Roundup: Talking About History

Heather McRobie and Anes Makul: Yugoslavs in the twenty-first century: ‘erased’ people

[Heather McRobie is studying human rights in South East Europe at the University of Sarajevo, and previously worked at the Amman Center for Human Rights Studies in Jordan. Anes Makul is a Bosnian journalist and researcher working on nationalism. He has worked for over two years as a journalist on Bosnian daily newspapers, recently spending a year researching Bosnia's economic crisis.] Earlier this month, the Slovenian Parliament adopted a Declaration on Yugoslav communities,

Lisa Fabrizio: American Love

[Lisa Fabrizio is a columnist who hails from Connecticut (mailbox@lisafab.com).] I have a sister who's around a decade younger than me. One day, a few years ago, we were discussing the presidency of Ronald Reagan when she made a most interesting comment. "When Reagan was president," she said, "I always felt safe." While I didn't think much of it at the time, I did so later on and most recently with the commemoration of Rea

Peter Hannaford: The Day That Isn't

[Mr. Hannaford is a former member of the Mount Vernon Advisory Committee.] Next Monday, February 21, will be the Washington's Birthday Holiday. That is what it's been ever since an Act of Congress created it in 1880 to honor the nation's first president. Forty years ago, however, it metamorphosed into "Presidents' Day." How did this happen? Beginning in 1951 a fellow named Harold Stonebridge Fischer created the Presidents' Day National Committee. He became its

Dan Senor and Roman Martinez: Donald Rumsfeld's Iraq Revisionism

[The writers were based in Baghdad in 2003-04 as officials of the Defense Department and the Coalition Provisional Authority.] What went wrong in Iraq? According to Donald Rumsfeld's memoir, U.S. difficulties stemmed not from the Pentagon's failure to plan for the war's aftermath - or Rumsfeld's unwillingness as defense secretary to provide enough troops to secure Iraqis after the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime. Rumsfeld pins most of the blame on the Coalition Prov

Sophia Deboick The Battle for Valentine's Day

[Sophia Deboick is a historian and writer on popular culture.] The development of Valentine's Day into the orgy of commercialised sentimentality we know today has been a long process, with Roman paganism and the poets of the middle ages both making a contribution to the day's current associations with romance, love and sex. But the reclaiming of the day by fundamentalist Christians to further the agenda of the religious right has added a new chapter to this long history.

Sam Tanenhaus: Daniel Bell, Master Builder

[Sam Tanenhaus is the editor of the Book Review.] With the death last month of Daniel Bell, America lost its last great 20th-century big thinker, though this is not necessarily the impression many now have of him. One reason is that Bell was most prolific during a period, 1950-80, bounded by the cold war, that has receded into the half-forgotten past. Another is that for most of his career, Bell was seen less as a singular figure than as one of a club of intellectuals whose pedigree

Lawrence D. Hogan: The Negro Leagues Discovered an Oasis at Yankee Stadium

[Lawrence D. Hogan is a senior professor of history at Union County College in Cranford, N.J.] On July 5, 1930, about 20,000 fans filed into seven-year-old Yankee Stadium for a baseball doubleheader. What made this day special was that the teams, the New York Lincoln Giants and the Baltimore Black Sox, were the first Negro leagues clubs to play at the Stadium, which was essentially for whites only, like so many other public places in the United States at the time. Jaco

Gennady Burbulis: Honoring the Yeltsin Legacy

[Gennady Burbulis was secretary of state under Boris Yeltsin from 1991-92.] Feb. 1 marked what would have been the 80th birthday of Boris Yeltsin, the first president of the Russian Federation and the first popularly elected leader in the country's long history. In Yekaterinburg, President Dmitry Medvedev laid a wreath at a new monument dedicated to Yeltsin and called on the nation to be grateful for his service to his country. In Moscow at a concert to honor Yeltsin, Prime Minister

Pedro Noguera and Robert Cohen: Remembering Reagan's Record on Civil Rights and the South African Freedom Struggle

[Pedro Noguera is the Peter L. Agnew Professor of Education at New York University. Robert Cohen is a professor of history and social studies in NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.] Sentimental 100th birthday tributes to Ronald Reagan rolling out this month would have us believe that the “Great Communicator” led America into a bright conservative era of prosperity, ended the cold war by getting tough with the Soviets and restored America’s confidenc

Robert J. Samuelson: The Real Reagan Legacy

[Robert J. Samuelson is a weekly columnist for The Post, writing on political, economic and social issues.] We are deluged with Ronald Reagan celebrations and retrospectives, but most are misleading. They omit Reagan's singular domestic achievement and the wellspring of his popularity: the defeat of double-digit inflation. In 1979 and 1980, inflation averaged 13 percent; by 1984, it was 4 percent - and falling. Without subdued inflation, the economy would have remained a mess and Re

Nathaniel Zelinsky: V for Victory: A Timeless Symbol

Media commentators remain divided about the hope for a democratic Egypt in light of the protests that have rocked the country. Some fear an Iran-like Muslim theocracy, while others have been cautiously optimistic that a secular order can take hold. Those who predict a positive outcome argue that Egyptians (and the broader Arab world) have internalized liberal-Western norms, which can provide a foundation for sweeping reform. While it is too early to predict the results of these even

Arthur B. Laffer: Reaganomics ... What We Learned

[Mr. Laffer is the chairman of Laffer Associates and co-author of "Return to Prosperity: How America Can Regain Its Economic Superpower Status" (Threshold, 2010).] For 16 years prior to Ronald Reagan's presidency, the U.S. economy was in a tailspin—a result of bipartisan ignorance that resulted in tax increases, dollar devaluations, wage and price controls, minimum-wage hikes, misguided spending, pandering to unions, protectionist measures and other policy mistakes.

Clinton Godart: Japan is Right to be Angry at QI Atom Bomb Joke

[Clinton Godart teaches Japanese history at the University of Cambridge. He specializes in modern Japanese intellectual history, philosophy, and history of science. He is currently working on a book on the reception of Darwin in Japan.] Stephen Fry and the BBC seemed to have been caught off guard by a wave of outrage among Japanese people since it featured Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a survivor of both nuclear attacks in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in panel show QI last December. In the programm

Lincoln Mitchell: Remembering Reagan

[Lincoln Mitchell is an Associate at Columbia University's Harriman Institute. From 2006-2009, he was the Arnold A. Saltzman Assistant Professor in the Practice of International Politics at Columbia University.] A few days before the 1988 election between George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis, I attended a rally on the University of California campus where I was enrolled in my last year of college. Although it was reasonably clear by then that Bush was going to win the election, we s

John Fund: The Roots of Ronald Reagan's Ambition

[Mr. Fund is a columnist for WSJ.com.] Ronald Reagan's status as a mythic figure was demonstrated on Sunday as 1,500 guests gathered at the Reagan Presidential Library to celebrate what would have been his 100th birthday. Liberals have come to accept his strengths and even acknowledge some of his accomplishments, while conservatives have raised even higher his pedestal. Yet unanswered questions about the Gipper linger. His son, Ron Reagan, notes that even though his fat

Kimberley Strassel: Rumsfeld's 'Slice of History' (interview)

[Ms. Strassel writes the Journal's Potomac Watch column.] 'I'd read other folks' books about things I'd been involved in . . . and I'd think, 'My goodness, that's not my perspective,'" chuckles former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in an interview last Friday. "I remember talking to [former Secretary of State] George Shultz and he said, 'Don, that's the way it is. Everyone has their slice of history and you need to write yours one day so that it is part of the record

Jonathan Chait: Reagan Revisionism And Reagan Mythology

[Jonathan Chait is a senior editor at The New Republic.] Politico has an interesting feature about the fear among conservatives that their campaign to canonize Ronald Reagan has turned their hero into a post-ideological hero, rather than an embodiment of conservative values. A specimen of this fear is Steven Hayward's National Review essay, Reagan Reclaimed," castigating liberals for an ideological kidnapping of Ronaldus Magnus. Before I wade into this, I should su

David A. Bell: Why We Can't Rule Out an Egyptian Reign of Terror

[David A. Bell is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the Era of North Atlantic Revolutions at Princeton University.] There are, of course, many different ways of categorizing historical revolutions. But for the purposes of understanding what is happening in Egypt -- and the challenges it may pose for the United States -- one simple, rough distinction may be especially useful. This is the distinction between revolutions that look more like 1688 and revolutions that look more li

Arnold Reisman: On an Armenian Manifesto Circa 1923, III

[Arnold Reisman is an engineer and a retired professor of operations research at Case Western Reserve University. Born in Lodz in 1934, he came to the United States after World War II and is the author of numerous books about Holocaust refugees in Turkey, including Turkey's Modernization: Refugees from Nazism and Ataturk's Vision (New Academia, 2006).]Hovannes Katchaznouni, 1923As the title implies this is the third article in a series published by HNN bearing

Christopher Sisserian: Understanding the Importance of a Shared Turkish-Armenian History

[Christopher Sisserian is a freelance journalist living in London, and currently a graduate student of International Politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).] The separation of Armenians and Turks in 1915 is a comparatively recent phenomenon. Both communities often choose to ignore their shared history, to the detriment of efforts at reestablishing ties, the most recent of which appear to have failed. Although the issue has received much attention following the