Roundup: Talking About History

Feb 21, 2004

What Did Jesus Really Look Like?

David Gibson, in the NYT (Feb. 21, 2004):Whatever arguments there may be about the verisimilitude of Mel Gibson's film "The Passion of the Christ," one thing is certain: this Jesus is a Hollywood hunk who probably bears little resemblance to what the Jesus of history looked like. The title role is played by Jim Caviezel, a dark-haired, blue-eyed star whose broodin

Feb 20, 2004

A Hateful View of the Jews: Gibson's Passion Play

Geza Vermes, in the London Sunday Telegraph (Feb. 15, 2004):In the storm of publicity which has preceded the release of Mel Gibson's gory film, The Passion of the Christ, its promoters have claimed (though the Vatican has denied) that the Pope gave his blessing to the movie saying: "It is as it was." This is supposed to mean that the film is historically reliable. Gibson was less reticent and suggested that it was "directed

Feb 20, 2004

Estonia Hasn't Come to Grips with Its Nazi Past

Anna Badkhen, in the SF Chronicle (Feb. 15, 2004):When the United States stripped Michael Gorshkow of his American citizenship and forced him to leave his Florida home 18 months ago, a federal judge said there was no doubt Gorshkow had helped slaughter at least 3,000 Jewish men, women and children during the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe. But now, surrounded by the quaint medieval steeples and tranquil snow-swept farmland of his n

Feb 20, 2004

Freudianism Is Dead. Long Live Freudianism!

Todd Dufresne, in the LAT (Feb. 18, 2004): What an utter disappointment the 1990s were for the fans of Freud. Time magazine asked aloud, and on its cover no less,"Is Freud Dead?" And the former analytic stronghold, the New York Review of Books, published lengthy feature articles debunking Freud's reputation as a man and as a thinker. By the end of the decade, e

Feb 20, 2004

Diane Ravitch: States Should Drop Textbook Reviews

Diane Ravitch, in the Austin-American Statesman (Feb. 18, 2004): The nation has come to expect a lot of laughs and outrage whenever Texas is engaged in the regular process of deciding which textbooks to buy (or"adopt") for public schools across the state. In fact, schoolchildren in Texas and throughout the nation would be far better served if Texa

Feb 20, 2004

Diane Ravitch: The Language Police

Diane Ravitch, in the WSJ (Feb. 13, 2004): While writing"The Language Police," I could not figure out why New York State had gone so far beyond other states in punctiliously carving out almost all references to race, gender, age and ethnicity, including even weight and height. In June 2002, the state was mightily embarrassed when reports appeared about its routine bowdlerizing on its exams of writers such as Fran

Feb 19, 2004

Special Issue: US News & World Report Devoted to the History of Exploration

Samantha Levine, in a Special Issue of US News devoted to the history of exploration (Feb. 23, 2004):There's the Magellan spacecraft, the first to thoroughly map Venus. There's a Magellan mutual fund, a Magellan healthcare insurance company, and dozens of other businesses and products all named in honor of the Portuguese explorer known as the first man to circumnavigate

Feb 19, 2004

The History Channel's Standards Are too Loose

Dorothy Rabinowitz, in the WSJ (Feb. 19, 2004):Can there be a way to prepare one's mind for the spectacle now before us, in which the History Channel explains its worthy reasons for airing a film back in November -- part of the 40th anniversary of JFK's assassination -- identifying Lyndon B. Johnson as the criminal responsible for John Kennedy's murder? We c

Feb 17, 2004

The Vinland Map ... And the Debate Goes On

Guy Gugliotta, in the Wash Post (Feb. 16, 2004): When it surfaced in 1957, it was too good to be true: a purported 15th-century world map depicting an island to the far west labeled Vinilandia Insula -- the fabled Vinland -- proof positive, it seemed, that Norse explorers had reached North America long before Columbus.

Feb 17, 2004

Harriet Tubman's Star Is Rising

Drew Gilpin Faust, in the NYT (Feb. 15, 2004): The Post Office has issued not one but two Harriet Tubman stamps; the National Standards for United States History have named Tubman as a figure who should be familiar to students by the fifth grade; Google lists more than 90,000 entries under her name; Amazon.com offers more than 1,200 results in

Feb 17, 2004

The Professor Who Insists John Wilkes Booth Got Away

Bill McCleery, in the Indiannapolis Star (Feb. 16, 2004): Twelve days after killing President Abraham Lincoln, assassin John Wilkes Booth was gunned down inside a Virginia barn. Or was he? Inspired by a coded message written in the late 1860s, a retired Indiana State University professor has spent decades searching for information about Lincoln's assassination. For Ray Neff, that o

Feb 17, 2004

Lost History: Slavery in California

Deborah Kong, for the Associated Press (Feb. 15, 2004): Californians like to think of their state as a freewheeling, tolerant place, one that entered the Union back in 1850 unbesmirched by the stain of slavery. But Joe Moore says there's just one problem with that sunny vision of the past - it isn't true. Though it was admitted to the Union as a ``free state,'' slavery still exi

Feb 16, 2004

NYT: History Channel Documentary Implicating LBJ in JFK's Death Was "Harebrained"

Editorial in the NYT (Feb. 13, 2004): The History Channel, an entertainment outlet with a serious name to live up to, has finally agreed to reconsider its"documentary" charging that Lyndon Johnson conspired to have President John Kennedy assassinated. It's about time. The channel initially promoted the show and its ludicrous accusation by darkly announcing that"the roots of the crime lie buried deep

Feb 13, 2004

The Soviet Union Planned on Going to Mars, too

Steven Aftergood, in Secrecy News, the newsletter of the Federation of American Scientists (Feb. 13, 2004):   Life will be discovered on Mars, the CIA predicted. Unfortunately, it will be communist!   As late as 1989, the CIA estimated that it was "likely" that the soon-to-collapse Soviet Union would undertake a manned mission to Mars. "We believe the Soviets are planning for a manned Mars landing mission some time after the year 2000,"

Feb 13, 2004

Lewis & Clark ... and Sex

From NPR's Day to Day (Feb. 11, 2004):The journals of Lewis and Clark record that on this day in 1805, the Shoshone woman Sacagawea, who, with her French-Canadian husband, was helping guide the expedition--she gave birth. Officially, the only birth noted by the Corps of Discovery, though some Native Americans have claimed that some of the explorers, including the leaders, fathered other children with tribal women. Historians don't know. But w

Feb 13, 2004

Franco-American Rivalry Also Extends to Inventions

Edward Tenner, senior research associate of the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian Institution, in US News & World Report (Feb. 16, 2004):A hundred years after the Wright brothers' triumph at Kitty Hawk, the European consortium Airbus announced a milestone of its own--surpassing the American aviation giant Boeing in the number of airliners delivered in 2003. Airbus, based in Toulouse, France,

Feb 13, 2004

Who Killed Jesus?

Jon Meacham, on MSNBC.com (Feb. It is night, in a quiet, nearly deserted garden in Jerusalem. A figure is praying; his friends sleep a short distance away. We are in the last hours of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, in the spring of roughly the year 30, at the time of the Jewish feast of Passover. The country—first-century Judea, the early 21st's Israel—is part of the Roman Empire. The prefect, Pontius Pilate, is Caesar's ra

Feb 12, 2004

New Documentary Asks Why Auschwitz Wasn't Bombed

Paul B. Miller, assistant professor of history at McDaniel College, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscribers only) (Feb. 13, 2004):When does a research project transcend the limits of what the academic establishment considers "legitimate" scholarship? At what point do tenure committees decide that a particular undertaking is "unacceptable"? As an ass

Feb 12, 2004

Did Slaves Use Quilts to Help Escape Through the Underground Railroad?

Sarah Ives, in National Geographic News (Feb. 5, 2004): Two historians say African American slaves may have used a quilt code to navigate the Underground Railroad. Quilts with patterns named"wagon wheel,""tumbling blocks," and"bear's paw" appear to have contained secret messages that helped direct slaves to freedom, the pair claim. Jacqueline Tobin and Raymond Dobard first posit

Feb 9, 2004

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall: Do the Surveys Which Show Americans Are Ignorant About History Revealing?

OAH President Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, in the OAH Newsletter (Feb. 2004): In a recent article in the Phi Delta Kappan , education researcher Richard J. Paxton skewers the “pop quizzes” that periodically inspire a round of hand-wringing about “historical illiteracy” among pundits, parents, professors, and politicians alike. College seniors in a 2000 survey, for instance, scored an average of 53 pe