Roundup: Talking About History

James Verini: The Cult of Massoud

James Verini is a Foreign Policy contributor based in Nairobi.The first sign of officialdom you see when you drive from the Kabul airport parking lot is a government billboard looming above a traffic jam. It's the size of a highway billboard in the United States, but closer to the ground, so that you can make out every nuance of the faces on it. Those faces belong to, on the right of the coat of arms of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai, and on the left, slain Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, dead some 11 years. With Karzai, you note those tired eyes and that child's chin, unaided by a trimmed gray beard. Massoud comes off vastly more dashing. He appears to be in conference with the heavens: The eyes smolder from within, the strong chin and bushy goatee angle out like a divining rod. A pakol, the traditional hat of the Hindu Kush, sits like a column capital on his head.

Michael Barone: Grand Old Parties ... The Republicans and Democrats Retain Their Original Character

Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.

Thomas Meaney: Chicken Wire and Telephone Calls: On Robert Caro’s LBJ

Thomas Meaney is a doctoral candidate in history at Columbia University and an editor of The Utopian.Robert Caro has been tracking his great white whale for thirty years now. As with any undertaking of this scale, an aura of legend attaches to the labor. First there is the Ahab-like devotion with which he has pursued the life of Lyndon Baines Johnson. In 1977, not long after publishing his epic biography of Robert Moses, New York City’s master builder, Caro decamped to Texas Hill Country for three years to take in the air of LBJ’s childhood. He spent a night outdoors in a sleeping bag to better fathom the desolation of the territory. Along with his wife, Ina, he has combed through every possible archive and ballot box; his appetite for firsthand impressions from LBJ’s entourage is matched only by his allergy to post-1960 scholarship.

Tom Rollins: The Ghost of Yasser Arafat

Tom Rollins is a freelance journalist.

Lee Ruddin: Alistair Cooke ... A Modern Proponent of the Unsentimental Anglo-American Relationship

Lee Ruddin is Roundup Editor at HNN. He lives in England.The state of the American economy, not surprisingly, dominated the recent presidential election. What was surprising, though, was the fact that the state of relations with Britain likewise featured, albeit less prominently. Headlines like ‘Romney would restore “Anglo-Saxon” relations between Britain and America’ (July 15, Telegraph), ‘Would a President M[itt] Romney do the special relationship better than Obama?’ (July 27, Birds on the Blog), and ‘Can ... Romney rescue the special relationship?’ (October 15, The Daily Caller) certainly made readers think about a Republican administration.Now that Obama has been re-elected, however, sentimental Anglophiles are best to tune into -- before reading the history of Anglo-American relations to understand that a President Romney would only have, at best, affected the Whitehall-Washington relationship stylistically and not substantially – BBC Radio 4’s series on Alistair Cooke (In Alistair Cooke’s Footsteps by Alvin Hall), since Cooke was an individual who succeeded in bringing the two countries closer together in unsentimental understanding and helped transform the image of America for the ordinary, working-class Briton.

James T. Patterson: Everything You Know About the 1960s is Wrong

Excerpted with permission from “The Eve of Destruction: How 1965 Transformed America,” by James T. Patterson. Available from Basic Books, a member of The Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2012.Late 1964 was a buoyant time for the majority of Americans: a prosperous year that promoted extraordinarily high expectations about the future. As in the previous twenty years, large numbers of people were flocking to buy houses in the suburbs and climbing into the middle classes.If there could have been a nationwide soundtrack for late 1964, it would have been especially upbeat, featuring hit songs by the Supremes (“Baby Love,” “Come See About Me”), the Beatles (“A Hard Day’s Night,” “I Feel Fine”), and the Beach Boys (“I Get Around”).

Michael Sontheimer: The Rise, Fall and Rebirth of Germany's Capital

Michael Sontheimer is a German historian and journalist. One might be tempted to draw comparisons, but it can also become an obsession. Still, that's exactly what Berliners tend to do, at least when it comes to their city. Whenever it happens, Berlin suddenly isn't good enough for them, and they constantly feel compelled to draw comparisons -- not with just any old cities, but with the crème de la crème. "Berlin, the German metropolis, can once again measure up to the likes of London, Paris and New York," the city's then-mayor said shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The die-hard residents of the German capital don't like to aim any lower than that. They see Berlin as the sassy little sister of London, Paris and New York, a city that successfully contended for a spot in the exclusive family of cosmopolitan cities in the 1920s. Berlin went into decline during the Nazi era and after it was divided into a free west and communist east. But Berliners like to think that, since Germany's reunification in 1990, the city has been on a path to rejoining the club of the world's great cities. The obsession with comparisons was already widespread in Berlin in the 1860s.

Walter Isaacson: The America Ben Franklin Saw

Walter Isaacson is chief executive of the Aspen Institute. He has written biographies of Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs and Henry Kissinger.When he was a young man, Benjamin Franklin wired together a set of batteries he had just invented and used them to shock turkeys slated for a Thanksgiving feast. Thus he added yet another invention to his list: the fried turkey. "The birds killed in this manner eat uncommonly tender," he wrote.After election seasons such as the one past, and when facing "fiscal cliffs" like the one looming, it’s therapeutic to gaze back through history’s haze and catch the eye of Franklin, the Founding Father who winks at us. The twinkle behind his bifocals reassures us that things will turn out all right.

Frank Jacobs: Thanksgiving is Un-American

Frank Jacobs is a London-based author, journalist, and blogger. Few U.S. folk customs are as popular and as quintessentially American as Thanksgiving. A rich thread of tradition connects the First Feast, famously celebrated almost four centuries ago by Pilgrims and native Americans at Plymouth Plantation, with the modern president's annual pardon of a turkey, officially the Luckiest Bird in America. But not only is the annual turkey-fest wholly American in origin, it is also -- like American football and the Fahrenheit scale -- as ubiquitous at home as it is rare overseas. Compare that to, say, Halloween or Santa Claus, two holiday phenomena that have struck deep roots in global culture in a still-recognizable American format. Perhaps why Thanksgiving hasn't become globalized is because it is the festive celebration of American exceptionalism -- a marker of the country's unique position in the world. How much, really, can other nations have to be thankful for, compared to the country that put men on the moon, won two World Wars and one Cold War, and with might and right on its side appropriated +1 as its telephone country code? But hold on a moment: Thanksgiving isn't all that typically American... 

Madeleine Johnson: Why the Pilgrims Thrived at Plymouth

Madeleine Johnson is a science writer and former neuroscientist. Rat urine. As we feast on succulent turkey, moist stuffing, and glistening cranberry sauce this Thanksgiving, the furthest thing from our minds is probably rat urine. Yet it’s quite possible that America as we know it would not exist without rat urine and leptospirosis, the disease it spreads. The disease conveniently cleared coastal New England of Native Americans just prior to the Pilgrims’ arrival and later killed the helpful Squanto. It still lurks among us, underdiagnosed, an emerging menace. In the winter of 1620, the Mayflower happened to dock at an abandoned village. It had been known in the local Wampanoag language as Patuxet. Pilgrims rejoiced; the land "hath been planted with corn three or four years ago, and there is a very sweet brook runs under the hillside." In fact, the French explorer Samuel de Champlain had observed what would become Plymouth harbor 15 years earlier and drew a map of native homes surrounded by fields of corn. Where had all the people gone?

Scott McConnell: Immigrants Against Empire

Scott McConnell is a founding editor of The American Conservative. Nearly 40 years ago, Daniel Moynihan and Nathan Glazer wrote that "the immigration process is the single most important determinant of American foreign policy." Immigration determined the ethnicity of the electorate to which our foreign policy responds. "It responds to other things as well, but first of all to the primary fact of ethnicity." The two scholars did not elaborate, but probably had in mind the ferocious political conflicts over American intervention in World Wars I and II, in which an Anglo-American establishment eventually prevailed over fierce opposition to intervene on Britain’s side.

Michael Newton: The Assassin’s Creed ... Were the Assassinations of Lincoln and Kennedy World-changing Events?

Michael Newton is the author of Age of Assassins. It was a grey January day in St Petersburg in 1878 when Vera Zasulich, a young nihilist, made the short journey to the office of the city’s governor, General Fyodor Trepov. Here the general listened to petitions and examined complaints. A crowd of people had gathered in the cold. Zasulich waited in line for her turn to approach the great man. At last they spoke, and just as Trepov was turning from her to deal with the next supplicant, she pulled a gun from under her cloak and fired at him at point-blank range. The bullet burst into his pelvis, wounding but not killing him. Zasulich threw down the gun, stood quite still, and waited to be arrested. They beat her, of course, and then bundled her into a room, and then wondered a little feebly what to do with her next. As they deliberated in the immediate aftermath of her deed, Zasulich moved from moments of dissociation and strangeness to an honest desire to offer advice to her baffled captors. Her words are quoted in a collection of revolutionary-era Russian memoirs, Five Sisters: Women Against the Tsar, edited by Barbara Alpern Engel and Clifford N Rosenthal: My foresight, and consequently my precise plan of action, did not extend beyond the moment of attack.

John Arquilla: Casualties of History ... The Thing We Shouldn't Forget About the Origins of Veterans Day

John Arquilla is professor of defense analysis at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and author of Worst Enemy: The Reluctant Transformation of the American Military. All of our nation's veterans are honored on November 11, but it is important to recall that the origin of this observance was revulsion at the horrific casualties suffered by so many countries during World War I. Yes, a second and even more destructive conflict followed all too soon after the "war to end all wars," impelling a name change from Armistice Day to Veterans Day. And the rest of the 20th century was littered with insurgencies, terrorism, and a host of other violent ills -- most of which persist today, guaranteeing the steady production of new veterans, of which there are 22 million in the United States. But despite the seemingly endless parade of wars waged and fresh conflicts looming just beyond the bloody horizon, World War I still stands out for its sheer horror. Over ten million soldiers died, and more than twice that number were wounded. This is a terrible enough toll. But what makes these casualties stand out even more is their proportion of the total numbers of troops mobilized.

Yang Jisheng: China’s Great Shame

Yang Jisheng, deputy editor of the historical journal Yanhuang Chunqiu and a former editor at the Xinhua News Agency, is the author of “Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962.” This essay was translated by Guo Jian from the Chinese.THIRTY-SIX million people in China, including my uncle, who raised me like a father, starved to death between 1958 and 1962, during the man-made calamity known as the Great Famine. In thousands of cases, desperately hungry people resorted to cannibalism.The toll was more than twice the number of fallen in World War I, and about six times the number of Ukrainians starved by Stalin in 1932-33 or the number of Jews murdered by Hitler during World War II.

William N. Brown: The Right Way to Remember the Great War

The writer is the president of the Association of the Oldest Inhabitants of the District of Columbia.As we pause this Veterans Day to remember Americans who have served in the armed forces, I’d like to draw attention to an unresolved legislative issue that casts a shadow over an important moment of remembrance that will soon be upon us: the World War I centennial.This year, Rep. Ted Poe (R-Tex.) finally set aside a long-standing attempt to “nationalize” the D.C. World War I Memorial on the Mall. Unfortunately, the plan Poe has put forward in its place isn’t much better. He now seeks up to $10 million to create a World War I memorial on the other side of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, in Constitution Gardens. The time and effort it would take to proceed with this initiative — not to mention the $10 million — would go a lot further if it were used instead to enhance the existing John J. Pershing Memorial and Pershing Park in time to mark the centennial of the Great War....

Glenn W. LaFantasie: From the Civil War to James Bond in One Quick Step

Glenn W. LaFantasie is the Richard Frockt Family Professor of Civil War History at Western Kentucky University. He is working on a book about Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant. When I set out in the early 1990s to write a short biographical piece on Col. William C. Oates, the Confederate commander of the 15th Alabama Infantry, who failed to dislodge Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and his 20th Maine Regiment from the slopes of Little Round Top at Gettysburg on July 2, 1863, I had no idea where the project would take me.  For one thing, that brief sketch led eventually — some 15 years later — to my writing a biography of Oates, cradle to grave.  For another thing, it showed me how close our connections are to the past and how relevant is William Faulkner’s comment that the past is not dead; in fact, it’s not even past....

Michael Trimble: The Evolutionary and Social History of Crying

by Michael Trimble

Michael Trimble is an emeritus professor of behavioral neurology and a consultant neuropsychiatrist at the Institute of Neurology, University College London, and the author of the forthcoming book “Why Humans Like to Cry: Tragedy, Evolution, and the Brain.” IN 2008, at a zoo in Münster, Germany, a gorilla named Gana gave birth to a male infant, who died after three months. Photographs of Gana, looking stricken and inconsolable, were ubiquitous. “Heartbroken gorilla cradles her dead baby,” Britain’s Daily Mail declared. Crowds thronged the zoo to see the grieving mother. Sad as the scene was, the humans, not Gana, were the only ones crying. The notion that animals can weep — apologies to Dumbo, Bambi and Wilbur — has no scientific basis. Years of observations by the primatologists Dian Fossey, who observed gorillas, and Jane Goodall, who worked with chimpanzees, could not prove that animals cry tears from emotion....

Lee Ruddin: The Anglo-American Unspecial Relationship of 1942-44

The relationship between Tony Blair and George W. Bush is likely to take center stage once more as we approach the tenth anniversary of the Iraq War. In the decade since, op-ed writers of all political stripes have pin-pointed the “unspecialness” of the British-American relationship to March 2003 when the UK supposedly fell in line with U.S. policy demands, purportedly without much hesitation or reservation, and marched in line onto the dusty plains of Mesopotamia.   Listening to Martha Kearney’s two-part program, GI Britain (BBC Radio 4), however, I would pin-point 1942 (the year in which some historians direct students of Anglo-American history to look upon as the start of the “special relationship”) as the annus horribilis in UK-U.S. relations and the start of the unspecial relationship between Whitehall and Washington.

Jennifer L. Anderson: Exotic Mahogany, a History of Violence and Deception

Jennifer L. Anderson is a professor of history at Stony Brook University. She is the author of “Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America.” The opinions expressed are her own.In 1780, Benjamin Franklin commissioned a large mahogany box from a London craftsman. His instructions for this custom-made item, intended to house a delicate scientific instrument, were unusually precise. In particular, he urged that special care be taken in selecting the mahogany because, in his words, there was “a great deal of difference in woods that go under that name.” He desired the “finest grained that you can meet with.”Franklin’s suspicions about what passed for mahogany suggest his awareness of a growing problem at the time: The precious trees were being rapidly depleted. Consequently, the size and quality of available mahogany was becoming increasingly erratic.

Richard Seymour: The British Have Invaded 90% of the World's Countries. Ha Ha?

Richard Seymour is a political activist who blogs at Lenin's tomb. He is the author of The Liberal Defence of Murder and The Meaning of David Cameron.