Historians/History

Corroborating MLK's Quote on anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism

by Martin Kramer

“When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking anti-Semitism!” —Martin Luther King, Jr.Aptly quoting Martin Luther King, Jr. is a common way to make a point or win an argument, and it’s no surprise that his new memorial in Washington includes an “Inscription Wall” of quotes carved in stone. It’s also no surprise that the quote about critics of Zionists didn’t make the cut for inclusion in the memorial. Still, it’s been put to use on many an occasion, most recently by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last year, in his address to the Knesset on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. A few years back it even cropped up in a State Department report on antisemitism. So I was perplexed to see it categorized as “disputed” on the extensive page of King quotes at Wikiquote—for better or worse, the go-to place to verify quotes. Indeed, as of this writing, it’s the only King quote so listed.

The Solution for Rising Textbook Costs? Free Peer-Reviewed Textbooks.

by David J. Trowbridge

As an academic doctor, books about history are the only thing I can legally prescribe. Altogether, I have written almost four thousand prescriptions. Not every patient (student) has taken their medicine, which led me to reconsider the way I practiced history. Was the $80 textbook I assigned at a community college based on a proper diagnosis of my students? Was the textbook that was even more expensive (but mostly full of pictures) the right book for my students at a research institution? Clearly not. But where could I find better medicine that would address my patients’ chief complaint—over-priced textbooks that failed to address their academic ailments? Similar to the pharmaceutical industry, a growing army of textbook reps responded by offering new editions of old books at prices that outpaced inflation.

The Arab World As It Was Seen Fifty Years Ago

by Daniel Pipes

"Once mellowed and moldering, the far-flung civilization of the Arabs is being swept today by invigorating winds of change. A fruitful kind of disorder is replacing the old fixed patterns of life." Those contemporary-sounding words were published in 1962, in a glossy, picture-laden, 160-page book titled The Arab World.The editors of Life magazine produced "The Arab World."The volume boasts three virtues that make it worth a review a precise half-century later. First, the editors of Life magazine, then the outstanding American weekly, produced it, implying cultural centrality. Second, a retired senior State Department official, George V. Allen, wrote the introduction, pointing to the book's establishment credentials. Third, Desmond Stewart (1924-1981), an acclaimed British journalist, historian, and novelist, wrote the text.

Comparing the British Giants: Niall Ferguson and Tony Judt

by Nick Shepley

Last October, a furious row broke out between conservative historian Niall Ferguson and writer Pankaj Mishra, who reviewed Ferguson's latest book Civilization: The West and the Rest in the London Review of Books. Mishra wrote a lengthy and critical essay about the book, prompting threats of libel action from Ferguson.Mishra claimed that Ferguson's argument required: "...sustained and complex analysis, not one hell-bent on establishing that the West was, and is, best."The results were predictable. Mishra, while acknowledging Ferguson's impressive scholarship, accused him of dismissing evidence that didn't fit his thesis out of hand.The Ferguson argument, which questions how and why Europe and then America have had such a long period of wealth and power, and whether this period is now at an end, taps deeply into a growing body of thought about the state of Western society, and its ability to project power globally.

How to Write a Good Memoir (It Helps If You Were Once Targeted by the Unabomber)

by Lawrence S. Wittner

As I’m not a famous politician, movie star, or athlete, people might well wonder how I -- a mere historian and academic -- ended up writing my recently-published autobiography, Working for Peace and Justice: Memoirs of an Activist Intellectual. In fact, sometimes I wonder about it myself.

An Interview with Ambassador David Scheffer, the Architect of the Modern War Crimes Tribunals

by Robin Lindley

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. ― Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.Mass atrocities in the Balkans, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and elsewhere shocked the world in the 1990s. The human toll and horror were incomprehensible in these savage conflicts, which saw a resurgence of concentration camps, “ethnic cleansing,” genocide with machetes and farm implements, the “new” war crime of mass rape, mutilations to terrorize populations into submission, and other innumerable assaults on life and property.In light of these horrific crimes, a key component of U.S. foreign policy under the Clinton administration in the 1990s became the pursuit of international justice and a determination to prevent and punish atrocities, including genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

Does Mimi Alford's New Memoir Finally Mean the Death Knell for the Camelot Myth of JFK?

by Vaughn Davis Bornet

The confirmation of the philandering JFK.

Should We Really Still Like Ike? Interview with Stephen Schlesinger

by David Austin Walsh

Dwight D. Eisenhower's presidential reputation has been on the uptick for the past several years. His presidency has been traditionally eclipsed by the glamor and tragedy of the Kennedy administration in popular memory, but academics have been more kind: a 1999 C-SPAN poll of historians ranked Ike eighth of all the presidents. And his place in public imagination may be growing: In a 2005 Gallup poll, Ike cracked the top ten amongst the general public for greatest president in history, and most recently in a 2012 Harris poll was named the fifth-greatest president since World War II (he was only beat by Reagan, FDR, JFK, and Clinton).Ross Douthat, an op-ed writer for the New York Times, devoted a column last Sunday to Eisenhower's successes as president. He attributed Ike's modest performance in popular and scholarly rankings to the fact that the Eisenhower administration eschewed crowd-pleasing "greatness" in favor of consistency and competence.

IBM’s Role in the Holocaust? New Documents Confirm the Worst

by Edwin Black

Newly-released documents expose more explicitly the details of IBM’s pivotal role in the Holocaust—all six phases: identification, expulsion from society, confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, and even extermination. Moreover, the documents portray with crystal clarity the personal involvement and micro-management of IBM president Thomas J. Watson in the company’s co-planning and co-organizing of Hitler’s campaign to destroy the Jews. IBM’s twelve-year alliance with the Third Reich was first revealed in my book IBM and the Holocaust, published simultaneously in 40 countries in February 2001. It was based on some 20,000 documents drawn from archives in seven countries. IBM never denied any of the information in the book; and despite thousands of media and communal requests, as well as published articles, the company has remained silent.

The Expansion and Transformation of NATO ... The Real Clinton Doctrine

by Lee Ruddin

William Jefferson Clinton is the 16th presidential profile in the American Experience series to be broadcast on PBS. The president programs have, to date, won a litany of honors including Emmys, Peabodys and DuPont-Columbia Journalism Awards. They have been particularly well-received for highlighting the contradictory nature of the commanders-in-chief. Previous installments include FDR ("a man who could not walk [that] led a crippled country"), Truman (a self-proclaimed "sissy" who dropped the A-bomb), LBJ (an individual who lived a "Jekyll and Hyde existence"), Nixon (a politician who "rose to power as a crusader against communism only to make his most lasting mark as building bridges to China and the Soviet Union"), Carter (a personality comprised of "hubris arrogance [as well as] Christian humbleness"), Reagan (a chief executive who was "ideological in his rhetoric yet pragmatic in his actions") and Bush ("an emotive … emotional leader [who] refused to show his emotions").

Washington Weathered a Terrible Economy and Great Power Rivalry Before ... in 1842

by Alasdair Roberts

On March 9, 1842, a young Charles Dickens arrived in Washington D.C. He was lionized in the city, as he had been everywhere since landing in Boston seven weeks earlier.  Senators William C. Rives of Virginia and Nathanial P. Tallmadge of New York gave him a personal tour of the Capitol. Former president John Quincy Adams entertained him on a Sunday afternoon. President John Tyler honored him at a White House levee. "Mr. Dickens receives the best hospitalities in Washington," the Alexandria Gazette reported on March 17, "and is delighted with almost everything that he sees in our country."

The Forgotten Bomb: Interview with Documentary Producer Craig Collie on the Destruction of Nagasaki

by Robin Lindley

Kokura’s luck: Avoiding a catastrophic event you didn’t even know was threatened. Japanese expressionJust three days after Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atomic bomb attack in history, an American B-29 dropped a second nuclear device on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, incinerating a large area of the city and killing an estimated 80,000 people.           If there is such a thing, the bombing of Nagasaki was a tragedy of errors. The original target of the second atomic bomb was the arms manufacturing city of Kokura but bad weather and mechanical failure saved Kokura and, rather than dropping the $2 billion bomb in ocean, the B-29 “Bockscar” flew onto and destroyed its secondary target, Nagasaki. That bomb, nicknamed “Fat Man,” was the first  plutonium weapon in history, made from material produced at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State.

The Context Behind Hitler's WWI Lovechild

by Julian T. Saltman

Newspapers are abuzz over the news that Adolf Hitler may have fathered a son with a French teenager while serving in the German Army during the First World War. According to the initial story in the French magazine, Le Point, Hitler, while serving in a Bavarian infantry unit near Seboncourt, met a sixteen-year-old French girl named Charlotte Lobjoie. After meeting and becoming friendly, a night of drinking in 1917 led to the conception of a boy, Jean-Marie Loret, who later died in 1985.Whether or not this particular story is true is unclear; there is certainly a tremendous amount of anecdotal and circumstantial evidence to support the possibility, but the picture is still murky. What is perfectly clear, however, is that such incidents happened frequently during the First World War, and are an important part of the war’s lasting resonance.

Western Trailblazers of the Atomic Age and Beyond: Interview with John Findley and Bruce Hevly

by Robin Lindley

The strong man with the dagger is followed by  the weak man with the sponge. —Lord ActonDuring the Second World War, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation on the banks of the Columbia River in south central Washington State attracted thousands of workers to the desolate and sparsely populated area.  Few of the workers knew the aim of the Hanford project until an atomic bomb fueled with Hanford-produced plutonium incinerated the Japanese city of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, and hastened the end of the war.

Why I Still Like Ike

by William Astore

The ongoing controversy over the national memorial to President Dwight D. Eisenhower provides us with an opportunity to recall Ike's legacy and his deeper meaning to America. Ike was of course a national hero, the supreme allied commander who led the assault at D-Day on June 6, 1944 and who later served as president during the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. His legacies are many and profound, from ending the Korean War to the interstate highway system that bears his name to advancing civil rights to creating the space program to the establishment of the department of health, education and welfare.As important as Ike's deeds were to our country, in some way his words were (and are) even more important, especially in this time of constant war and bloated budgets for "defense" and our burgeoning trade in deadly weaponry.

Rediscovering Walt Whitman's Soldiers

by Lenore Barbian, Paul Sledzik, and Jeffrey S. Reznick

It is a remarkable fact that the National Museum of Health and Medicine (NMHM) holds thousands of anatomical specimens from soldiers injured during the American Civil War. More remarkable is that four of these specimens originate from soldiers who the poet and essayist Walt Whitman nursed in the wartime hospitals of Washington, D.C. A study published in the January 2012 issue of the Museum History Journal unites these remains with Whitman’s words to yield a new interpretation of individual sacrifice during a time of unprecedented conflict in American history.The impetus for this study followed a reading of Roy Morris’s The Better Angel, in which Morris ties the development of Whitman’s Civil War writings to his experiences of caring for wounded soldiers. Morris’s discussion of these soldiers treated by Whitman and Whitman’s own writings about these soldiers prompted the authors—then curators at the NMHM—to explore the collections for evidence of these soldiers. A search revealed specimens from four soldiers—John Mahay, Oscar Wilbur, Oscar Cunningham, and Frank Irwin—still housed within the museum.

The Tortured History between Israel and the Left

by Colin Shindler

Why is the far Left so antagonistic towards Israel? Such fixation is no doubt fuelled to a great degree by the forty-year long settlement drive on the West Bank and the political inanities of a succession of right-wing governments in the country. But its deeper roots lie in the age of decolonization.

Channelling George Washington: America's Forgotten Blessing

by Thomas Fleming

 “I bet you can’t tell me one of the most important—and totally forgotten—blessings that enabled our American experiment to survive its first perilous decades.” “An electorate who could read and write?” “Important, but not in the way I’ve been thinking. I’ll give you a hint. I’ve got a birthday coming up—my 280th. Birthdays induce thoughts of births, of children, wouldn’t you say?” “Undoubtedly—but I can’t connect children to politics.” “They’ve always been powerfully connected, and never more so than in the eighteenth century. It was still the era of kings. We were the world’s first republic, trying to survive without a royal family to create loyalty and affection in the minds and hearts of the people.”

What Happened to the Statesman?

by Frank Uekoetter

Looking back on 2011 from the safe distance of February 2012, it seems that there are two things that one can safely state about last year: first, that it was a year full of epochal events, and second, that we have no idea about what they will mean in the longer term. From the Arab world to the eurozone, we see completely undecided states of affairs: established structures have been challenged or swept away, but the new is still evolving. Even more, it is difficult to imagine certainty about the new structures any time soon. 2011 may have been the overture for a decade of instability.

No Place Like Home—Interview with Historian Susan J. Matt on Homesickness in American History

by Robin Lindley

Our national mythology celebrates the exploits of swashbuckling adventurers and pioneers and explorers and immigrants who cut their ties to their homes and their past, traveled widely, and never looked back. Americans today see themselves as a dynamic and mobile people and often dismiss the sense of homesickness as juvenile and unrefined.But cultural historian Susan J. Matt presents a contrasting view of our past in her groundbreaking study of the profound sorrow and longing for home felt by the uprooted in America from colonial Jamestown to the present-day world of email and Skype in her new book Homesickness: An American History (Oxford). As Dr. Matt recounts, today’s marginalized condition of homesickness was once considered a fatal disease. She learned, for example, that the Union Army reported that 74 troops died of homesickness during the Civil War and thousands more were granted leave to go home and recover from severe symptoms.