Roundup: Talking About History

Rosamund Bartlett: Remembering Anton Chekhov in Russia

[Rosamund Bartlett is the author of Chekhov: Scenes from a Life, editor of Chekhov: A Life in Letters, and translator of two anthologies of Chekhov’s stories. She is Director of the Anton Chekhov Foundation, set up to preserve Chekhov’s house in Yalta.] Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev chose to celebrate Chekhov’s 150th birthday on 29 January in Taganrog. This was entirely fitting, for it was in this southern Russian city that the writer was born. Medvedev turns out to know and

Abby Wisse Schachter: The Problem with the Jewish Holiday of Purim

[Abby Wisse Schachter is an associate editor at the New York Post.] The liturgy and observances of the Jewish religious calendar have been set in place for many centuries. But in recent decades a trend toward the reinterpretation of many holidays has been gaining ground. Passover’s celebration of freedom has served to turn it into a clearinghouse of trendy concepts, with Seders dedicated to civil rights, the labor movement, ecology, and a host of other topics. Chanukah’s festival of lights ha

Joseph J. Ellis: James Madison's Radical Constitutional Agenda

[Joseph J. Ellis, winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in History for Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (Knopf 2000), is the Ford Foundation Professor of History at Mount Holyoke College.] On May 5, 1787, James Madison arrived in Philadelphia. He was a diminutive young Virginian—about five feet three inches tall, 130 pounds, 36 years old—who, it so happened, had thought more deeply about the political problems posed by the current government under the Articles of Confeder

Kevin M. Schultz and Paul Harvey: Religion is Everywhere in History, but Nowhere in Historiography

[Kevin M. Schultz is assistant professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Paul Harvey is associate professor of history at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.This essay is adapted from a forthcoming article in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion.] We seem to be in the midst of a religious revival. At least that seems true within higher education, and especially within our own field of American history. According to a recent report from the

Jack Hunter: Liberal and Conservative Uses of the Term "Terrorism" in History

[The "Southern Avenger" Jack Hunter is a conservative commentator on WTMA 1250 AM talk radio and columnist for the Charleston City Paper in South Carolina.] In a recent commentary, I called alleged 19th-century slave insurrectionist Denmark Vesey a “terrorist,” defining that term as the intentional targeting of civilians to advance an objective or agenda. Vesey, who planned to murder every white person in Charleston, South Carolina in 1822, certainly fit this description,

Tara Bynum: The African-American Story is Not Just Activism and Resistance

[Tara Bynum is an assistant professor of English at Towson University in Baltimore, MD] It’s Black History Month yet again. With several years of university teaching under my belt, I’ve begun to wonder what black history my students have actually learned during this month or any month before entering college. It’s clear the students know a version of black history that moves rather quickly from slavery to Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement to the election of Barack Obama...

Henry Louis Gates Jr.: The African Roots of Carnival

[Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is a literary critic, educator, scholar, writer, editor and public intellectual. He was the first African American to receive the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship. In 2002, Gates was selected to give the Jefferson Lecture, in recognition of his"distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities." The lecture resulted in his 2003 book, The Trials of Phillis Wheatley.] When the 10.8 million African slaves disembarked from the hell-hole of the slave

Michael Rubin: Taking Tea with the Taliban

[Michael Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is completing a history of U.S. engagement with rogue regimes.] Addressing the nation on December 1, 2009, President Barack Obama laid out the case for an augmented American presence in Afghanistan to battle the Taliban forces seeking to push their way back into power. “Over the last several years, the Taliban has maintained common cause with al-Qaeda, as they both seek an overthrow of the Afghan government,” h

Walter Rodgers: Is it Presidents Day or President's Day or Presidents' Day?

[Walter Rodgers is a former senior international correspondent for CNN. He writes a biweekly column for the Monitor's print weekly edition.] America's literary strong suit has always been humor. It's when they reach for rectitude that Americans become comic. Take holidays. In February we try to honor our presidents, but we can't figure out which ones we pay tribute to or even how to spell the holiday. Is it Presidents Day or President's Day or Presidents' Day?

Ruth Graham: Was President Lincoln's Wife Bipolar or Just Ahead of Her Time?

[Ruth Graham is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn.] As we are enjoying a day off of work in honor of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, it's worth revisiting Lincoln's troubled wife, Mary Todd Lincoln. Most Americans think of Mary—if they think of her at all—as crazy. In 1875, she was publicly tried for insanity by her only living son and found guilty. Then she spent months in an asylum against her will. As one contemporary summed it up, "She was not like ladies in general.&qu

John Castellucci: The Night SDS Burned Orest Ranum's Papers

[John Castellucci, a former reporter at The Providence Journal, was a student of Orest Ranum.] At about 2:30 a.m. on May 22, 1968, as New York City police entered Hamilton Hall, on Columbia University's Morningside Heights campus, to clear it of demonstrators, files belonging to Orest A. Ranum, an associate professor of history, were ransacked, and papers documenting more than 10 years of research were burned. The fire came at the tail end of a month of protests that had roiled Colu

Jeremy Kotkin: R.I.P. Mr. Wilson, Father of the Taliban

[Major Jeremy Kotkin is an Army officer who specializes in Afghanistan and Pakistan.] “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” This proverb which has become a mainstay of foreign policy courses of action has, in fact, pushed the United States to make horrifically misguided and ignorant decisions about how to view challenges across the globe and the ways and means used to confront them. With this proverb in mind, and often with the best of intentions in tow, organs of U.S. national secu

Timothy W. Ryback & Florian Beierl: A Damnation of Memory at Berchtesgaden

[Timothy W. Ryback is cofounder of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation and author of “Hitler’s Private Library.” Florian Beierl is founder of the Obersalzberg Institute and author of “Hitler’s Berg” (Hitler’s Mountain).] Earlier this month, the Bavarian Monument Protection Agency reported that the Bavarian government had used stones from Adolf Hitler’s alpine retreat on the Obersalzberg to construct a small, roadside chapel, Wegmacher Kapelle, near the town of Be

Russell Shorto: Christianizing American History

[Russell Shorto is a contributing writer for the magazine. His most recent book is ‘‘Descartes’ Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason.’’] ...This year’s social-studies review has drawn the most attention for the battles over what names should be included in the roll call of history. But while ignoring Kennedy and upgrading Gingrich are significant moves, something more fundamental is on the agenda. The one thing that underlies the entire program of the n

HDS Greenway: Charlie Wilson’s war and the politics of blowback

[HDS Greenway leads the Opinion and Analysis section for GlobalPost.] Charlie Wilson, the high-living Texas Congressman who did so much to support America’s covert resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, is dead. But “Charlie Wilson’s War,” the title of a book and film about his exploits, lives on. The Soviets are gone. Indeed the Soviet Union is gone, but the war in Afghanistan rolls on, with no clear end in sight. In one of the ironies of histor

Peter West: Mammoth Cave and Racial Imagination

[Peter West is Assistant Professor of English at Adelphi University.] In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Kentucky's Mammoth Cave was a popular tourist destination for travelers from around the United States and beyond. The cave also functioned during these years as a dynamic symbol in the national imagination, appearing in travel books, lyric poems, private diaries, love letters, gothic novels, and even a moving panorama. Peter West examines this diverse body of cultural arti

Kate Merkel-Hess and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom: A New Consensus on the Rape of Nanking

[Kate Merkel-Hess is an ACLS/Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the University of California - Irvine, the editor of "The China Beat" blog/electronic magazine, and a co-editor of China in 2008: A Year of Great Significance. Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is a professor of history at University of California - Irvine and the author of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, which will be published in April.] The "Rape of Nanking," in which invading

Martin Rees: The Royal Society's Unstoppable Thirst for Inquiry

[Martin John Rees, Baron Rees of Ludlow, OM, PRS, is president of the Royal Society, a Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and an cosmologist and astrophysicist.] The Royal Society began in 1660. At its regular meetings, experiments were performed. Samuel Pepys became a Fellow in 1665: he recorded in his diary that at his first meeting he enjoyed demonstrations on "the nature of fire, and how it goes out in a place where the ayre is not free, and sooner out where the ayre is

Jen Paton: Europe and Its Cannibals

In the fourteenth century Romance of Richard the Lionheart, the crusader king falls ill outside of Acre: the food he needs to recover, he claims, is pork. Since rumor has it Saracens taste of pork, his men cook and feed him human flesh without his knowledge. Demanding to see the head of the “pig” he has just eaten, the cooks bring in the human head. Richard reacts with amusement, laughing aloud. Gnawing

RedState: Who Wrote Your History Textbook?

I recently wrote about the US history that is not taught about some famous American market entrepreneurs. That really is just the tip of the iceberg. In every period of our history there are statist biases being taught to students in classes. Larry Schweikart has written a book that includes a list of lies that can l