Roundup: Talking About History

Ariela Gross: Race, Law and Conservatism in America

[Gross is the John B. and Alice R. Sharp Professor of Law and History at the University of Southern California.] Are conservatives racist? A number of political writers have complained recently that conservatives are being unfairly painted as racist because of the activities of a fringe of Tea Party activists, and that conservatism has a proud history of support for civil rights. Ross Douthat recently complained in the pages of the New York Times that the only reason we are seeing “wh

Bill Eichenberger: Bloodshed at Little Bighorn: An Interview with Tom Lehman

[Bill Eichenberger was the books editor at The Columbus Dispatch newspaper in Ohio from 1997 through April of 2009. He was voted Best Critic in Ohio in 2000 by the Society of Professional Journalists and in 2001 by the Press Club of Cleveland.]On July 10, 1876, the New York Daily Tribune published a poem by Walt Whitman entitled,"A Death-Sonnet for Custer."The poem began,"Far from Montana's canyons, / Lands of the wild ravine, the dusky Sioux, the lone-some stretch of silence,

Vuk Jeremic: Kosovo's Disastrous Precedent

[Mr. Jeremic is the foreign minister of the Republic of Serbia.] On Feb. 17, 2008, the ethnic-Albanian authorities of Serbia's breakaway province of Kosovo unilaterally declared independence against the will of the U.N Security Council and in contravention of my country's constitution. We made it immediately clear that we would never recognize the unilateral declaration of independence, implicitly or explicitly. This position will not change. Serbia will continue to use all diplomat

Olusegun Obasanjo and Malik Dechambenoit: Reclaiming the Sword: 50 years later, a Brief Account of Africa’s Road to Independence

[Olusegun Obasanjo is a former president of Nigeria (1999-2003). Former President Obasanjo is a leading voice on African governance issues. He is one of the architects of Nepad, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development. He is also a member of numerous influential organizations, including the Africa Progress Panel, the Inter-Action Council of Former Heads of Government and Club of Madrid. Malik Dechambenoit is the CEO of Sankoré, an Africa focused Strategic Advisory firm based

Richard Perle: Against Evil

[Richard Perle is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He served as assistant secretary of defense for international security from 1981-1987.] One could assume that the dubious straw men invented by Peter Beinart ("Think Again: Ronald Reagan" July/August 2010) are the result of innocent misconstruction. After all, Beinart was only 10 years old when Ronald Reagan became president and began the daunting task of re-establishing American pride, confidence an

Mark Tooley: Was the American Revolution Just?

[Mark Tooley is president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington, D.C. and author of Taking Back the United Methodist Church.] Americans of all stripes recently celebrated our country's 234th birthday. But it is fashionable by some on the Religious Left to discredit the American Revolution as primarily the selfish reaction against reasonable taxation. In their eyes, the original Tea Partiers of 1773 are as offensive and today's Tea Party rebels against big governme

Jerry Adler: Why Some Republicans Want to ‘Restore’ the 13th Amendment

[Jerry Adler was promoted to senior editor in January 1993, after serving as Newsweek senior writer for 12 years.] If there is an aspect of the human condition that is unaddressed by the platform of the Republican Party of Iowa, adopted last month at the state convention in Des Moines, you’d have to look awfully hard to find it. Its 387 enumerated planks and principles range widely over politics, culture, and economics, from sweeping statements of belief (“America is good”) to the fine nuance

Edward G. Lengel: Meuse-Argonne

[Edward G. Lengel, the senior editor of The Papers of George Washington, and associate professor of history at the University of Virginia, is author most recently of To Conquer Hell: The Meuse-Argonne, 1918 (Henry Holt and Co. 2008).] On October 11, 1918, late in the afternoon, a platoon of American doughboys marched to the front in eastern France, passing shattered villages, forests reduced to matchsticks, and water-filled shell craters. At every step the Americans struggled to fre

Michael Tomasky: A Quiz on the Eminent Historians

[Michael Tomasky is the Editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas and American Editor-at-Large of the Guardian (UK).] As a young man, I briefly toyed with the notion that I might get myself a nice Ph.D. in history. I was a fairly unaggressive student as an undergraduate, but the one category of classes I really did enjoy, in which I actually even tended to do the reading, was history. My first class on the French Revolution opened my eyes and set my mind ablaze, and I will always reme

David W. Blight: What Gives the Confederacy Its Staying Power

[David W. Blight is a professor of American history and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery and Abolition at Yale University. He also is a member of the board of trustees of the National Civil War Center at Tredegar in Richmond, Va., and the author of "Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory." Readers may send him e-mail at David.Blight@yale.edu. He wrote this for The Free-Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, Va

Vladimir Ryzhkov: The Wrong Kind of Monument

[Vladimir Ryzhkov, a State Duma deputy from 1993 to 2007, hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.] History has always been an inflammatory topic in Russia, and this is particularly true when the topic of discussion is whether the Soviet Union played a positive role in history. On Wednesday, for example, the Georgian parliament approved a resolution making Feb. 25, 1921 — the day Georgia was incorporated into the Soviet Union — “Soviet Occupation Day.” Several

Amity Shlaes: On FDR, Shlaes Annotates Black

[Amity Shlaes, senior fellow in economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of The Forgotten Man, is at work on the forthcoming biography of Calvin Coolidge, Coolidge.]My friend Conrad Black takes up the topic of the New Deal’s economic success in a recent column for NRO. He seeks to demonstrate that Franklin Roosevelt is not to be blamed — or, so it seems, even critic

Jeff Wiltse: Swimming in the Long Shadows of Segregation

[Jeff Wiltse is associate professor of history at the University of Montana-Missoula and the author of "Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America."] ...Swimming as a recreational activity boomed in popularity during the 1920s and 1930s, when cities and towns throughout the United States built thousands of swimming pools. Many of these pools were larger than football fields and surrounded by concrete sun decks, grassy lawns, and artificial sand beaches

John Amoda: Henry Louis Gates and the Slavery Blame Game, Part 2

[John Amoda is professor emeritus of political science at the City College of New York.] OUR new understanding of the scope of African involvement in the slave trade is not historical guesswork. Thanks to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, directed by the historian David Eltis of Emory University, we know the ports from which more than 450,000 of our African ancestors were shipped out to what is now the United States (the database has records of 12.5 million people shipped to

Michael L. Gillette: The War on Poverty

[Michael L. Gillette is the current executive director of Humanities Texas, the state humanities council. Before serving as the executive director, he directed the LBJ Library’s Oral History Program from 1976 to 1991, and then became the director of the Center for Legislative Archives at the National Archives for twelve years after.

Iain Mills: Japan's Notorious Unit 731 Rears Its Ugly Head

[Iain Mills is a Beijing-based freelance writer specializing in the Chinese political economy, who can be reached at sigmills@hotmail.com] Harbin, provincial capital of Heilongjiang province in northeast China, is most famous for its European architecture and ice festival, when huge structures are carved out of frozen blocks and adorned with lights. However, a less pleasant history lurks in the city's southern Pingfang district

John Summers: What Politics Does to History

[John Summers is visiting scholar in history at Boston College.] *The Admirable Radical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent, 1945–1970 by Carl Mirra Before Staughton Lynd vanished from intellectual society, he was one of the country’s most recognizable and controversial academics. “I was to be an American Lenin and a tenured professor at an Ivy League university,” he has recalled of the hopes he inherited from his famous parents, Robert and Helen Lynd. By 1970,

Krista McCracken: Canadian Census Data: A Lost Resource

[Krista McCracken is a public history consultant and is currently working as a Digitization Facilitator for Knowledge Ontario.]Statistics Canada is making significant changes to the way that the Canadian census is conducted.  Beginning in 2011 the long census form will no longer be distributed to Canadians. Previously, this portion of the census collected information on topics such as ethnicity, religion, employment, educa

Heghnar Watenpaugh: Armenian Church and the Getty Should Work Together

[Heghnar Watenpaugh is an associate professor of art history at UC Davis. She is a former Getty postdoctoral fellow and is of Armenian descent.] Seven illustrated pages ripped out of a medieval Gospels manuscript: Who owns them; who should own them? Those who value them as works of art, or those who revere them as religious objects? The seven pages feature beautiful illuminations by Toros Roslin, the most important Armenian miniatures painter of the Middle Ages. Their value is immen

John Turner: Give R.B. Bennett His Place on the Hill

[John Turner was Canada’s 17th prime minister.] As a boy growing up in Ottawa in the 1930s, it was my good fortune to meet Richard Bedford Bennett, Canada’s 11th prime minister, on many occasions. I recall a friendly man with a booming voice who gave me chocolates once in a while. A man with progressive views for his time about women, he was responsible for bringing my late mother, Phyllis Gregory (later Ross), into Canada’s public service during the Great Depression. S