Roundup: Talking About History

Edmund S. Morgan, Marie Morgan: Our Shaky Beginnings

In the procession of anniversary celebrations by which we congratulate our predecessors for begetting us, 2007 is the year to honor our shaky beginnings at Jamestown, Virginia. The 108 men and boys who stepped ashore on May 14, 1607, and the four or five thousand who followed them in the next fifteen years were the victims of a failed business enterprise. But enough of them survived starvation and disease, their sponsors' negligence, and their own mistakes to start the first permanent settlement

Ian Stewart: Number Symbolism ... Lincoln and Kennedy

[Ian Stewart is a science writer, science fiction writer, and a professor of mathematics at the University of Warwick in England. ] Humanity has had a love-hate relationship with numbers from the earliest times.  This relationship is especially appropriate to discuss this week, as yet another Friday the 13th rolls around.  As I explain in greater length in my entry on “number symbolism” for Encyclopaedia Britannica, the enormous range of symbolic roles that numbers have

Ronald Radosh: Cold War Liberalism

Two years ago, TNR's Peter Beinart argued in his book The Good Fight, that a vibrant liberal tradition advocating a tough but realistic foreign policy was the heart of a mainstream liberal foreign policy. As reviewer James A. Lindsay explained in The Washington Post Book World, "In the years following World War II, it was Democrat Harry S. Truman who developed a coherent and compelling vision of national greatness in the dangerous world. The Cold War liberalism--a term Beinart takes as a co

James C. Cobb: Official slavery apologies are bad for blacks

[James C. Cobb is Spalding Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Georgia. His most recent book is Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity (Oxford University Press, October 2005). ] ... Addressing racial inequality is definitely a good thing, but pursuing official slavery apologies as a means of doing so could hurt blacks more than it may help them--particularly those whose circumstances most reflect the disparities that apology advocates seek to address.

Henry Porter: As the 400th anniversary of Jamestown nears, its spiritual father is being unjustly ignored

... We are flush with anniversaries. The abolition of slavery on 25 March 1807 is still being observed. Ahead of us are the anniversaries of the Act of Union and the founding of Jamestown, to be marked by the Queen's state visit to Williamsburg and Washington, DC, in May. British history, or at least the history of English expansion, is flashing past us with unnerving and, perhaps in Scotland, consequential speed. Anniversaries prompt questions and suggest reassessment, particularly

Noemie Emery: Reinventing Ronald Reagan

[Noemie Emery, a WEEKLY STANDARD contributing editor, is author most recently of Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.] Ronald Reagan is weeping. There, on the cover of the March 26 Time magazine, under the headline "How the Right Went Wrong," we see the old lion, a tear rolling out of his eye and snaking down sadly over the contours of his aging, but still good-looking, once-was-a-movie-star face. And what is he mourning? The state of his party, la

Edward Rothstein: Colonial Williamsburg upgraded

... Colonial Williamsburg, where all this took place (about 150 miles south of Washington), is variously called a historical village or a living museum. But that means much more now than it once did. Aside from dramatizing historical controversies, the town is also caught up in living ones: debates about who writes history and how it is told, about what historical realism is and how it should be portrayed, even about what aspects of our past are to be celebrated in this strange combination of ed

Matt Frehner: Holocaust, Schmolocaust

[Frehner is editor in chief.] History is full of assholes. Hitler being one of the worst, though of course there were others. The BBC reported on Monday that a number of British schools are planning to avoid teaching the Holocaust in history classes for fear of upsetting Muslim pupils. Other contentious subjects include the Crusades, the slave trade, the history of Israel and gravity. According to a government-funded report, “Staff may wish to avoid causing

Uri Avnery: Israelis and Palestinians Raise Another Bloody Generation

[Uri Avnery is a journalist, peace activist, former member of the Knesset and leader of Gush Shalom.] Incredible! In Palestinian schoolbooks, there is no trace of the Green Line! They do not recognize the existence of Israel even in the 1967 borders! They say that the"Zionist gangs" stole the country from the Arabs! That's how they poison the minds of their children! These blood-curdling revelations were published this week in Israel and around the world. The conclusion is sel

Eric Stoner: King's Prophetic Call for Peace

[Eric Stoner is a writer based in New York, who has written for numerous publications, including The Nation and the Peoria Journal Star. he can be reached at ericstoner1@gmail.com.] Forty years ago this week, on April 4, 1967, and a year to the day before his tragic assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. rose to the pulpit of New York's Riverside Church to deliver one of the most controversial speeches of his life.   Entitled "

Richard Garner: The End of (Ancient) History (UK)

Ancient history is to become a thing of the past, with the only exam board offering it as an A-level subject now planning to ditch the course. The decision by the Oxford and Cambridge and Royal Society of Arts (OCR) exam board has led to concerns that pupils will no longer understand the legacies of ancient civilisations. The subject has introduced students to topics such as the birth of Athenian democracy, the growth of the Roman Empire, the beginnings of Christianity,

Charlene Mires: The history of the Liberty Bell illustrates both freedom and its numerous limitations

[Charlene Mires (charlene.mires@villanova.edu) is associate professor of history at Villanova University, the author of "Independence Hall in American Memory" and a member of the President's House Oversight Committee.] The Liberty Bell. USA. First-Class. Forever. Philadelphia's famously flawed symbol will get a boost next week when the U.S. Postal Service rolls out its new "Forever" stamp, good for fi

Benjamin Schwarz: It's time to revise your understanding of the war on the eastern front (WW II)

It’s time for those (mostly male) readers interested in the Second World War to put down that umpteenth account of D?Day and turn to the new crop of books on the most colossal conflict the world has ever seen: the German-Soviet clash on the Eastern Front. Since the late 1980s, a historiographical revolution has been under way, as scholars fundamentally alter their understanding of this epic struggle, which killed 27 million Soviet soldiers and civilians and nearly 4 million Wehrmacht troops. The

Theodore K. Rabb: Narrative, Periodization, and the Study of History

[Theodore K. Rabb is emeritus professor of history at Princeton University. Among his many books and articles are Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry Investment in the Expansion of England, 1575-1630 (Harvard University Press, 1967) and Jacobean Gentleman: Sir Edwin Sandys, 1561-1629 (Princeton University Press, 1998). ] ... If there is no “basic” story to tell, even within nations, let alone for the West, then any account is as good as any other. Common criteria dissolve; th

Brooke Allen: Moral Minority–America’s Skeptical Founding Fathers

[Writer Brooke Allen, whose most recent book is Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers, is now a blogger at Britannica.] I was interested to read the blog postings by Joseph Ellis and Michael and Jana Novak, having recently completed a book on the religious beliefs of the Founding Fathers. I was initially inspired to write the book after hearing from various politicians and pundits the statement that the United States h

Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon: The Martin Luther King You Don't See on TV

[Jeff Cohen is the author of"Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media." Norman Solomon's book"War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death" is out in paperback.] It's become a TV ritual: Every year on April 4, as Americans commemorate Martin Luther King's death, we get perfunctory network news reports about "the slain civil rights leader." The remarkable thing about these reviews of King's life is that several years -

James Castagnera: Remembering Ronald Reagan

[Jim Castagnera is a Philadelphia lawyer and writer, and the Associate Provost/Associate Counsel at Rider University, Lawrenceville/Princeton, NJ.] Don’t you always wonder how tough the he-men of the silver screen really are? I’ve always wondered about that. John Wayne, for instance… his real name was Marion Morrison. Was he the real-life equivalent of “A Boy Named Sue,” or was he a wimp? From “Flying Tigers” (1942) to “Sands of Iwo Jima” (1949), the Duke fought World War II on movie s

Ben Yagoda: A Brief History of Memoir-Bashing ... It's almost as old as the memoir itself.

Way, way back in the day, before memoirs lost its s, when all the memoirs that had ever been written could fit in a couple of modest bookcases, the form represented a brilliant innovation in genre. Or so it seemed to Samuel Johnson. Writing in 1759, he observed that the best kind of biography was one in which"the writer tells his own story." Such books benefited from their authors' total command of the subject, Johnson argued: "Certainty of knowledge not only excludes mistake, but fortifies v

Robert Dallek: The Kissinger Presidency

[Battered by Watergate in 1973, President Nixon was losing his epic power struggle with Henry Kissinger. Then the Middle East exploded. In an excerpt from his new book, using freshly opened archives, the author describes how the secretary of state took control. ] Henry Kissinger never wanted the 20,000 pages of his telephone transcripts made public—not while he was alive, at any rate. And for good reason. It was Kissinger's practice while he served as Richard M. Nixon's national-securi

Maria Grasso: What's behind the latest bout of handwringing over the display of shrunken human heads in a museum in Oxford?

[Maria Grasso is researching a DPhil on the decline of political activism in Western Europe at Nuffield College, Oxford University.] Recent reports suggest that some of the staff at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, England, are feeling increasingly uncomfortable with the museum’s famous ‘shrunken heads’ exhibit. They’re planning a review of the exhibit with an eye for making it more ‘respectful’, and there are even rumours of the heads being repatriated to South America. How true i