Roundup: Talking About History

May 26, 2004

Slate's Timothy Noah: Why I Like the New WW II Memorial

Timothy Noah, in Slate (May 24, 2004): What is so godawful about Washington's new World War II Memorial? Not even Pappy Chatterbox, a card-carrying member of the Greatest Generation (he had a desk job in Florida, but still can't bring himself to laugh at Mel Brooks'"Springtime for Hitler") c

May 24, 2004

How Your Generation Affects How You Think About Events

Liz Taylor, in the Seattle Times (May 24, 2004):Over a decade ago, William Strauss and Neil Howe wrote a timeless book,"Generations," (Perennial, $16.95) in which they discussed the intriguing phenomenon they call the"peer personality" of the generations. That is, every birth group has a personality, shaped by events that happened to its members w

May 22, 2004

The Supreme Court Case that Got Right What Brown Got Wrong

Ian Haney Lopez, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, in the NYT (May 22, 2004):With commemorations from coast to coast to remind them, most Americans already know that this week was the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. Unfortunately, what they don't realize is that the country missed an equally important anniversary two weeks ago, that of Hernandez

May 22, 2004

Joel Beinin: The Golden Age of the Israeli Military

Joel Beinin, in the Nation (May 13, 2004):For the last three and a half years the Israeli army has deployed American-supplied F-16 fighter jets, Apache helicopters, armored Caterpillar bulldozers and Merkava tanks powered by engines made in the USA in an unsuccessful effort to suppress the second Palestinian uprising. According to both Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon, Israel is engaged in a wa

May 22, 2004

A Mob Museum?

Harriet Baskas, National Public Radio (May 21, 2004): After a brief attempt at selling itself as a family vacation land, Las Vegas is restaking its claim as America's most decadent destination. Unidentified Man: Yeah, hi. I was wondering, could I get a wake-up call tomorrow morning please? Could I get that to go to my cell phone instead of my room? Well, here's the thing. I--I'm not quite sure if I'm going to be in my room tomorrow so... BASKAS: A new national ad cam

May 22, 2004

Was There a Trojan War?

Manfred Korfmann, in Archaeology Magazine (May 2004):Recorded sometime in the eighth century b.c., the Iliad represents the culmination of several centuries of oral epic poetry that wove a complex story of the relationship between mortals and gods. This narrative takes place against the bloody backdrop of the ten-year-long Greek siege of the city alternatively called Ilios or Troy, a war launched over

May 22, 2004

World War II Was the Seminal Event of the 20th Century

Scott Galupo, in the Wash Times (May 21, 2004):... The World War II Memorial, sober and sunk low in a long frame of elms, rests between the two structures that anchor the Mall.The monument to America's first great warrior, George Washington, towers over it on one side. The statue of America's great uniter, Abraham Lincoln, looks on from the other. In such company, the location an

May 22, 2004

What Accounts for the Renewal of the New York Review of Books ? Vietnam

Scott Sherman, in the Nation (June 7, 2004):... In the wake of the Vietnam War, the [New Yok Review of Books] became a formidable--and, in some sense, unique--journalistic institution. Many of its readers reside in academia, but the paper has a devoted following in the upper reaches of media, politics and philanthropy, which gives it an influence vastly out of proportion to its circu

May 21, 2004

Tina Brown: History Is Hot Right Now

Tina Brown, in the Wash Post (May 20, 2004):History is hot. And not just because of Brad Pitt's flying thighs. There's such an outpouring of books from historians at the moment, you can't throw a canape in Manhattan after 6 p.m. without hitting a tweedy scholar wearing the dazed expression that comes with a sudden release from the past.The city has been cra

May 21, 2004

Lewis & Clark Aren't Celebrated Among Indians

Kris Axtman, in the Christian Science Monitor (May 14, 2004):When Meriwether Lewis and William Clark pushed off from the banks of the Mississippi River near St. Louis on May 14, 1804, along with a group of skilled botanists, zoologists, and survivalists, the two had little idea of what lay ahead. Their only directive, given by President Thomas Jefferson: Reach the Pacific Ocean. The journey, which lasted two years and four months, is widely taught

May 21, 2004

Did William Rehnquist Embrace Plessy v Ferguson?

Cass Sunstein, in the LAT (May 17, 2004):When the Supreme Court decided Brown vs. Board of Education on this day in 1954, it overruled Plessy vs. Ferguson, one of the most infamous decisions in the history of the court. In that case, which dated back to 1896, the court ruled that the Constitution allowed the prosecution of a 30-year-old African American shoemaker named Homer Plessy for refusing to sit in the "colored" car on the train. The

May 19, 2004

Anne Applebaum: Blanding-Down History

Anne Applebaum, in the Wash Post (May 18, 2004):... [A]lthough a lot of angst has been focused on the dark forces of political correctness in education, the larger problem in many schools is an apolitical one: Nowadays, history is too often drained of any meaning, left- or right-wing, whatsoever. Partly this is because history, unlike math or science, doesn't lend it

May 18, 2004

Eric Foner & Randall Kennedy: Brown at 50

Eric Foner and Randall Kennedy, in the Nation (May 4, 2004): Prior to the landmark Supreme Court rulings in Brown v. Board of Education and Bolling v. Sharpe, the US government and the states were permitted to segregate students racially in primary and secondary public schools. The official rationale for this arrangement was that students--black as well as white--would all fa

May 18, 2004

Michael Klarman: The Supreme Court Has Never Been in the Vanguard of Social Reform

Michael Klarman, in the NYT (May 17, 2004): The Supreme Court has never been in the vanguard of social reform. Few people would credit it with playing a pivotal role in the women's movement, the environmental movement or the gay rights movement. Yet many people, citing the court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, insist that it played a crucial role in the civil rights movem

May 18, 2004

The Hispanic "Brown" Case

Editorial in the NYT (May 15, 2004): Fifty years ago this month, the Supreme Court handed down a landmark civil rights decision, the first under the newly seated Chief Justice Earl Warren. Brown v. Board of Education, involving African-Americans and segregated schools, came two weeks later. Unlike Brown, the case called Hernandez v. Texas has been mostly relegated to legal footnotes. But this decision, which protected Mexican-Americans and the right to fair trials and helped w

May 18, 2004

Was a Tyrant Prefigured by Baby Saddam?

Elisabeth Bumiller, in the NYT (May 15, 2004): It is no surprise to Jerrold M. Post, the founder of the Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior at the C.I.A., that Saddam Hussein grew up to be one of the world's most dangerous dictators and a member of President Bush's axis of evil."Of all of the leaders I've profiled, his backg

May 14, 2004

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Anti-Semite?

Cathy Young, in Reason magazine (May 2004):Controversy rages as charges of anti-Semitism dog a beloved cultural icon. No, not Mel Gibson: The man at the center of this debate is the Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago, was once a revered symbol of moral resistance to the Soviet state. He probably deserves more credit than any other

May 14, 2004

Harvard Poet Helen Vendler's Rebuke of History

Harvard poet Helen Vendler, in the course of her Jefferson Lecture (May 6, 2004):When it became useful in educational circles in the United States to group various university disciplines under the name "The Humanities," it seems to have been tacitly decided that philosophy and history would be cast as the core of this grouping, and that other forms of learning--the study of languages,

May 13, 2004

Evolution: Still Controversial (Teaching It Is Banned in Islamic Countries)

Craig McDonald, inThisWeek(May 13, 2004):In 1998, Mansfield native Edward J. Larson earned the Pulitzer Prize in history for his book, Summer of the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion. On May 20, Larson will come to Columbus to discuss Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Sc

May 13, 2004

Newsweek: Why Brown Seems a Bust

Ellis Cose, in Newsweek (May 17, 2004):Sometimes history serves as a magnifying mirror—making momentous what actually was not. But Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, is the real thing: a Supreme Court decision that fundamentally and forever changed America. It jump-started the modern civil-rights movement and excised a cancer eating a hole in the heart of the Constitution.So why i