Roundup: Talking About History

Carlin Romano: The Nazi skeleton in writer's closet

WHERE have we seen this story before? An influential European writer and thinker, celebrated in his mature years for works of sophisticated philosophical nuance, turns out to have been an anti-Semitic, pro-Hitler creep in his 20s. The standard query immediately presents itself: Will the nefarious politics destroy the reputation? Marta Petreu's An Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania (Ivan R. Dee, 2005), inevitably hurtles humanists of a certain age back to o

Louis Galambos: The Business of History

[Mr. Galambos, a professor at Johns Hopkins and the Maguire Professor at the John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress, is the author, with Roy Vagelos, of "Medicine, Science, and Merck" (Cambridge, 2004).] What did you learn about business in the history courses you took in your college or university? Not much, I suspect. Not if you're thinking about the kind of business you do every day, the company you work for, and the people with whom you work. You may have lear

Stanley Kauffmann: CSA: Confederate States of America

[Stanley Kauffmann is TNR's film critic.] CSA: Confederate States of America is an entry in the "what if" school of fiction. (A recent instance: Philip Roth entered that school with The Plot Against America, in which he postulated that Charles Lindbergh had been elected president in 1940.) A new director named Kevin Willmott has made a pseudo-documentary about what would have happened if the Confederacy had won the Civil War and this entire country had become the Confedera

Amy Dorsett: Secularity obscures Alamo's sacred character

[Amy Dorsett is a staff writer.] Strolling the grounds of the Alamo, where background noise is provided by hucksters across the street trying to lure tourists to their gaudy attractions, it's easy to forget that the area is sacred ground, where 170 years ago today, hundreds of men died. Even the landmark's own gift shop can feature less-than-tasteful souvenirs (nothing says Remember the Alamo quite like an ashtray made in China, retail price $5.25), and last spring it o

Five reasons why the founding fathers could have killed slavery

For generations, white historians have taken for granted that it would not have been possible to abolish slavery during the revolutionary era. In 1976, as the nation was celebrating the bicentennial of the American Revolution, it was commonplace to commend the founding fathers for not attempting to end slavery, a step regarded as hopelessly idealistic if not fanatical. Why fanatical? Partly, it is argued, because "only gradually were [white] men coming to see that [slavery] was a peculiarly

M.J. Rosenberg: The response to "Munich" & "Paradise Now" assumes it's still 1940 for Jews

[The views expressed in IPF Friday are those of MJ Rosenberg and not necessarily of Israel Policy Forum. If you have colleagues or friends who would appreciate receiving this weekly letter, or you would like to unsubscribe, send an e-mail to: ipfdc@ipforumdc.org .] There must be a word for it, although I don't know what it is. I'm trying to describe the phenomenon when people appear trapped in a different historical period than the presen

Teaching 9/11 and the War on Terrorism

PRESIDENTIAL LEADERSHIP IN TIMES OF CRISIS David Eisenhower opened the conference by observing that historical parallels for this new war are inexact: unlike World War II, to which President Bush often compares it, a striking feature of the war on terror is that we are not mobilized in any way that affects us directly. Nor is it like Vietnam, to which others often compare it. That war was fought with draftees, in an area not of vital interest to the U.S. But like the Cold War, which wa

Stella Clarke: Havoc in History House (Australia)

JOHN Howard's Australia is a solid, sandstone institution, civilised and exemplary, like a private school in fine repair. But wait, what's all that noise? Where's the teacher? Who's in charge? In History House, where the nation's biography should be sagely intoned by dignified experts for the edification of the class, behold a disgraceful mess: pandemonium. Little piles of history lie about, higgledy-piggledy. Some people are on the floor engaged in riotous creative play, others stand about squa

Jerome Eric Copulsky: The Meaning of Munich

[Jerome Eric Copulsky is Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies at Virginia Tech.] Three days from now, the annual ritual of the Academy Awards will be performed. Steven Spielberg's movie Munich, which depicts the exploits of a team of Israeli assassins sent to avenge the murder of eleven athletes by Black September at the 1972 Munich Olympics, has been nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. CNN hailed Munich as "a masterpiece," while Fox New

Walter Reich: David Irving isn't the real threat to the world's Jewry

[Dr. Reich, director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum from 1995-98, is a professor of international affairs, ethics and human behavior at George Washington University and a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center.] It's time for Europeans to decriminalize Holocaust denial. And it's time for them to act against threats, increasingly murderous, of a new genocide against the Jews. David Irving, the British pseudo-historian who was sentenced last week to three year

Robert Polner: The mythologizing of Rudy Giuliani

[Robert Polner covered former mayor Rudy Giuliani for Newsday.] If people were surprised by Rudy Giuliani’s steadying performance on September 11, 2001, I was not among them. As a Newsday reporter in the City Hall press room for more than four years, I had observed and chronicled the restive and driven politician who was comfortable with conflict and ill at ease in periods of relative calm. Peaceful times, of course, can invite scrutiny and debate, two things the forme

David Beito, Ralph E. Luker, and Robert K. C. Johnson: The AHA's Double Standard on Academic Freedom

Click here to read David Horowitz's response. Has the AHA turned its back on academic freedom? In January, members present at its business meeting rejected a resolution to condemn attacks on academic freedom, whether from the right or from the left. Instead, they passed a weaker resolution that selectively condemned only threats coming from the right. We weighed into this controversy as part of a three person "

Pierre de Villemarest: Interviewed about his new book ... Untouchable, Who Protected Bormann and 'Gestapo' Muller after 1945

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Pierre de Villemarest, a member of the French Resistance from autumn 1940, thereafter officer in the French Secret Army, then officer with the Intelligence services assigned to the countries which had fallen under Soviet Communist rule. He was a member of the National Defence's Association of former special agents. As an intelligence officer, he is the only specialist to have met Hitler’s key deputy Martin Bormann in 1949, when Bormann went into p

Juan Cole: A Treatment for Radical Ignorance About Islamic Radicalism

Just as a commitment to containment of the Soviet Union served as a framework for U.S. foreign policy during the cold war, so the "war on terror" animates the foreign policy of the Bush administration. This struggle, in George W. Bush's words, is "a war unlike any other." Here, the enemy is vague, and terrorist groups are less the primary target than the conceptual glue holding together disparate policies toward Washington-defined "rogue states" such as Iran, Sudan,

Christine Rosen: Eugenics was a bad idea bred of good intentions

[Ms. Rosen is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of "Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement" (Oxford, 2004).] n 1927, physicians at the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded in Lynchburg sterilized a young woman named Carrie Buck. Although doctors at state institutions across the country had performed sterilizations before, Carrie's case was unusual. Her sterilization had received the imprimatur of the U.S

Pete DuPont: Ronald Reagan's election marked America's economic turning point

In 1981 Ronald Reagan became our 40th president, the hostages were released from Iran, Walter Cronkite retired after 19 years as "CBS Evening News" anchorman, and Sandra Day O'Connor became the first female Supreme Court justice. But a quarter of a century later we should remember 1981 as the year the kaleidoscope turned in America, a dividing point between the previous two decades' big-government beliefs and the individualism and market economy thinking of the next 20 yea

David J. Garrow: Kenneth Starr's Boo Boo

Kenneth W. Starr was a gullible and slipshod investigator. No, not in his all-too-thorough probe of Bill Clinton's dalliance with a White House intern, but seventeen years earlier, when he was the Reagan administration's point man in the background vetting of a Supreme Court nominee. During the presidential campaign in 1980, Ronald Reagan had declared that if elected, "one of the first Supreme Court vacancies in my administration will be filled by the most qualified woman I c

Kevin Mattson: Aha, so on the Sacco and Vanzetti case, Sinclair was a self-promoting liar?

[Kevin Mattson is a professor of contemporary history at Ohio University and author, most recently, of Upton Sinclair and the Other American Century (John Wiley & Sons, 2006).] Upton Sinclair has been in the news lately. And it's not just the 100th anniversary of The Jungle. Seems the man was a liar. On December 24, 2005, the Los Angeles Times reported that an Orange County lawyer, Paul Hegness, had bought a box of papers at an auction warehouse for $100. Inside the

Christopher Phelps: How Should We Teach 'The Jungle'?

[Christopher Phelps is an associate professor of history at the Ohio State University at Mansfield and editor of a 2005 edition of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (Bedford/St. Martin's).] ... Originally published by Doubleday, Page in 1906, and celebrating its centennial in February, The Jungle describes a callous America in which the dollar trumps justice. It famously exposed the American meatpacking industry's loathsome practices and prompted federal consumer-protection laws. It is, h

John Wertman: Bush's Obstruction of History

[The writer was on President Bill Clinton's White House staff from 1999 to 2001 and is now director of public policy at the Association of American Geographers.] At some point in the next few months, President Bush is expected to announce his choice for the location of his presidential library. Once it's open, most of the media attention is likely to focus on the public exhibits, which will no doubt extol the president's compassionate conservatism, his leadership immediately after t