Roundup: Talking About History

Debra Burlingame: Ground Zero ... Why We Need the Museum

[Ms. Burlingame, a director of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, is the sister of Charles F. "Chic" Burlingame III, the pilot of AA flight 77, which was crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.] They came and would not leave, an army of ironworkers and heavy-equipment operators, stopping only when the scent-trained dogs barked out a signal. They cut and moved twisted steel and steaming concrete, clearing an astonishing 1.8 million tons in a continuous convoy

Mark Feldstein: Lessons from the Jack Anderson Case

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee: Thank you for the opportunity to testify and for the important oversight role you play keeping the government accountable to the people. My name is Mark Feldstein. I am an associate professor of media and public affairs and director of the journalism program at George Washington University. I am here today wearing two hats: First, as someone with first-hand experience who was recently visited at home by two FBI agents seeki

Harry Clark: How It All Began ... Truman & Israel

[Harry Clark grew up in the Illinois congressional district represented for twenty-two years by Paul Findley, a centrist Republican. Findley's support for the Palestinians aroused the ire of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, which eventually drove him from office. Studying Zionism is an avocation.] The Truman Administration's policy on Palestine challenges at its start the "strategic asset" view of the US-Israel relationship, and reinforces the "Israel lob

Paul A. Kramer: The Philippine-American War as Race War

[Paul A. Kramer is an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University and is currently a visiting professor at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States nd the Philippines (University of North Carolina Press, 2006). He can be reached at pakramer@jhu.edu.] Speaking on May 4, 1902 at the newly-opened Arlington Cemetery, in the first Memorial Day address there by a U.S. President, Theodore Roosevelt placed colonial

TSUYOSHI HASEGAWA vs. SADAO ASADA: Debating Hiroshima

Letter from TSUYOSHI HASEGAWA: I would like to respond to Sadao Asada’s review of my book, Racing the Enemy [published in Journal of Strategic Studies 29/1 (February 2006) 169–71]. He raises two important interpretive questions: whether or not there was a ‘race’ between Truman and Stalin, and which event, the atomic bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the Soviet entry into the war, played a more decisive role on Japan’s decision to surrender. On the first issue, I

Roy Rosenzweig: Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past

History is a deeply individualistic craft. The singly authored work is the standard for the profession; only about 6 percent of the more than 32,000 scholarly works indexed since 2000 in this journal's comprehensive bibliographic guide, "Recent Scholarship," have more than one author. Works with several authors—common in the sciences—are even harder to find. Fewer than 500 (less than 2 percent) have three or more authors. Historical scholarship is also characterized

Abraham H. Miller: Remembering the Farhud

[Abraham H. Miller is emeritus professor of political science, University of Cincinnati. His writing has appeared in numerous academic and popular venues, both here and abroad. He now lives in the East Bay.] Today marks the 65th anniversary of the Farhud. Arabic for “violent dispossession,“ this is the word used to describe the infamous pogrom of June 1, 1941, against the Jews of Baghdad. In its wake, the Farhud left some 200 dead, 2000 injured, and 900 Jewish homes destroyed. It wa

Jason Emerson: The Madness of Mary Lincoln

[Jason Emerson is currently working on a book about the Mary Lincoln insanity letters, to be published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2007, and a biography of Robert Lincoln to be titled Giant in the Shadows. He was an HNN intern.] Her son had her committed. She said it was so he could get his hands on her money. Now, 130 years after this bitter and controversial drama, a trove of letters—long believed destroyed—sheds new light on it. In August 1875, after spe

Presidents & Their Medical Conditions

Of the thirty-seven U.S. presidents from George Washington to Richard Nixon, almost half may have suffered from a mental illness, according to a Duke University study. Two of the psychiatrists who authored the study reviewed biographical material on each president and assessed the likelihood that each chief executive suffered from various psychological disorders. While acknowledging the “limitations” of this method, they report that eighteen presidents exhibited tendencies suggestive of mental i

Michael Punke: Q & A About the North Butte Disaster of 1917 ... the worst hard-rock mining disaster in American history

This is an interview with Michael Punke, author of Fire and Brimstone : The North Butte Mine Disaster of 1917 (Hyperion). Q: What was the North Butte disaster of 1917 and how did it start? A: T

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad discusses the Holocaust

In an interview with SPIEGEL, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad discusses the Holocaust, the future of the state of Israel, mistakes made by the United States in Iraq and Tehran's nuclear conflict with the West. [Excerpt]SPIEGEL: First you make your remarks about the Holocaust. Then comes the news that you may travel to Germany -- this causes an uproar. So you were surprised after

Robert Hefner : We Shouldn't Identifiy Islam with the Arab Middle East

Robert Hefner is Director of the Program on Islam and Civil Society at Boston University and author of Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia (Princeton, 2000). This essay is based on his presentation at FPRI History Institute’s May 6-7, 2006 conference on Islam, Islamism, and Democratic Values.We in the West have long identified Islam with Arab culture. In one sense this is reasonable enough. After all, th

Catesby Leigh: The unbearable lightness of the Pentagon memorial.

[Catesby Leigh is author of the forthcoming Monumental America.] HARRIED DESIGNERS, and the number crunchers breathing down their necks, are hacking away at plans for the World Trade Center Memorial, struggling to fit this bloated, billion-dollar, largely subterranean leviathan into the $500 million budgetary straitjacket prescribed by Governor George Pataki and New York's mayor, Michael Bloomberg. But apart from the staggering expense, the six-acre antimonument's conce

Eric Muller: The Pope's Disastrous Speech at Auschwitz

When the white smoke told the world that Josef Ratzinger had been elected pope, it took some of us a moment or two to get our minds around the idea that the College of Cardinals had elevated a childhood member of the Hitler Youth to one of the world's leading positions of moral leadership. Clearly, Ratzinger had been no teenaged Nazi, but his public comments about that period of his (and his country's) life left some – myself included – with the nagging sense that he was airbrushing his memories

Mark Roth: Pitt anthropologist thinks Darwin's theory needs to evolve on some points

Darwin was wrong, and his modern-day adherents perpetuate his mistakes. That sounds like the opening salvo of an advocate for Intelligent Design or some other religiously driven critique of the theory of evolution. But it actually summarizes the ideas of Jeffrey Schwartz, a noted anthropologist at the University of Pittsburgh and one of a growing group of critics of standard Darwinian theory. Most of the recent publicity Dr. Schwartz has received has focuse

Alexander Smoltczyk: German Silence in Auschwitz

Pope Benedict XVI's visit to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz during his trip to Poland attracted worldwide attention. While some Holocaust survivors were satisfied with the German pontiff's address, other members of the Jewish community missed a mention of anti-Semitism.... "Words fail in this place. Only a devastated silence can stand here -- a silence that is a necessary cry to God: Why were you silent?" That's how he begins his address. Standing in front of the stone

Adam Gopnik: Was the French Reign of Terror Really Terrible?

Revisionism in history knows no boundaries. Just in the past few years, we have been told that that comet may have glanced right off the dinosaurs, prodding a few toward flight and feathers; that the German blitzkrieg barely meandered across Europe; and that Genghis Khan was actually a sharing and caring and ecumenical leader, Bill Moyers with a mustache and colorful folk costume. So it was inevitable that we would get a revisionist history of the French Reign of Terror—the period from September

Paul Richard: Something Has Gone Terribly Wrong With the Statues of Monumental Washington

Remember, tomorrow's Memorial Day. That's what it's for, remembering. The holiday's gone blurry. Now it's mostly fun (ballgames, setting up the barbecue, another day off work), but it used to be for focused recollections of the dead. Not the dead in general, the dead in sharp particular. Half a million soldiers had died in the Civil War. When the rites were first observed in 1866, there were plenty to recall. Each spring at the end of May, their graves were

Nishimura Hideki: The Retrial of the “Yokohama Incident” ... A Six Decade Battle for Human Dignity

[Nishimura Hideki is a journalist and author of Kita Chosen yokuryu (North Korean Internment) (Iwanami gendai bunko) and Osaka de tatakatta Chosen senso (The Korean War Fought in Osaka) (Iwanami shoten). Kumatani Shin’ichiro is an editor and writer. Translated for Japan Focus by Aaron Skabelund (ahs39@columbia.edu), a JSPS postdoctoral fellow at Hokkaido University and Japan Focus associate. He is the author of “Can the Subaltern Bark? Imperialism, Civilization, and Canine Cultures in Nineteenth

Michael Lopez-Calderon: About Those Second Thoughts on the Bombing of WW II Cities

[Michael Lopez-Calderon runs the website Calderon's Call and is also featured on Inherit the Wirbelwind.] “The bomber will always get through …The only defence is offence. You have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourself.” – Stanley Baldwin, November 10, 1932[1] “War is a nasty, dirty, rotten business. It’s all right for the Navy to blockade a city, to starve the inhabitants to death. But there is something wrong, not nice, about bombi