Roundup: Talking About History

Ian Morris: Is the west still the best?

[Ian Morris is Willard Professor of Classics, History and Archaeology at Stanford University, and author of “Why the West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History, and What they Reveal About the Future”.] The west is still the “best”—if by that we mean richest, strongest, and most inventive. True, China now has the second biggest economy in the world and Japan the third; but Europe and north America still generate two thirds of the world’s wealth, own two thirds of its weapons, and sp

Dalton Conley: Making Sense of the 'Me Decade'

[Dalton Conley is vice provost and dean of the social sciences and a professor of sociology at New York University. The paperback edition of his latest book, Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety, was published this year by Vintage.] Does anyone really understand the 1970s? My excuse is that I was only 11 when they passed from the scene. What's yours? Even those folks 10

D.J. Waldie: Los Angeles in Maps

[D.J. Waldie is a contributing editor for Opinion. He wrote the forward to the just-published book, "Los Angeles in Maps," by Glen Creason with additional essays by Dydia DeLyser, Joe Linton, William J. Warren and Morgan P. Yates, and photography by Julie Shafer.] As a boy, I paged through the old Renie Atlas of Los Angeles streets and later the Thomas Guide. The fact that there was a map linking my Lakewood neighborhood to the vast grid of Los Angeles made my suburban loc

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: Faces of America: The Yamaguchi Story -- How an Immigrant Farmer Paved the Way for Success

[Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard. He has written twelve books and produced and narrated ten documentaries. His new series, Black in Latin America, airs on PBS in April.] You might say that since ABC aired its most famous mini-series in 1977, that I have had a serious case of Roots envy. Like Alex Haley, I wanted to be able to find the ancestors on my family tree, deep into the depths of slavery. And to find the lost tribal or ethnic id

Samira Kawash: How Candy and Halloween Became Best Friends

[Samira Kawash researches and writes on the cultural and social history of candy in 20th-century America. She is professor emerita, Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ). She blogs on candy history and opinion at CandyProfessor.com.] Wherever you turn this October, candy beckons. Americans will spend an estimated $2 billion on candy during the Halloween season this year, and here's a fun fact from the California Milk Processors Board: "an average Jack-O-Lantern bucket carries

Alexis Madrigal: The Zambian Space Cult of the 1960s

[Alexis Madrigal is a senior editor for TheAtlantic.com. A former staff writer for Wired.com, he's the author of the forthcoming history of clean energy in America, Powering the Dream.]We tend to associate space exploration with hulking rockets and massive R&D budgets, but there's a strange thread through the last fifty years of outsider space exploration. We've seen it recently in people sending

Rick Perlstein: That Seventies Show

[Rick Perlstein's most recent book is Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.] I've been calling 1973, as I sort through my research for a political and cultural history of the United States in the '70s, the Year Without Christmas Lights. News of fuel shortages—what would come to be called the "energy crisis"—had begun cropping up in the spring, around the same time the resignations of Nixon confidants John Ehrlichman and Bob Haldeman introduced t

Piers Brendon: Will China seek revenge for its century of humiliation at the hands of the West?

[Piers Brendon is a fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University. His most recent book is The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781–1997.] Among the gifts brought by Lord Macartney, who came to Beijing in 1793 on a historic embassy intended to open China to British merchants, was a map of the world, which the Emperor Ch’ien-lung found unacceptable because the Middle Kingdom was represented on it as too small and not in the middle. As it happened, Macartney’s compatriots h

James Tuten: The End of Lowcountry Rice Culture

[James Tuten is the author of "Lowcountry Time and Tide: The Fall of The South Carolina Rice Kingdom" and creator of ricekingdom.com. He is an associate professor of history at Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pa.] One hundred years ago South Carolina coastal dwellers, unbeknownst to them, were in the middle of an especially intense set of hurricane seasons. Never has the state felt the sting of three destructive storms in as many years. Storms can bring death and destructio

J.R. McNeill: Malarial Mosquitoes Helped Defeat British in Battle that Ended Revolutionary War

[McNeill is a Georgetown University professor of environmental history and author of many books, including "Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914."] Major combat operations in the American Revolution ended 229 years ago on Oct. 19, at Yorktown. For that we can thank the fortitude of American forces under George Washington, the siegecraft of French troops of Gen. Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, the count of Rochambeau - and the relentless b

Alexis Madrigal: The Legend of Coal Oil Johnny, America's Great Forgotten Parable

[Alexis Madrigal is a senior editor for TheAtlantic.com. A former staff writer for Wired.com, he's the author of the forthcoming history of clean energy in America, Powering the Dream.] Surely you've heard of Coal Oil Johnny, right? Before J.R. Ewing, or the Beverly Hillbillies, or even John D. Rockefeller, there was Coal Oil Johnny. He was the first great cautionary tale of the oil age -- and his name would resound in popular culture for more than half a century after

Jason Saltoun-Ebin: Six Lessons Mr. Donilon Could Learn From Reagan's Six National Security Advisers

[Jason Saltoun-Ebin is the editor of The Reagan Files: The Untold Story of Reagan's Top-Secret Efforts to Win the Cold War and the creator of the website, http://www.thereaganfiles.com. He can be reached at thereaganfiles@gmail.com.]Having spent the last decade studying the Reagan administration, and the last few years focusing on Reagan's National Security Council, I thought it could be useful for Mr. Donilon to get a quick review (and a few lessons) of where some of his contempora

James Swanson: Was Jefferson Davis Captured in a Dress?

[James Swanson is a senior legal scholar at the Heritage Foundation and author of Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer (William Morrow 2006).] On Sunday, May 14, 1865, Benjamin Brown French, commissioner of public buildings for the District of Columbia, left his home on Capitol Hill to buy a copy of the Daily Morning Chronicle. “When I came up from breakfast I went out and got the Chronicle,” he wrote in his journal, “and the first thing that met my eyes was ‘Capture of Je

Leon Aron: The Russian Masterpiece You've Never Heard of

[Leon Aron is director of Russian studies at the American Enterprise Institute and author of a forthcoming book on the intellectual origins of the Soviet collapse. All translations in this piece are by the author.] Fifty years ago this past October, Vasily Grossman submitted for publication the greatest Russian novel of the 20th century. The KGB immediately destroyed all copies of what Grossman called Life and Fate (Zhizn' i sud'ba in Russian) except for two hidden by his friends, a

Tommy De Seno: The Truth About Christopher Columbus

[Tommy De Seno is a writer and an attorney.] I’m sure it’s happened to you, as it did to me, again, last night: Some starry-eyed collegian told me that Christopher Columbus shouldn’t be celebrated because of his treatment of native Americans. Oh, and surprise, surprise, she was armed with nothing more than her university professor’s insistence.... Let me introduce you to Francisco de Bobadilla – liar and Columbus usurper. The criticism of Columbus today comes from de Bo

Robert Dallek: The Tyranny of Metaphor in U.S. Foreign Policy

[Presidential historian Robert Dallek is author, most recently, of The Lost Peace: Leadership in a Time of Horror and Hope, 1945-1953.] In 1952, British historian Denis William Brogan published a brilliantly perceptive article on "The Illusion of American Omnipotence." In the midst of the Korean War, Brogan was not only commenting on Americans' frustration with their inability to prevail decisively against supposedly inferior Chinese and North Korean forces, but also cauti

Stephen Zunes: Serbia: Ten Years Later

[Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics and chair of Middle Eastern studies at the University of San Francisco.] Tuesday, October 5, marked the tenth anniversary of the overthrow of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, the infamous "butcher of the Balkans." Despite lingering problems, Serbs appear to be more optimistic about their country's future than they have for decades. The United States deserves little credit for the positive developments, however, and a fair amou

Jon Wiener: John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Deportation Battle

[Jon Wiener is a professor of history at UC Irvine and author of "Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files." Copies of the letters he obtained protesting Lennon's deportation order are posted online at lennonfbifiles.com.] In 1972, John Lennon had a problem. He and his wife, Yoko Ono, had been living in New York for a year, and they wanted to stay. But it happened also to be the year President Nixon was running for reelection. Opposition to the Vietnam War

Brooke C. Stoddard: When Ben Franklin Met the Battlefield

[Brooke C. Stoddard is the former editor of Military Heritage.] Weapons ready, slogging into the deserted village, the men and their commander were appalled at what they saw: dead soldiers and civilians and evidence of a hasty retreat. The commander ordered quick fortifications against further attack, then burial parties. The orders came from an unlikely figure: Benjamin Franklin, 50 years old, already rich, retired from his printing business and notably famous for his

Chris Gainor: Jetsons Prove the Future Isn't What It Used to Be

[Chris Gainor is writing his PhD dissertation on the history of technology. His most recent books are To A Distant Day: The Rocket Pioneers and Who Killed the Avro Arrow?] Do historians always look at the past? Not always. Some historians conduct research on how conceptions of the future have changed over time. If that doesn't make sense, think about the common observation that the future isn't what it used to be. That's where historians come in, to ask how