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Mark Byrnes's Facing Backwards

"A historian is often only a journalist facing backwards." -- Karl Kraus

Mark Byrnes is an associate professor of history at Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC.

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  • Jul 30, 2016 3:02 pm

    Will Khizr Khan be Donald Trump’s Joseph Welch?

    by Mark Byrnes

    Joseph Welch asked the question that woke up the American people to Joe McCarthy’s lack of decency. Khizr and Ghazala Khan have done the same service for the American people today—if we listen.
  • Mar 28, 2016 11:03 pm

    Orrin Hatch's Embarrassing New York Times Op-Ed

    by Mark Byrnes

    Senator Orrin Hatch took to the New York Times op-ed page to try to make the case for the Senate refusing to take up President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee. It didn’t go well.

  • Apr 8, 2015 8:08 pm

    "Unconditional Surrender" in Iran

    by Mark Byrnes

    After the nuclear framework agreement was announced last Thursday, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton told CBS News that "the only acceptable deal would be Iran's nuclear disarmament." What?


  • Dec 14, 2014 6:46 pm

    Dick Cheney’s David Frost Moment

    by Mark Byrnes

    “I'm more concerned with bad guys who got out and released than I am with a few that, in fact, were innocent.”--Dick Cheney on Meet the Press
  • Aug 19, 2014 4:06 pm

    "He Wasn't A Regular Guy"

    by Mark Byrnes

    The eagerness on the part of some people to embrace a narrative that suggests that Michael Brown "deserved it," before the facts are established, has a long and ugly history--and that fact may be far more significant and troubling than what happened that day in Ferguson.
  • Aug 1, 2014 5:00 pm

    The Lesson Tolstoy Teaches About Writing History that We Should Remember on the Anniversary of World War I

    by Mark Byrnes

    An age-old debate in history is whether individuals make history, or whether individuals are swept along by great forces that they can only hope to ride skillfully, not control completely.

    Tolstoy gave expression to the latter idea in War and Peace:

    The further back we transport ourselves in examining events, the less arbitrary they appear to us…. The further back in history we transport the object of our observation, the more questionable becomes the freedom of the men producing events, and the more obvious the law of necessity. 

    While the wide, long-term perspective employed by Tolstoy in this passage is familiar to historians, two articles in the popular press prompted by the anniversary of the beginning of World War I show the great appeal of focusing on the individual. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan details the toll taken by the war on the leaders of major states: Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II, England’s King George V, Russia’s Czar Nicholas II. In the Washington Post, Graham Allison examines how two of those three leaders (“Nicky and Willy”) tried to prevent the war. 

  • Jul 22, 2014 1:47 pm

    Historical Humility

    by Mark Byrnes

    The great advantage historians have is that we know how the story ends. 

    The great temptation that follows from that fact is historical arrogance—an unspoken certainty that because we know it now, we would have known it then. 

    The great challenge, therefore, is to impose upon ourselves historical humility, to remind ourselves that the historical actors we study did not have the advantage we do of knowing the story’s end. 

    I was reminded of that recently while doing some research at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, NY. I’m working on the role of radio in the Great Debate over American intervention in World War II, and came across some of the countless personal letters people wrote to FDR on the subject. 

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