Roundup: Talking About History

William Underwood: Wartime forced labor and the future of Japan-China-Korea Relations

[William Underwood, a Japan Focus coordinator, is an independent researcher of reparations for forced labor in wartime Japan. He can be reached at kyushubill@yahoo.com.]HNN note: The following is the introduction to "Assessing the Nishimatsu Corporate Approach to Redressing Chinese Forced Labor in Wartime Japan", Kang Jian, Arimitsu Ken and William UnderwoodThe Nishimatsu Settlement Controversy

TNR Slideshow: Famous Filibusters

The first filibuster occurred in 1790, when senators from Virginia and South Carolina tried to prevent the U.S. capital from relocating to Philadelphia. The blocking measure didn't last long, and Congress was moved from New York to Philadelphia, temporarily, while a new federal city was constructed on the Potomac River.

Michael Hiltzik: The world still can learn from Keynesian economics

[Michael Hiltzik's column appears in the paper on Mondays and Thursdays.] Great crises have a way of reminding us that acting as though we know perfectly well what the future holds almost always leads to disaster. That's especially true in economics, which tends to underscore the murkiness of the real world by dealing out surprises one after another -- booms, crashes, bubbles, you name it. It's fitting, therefore, that the recent economic meltdown has beg

Kang Jian, Arimitsu Ken and William Underwood: Assessing the Nishimatsu Corporate Approach to Redressing Chinese Forced Labor in Wartime Japan

[William Underwood, a Japan Focus coordinator, is an independent researcher of reparations for forced labor in wartime Japan. ]Introduction: Wartime forced labor and the future of Japan-China-Korea Relations WILLIAM UNDERWOODThe Nishimatsu Settlement Controversy Xinhua News Agency reported in October 2009 that Nishimatsu Construction Co. “secured a reconciliation” by voluntarily agreeing to compensate Chinese victims of wartime forc

W. Barksdale Maynard: Mr. Wilson's University

[W. Barksdale Maynard has served as a lecturer at the Environmental Institute at Princeton University. His fourth book is Woodrow Wilson: Princeton to the Presidency (Yale University Press, 2008).] One drizzly weekend last month, a conference convened at Princeton University to consider "The Educational Legacy of Woodrow Wilson." Up front sat the organizers, the historian of higher education James Axtell—an emeritus professor at the College of William and Mary and visiting

Jeffrey Herf: Hate Radio, a Review of 'Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11'

[Jeffrey Herf is a professor of modern European and German history at the University of Maryland at College Park and author of The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust (Harvard University Press, 2006). His latest book is Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, published this month by Yale University Press.] Between 1939 and 1945, shortwave radio transmitters near Berlin broadcast Nazi propaganda in many languages around the world, including Arabic througho

David P. Colley: How World War II Wasn’t Won

[David P. Colley is the author of “Decision at Strasbourg: Ike’s Strategic Mistake to Halt the Sixth Army Group at the Rhine in 1944.”] SIXTY-FIVE years ago, in November 1944, the war in Europe was at a stalemate. A resurgent Wehrmacht had halted the Allied armies along Germany’s borders after its headlong retreat across northern France following D-Day. From Holland to France, the front was static — yet thousands of Allied soldiers continued to die in futile battles to reach the Rhi

Warren Breckman: A Man of Parts: Jeremy Bentham and dead bodies

[Warren Breckman teaches modern European intellectual history at the University of Pennsylvania.] Colin Dickey’s recent Roundtable offers a fascinating glimpse into the politics of human dissection in early modern Europe through unique situation in nineteenth-century Vienna. There, dissection was not only allowed but increasingly supported by the medical establishment and the state. At Vienna’s General Hospital, the poor could receive health care free of charge, but only on conditio

Mark Bauerlein: Who (or What) Killed JFK?

[Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University. His books include Literary Criticism: An Autopsy (1997) and Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906 (2001).] My father heard the news from a guy in the next office. He was a graduate student in math at Berkeley, and his neighbor stepped inside the door and said, "Well, that's it -- that's the second one they've killled for pushing civil rights." The assassination had just happened, information was

Frank Gannon: US-Japanese relations 1969

[Frank Gannon won a White House Fellowship and served in the Nixon White House 1971-4. He accompanied RN to San Clemente aboard Air Force One on August 9th and organized the researching and writing of the President’s memoirs, RN.] Forty years ago, on 19 November 1969, RN welcomed Japanese Prime Minister Eisaku Sato to the White House at the beginning of what would be a significant few days in the history of US-Japanese relations. Typically, the meeting was the result of long plannin

Andreas Umland: Understanding the Orange Revolution: Ukraine's Democratization in the Russian Mirror

[Dr Andreas Umland is a lecturer in contemporary East European history at The Catholic University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt in Upper Bavaria, general editor of the book series “Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society”, and co-editor of the German-Russian journal "Forum for the Ideas and History of Contemporary Eastern Europe".] On November 21st, 2009, Ukrainian democrats will be celebrating the fifth anniversary of the start of demonstrations in Kyiv which led to larger

Akash Kapur: India's Path Was Paved by Soviet Fall

[Akash Kapur is a writer, living mostly in South India, outside Pondicherry. His work has been published in The Atlantic, The Economist, Granta, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Yorker, among other places. He also writes a fortnightly “Letter from India” column for the International Herald Tribune.] With all the attention being paid this month to the fall of the Berlin Wall, I’ve found myself thinking of how much India has changed over the last 20 years. Most of the media

Dick Meister: The Man Who Didn't Die, Joe Hill and the Industrial Workers of the World

[Dick Meister is a San Francisco-based writer who has covered labor and politics for a half-century as a reporter, editor, author and commentator. You can contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com.] It's November 19, 1915, in a courtyard of the Utah State Penitentiary in Salt Lake City. Five riflemen take careful aim at a condemned organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Joe Hill, who stands before them straight an

Leon Wieseltier: Unmending Wall

[Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor of The New Republic.] The absence of Barack Obama from Berlin on the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall may be explained in many ways, and one of the explanations may be his view of the world. He is kein Berliner. No, he is not soft on communism, not least because there is no longer any communism, at least of the classical kind, to be soft on. In the video message that was broadcast to the commemoration--it allowed him once again to ha

David R. Stokes: This Thanksgiving, Please Pass The Brisket

[David R. Stokes is a minister, columnist, author, and broadcaster. He lives in Fairfax, Virginia.] Ever hear of Gershom Mendes Seixas? Well, he might just be the forgotten hero of Thanksgiving. Our national Thanksgiving narrative is rich with stories about proclamations, gatherings, meals, traditions, football, and of course, the obligatory pardoning of a turkey by the president of the United States. Schoolchildren rehearse that day long ago when the Plymouth pilgrims

Mark Bowden: How Iran's Revolution Was Hijacked

[Mr. Bowden, a national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, is the author of "Guests of the Ayatollah" and, more recently, "The Best Game Ever," both published by Atlantic Monthly Press.] It has been three decades since Iranian college students overran and occupied the American Embassy in Tehran, and we are still dealing with that country's revolution. Americans at the time were understandably preoccupied with the fate of 66 countrymen who were h

Ben Gelber: Ben Franklin on Global Warming

[Ben Gelber is a meteorologist at WCMH-TV in Columbus, Ohio, and the author of “The Pennsylvania Weather Book.”] FEW would argue that the debate on global warming engenders a lot of emotion. What else are we to make of comments that “within the last 40 or 50 years there has been a very great observable change of climate,” that “a change in our climate ... is taking place very sensibly” and that “men are led into numberless errors by drawing general conclusions from particular facts”

Thomas Omestad: Remembering the twitchy, terrifying final days of communist rule in Czechoslovakia

[Thomas Omestad is a senior fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. He covered the Velvet Revolution in Prague for the December 25, 1989, issue of TNR. Read his piece here] The opening moments of what became known as Czechoslovakia’s “Velvet Revolution” did not feel so velvety. Nor did the outcome of those events--a largely peaceful trium

Simon Schama: China's on-off American romance

[The writer is an FT contributing editor] Finding something American to sell to the Chinese, whether democracy or widgets, has always been a problem. The first merchant vessel to sail from New York to Canton in 1784 was on a tea-buying voyage, but the cargo it had to exchange was ginseng. American ginseng was consumed by the Chinese for its yin: the female properties of cool, while the native product was thought more yang-heavy. A population explosion may have made it difficult for

Robert McHenry: The (Editorial) Cost of Political Change: 1989 and Britannica

[Robert McHenry is a former editor-in-chief of Encyclopaedia Britannica and author of How to Know.] The 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, celebrated here last week as everywhere around the globe, was a highlight of the astonishing transformation that came over Eastern Europe in the years 1989-90. Many less dramatic but perhaps more substantial events preceded and helped make possible the fall, among them the remarkable changes that occurred in Hungary earlier in 1989.