Roundup: Talking About History

Ilan Stavans: The Novelists and the Dictators

[Ilan Stavans is a professor of Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst College. His latest book is Gabriel García Márquez: The Early Years (Palgrave Macmillan). He is general editor of The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, due out in September.] Does the current crop of left-wing caudillos in Latin America, like Hugo Chávez, inspire the type of animosity their military counterparts once did? And will its members be turned into larger-than-life dictators in novels, as they

Rodolfo F. Acuña: The Meaning of Occupation

[Rodolfo F. Acuña, PhD, teaches at California State University Northridge[ Dear Steve Nuñez, I just read the print version of your interview and it is precisely why I am reluctant to grant interviews. I attempted to be candid; however, I forgot that we are living in the age of Fox News which almost makes civil discourse impossible. This is disconcerting because there can be no resolution without people listening to each other. The first distortion is your o

Eliot Spitzer: Read the Gettysburg Address

[Eliot Spitzer is the former governor of the state of New York.] How quickly we forget. Just days ago, on Memorial Day—a day of gratitude, respect, and celebration—the words of President Lincoln's Gettysburg Address were read at ceremonies across the nation. The phrase from that speech that always sticks with me is the challenge President Lincoln set forth for us: "[R]esolve that these dead shall not have died in vain." He implored us not to shy away from the sacrifices we

Jay Mathews: The Myth of Tiananmen

[Mathews is an education reporter for The Washington Post. He was the paper’s first Beijing bureau chief and returned in 1989 to help cover the Tiananmen demonstrations. With his wife, Linda Mathews, he is the author of One Billion: A China Chronicle. This piece originally ran in the September/October 1998 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review.] President Clinton’s precedent-setting visit to China filled the front pages of American newspapers and led the evening television news fo

Nick Foulkes: Racing Through History at Britain's Epsom Derby

[Foulkes is the author of Gentlemen and Blackguards: Gambling Mania and The Plot To Steal The Derby Of 1844, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.] As the colorful 19th-century Whig politician Lord Palmerston put it, “Epsom week is our Olympic Games.” That was back in 1847, when both houses of Parliament adjourned for most of the week of the Derby, then the world’s most famous horse race. The way Palmerston saw it, the holiday was “part of the unwritten law of Parliament.”

Richard V. Allen: Reagan’s Secure Line

[Richard V. Allen, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, was the national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan from 1981 to 1982.] WITH a controversial Israeli attack in the news, I have thought back to another controversial Israeli attack, one that took place 29 years ago today: the strike on the Osirak nuclear reactor under construction in Iraq. The daring, risky bombing dealt a fatal blow to Saddam Hussein’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon. I was then President Ronald Rea

Martin Kettle: With No Common Culture in Britain, a Common History is Elusive

[Martin Kettle is an associate editor of the Guardian and writes on British, European and American politics, as well as the media, law and music.] ...[W]arnings surely apply to a labelling in the Guardian this week of Professor Niall Ferguson as a rightwing historian. Ferguson may or may not be usefully described as rightwing. "Irritating" is his own word for that. But he is certainly a historian – author of some formidable books with an occasional weakness for arresting o

Joyce Appleby: Getting Ready to Lead a World Economy: Enterprise in Nineteenth Century America

[Joyce Appleby is Professor of History Emerita at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her most recent book is The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (W. W. Norton & Company, 2010).] When Jefferson won the presidency in 1801, his victory had an economic impact as great as the political one. The establishment of the new government under the Constitution twelve years earlier had laid the foundation for an integrated market, but its character remained to be shaped

Christian Caryl: Why the 1970s Are Still Haunting Us Today

[Christian Caryl is a contributing editor to Foreign Policy. His column, "Reality Check," appears weekly on ForeignPolicy.com.] Those were the days: Economic upheavals wiped out long-established institutions and jolted self-satisfied elites. Terrorists declared war on the West in the name of eccentric utopias. New technologies collapsed geographical distance, bringing far-flung regions closer together and undermining the power of the traditional nation-state.

Jonathan Tremblay: History Shows that Sex is Much Better than Torture

[Jonathan Tremblay is a historian and is a Breaking News editor for the History News Network] News has trickled out of Russia that several dissidents against Moscow’s government have been taped with prostitutes and or while engaging in some ‘unconventional’ behaviour. Ilya Yashin is amongst these dissidents and describes the ploy as a ‘honey trap’ set up by Russian officials to discredit him and the ideals of his protest movement. He claims he was simply getting involved in a ’summe

William R. Forstchen: A Tale of Two Americas On Memorial Day 2010

[William R. Forstchen is a professor of history at Montreat College and is a specialist in military history. He has co-authored seven books with Newt Gingrich, the latest “To Try Men’s Souls” about Washington’s crossing of the Delaware. He is also the author of “One Second After,” a novel warning about the dangers of an EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) attack on the United States.] Memorial Day. Those of us old enough to remember might recall a parent or grandparent who referred to it a

Andrew B. Wilson: Rolling Back the Socialist Tide

[Andrew B. Wilson, a former Business Week bureau chief in Dallas and London, is a writer living in St. Louis, Missouri. He is working on a book on the rise and fall of socialism in Britain between the Churchill and Thatcher eras.] Talk about a swift reversal in fortune. Consider how quickly British Prime Minister Winston Churchill went from winning a war to losing the peace. On V-E Day -- May 8, 1945, the day after the surrender of Nazi Germany -- Churchill stood on a balcony overlo

Toby Miller: Soccer Conquers the World

[Toby Miller is a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California at Riverside. Among his books is Globalization and Sport: Playing the World (Sage, 2001), which he wrote with Geoffrey Lawrence, Jim McKay, and David Rowe.] Why are the Ivory Coast soccer player Didier Drogba and the Portuguese star Cristiano Ronaldo featured in underpants on a recent cover of Vanity Fair? Why was Drogba just named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time mag

Jon Meacham: The Price of Forgetting

[Jon Meacham is the editor of Newsweek.] The beginning of the end of War, wrote the novelist Herman Wouk, lies in Remembrance. But what happens if Americans know so little of war that they have nothing to remember? Today, in the spring of 2010, nine years into one war in Afghanistan and seven years into another in Iraq, we are trapped in a strange moment: America is a country at war, but hardly anybody notices. This Monday is Memorial Day. It is an editorial commonplace

Kathy Olmsted: California... Yesterday and Today

[Kathy Olmsted is a history professor at UC Davis.]Wallace Stegner famously said that California is like the rest of America, only more so.  But when did he say it, and in what context? Yesterday I tracked down the original quote, which appeared in an editorial Stegner wrote for a special Golden State edition of Saturday Review magazine in 1967.The references to Max Rafferty, Ronald Reagan, and Gary Snyder may seem dated, but in many ways the essay describes the Cal

Michael Kinsley: Cut the Boomers a Break

[Michael Kinsley is an editor at the Atlantic.] The basic story line is this: The "greatest generation" answered the call and proved their patriotism by winning World War II and thereby saving the world from the Nazis. Then came the boomers, who evaded the draft and spat at soldiers and generally have been a huge disappointment. Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut attorney general and senate candidate who "misspoke" about having served in Vietnam has given us a n

Martin Johnes: What are Academic Historians For?

[Dr Martin Johnes is from Pembrokeshire and took his BA and PhD at Cardiff University. He subsequently held research posts at the universities of Oxford and Cardiff, before taking up a lectureship at St Martin’s College (of Higher Education) in Lancaster.] The BBC is currently commissioning a major new television series on the history of Wales. No doubt this will be widely welcomed, but some academics are rather snooty about television history. They see it as obsessed by the gruesom

Mohammad Qayoumi: Once Upon a Time in Afghanistan...

[Mohammad Qayoumi is president of California State University, East Bay. He grew up in Kabul and came to work in the United States in 1978. Since 2002 he has volunteered his time in reconstruction efforts, serving on the board of directors to the Central Bank and as senior advisor to the minister of finance.] On a recent trip to Afghanistan, British Defense Secretary Liam Fox drew fire for calling it "a broken 13th-century country." The most common objection was not that h

Jon Wiener: Art Linkletter and Richard Nixon: Alcohol vs. Pot

[Jon Wiener teaches US history at UC Irvine.] Art Linkletter, who died May 26 at 97, was important not only for getting little kids to say the darndest things, but also as a crusader against the counterculture of the 1960s, and especially against drugs. Nixon appointed him an adviser on drug policy, and on May 8, 1971, Linkletter went to the White House and met with the president. The transcripts show Linkletter telling Nixon, “There's a great difference between alcohol

Sheldon Richman: Rand Paul was Right about the Civil Rights Act

[Sheldon Richman is the editor of The Freeman. He lives near Little Rock, Arkansas.] Fresh from his victory in last week’s Kentucky Republican senatorial primary, Rand Paul found himself caught in a whirlwind when MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow asked whether the 1964 Civil Rights Act properly outlawed racial segregation at privately owned lunch counters. Speaking circuitously if not evasively, Mr. Paul finally said: “[O]ne of the things freedom requires is that we allow people t