Roundup: Talking About History

Robert Elder: Remembering Lincoln

Robert Elder is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts at Valparaiso University.

Jon Wiener: Another Watergate Gap

The Nixon Presidential Library and Museum opened a new exhibit in Yorba Linda and online Feb. 15, "Patriot, President, Peacemaker." It covers Richard Nixon's entire life, like the permanent installation there, and claims to present "a fuller picture" than ever before.

Manisha Sinha: Lincoln Again

Manisha Sinha is a professor of Afro-American studies and history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of “The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina” and the forthcoming “The Slave’s Cause: Abolition and the Origins of America’s Interracial Democracy.”The “Lincoln industry,” through which Abraham Lincoln has become the most-written about American, used to be confined to historians and other writers. But between the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth in 2009 and the sesquicentennial of the Emancipation Proclamation in 2013, a period during which the nation’s first black President continuously paid homage to the sixteenth President, Lincoln has come to reign unchallenged in popular culture too, nowhere more so than in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln,  which was considered by many an Oscar favorite. Perhaps historical criticism has proven to be a kiss of death for the film’s chances.

Jim Cullen: How Six Oscar Winners Tell the Story of America

Jim Cullen is chairman of the history department at the Fieldston School in New York and author of "Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions" (Oxford University Press). A box office is not a voting booth, but they have their similarities. Neither is entirely democratic in the ways it offers choices, and each is a little too deferential to market forces. But both tell stories about the state of the nation, produced by teams that are fronted by star performers.In politics, some of the most successful performers take on multiple roles. Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama: Their stories have offered versions of the country — where it had been, where it was headed. Some were stories of restoration, others of progress.In the Republic of Hollywood, it’s movie stars, not politicians, who rule. And in Hollywood, as in politics, one of the recurring themes is our national ambivalence about powerful institutions — religious, economic, military or political — and their influence over everyday life.

Charles Moore: Harold Wilson Night: The PM Who Lived and Died by Television

Charles Moore covers politics with the wisdom and insight that come from having edited The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph and The Spectator.No one but the BBC would have dreamt up a “Harold Wilson Night”. It is hard to think of any other politician who was at the top for so long (he won four general elections) with so little to show for it. But it is fitting that the BBC should have commemorated the 50th anniversary of Wilson’s capture of the Labour leadership because, at the time, it loved him.In the general election of 1964, Wilson spotted that the BBC comedy Steptoe and Son would be broadcast on polling day. Believing that the programme (about father-and-son rag-and-bone men) was particularly popular with Labour voters, and would therefore keep them away from the polling stations, Wilson went to see Hugh Greene, the director-general, to persuade him to reschedule. Greene, who craved a Labour victory, obliged. Since Wilson’s overall majority was only four seats, it is possible that it was the Beeb wot won it.

Lucinda Matthews-Jones: Facebooking the Past

Lucinda Matthews-Jones is a lecturer in history at Liverpool John Moore (UK), where she teaches nineteenth-century British History. Details of her research can be found on her academia.edu profile. She also blogs and co-edits the Journal of Victorian Culture: www.victorianculture.com. She tweets from @luciejones83.Digital databases have provided scholars with new ways to access source material. Have we been quick enough to extend these benefits to our students? As a history lecturer, I am keen to encourage students to get their hands dirty by exploring a number of different kinds of primary source databases. Just before Christmas, I decided that I wanted to use digital sources in a different way. I wanted my students not just to find source material but also to use it, digitally, in ways that showed their understanding of lecture topics.There was also a practical reason for this change of gear. Having recently been appointed to a new lectureship, I was faced with a new challenge: how to devise a 28 week long nineteenth century gender history module that would not necessarily rely on the traditional lecture/seminar format that I had been used to.

Keith Harris: Can Social Media Bridge the Gulf Between Academic Historians and the Public?

Keith Harris blogs at Cosmic America and holds a PhD in history from the University of Virginia.Greetings Cosmic Americans!Of course, I believe that the answer is yes. This summer, I will take part in a panel at the Civil War Institute’s annual conference at Gettysburg College with fellow Civil War bloggers Kevin Levin, Brooks Simpson, and Mark Grimsley. The so-called “gulf” is one of the principal issues that I will be addressing.Years ago, before the Internet opened the doors for real-time access to just about anyone anywhere in the world, the television historical documentary probably stood alone as the medium most likely to serve as the middle ground on which academic historians and an informed public might relate.

Justin E. H. Smith: The Enlightenment’s ‘Race’ Problem, and Ours

Justin E. H. Smith teaches philosophy at Concordia University in Montreal. His most recent book is “Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life.” He is a contributing editor of Cabinet Magazine, and writes regularly on his blog.In 1734, Anton Wilhelm Amo, a West African student and former chamber slave of Duke Anton Ulrich of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, defended a philosophy dissertation at the University of Halle in Saxony, written in Latin and entitled “On the Impassivity of the Human Mind.” A dedicatory letter was appended from the rector of the University of Wittenberg, Johannes Gottfried Kraus, who praised “the natural genius” of Africa, its “appreciation for learning,” and its “inestimable contribution to the knowledge of human affairs” and of “divine things.” Kraus placed Amo in a lineage that includes many North African Latin authors of antiquity, such as Terence, Tertullian and St. Augustine.

Sarah Carr: In Southern Towns, 'Segregation Academies' Are Still Going Strong

Sarah Carr is a contributing editor at The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University, and author of the forthcoming book Hope Against Hope.It took LaToysha Brown 13 years to realize how little interaction she had with white peers in her Mississippi Delta town: not at church, not at school, not at anywhere.The realization dawned when she was in the seventh grade, studying the civil rights movement at an after-school program called the Sunflower County Freedom Project. It didn't bother her at first. By high school, however, Brown had started to wonder if separate could ever be equal. She attended a nearly all-black high school with dangerous sinkholes in the courtyard, spotty Internet access in the classrooms, and a shortage of textbooks all around. Brown had never been inside Indianola Academy, the private school most of the town's white teenagers attend. But she sensed that the students there had books they could take home and walkways free of sinkholes."The schools would achieve so much more if they would combine," said Brown, now age 17 and a junior.

Sean Wilentz: Cherry-Picking Our History

Sean Wilentz is George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History at Princeton and author of The Rise of American Democracy. (February 2013)Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick’s new book and accompanying ten-part televised documentary have a misleading title. Most if not all of the interpretations that they present in The Untold History of the United States—from the war in the Philippines to the one in Afghanistan—have appeared in revisionist histories of American foreign policy written over the last fifty years. Challenged by early reviewers, Stone and Kuznick have essentially conceded the point about their sources and claimed that what they call the “revisionist narrative” that informs their book has in truth become “the dominant narrative among university-based historians.”

Mark Auslander: Enslaved Labor and Building the Smithsonian -- Reading the Stones

And what erudition. He can even read stone. Only he never figures out that the veins in the marble of Diocletian's baths are the burst blood vessels of slaves from the stone quarries.

Corey Robin: The Question of Palestine at Brooklyn College, Then and Now

Corey Robin is an American political theorist, journalist and associate professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.In 1942, Brooklyn College hired a young instructor to teach a summer course on Modern European history. Though academically trained, the instructor was primarily known as the author of a series of incendiary articles in the Jewish press on Jewish politics and Zionism.An active though ambivalent Zionist, the instructor did not shy from scorching criticism of the movement for Jewish settlement in Palestine. She had already come to some unsettling conclusions in private. In an unpublished essay, she compared the Zionists to the Nazis, arguing that both movements assumed that the Jews were “totally foreign” to other peoples based on their “inalterable substance.” She wrote in a letter that she found “this territorial experiment” of the Jews in Palestine “increasingly problematic.” By the spring of 1942, she was more public in her criticisms. In March, she wrote that the Irgun—the Jewish paramilitary group whose most prominent commander was Menachem Begin—was a “fascist organization” that “employed terrorist methods in their fight against Arabs in Palestine.”

Patrick French: The Truth About Mahatma Gandhi ... He Was A Wily Bigot, Not India’s Smiling Saint

Patrick French is the author of India: A Portrait. This week, the National Archives here in New Delhi released a set of letters between Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and a close friend from his South African days, Hermann Kallenbach, a German Jewish architect. Cue a set of ludicrous "Gay Gandhi" headlines across the world, wondering whether the fact the Mahatma signed some letters "Sinly yours" might be a clue (seemingly unaware that "sinly" was once a common contraction of "sincerely"). The origin of this rumour was a mischievous book review two years ago written by the historian Andrew Roberts, which speculated about the relationship between the men. On the basis of the written evidence, it seems unlikely that their friendship in the years leading up to the First World War was physical. Gandhi is one of the best-documented figures of the pre-electronic age. He has innumerable biographies. If he managed to be gay without anyone noticing until now, it was a remarkable feat.

Mehdi Hasan: Today We Remember Lincoln as a Great Redeemer - And That Should Give Obama Hope

Mehdi Hasan is political director of The Huffington Post UK and a contributing writer to the New Statesman. Steven Spielberg's Lincoln is a spectacular movie - "less a biopic than a political thriller, a civics lesson... alive with moral energy", in the words of the New York Times review. Sitting in a preview screening in Soho Square, I cried. I couldn't help it: the story of how Lincoln pushed the Thirteenth Amendment through a divided House of Representatives in the space of just four months, thereby abolishing the institution of slavery for ever, only to be assassinated, was too moving and melodramatic for even this cynical writer to bear. The film presents Lincoln as an eloquent and noble commander-in-chief, an intensely moral man and a champion of black America.

Richard Gott: As Illness Ends Hugo Chávez’s Rule in Venezuela, What Will His Legacy Be?

Richard Gott is a writer and historian. He is the author of Cuba: A New History, published by Yale University Press. An atmosphere of sadness and imminent tragedy has taken over the towns and cities of Venezuela as Hugo Chávez nears death. For so long portrayed in the west as a buffoon or a socialist firebrand, this immensely important political figure has suddenly begun to be treated with dignity and respect. What is not yet understood is that Chávez, who is suffering from cancer, has been the most significant ruler in Latin America since Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba in January 1959, more than half a century ago. Such extraordinary and charismatic people emerge rarely in history; they leave an imprint that lasts for decades. I have long been a supporter of Chávez, writing and talking about him since he first emerged as a serious and revolutionary political contender in the middle of the 1990s.

Robert Whiting: Saying UnSorry ... Japan's New PM and His Country's Apology for World War II

Robert Whiting is the author of Tokyo Underworld and You Gotta Have Wa, among other books. He has lived in Japan for 35 of the past 50 years. In late December, newly installed Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced that he will revisit Japan's 1995 apology for the suffering the country wrought in Asia during World War II. That apology admitted that the Japanese Imperial Army had forced females, mostly from Korea, China, Japan, and the Philippines, known euphemistically as "comfort women," to work in brothels during the Japanese occupation. "This is entirely inexcusable," the prime minister at the time, Tomiichi Murayama, said in a statement.

Richard Striner: 'Hurrah for Old Abe'

Richard Striner, a history professor at Washington College, is the author of “Lincoln and Race.”Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863, but the immediate reactions for and against it reverberated loudly throughout the following month.Almost all abolitionists and radical Republicans, even those who had condemned Lincoln’s methods as being too cautious, were thrilled. William Lloyd Garrison, the venerable abolitionist, called the occasion “a great historic event, sublime in its magnitude and beneficent in its far-reaching consequences.” The radical Republican Benjamin Wade proclaimed, “Now, hurrah for Old Abe and the proclamation!”Black Americans were naturally likewise jubilant. The minister Henry Highland Garnet called Lincoln “the man of our choice and hope” and said that the proclamation was “one of the greatest acts in all history.” Frederick Douglass said much the same thing: the proclamation was “the greatest event in our nation’s history.”

James Grossman and Elaine Carey: An Undisciplined Report on the Teaching of History

James Grossman is executive director of the American Historical Association. Elaine Carey is vice president for the Teaching Division of the association and chair of the history department at St. John's University, in New York.Historians welcome informed debate. It is precisely what attracted many of us to the discipline in the first place. Thus our initial reaction to a recent report by the National Association of Scholars, "Recasting History: Are Race, Class, and Gender Dominating American History?," was to engage the ideas, explore the research model, and open a conversation about different ways of understanding history. This report, however, does not contribute to informed debate.

Richard Pells: The Obsession With Social History

Richard Pells is professor of history emeritus at the University of Texas. He is the author of four books on modern American culture, most recently Modernist America: Art, Music, Movies, and the Globalization of American Culture (Yale University Press, 2011).The National Association of Scholars recently released a report excoriating the teaching of American history at the University of Texas at Austin and, to a lesser extent, at Texas A&M University at College Station.The report argues that there is an almost monomaniacal preoccupation in American-history courses withon the issues of race, class, gender, and ethnicity. Meanwhile, it argues, not enough attention is being paid to the history of American politics, economics, and culture, and the military.The report has caused considerable fury among University of Texas historians,and it has apparently incensed American historians at other universities as well. Its critics have accused the association's writers of being conservative assailants who don't know what they're talking about.It's true that the NAS is a conservative organization. Yet being conservative does not by itself make an organization uninformed or invalidate its report....

Mark Joseph Stern: Did Chernobyl Cause the Soviet Union To Explode?

Mark Joseph Stern is a Slate intern.At 1:23 a.m. on April 26, 1986, Reactor 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded, following a disastrously ill-judged systems test by undertrained technicians. As surplus energy surged through the reactor, its core combusted, immediately killing nearby workers and exposing others to deadly levels of radiation. In the nearby town of Prypiat, Ukraine, people woke up to respiratory distress and nausea. Emergency response workers encased the reactor in a concrete sarcophagus and, unprepared for exposure to radioactivity, became stricken with severe symptoms of radiation poisoning. Tens of thousands of Soviet citizens filed into Chernobyl to help, considering it their patriotic duty; all were exposed to dangerous levels of radiation with no warning from the government. It took two days for the explosion to be announced, in vague terms, on the national news; not until Sweden discovered a radiation cloud that had drifted across Europe was the true extent of the Chernobyl explosion revealed.