Roundup: Talking About History

Sean Thomas: Was the Garden of Eden in Modern-Day Turkey?

[Sean Thomas is the author of three novels: Absent Fathers, Kissing England, and The Cheek Perforation Dance. His next book, Millions of Women are Waiting to Meet You - a memoir of his chequered lovelife - is published by Bloomsbury Books in May, 2006.] I am standing above an archaeological dig, on a hillside in southern Turkey. Beneath me, workmen are unearthing a sculpture of some sort of reptile (right). It is delicate and breathtaking. It is also part of the world's oldest temp

NewsHour Debate: Books Written on the War in Iraq and on President Bush Will Impact History

JIM LEHRER: Finally tonight, writing history as it happens. Jeffrey Brown has our Media Unit look. JEFFREY BROWN: Philip Graham, the late publisher of the Washington Post, is often credited with calling newspapers "the first rough draft of history." These days, a walk through a bookstore suggests that reporters at Mr. Graham's paper are submitting second drafts, as well, part of a flood of new books on recent events even as those events continue to unfold. In

William Dalrymple: The last Mughal and a clash of civilisations

[East and west face each other across a divide that some call a religious war. Suicide jihadis take what they see as defensive action and innocent people are killed. But this is 1857. William Dalrymple on lessons from the Raj for the neo-cons. William Dalrymple is the India correspondent of the New Statesman. His book "The Last Mughal: the fall of a dynasty (Delhi 1857)" is published by Bloomsbury (£25)] ... The Siege of Delhi was a fight to the death between two powers,

Michael Currie Schaffer: Idi Amin's path to stardom

[Michael Currie Schaffer is a staff writer at The Philadelphia Inquirer. ] Idi Amin lumbered back onto our cultural radar this month, the subject of a splendidly reviewed new movie starring Forest Whitaker as the legendary Ugandan tyrant. But did he ever go away? Twenty-seven years after his overthrow, Amin, who fashioned himself Africa's strongest strongman, has managed to outlast his fellow despots in a category he himself might have appreciated: Celebrity. How many dead African d

Robert Kagan: Against the Myth of American Innocence

These days, we are having a national debate over the direction of foreign policy. Beyond the obvious difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is a broader sense that our nation has gone astray. We have become too militaristic, too idealistic, too arrogant; we have become an "empire." Much of the world views us as dangerous. In response, many call for the United States to return to its foreign policy traditions, as if that would provide the answer. What exactly are thos

WSJ Editorial: It's France that's in Denial

By passing a bill to outlaw the denial of World War I-era massacres of up to 1.5 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as a "genocide," lawmakers at the National Assembly in Paris on Thursday moved French legislation in line with Turkey's, which makes it a crime not to deny that the massacres were a genocide. Both produce the same outcome, the suppression of free speech. Kemal Atatürk modeled his modern Turkey on France. In both laïcité, or secularism, means the subordin

Rick Perlstein: The best wars of their lives

[Mr. Perlstein is working on a book about Richard Nixon.] Conservatism's cherished fantasy of American omnipotence has died once again, this time in the sands of Iraq, and the grieving process has begun. But conservatives mourn differently from you and me. They begin with denial, anger and bargaining, just like everyone else. And that's where they stay--forever paralyzed by a petulant refusal to acknowledge their fantasy's passing, a simple inability to process reality. The de

Kirsten Seaver: The Chinese Discovery of America ?

[Kirsten Seaver is the author of Maps, Myths and Men: The Story of the Vinland Map.] Some four years have passed since knowledgeable critics began to take apart Gavin Menzies’s published assertion that the task of Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, Vasco da Gama and other early European explorers had been considerably simplified by their access to maps incorporating key information collected by medieval Chinese navigators who supposedly preceded them: thus it is hardly news

Frances Wilson: The Real Marie Antoinette

Here we go again, losing our heads over Marie Antoinette. The cake-fixated clothes-horse whose rumoured appetites are widely held to have resulted in the French Revolution appears on screens this Friday in the much-anticipated film by Sofia Coppola. Marie Antoinette, sporting a head of hair which would put Marge Simpson in the shade, is played by Kirsten Dunst. Her "sprite-like spirit and dazzling, pale complexion" were precisely what Coppola was after. The last actress t

Gabby Wood: Shooting Bobby

Robert F Kennedy announced late in the race that he would run for President. He hadn't wanted to - his brother had been assassinated only five years earlier, when he was less than three years into his first term - but the pressure of public opinion was on him. It was 1968; the war in Vietnam had taken a sharp turn for the worse, there were race riots all over the country, and students were staging sit-ins. Kennedy was considered the only figure who could responsibly argue the anti-war position,

Chris McGreal: Britain's shameful legacy ... 50 years after putting down the Mau Mau rebellion

It has been 50 years and there is much to remember. But what still stands out from his time in the camps is a tall white man in shorts with a swagger stick. "When we first arrived we didn't know who he was, but we quickly knew he was in charge," says Espon Makanga. "All the other whites and the black guards waited for him to speak, and when he gave the order that is when it began. After that it never really stopped. I came to hate that man. I can never forgive him."

John Lichfield: Does Marie Antoinette deserve her infamous reputation?

Why the sudden interest in France's last memorable queen? Marie Antoinette, air-headed Austrian princess and then much traduced French queen, was born 250 years ago last year. The anniversary has generated aHollywood film starring Kirsten Dunst and several exhibitions. From today, the Archives in Paris will be showing for the first time most of the personal and public documents related to Marie Antoinette held by the French state. They range from her marriage certifica

Robert Satlof: The Holocaust's Arab Heroes

[Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, is author of "Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust's Long Reach into Arab Lands" (PublicAffairs).] Virtually alone among peoples of the world, Arabs appear to have won a free pass when it comes to denying or minimizing the Holocaust. Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah has declared to his supporters that "Jews invented the legend of the Holocaust." Syrian President

Keith Thomas: TLS revisits history 40 years after ground-breaking series

In 1966, the TLS devoted three issues to “New Ways in History”. They were orchestrated by the restless medievalist Geoffrey Barraclough, who had turned from the Middle Ages to contemporary history in the belief that recent world events had made irrelevant the austerely remote tradition of scholarship in which he had been raised. Many of the contributors must have been chosen in the hope that they would adopt an aggressively forward-looking tone; and they did not disappoint. M. I. Finley, one of

George Rafael: Other prize winners than Gunter Grass have disgraced themselves too

... If you put faith in prizes then the Nobel does matter, not for its literary merit, which seldom counts, but for what it has come to represent. Factors such as which country's turn it is to win, being at the right trouble spot at the right time and, above all, gravitas -- the right tone as it were -- on the burning issues of the day weigh more. Certain writers, like Seamus Heaney (Ireland 1995), Nadine Gordimer (South Africa 1991) and Gao Xingjian (China 2000), are tailor-made for the Nobel.

Marisa Treviño: Scholastic Book Titled "Angry Aztecs" Making Some Latinos Angry

[I am, as one friend likes to call me, a hybrid. It means that I'm second-generation Spaniard, Mexican, British and third generation German. I am a syndicated journalist and local public radio commentator and have been writing about family, education and other social justice issues for about 10 years now. ] The children's book publisher Scholastic Inc. is home to such favorite characters as Clifford the Big Red Dog, Harry Potter, The Magic School Bus and Maya and Miguel.Their

Jill Lepore: Was Thomas Paine too much of a freethinker for the country he helped free?

... Thomas Paine is, at best, a lesser Founder. In the comic-book version of history that serves as our national heritage, where the Founding Fathers are like the Hanna-Barbera Super Friends, Paine is Aquaman to Washington's Superman and Jefferson's Batman; we never find out how he got his superpowers, and he only shows up when they need someone who can swim. For all that, Paine's contributions to the nation's founding would be hard to overstate. "Common Sense" made it possible to decl

John J. Miller: Is Military History Dead?

... Although the keenest students of military history have often been soldiers, the subject isn’t only for them. “I don’t believe it is possible to treat military history as something entirely apart from the general national history,” said Theodore Roosevelt to the American Historical Association in 1912. For most students, that’s how military history was taught — as a key part of a larger narrative. After the Second World War, however, the field boomed as veterans streamed into higher education

Benjamin Balint: Hannah Arendt, 100 Years Later

[Benjamin Balint is a fellow at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem.] Islamic terrorism is the new totalitarianism. At least that's the impression one gets from some Western commentators these days. In"Terror and Liberalism," Paul Berman invoked totalitarianism in order to explain the strikingly modern ideology of Islamism. Joschka Fischer, then Germany's foreign minister, spoke of a"third totalitarianism." This past February, Salman Rushdie, Bernard-Henri Lévy and others published a

Glenn Morris: Why activists are challenging Columbus Day in Colorado

[Glenn Morris, member of the Leadership Council of the American Indian Movement of Colorado <http://www.coloradoaim.org/> . Attorney and Associate Professor of Political Science at University of Colorado at Denver. ] GLENN MORRIS: Columbus Day began -- most people don't know -- as a state holiday in Colorado in 1907. But what's more important for people to understand is the ideology behind Columbus Day and why there is a Columbus Da