Roundup: Talking About History

Frank Dikötter: Why Does China Still Hide Evidence of Mao's Great Famine?

Frank Dikötter is chair professor of humanities at the University of Hong Kong and author of Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962. For decades, the Soviet Union hid its horrors behind the Iron Curtain. The worst of them was Joseph Stalin's man-made famine in Ukraine and southern Russia, the result of his program of forced rural collectivization that claimed the lives of 7 to 10 million people in 1932 and 1933. Land, property, livestock, even houses were requisitioned as farmers became state employees forced to deliver ever higher grain quotas. Those who resisted or tried to hide food were deported to the Gulag or executed. Whole parts of the Ukrainian countryside turned into death zones. Millions perished, yet Stalin managed to silence all talk of the famine, sending those who breathed a word of it to labor camps in far-off Siberia. The census data, which would have shown a huge spike in mortality rates, were locked away for half a century. But even before the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union, Communist Party leaders in Ukraine started investigating the famine in their own party archives.

Charles Emmerson: 2013 Eerily Similar to 1913

Charles Emmerson is the author of the forthcoming 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War and is a senior research fellow at Chatham House. The leading power of the age is in relative decline, beset by political crisis at home and by steadily eroding economic prowess. Rising powers are jostling for position in the four corners of the world, some seeking a new place for themselves within the current global order, others questioning its very legitimacy. Democracy and despotism are locked in uneasy competition. A world economy is interconnected as never before by flows of money, trade, and people, and by the unprecedented spread of new, distance-destroying technologies. A global society, perhaps even a global moral consciousness, is emerging as a result. Small-town America rails at the excessive power of Wall Street. Asia is rising once again.

Benjamin Schwarz: Everything You Know About the Cuban Missile Crisis is Wrong

Benjamin Schwarz is The Atlantic’s literary editor and national editor....Scholars ... have ... known a very different story [of the Cuban Missile Crisis than the traditional pro-Kennedy narrative]: since 1997, they have had access to recordings that Kennedy secretly made of meetings with his top advisers, the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (the “ExComm”). Sheldon M. Stern—who was the historian at the John F. Kennedy Library for 23 years and the first scholar to evaluate the ExComm tapes—is among the numerous historians who have tried to set the record straight. His new book marshals irrefutable evidence to succinctly demolish the mythic version of the crisis. Although there’s little reason to believe his effort will be to any avail, it should nevertheless be applauded.

Robert W. Merry: Spengler's Ominous Prophecy

Robert W. Merry is editor of The National Interest and an author of books on American history and foreign policy, including Sands of Empire: Missionary Zeal, American Foreign Policy, and the Hazards of Global Ambition (Simon & Schuster, 2005), from which portions of this article were adapted. A question haunts America: Is it in decline on the world scene? Foreign-policy discourse is filled with commentary declaring that it is. Some—Parag Khanna’s work comes to mind—suggests the decline is the product of forces beyond America’s control. Others—Yale’s Paul Kennedy included—contend that America has fostered, at least partially, its own decline through "imperial overstretch" and other actions born of global ambition. Still others—Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution and Stratfor’s George Friedman, for example—dispute that America is in decline at all. But the question is front and center and inescapable. It may be the wrong question. America is a product of Western civilization—part and parcel of it, inseparable from it. Thus, no serious analysis of America’s fate as a global power can be undertaken without placing it within the context of the West, meaning primarily Europe. Kagan disputes this.

Philip Johnston: The Magna Carta ... An Old Piece of Parchment that Made England a Nation

Philip Johnston is The Daily Telegraph's Assistant Editor. Forty years ago today, the United Kingdom joined what was then called the European Economic Community. Where is the celebratory bunting? Why do we not run up those blue flags with gold stars on them and whistle Beethoven’s Ode to Joy? The fact that we are not commemorating what by any measure was a momentous occasion in our national story speaks volumes about our semi-detached relationship with Europe. Almost from the day Edward Heath walked us up the aisle, this has been a loveless marriage with which we have struggled to come to terms. Largely, this was due to the circumstances that brought about the nuptials and how our motivation for joining differed from that of our continental neighbours. They were wedded to the idea of an ever-closer political union to avoid a repeat of the wars that had twice reduced many of their towns and cities to rubble in the previous 70 years. For our part, we were more interested in the economic than the community bit of the EEC.

Andrew Gilligan: The EU ... So Where Did it All Go Wrong?

Andrew Gilligan is London editor for the Sunday Telegraph. In the first week of 1973, the week Britain joined the Common Market, the Government put on a festival of European culture so that the British people could share what their Prime Minister, Edward Heath, called his "heart full of joy" at their country’s shiny new Euro-future. Alas, the "Fanfare for Europe", though now entirely forgotten, ended up symbolising the ambivalence of the 40-year relationship that has followed. A plan to borrow the Bayeux Tapestry and show it in Westminster Hall was dropped after it was pointed out that the butchery of Saxons by Normans was hardly a suitable theme for the occasion. Instead, the centrepiece was a showcase of European treasures at the V&A – the French refused to lend the Mona Lisa, despite Heath’s personal plea, on the grounds that the British Museum had just refused them a loan of the Rosetta Stone. As an alternative, with a certain unintended symbolism, they offered Georges de la Tour’s Le Tricheur, a picture of someone cheating at cards. There was also, among other things, an exhibition of European sweets at the Whitechapel Art Gallery; a "Dutch breakfast" and food festival at a London hotel; and co-ordinated demonstrations of "Continental cooking" at Scottish gas and electricity board showrooms.

Martin Kettle: The Full Story of the British Empire is Yet to be Told

Martin Kettle is an associate editor of the Guardian. The first things the visitor sees are the treasure chests. Strong and functional yet ornately decorated, the ranks of chests against the wall are a silent reminder of an eloquent truth. The building of a global empire is principally about the commodity the original owners of these imposing boxes hoped to fill them with: money. In Amsterdam, the city museum has just opened a fascinating new exhibition. They call it simply De Gouden Eeuw (The Golden Age). The age in question is the one that followed the 16th-century Dutch revolt against Spanish rule. The Netherlands became a world power within the space of not much more than a generation. It was also an age of Dutch enlightenment, the age of Rembrandt, Spinoza, Grotius and Huygens. In those years, Amsterdam was the capital of the world. That era has long been called the Dutch golden age by historians. Yet an exhibition like this raises wider questions for all postcolonial European nations, including Britain. Can any age of empire, which this certainly was for the Netherlands, be described in something like an exhibition as a golden age?

Eric Foner: The Emancipation of Abe Lincoln

Eric Foner is a professor of history at Columbia and the author, most recently, of “The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery.”ONE hundred and fifty years ago, on Jan. 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln presided over the annual White House New Year’s reception. Late that afternoon, he retired to his study to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. When he took up his pen, his hand was shaking from exhaustion. Briefly, he paused — “I do not want it to appear as if I hesitated,” he remarked. Then Lincoln affixed a firm signature to the document.Like all great historical transformations, emancipation was a process, not a single event. It arose from many causes and was the work of many individuals. It began at the outset of the Civil War, when slaves sought refuge behind Union lines. It did not end until December 1865, with the ratification of the 13th Amendment, which irrevocably abolished slavery throughout the nation.

Henry Allen: Why Do Americans Love Guns? They’re Part of Our Culture

Henry Allen, who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2000, was a Post editor and reporter for 39 years.Let me dust off my favorite Sufi parable. A man loses a ring inside his house. A friend sees him crawling around outside and asks, “If you lost your ring in the house, why are you looking for it here?” “You fool,” says the man, “the light is much better out here.” And so it goes with people looking for solutions to gun killings in America. We’re talking about the very best people, the people with statistics and proposals for regulation, crawling around in the sunlight of their social-scientific rationality. They never find a solution because all their legislation, academic studies, mathematical proofs, and proposals for waiting periods, background checks and buying limits aren’t going to do much more than they ever have. Nor are the pleas of the progressives asking why anyone would ever want to own a gun — thereby demonstrating their arrogance toward the people who own the hundreds of millions of guns in the United States. Both the problem and the solution lie elsewhere, in what historian Richard Hofstadter called “America as a Gun Culture.”..

Justin Dyer: Fictional Abortion History

Justin Dyer teaches political science at the University of Missouri. He is the author, most recently, of Slavery, Abortion, and the Politics of Constitutional Meaning (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press).

Stanley Kutler: Robert Bork ... A Pass on Watergate, Not ‘Original Intention’

[Stanley Kutler is the author The Wars of Watergate (Norton), Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes (Free Press), The American Inquisition: Cold War Political Trials (Hill & Wang), numerous other books and articles, and with Harry Shearer the forthcoming television series, “Nixon’s the One.”]

Justin Peters: 80 Years Later, Remembering the Deadliest School Massacre in U.S. History

Justin Peters is an editor at the Columbia Journalism Review. The recent shootings in Newtown, Conn., have led many people to characterize school violence as a modern affliction, a byproduct of our national obsession with guns and media violence. But the deadliest school-related massacre in American history happened in 1927, at an elementary school in Bath, Mich. A school board member named Andrew Kehoe, upset over a burdensome property tax, wired the building with dynamite and set it off in the morning of May 18. Kehoe’s actions killed 45 people, 38 of whom were children. At the time, Bath was a small farm community with under 300 residents. The town had "an elevator, a little drugstore, and you knew everybody within 20 miles," as one survivor of the attack recalled in 2009. Perhaps its most modern feature was the Bath Consolidated School, which opened its doors in 1922 and brought all the region’s students under one roof. In The Bath School Disaster, published in 1927 and available online here, Kehoe’s neighbor, Monty J.

Kelly Candaele: Film History: Columnists and Historians Assess Spielberg’s 'Lincoln'

Kelly Candaele is a journalist, filmmaker and elected official in Los Angeles. He has written extensively for the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Nation Magazine and the Huffington Post. His documentary films include, A League of Their Own (about his mother’s years in the All American Girls Professional Baseball League), When Hope and History Rhymed (about the Northern Ireland Peace Process), Second Chances – Union Made, and El Clasico – More Than a Game (about Spanish history and politics as seen through the soccer rivalry between Real Madrid and FC Barcelona). Mr. Candaele is an elected Trustee of the Los Angeles Community College District and was a union organizer in Los Angeles for 20 years.ONE OF THE MOST gratifying aspects of Steven Spielberg’s movie Lincoln has been the debate that its release has generated among historians and journalists, a debate more important than the movie itself. What were the complex dilemmas that Lincoln faced as President? What were the political realities and conduct of the time? How should we interpret the decisions that Lincoln and others made? What role did slaves and free blacks play in their own liberation?

Danielle McGuire: It’s Time to Free Rosa Parks from the Bus

Danielle McGuire is the author of "At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance-a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power." She is an Assistant Professor in the History Department at Wayne State University, and a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. She lives with her husband and two children in metro Detroit. (CNN) - In 2011, Rosa Parks was in the news, six years after her death. An excerpt from a breathtaking essay she wrote in the 1950s about a “near rape” by a white man in Alabama was released to the public.  The handwritten narrative detailed Parks' steely resistance to a white man, “Mr. Charlie," who attempted to assault her in 1931 while she was working as a domestic for a white family.It was late evening when “Mr. Charlie” pushed his way into the house and tried to have sex with her.  Having grown up in the segregated South, she knew all too well the special vulnerabilities black women faced. She recalled, for example, how her great-grandmother, a slave, had been “mistreated and abused” by her white master.

Michael Oren: The Shared Roots of Hanukkah and Christmas

Michael Oren is a historian and Israeli ambassador to the United States.WASHINGTON — Growing up in the only Jewish family in my New Jersey neighborhood, I always felt left out at Christmas. Our house alone lacked decorative lights, wreaths, and reindeer. Instead, we had a small menorah which, even when all nine candles were lit on the last night of Hanukkah, cast a modest light.At school, we sang Christmas carols and the town’s center boasted a glowing tree. While I enjoyed watching my friends unwrap their gifts on Christmas morning, I was keenly aware that their holiday was unrelated to mine. While they were blessing the birth of a new faith, we were celebrating the survival of the Jewish people from spiritual annihilation.I eventually moved to Israel where, each December, Hanukkah hymns jam the airwaves and Dec. 25 — unless it falls on the Sabbath — is a regular work day. Still, Israel has the only growing Christian community in the Middle East and, on Christmas, the country’s churches are packed. Near my home in Jerusalem, the road to Bethlehem teems with pilgrims, their path illuminated by festive lights....

Doyeun Kim: South Korea's Forgotten War

Doyeun Kim is a student at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. Many young South Korean men today describe the two years they are required to serve in the military as "wasted time." It is an imposition on their prime years -- when they could be getting ahead in their education, getting a job, or meeting their life partner, they spend 21 to 24 months in a sort of man camp. Of course, they are trained to defend the country from North Korea, but that is usually the third or fourth thing they mention, when asked to talk about what the military experience means for them."The day I completed my service was the best day of my life by far," said Chung Minjae, 24, who served 23 months as a Korean Augmentation To the United States Army (KATUSA) at the American base in Seoul from 2008 to 2009.KATUSA conscripts serve alongside approximately 28,500 U.S. troops that remain stationed in South Korea today since the Korean War ended in a cease-fire, not a peace treaty, in 1953. The American presence and joint operation with South Korea continue to play a major role in deterrence efforts against aggression from North Korea. "The hardest thing being in the army is that you are stuck in one place [...] for two years while everyone else continues to move on with their lives," Chung told me.

Robin Wilson: Who are the Northern Irish? The Census and Violence Over a Flag

Robin Wilson founded the Belfast-based think-tank Democratic Dialogue. He now works as an independent researcher. Last week, Belfast City Council voted to flag the Union Jack only on designated days, sparking protest. What does this say about Northern Ireland today, and does it tally with the recent census results? There is a very simple moral reason why the violent protests against the regulated flying of the Union flag at Belfast City Hall should be condemned. Because they are fascist. Freedom of expression and association depend on respect for the democratic process, the rule of law and the human rights of others. These universal norms have been defied by the campaign of intimidation in recent days. But there is another, factual, reason. Among the protesters have been generals, including some loyalist paramilitary figures. The 2011 census results, just out, show a reduced gap between the proportion of Protestants and Catholic residents in Northern Ireland. In the country’s chronically mistrustful political culture, some may think this an additional reason to be fearful. They should calm down. First of all, this ‘rugby score’ tally, as the former Community Relations Council chief Duncan Morrow has called it —now 48 to the Protestants, 45 to the Catholics —is the product of a statistical wheeze which is quite disreputable.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: Who Led the 1st Back-to-Africa Effort?

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research at Harvard University. He is also the editor-in-chief of The Root.The person who spearheaded "the first, black initiated 'back to Africa' effort in U.S. history," according to the historian Donald R. Wright, was also the first free African American to visit the White House and have an audience with a sitting president. He was Paul Cuffee, a sea captain and an entrepreneur who was perhaps the wealthiest black American of his time. Cuffee was born on Cuttyhunk Island, off Southern Massachusetts, on Jan. 17, 1759, and died on Sept. 7, 1817. He was one of 10 children of a freed slave, a farmer named Kofi Slocum. ("Kofi" is a Twi word for a boy born on Friday, so we know that he was an Ashanti from Ghana.) Kofi Anglicized his name to "Cuffee."Paul's mother was Ruth Moses, a Wampanoag Native American. He ended up marrying a member of the Pequot tribe from Martha's Vineyard, Alice Pequit.  

Rachel N. Schnepper: Yuletide’s Outlaws

Rachel N. Schnepper is a junior faculty fellow in history at Washington and Lee University.EACH year, as wreaths and colored lights are hung on any structure that can support their weight, another holiday tradition begins: the bemoaning of the annual War on Christmas.The American Family Association has called for boycotting Old Navy and the Gap for, out of political correctness, not using the term “Christmas” in their holiday advertising. Parents have criticized schools for diminishing Christmas celebrations by giving equal time to Hanukkah and Kwanzaa. And the Catholic League used to have a Christmas “watch list” for naming and shaming “Christmas kill-joys.”Anxiety over the War on Christmas is, in other words, an American tradition. But few realize how far back that tradition goes. The contemporary War on Christmas pales in comparison to the first — a war that was waged not by retailers but by Puritans who considered the destruction of Christmas necessary to the construction of their godly society.

Timothy Egan: In Ignorance We Trust

Timothy Egan worked for The Times for 18 years – as Pacific Northwest correspondent and a national enterprise reporter.A packet of letters arrived the other day from the honors English class at St. Lawrence School in Brasher Falls, N.Y. Snail mail, from high school sophomores? Yes, and honest, witty and insightful snail mail at that. They had been forced to read a book of mine.“Personally, I don’t like reading about history or learning about it,” wrote one student, setting the tone for the rest of the class.“The Dust Bowl? Really?” So began another missive. “When we heard we were reading your book…heads dropped. Let me rephrase that, heads fell to the floor and rolled down the hallway.”You get the drift: history is a brain freeze. And, writers of history, well, there’s a special place with the already-chewed gum in nerd camp for them. But as I read through the letters I was cheered. Some of the last survivors of the American Dust Bowl were high school sophomores when they were hit with the nation’s worst prolonged environmental disaster. In that 1930s story of gritty resilience, the Brasher Falls kids of 2012 found a fresh way to look at their own lives and this planet....