared the story an "urban myth." They know vets got spat on because it happened to them, they wrote. Also taking exception to my piece were Dan Riehl at the NewsBusters blog, Jim Lindgren at the Volokh Conspiracy, and others. My piece took the stand—following Jerry Lembcke's 1998 book, S

Jeffrey Toobin: Google's quest for the universal library

Every weekday, a truck pulls up to the Cecil H. Green Library, on the campus of Stanford University, and collects at least a thousand books, which are taken to an undisclosed location and scanned, page by page, into an enormous database being created by Google. The company is also retrieving books from libraries at several other leading universities, including Harvard and Oxford, as well as the New York Public Library. At the University of Michigan, Google’s original partner in Google Book Searc

Conrad Worrill: Dr. Martin R. Delany ... A man missing from Black History

[Conrad Worrill is National Chairman of the National Black United Front (NBUF).] The use of history as a tool of liberation is an ongoing battle that the African in American Community must come to grips with. Far too many African in American people reject the use of history as a tool to understand the past, the present, and the future. The rejection of history, by many of us, results in the denial of our true condition and situation as thirty million people living in th

Randal Maurice Jelks: Black History Month is relevant to all Americans

[Randal Maurice Jelks is a Rockefeller Foundation fellow and associate professor of history at Calvin College in Michigan.] I grew up at a time when Black History Month was called Negro History Week. This was in the days when African-American history was not ubiquitous. There were no major retailers then vying for black consumer dollars with ready-made Black History Month advertisements as there are today, with the exception of, perhaps, in Ebony and Jet magazines.

Bill Warner: Why Americans are so ignorant about Islam

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Bill Warner, the director of the Center for the Study of Political Islam (CSPI). CSPI’s goal is to teach the doctrine of political Islam through its books and it has produced a series on its focus. Mr. Warner did not write the CSPI series, but he acts as the agent for a group of scholars who are the authors. FP: Bill Warner, welcome to Frontpage Interview. Warner: Thank you Jamie for thi

Peggy Noonan: Happy Birthday, Mr. Reagan

Next Tuesday would have been Ronald Reagan's 96th birthday, which is amazing when you consider he is, in a way, more with us than ever: his memory and meaning summoned in political conversation, his name evoked by candidates. I remember 10 years ago when there was controversy over the movement to name things for him--buildings and airports. I was away from home at the time, and I realized that to talk to people in Washington about it, I'd have to land at JFK, take the FDR Drive and go through th

Fergus M. Bordewich: The fake history now associated with the Underground Railroad

[Fergus M. Bordewich is the author of “Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America.”] FEW aspects of the American past have inspired more colorful mythology than the Underground Railroad. It’s probably fair to say that most Americans view it as a thrilling tapestry of midnight flights, hairbreadth escapes, mysterious codes and strange hiding places. So it’s not surprising that the intriguing (if only recently invented) tale of escape m

Joshua Muravchik: Our Worst Ex-President (Jimmy Carter)

[Joshua Muravchik is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a veteran contributor to Commentary.] ... Few men who are called to politics suffer defeat gladly, and Carter was certainly not one of the exceptions. The last election he had lost was his first run for governor of Georgia, and it deeply shook him; as he would later relate, it was in the course of struggling to right his mood afterward that he experienced the epiphany of being born again. The loss this

Theodore K. Rabb: Narrative, Periodization, and the Study of History

[Theodore K. Rabb is emeritus professor of history at Princeton University. Among his many books and articles are Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry Investment in the Expansion of England, 1575-1630 (Harvard University Press, 1967) and Jacobean Gentleman: Sir Edwin Sandys, 1561-1629 (Princeton University Press, 1998). ] ... If there is no “basic” story to tell, even within nations, let alone for the West, then any account is as good as any other. Common criteria dissolve; th

Paul Evans: Scripting history ... Culture Wars Challenge Historical Museums

"You’ll be touring Colonial Williamsburg," says Richard Handler, a U.Va. anthropology professor and associate dean for academic programs, "and stopping at, say, Raleigh Tavern. The guide is completely candid: ‘You’re looking at a reconstruction. The building burned in 1816 and was rebuilt in the 1930s the way it was thought to be, but we now know there are details that just aren’t right.’ Yet by the end of the tour, you’re in a meeting room in the tavern when [the guide] will say,

Caroline Alexander: Amid the horrors of World War I, a corps of artists brought hope to soldiers disfigured in the trenches

Wounded tommies facetiously called it "The Tin Noses Shop." Located within the 3rd London General Hospital, its proper name was the "Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department"; either way, it represented one of the many acts of desperate improvisation borne of the Great War, which had overwhelmed all conventional strategies for dealing with trauma to body, mind and soul. On every front—political, economic, technological, social, spiritual—World War I was changing Europe forev

Keith Windschuttle: The English-speaking century

In the past one hundred years, four successive political movements—Prussian militarism, German Nazism, Japanese imperialism, and international Communism— mounted military campaigns to conquer Europe, Asia, and the world. Had any of them prevailed, it would have been a profound loss for civilization as we know it. Yet over the course of these bids for power, a coalition headed first by Britain and then by the United States emerged not just

Larry Wilmore: His Take on Black History Month (Video: Comedy Central's Jon Stewart Show)