Roundup: Talking About History

Roger Kimball: The Forgotten Founder

Who is the most unfairly neglected American Founding Father? You might think that none can be unfairly neglected, so many books about that distinguished coterie have been published lately. John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Washington--whom have I left out? It has been a literary festival of Founders these last few years, and a good thing, too. But there is one figure, I believe, who has yet to get his due, and that is John Witherspoon (172

Mary Beth Norton: History Under Construction in Florida

AS a historian, I love facts. I especially love facts about early America, the subject I have researched, taught and written about for more than 40 years. The Florida Legislature would seem to share my enthusiasm. An education law it recently enacted insists, "American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed" and "shall be viewed as knowable, teachable and testable." The statute places particular importance on the facts of the Declaration of Independence, which

Jesse Lemisch: Weather Underground Rises from the Ashes: They're Baack!

I attended part of a January 20, 2006, "day workshop of interventions" -- aka "a day of dialogic interventions" -- at Columbia University on "Radical Politics and the Ethics of Life."1 The event aimed "to stage a series of encounters . . . to bring to light . . . the political aporias [sic] erected by the praxis of urban guerrilla groups" in Europe and the United States from the 1960s to the 80s.2 Hosted by Columbia's Anthropology Department, workshop spea

Edward Grey: Historians used to fight about much larger topics

[Edward Gray is associate professor of history at Florida State University and editor of Common-place.] I have a friend who’s always ranting about the fact that historians can no longer handle a good scholarly fight. Mea culpa. Wimp. Coward. That’s me. I have never written anything that put a shot across another historian’s bow. My first book was about a subject historians don’t much care about: language. Insofar as it got any play, it was among the lit crit crowd. And my subsequent

R. J. Del Vecchio: Vietnam War Myths ... Response to Ron Briley

[R. J. Del Vecchio is a veteran activist and long-time student of the conflict in SE Asia, starting prior to joining the Marines and serving in the 1st Marine Division in 1968. He has been making presentations on the war as a guest lecturer at colleges and high schools since 1996, is active in several veteran’s organizations, and was a speaker at the 2004 Boston Conference on the Myths of Viet Nam. He is a co-author of “Whitewash/Blackwash: Myths of the Viet Nam War”, a teacher’s aid booklet com

Glenn W. LaFantasie: On the vast differences between the world of the Civil War and our own

[Glenn W. LaFantasie, the Frockt Family Professor of Civil War History at Western Kentucky University, is the author of Gettysburg Requiem: The Life and Lost Causes of Confederate Colonel William C. Oates.]

Ralph Luker: Access to King's papers also key

[Ralph E. Luker of Atlanta co-edited the first two volumes of "The Papers of Martin Luther King Jr." He is now preparing the Vernon Johns Papers for publication.] Thirty-two million dollars and what do you get? Fifty years ago, Tennessee Ernie Ford scored a hit with his recording of "Sixteen Tons," originally recorded by Merle Travis. The song's lyrics said: "You load 16 tons and what do you get?" The answer was "Another d

Lisa Jardine: When War Disburses Art

[The theft of art during war has always taken place, says Lisa Jardine. But the recent plundering of historic remains in Iraq and Afghanistan threatens the permanent loss of the record of ancient civilisations.] I went to look at a painting at Christie's on Monday, by the early-20th-Century Austrian artist Egon Schiele. Wilted Sunflowers is a largish landscape - about a metre square. In the foreground are half-a-dozen tall, withered sunflower stems, silhouetted again

Karl Rove: Lessons from a Larger-than-Life President

Theodore Roosevelt is one of the most remarkable figures in America's story. Adventurous, brave, opinionated, a larger-than-life personality, he was a man of action, energy and motion. T.R. loved what he called "the literature of history"--and wanted to be a key actor in America's great drama. Roosevelt was not perfect by any means--but he was an extraordinary man by any reasonable measure. He was among our most consequential Presidents, changing America in deep and lastin

Richard Lacayo: TR's Lasting Impact

Presidents come and go, but monuments are always with us. There's a reason Theodore Roosevelt is the only 20th century President whose face is carved into Mount Rushmore, the only one who could hold his own with Washington, Lincoln and Jefferson. Roosevelt not only remade America, but he also charmed the pants off everybody while he did it. And just short of a century after he left the White House, in 1909, the collective memory of his strength and intellect and charisma still lingers. How many

George F. Will: Gone with the Wind, Indeed

Confined to her bed in Atlanta by a broken ankle and arthritis, she was given a stack of blank paper by her husband, who said, "Write a book." Did she ever. The novel's first title became its last words, "Tomorrow is another day," and at first she named the protagonist Pansy. But Pansy became Scarlett, and the title of the book published 70 years ago this week became "Gone With the Wind." You might think that John Steinbeck, not Margaret Mi

Rebecca Solnit: Of illegal immigration and bloodshed -- in 1846? Celebrated killings highlight dubious path to statehood in CA

[Rebecca Solnit is the author of "Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities" and "River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West."] The place where the teenage twins were murdered was beautiful, and the men who killed them and their uncle were to become among the most celebrated in the United States. But on that Sunday, June 28, 1846 -- 160 years ago -- the murder site just north of San Francisco was not in the United States. It

Ainslie T. Embree: Why It’s Important To Know About India

[Ainslie T. Embree is professor emeritus at Columbia University. This essay is based on his presentation to the History Institute for Teachers on “Teaching India,” held in Chattanooga, March 11-12, 2006. The conference was sponsored by FPRI’s Marvin Wachman Fund for International Education, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s Asia Program, and the University of Pennsylvania South Asia Center, and made possible by a grant from the Annenberg Foundation.] Fifty years ago, when I bega

Johann Hari: The truth? Our empire killed millions

We are still a nation locked in denial. If you point out basic facts about the British Empire - that the British deliberately adopted policies that caused as many as 29 million Indians to starve to death in the late 19th century, say - you smack into a wall of incomprehension and rage. The historian Niall Ferguson called me "Hari the horrible" for writing about this in my column last week. Another neo-imperi-alist historian, Lawrence James, accuses me in The Sunday Times o

Peniel E. Joseph: Black Power's Quiet Side

[Peniel E. Joseph, an assistant professor of Africana Studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is the author of the forthcoming "Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America."] JUST over 40 years ago, on June 16, 1966, Stokely Carmichael, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, mounted a podium on a sticky evening in the Mississippi Delta and introduced the phrase "Black Power" to a crowd of c

Steven Pinker: Are Jews Smarter?

My grandparents were immigrants from Eastern Europe who owned a small necktie factory on the outskirts of Montreal. While visiting them one weekend, I found my grandfather on the factory floor, cutting shapes out of irregular stacks of cloth with a fabric saw. He explained that by carving up the remnants that were left over when the neckties had been cut out and stitching them together in places that didn't show, he could get a few extra ties out of each sheet of cloth. I asked him why he was do

Glenn W. LaFantasie: Civil War Battlefield's Cyclorama Center’s Days Are Numbered

[Glenn W. LaFantasie, the Frockt Family Professor of Civil War History at Western Kentucky University, is the author of Gettysburg Requiem: The Life and Lost Causes of Confederate Colonel William C. Oates.] Near the High Water Mark on Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg, a massive white building shaped like a drum sits flat on the eastern slope of the ridge, obscured partially by a grove of fruit trees. Almost exactly in the center of the lines that Major General George Gordon Meade’s Army of the

Brent Staples: The Racist Side of WW II We Prefer Not to Think About

Nations tend to write their histories by forgetting the shameful parts. In America, once-buried issues associated with slavery and the genocide against Native Americans have resurfaced and been incorporated into the national memory. But World War II has thus far been held apart as an era that is almost beyond reproach. Indeed, the people who led the country in the 40's and fought the war have been transformed from mere mortals — with faults like the rest of us — into sudden secular saints. They

Jonathan Zimmerman: A Florida law banning relativism in classes ignores reality and 75 years of academic tradition

[JONATHAN ZIMMERMAN teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of "Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century," which will be published in the fall by Harvard University Press.] JUST WHEN YOU thought it was safe to study American history again … the revisionists are back! You know, those relativists who distort or simply fabricate the past to make it fit their present-day biases. For instance, shortly after the U.S

George F. Will: AIDS, 25 Years Later

"In the period October 1980-May 1981, five young men, all active homosexuals, were treated for biopsy-confirmed Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia at three different hospitals in Los Angeles, California. Two of the patients died." -- U.S. Centers for Disease Control June 5, 1981 Those words 25 years ago announced the arrival of something many thought anachronistic -- an infectious disease epidemic. At first it was called GRID -- gay-related immune deficienc