Roundup: Talking About History

James M. Lindsay: Who Were the Most and Least Successful Foreign Policy Presidents?

James M. Lindsay is Senior Vice President, Director of Studies, and Maurice R. Greenberg Chair at the Council on Foreign Relations.As a teaser for next month’s presidential debates, CNN.com’s Global Public Square asked a group of “historians and commentators” to offer their judgments on which presidents enjoyed the most success on foreign policy and which enjoyed the least.  I was lucky enough to be invited to weigh in. GPS posted the picks for most successful foreign policy president yesterday, and it posted the picks for least successful foreign policy presidents today.

Brent Huffman: Ancient Site Needs Saving, Not Destroying

Brent Huffman is a documentary filmmaker and assistant professor at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. He started making a film about the Mes Aynak site in the summer of 2011 thinking he would be documenting the site before it was demolished and recording the process of rescue archeology. Now he hopes he can use his film to raise awareness to actually save Mes Aynak. (CNN) -- Please bear with me as I ask you to briefly use your imagination. Close your eyes. Imagine Machu Picchu at dawn cloaked in fog. Now imagine the fog slowly lifting to reveal an enormous ancient city perched on the edge of a mountain.Picture a sense of mystery being immersed in thousands of years of history as you walk between antiquated hewn stone structures. There is tranquility in the wind-blown stillness of the primeval site. You feel a renewed sense of kinship with the past and with your ancestors and feel a deep reverence for their lives and accomplishments.

Richard Vinen: Imperial Dreams Still Haunt Britain

Richard Vinen teaches history at King’s College London and is the author of Thatcher’s Britain.George Orwell wrote that the loss of empire would reduce England to a “cold and unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live on herrings and potatoes”. It has not turned out like that. The British live better than ever before. Herring is a pungent delicacy enjoyed by the Borough Market-going classes. In spite of this, it is widely held to be political suicide for any British leader to suggest that their country might have a future that does not involve “greatness”. Indeed, the only politician to have taken such a stance was that great kamikaze of the backbenches, Enoch Powell. Even Harold Macmillan, who was particularly qualified to understand the great sweep of history, managed to feign outrage when it was suggested that Britain was no longer a first-rate power. The party conferences will probably feature calls to “put the Great back in Great Britain”. But does anyone believe that Britain can be great again and does anyone, really, think it matters?..

Allen Guelzo: How Lincoln Saved the 'Central Idea' of America

Mr. Guelzo, professor of history and director of the Civil War Era Studies Program at Gettysburg College, is the author of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (Simon & Schuster, 2004).

James Martin: Mr. and Mrs. Jesus Christ?

The Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest, is a contributing editor to the Catholic magazine America and the author of “Between Heaven and Mirth: Why Joy, Humor, and Laughter Are at the Heart of the Spiritual Life.”AT an academic conference in Rome on Tuesday, Karen L. King, a church historian at Harvard Divinity School, presented a finding that, according to some reports, threatened to overturn what we know about Jesus, as well as the tradition of priestly celibacy. She identified a small fragment of fourth-century papyrus that includes the words, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife...’ ” Another clause appears to say, “she will be able to be my disciple.” Some experts have concluded that the manuscript, written in Coptic, is authentic.But does this mean that Jesus was married? Probably not. And will this fascinating new discovery make this Jesuit priest want to rush out and get married? No.

Eric Foner: The Emancipation Proclamation at 150 ... Abraham Lincoln's Turning-Point

Eric Foner is DeWitt Clinton professor of history at Columbia University, New York. He is the author of many books, including, most recently, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (2010), which has been awarded the 2011 Pulitzer prize for history.

John Fund: Re-branding Guevara ... Che the Butcher

John Fund is national-affairs columnist for NRO.

Tony Platt: The Case For and Against Richard Aoki

Tony Platt is Visiting Professor of Justice Studies at San Jose State University.The blogs are full of charges and countercharges about journalist Seth Rosenfeld's claim (in his recent book, Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power and published articles) that Black Panther Party cadre Richard Aoki was a "paid FBI informer."Here are a few thoughts about the debate:Rosenfeld's claim that Aoki was an FBI informant takes up only a few pages in his 734-page book and is not central to his argument. Rosenfeld, however, chose to publish an article about Aoki on the release date of his book, thus making the topic appear central to his book.Rosenfeld's piece about Aoki, published in the San Francisco Chronicle on August 20th, summarizes what appears in Subversives, namely that Aoki was "an undercover FBI informer." His evidence is based on an interview with Aoki's FBI handler, internal FBI records, the expertise of an ex-FBI agent, and an interview with Aoki. Rosenfeld's book thoroughly documents his evidence and is persuasive.

Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey: The Contested Color of Christ

Edward J. Blum is an associate professor of history at San Diego State University, and Paul Harvey is a professor of history at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. They are the authors of The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America, just published by the University of North Carolina Press.In a world filled with images of Jesus, this one made headlines. He stood in a stained-glass window wearing a simple white robe and a dark tunic. When sunlight struck the glass just so, kindness radiated from his white face and warmth from his brown eyes. This was a comforting Jesus, and for decades he had been with this black congregation in Birmingham, Ala. But on Sunday morning, September 15, 1963, less than three weeks after Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed his dream of racial equality, dynamite set by white supremacists exploded outside the 16th Street Baptist Church, and four little girls who had gone to the basement lounge to freshen up were dead. The face of Jesus shattered into a thousand shards of glass. In the blink of an eye, the prince of peace was a casualty of racism.

Evan Thomas: The Brilliant Prudence of Dwight Eisenhower

Evan Thomas is the author of eight books, including The War Lovers and Sea of Thunder. Editor-at-large of Newsweek until 2010, he was the author of more than 100 cover stories there and won numerous journalism awards, including a National Magazine Award. He teaches writing at Princeton. Dwight Eisenhower is a president whose reputation has improved over time. When he left office, he was regarded as a genial, grandfatherly figure but also as a caretaker who was a little out of it. At the time, in January 1961, his Farewell Address presciently warning against the "military-industrial complex" was little noticed; far more attention was paid to JFK's soaring (and, in hindsight, overreaching) inaugural speech, promising to "bear any burden."

Jeff M. Smith: A Forgotten War in the Himalayas

Jeff M. Smith is the Kraemer Strategy Fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council and author of a forthcoming book on Sino-Indian relations. 

Akhil Reed Amar: Happy 225th Birthday, U.S. Constitution!

Akhil Reed Amar is the Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale and the author of America's Constitution: A Biography....The most powerful portents of the future are to be found in America’s existing state constitutions, the proverbial laboratories of American democracy. These 50 documents have converged to form a distinctly American model of governance—call it “American exceptionalism,” if you like. For example, unlike the regimes in various democratic countries around the world—England, Germany, France, Israel, India, Australia—almost all 50 states follow the same basic formula, featuring (1) ratified written constitutions, (2) bicameral legislatures, (3) chief executives who look remarkably like mini-presidents, and (4) robust bills of rights enforceable in ordinary courtrooms....

Louis P. Masur: Liberty Is a Slow Fruit

Louis P. Masur is the author of Lincoln's Hundred Days: The Emancipation Proclamation and the War for the Union. He is a professor of American studies and history at Rutgers University.William Lloyd Garrison, the fiery abolitionist editor of the Liberator, had struggled for decades to see slavery abolished, but when Abraham Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862, the long-awaited action came as a disappointment. Garrison was furious. Lincoln’s decree would free the slaves in rebel-controlled areas in the seceded states on January 1, 1863, a hundred days away. The delay was intended to give the Confederate states a chance to return to the Union and thus prevent the proclamation from applying to them. Lincoln also believed that the public needed time to digest this unprecedented development. “The President can do nothing for freedom in a direct manner, but only by circumlocution and delay,” lamented Garrison, who on an earlier occasion declared, “If he is 6 feet 4 inches high, he is only a dwarf in mind.”

Michael Collins: The Neil Armstrong I Knew — and Flew With

Michael Collins, a retired Air Force major general, was the command module pilot of Apollo 11. He remained in lunar orbit while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed in the Sea of Tranquility in July 1969. Before manned space flights began, officials pondered what background they should seek in the crew for this bizarre new venture: Danger lover? Bullfighter? Mountain climber? Should they search for people who were self-aware and calm in extreme conditions? A deep-sea diver, perhaps? Finally, they settled on — and President Dwight Eisenhower supported — experimental test pilots, people who had already guided complex new flying machines. Thus the original seven astronauts were selected in 1959.

Jennifer Burns: Top 3 Differences between The Colbert Report and The Daily Show

Jennifer Burns is Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University and the author of Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. A nationally recognized authority on Rand and conservative thought, she has discussed her work on The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Book TV, and has been interviewed on numerous radio programsHow does being a guest on The Colbert Report compare to being a guest on The Daily Show? Here’s a breakdown!...

Jerusalem Post Editorial: Refugees and Peace

‘Palestinians" are the first people to come to mind when the word "refugee" is uttered in a Middle East context. And Palestinians have paid dearly to reinforce this misconception.Largely dispossessed by their fellow Arabs, Palestinians have lived as second-class citizens in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere in the region. Palestinians’ dismal treatment by their Arab brethren is undoubtedly due in part to strongly held prejudices and exclusionary nationalist loyalties.But the perpetuation of the Palestinian "refugee" problem has also served as a means of undermining the legitimacy of Israel, as if it was the Jewish state – not extremist, uncompromising and sorrowfully incompetent Palestinian leadership – which was responsible for the flight of Palestinians from Palestine after the failed attempt to violently snuff out the State of Israel at conception.In reality, however, there was at least one additional population movement in the region around the same time...

Lee Ruddin: 9/11 ... The Brits Who Stood with America in Its Darkest Hour

Lee Ruddin is Roundup Editor at HNN. He lives in England. Reading Lynne Olson’s Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood with Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour made me think of the British officials who supported America during its hour of need 11 years ago. The Bush Administration was caught like a rabbit in the headlights back in 2001, as the symbols of America’s economic and military power lay smouldering, but three Brits ensured that their transatlantic cousins did not stand alone. Given the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I feel it is both a worthwhile and timely exercise to recall the support given by Tony Blair, Alastair Campbell, and Sir Richard Dearlove.  London at the time of Blitz was a city in peril, with Hitler’s Luftwaffe bombing almost nightly, and the capital burning throughout the day. Yet three Americans – Edward R. Murrow (CBS radio broadcaster), W. Averell Harriman (a Roosevelt appointee to administer the “Lend-Lease” program), and John Gilbert Winant (U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s) – witnessed the suffering of Londoners up close and personal and, says Olson, suffered with them. Her book wonderfully illustrates that the presence of three Americans in the heart of Blitz-hit London illuminated beyond any doubt just how much America really cared for and assisted Britain.

Andrew Cohen: A September 11th Catastrophe You've Probably Never Heard About

Andrew Cohen is a contributing editor at The Atlantic and legal analyst for 60 Minutes. He is also chief analyst and legal editor for CBS Radio News and has won a Murrow Award as one of the nation's leading legal analysts and commentators.On September 11, 1957, 55 years ago tomorrow, a national catastrophe was unfolding, one you likely have never heard about before. At the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons facility near Denver, inside the plutonium processing building, a fire had started in an area designed to be fireproof. Soon it was roaring over, through, and around the carefully constricted plutonium as one Cold-War-era safety feature after another failed. The roof of the building, the building itself, were threatened. And plumes of radioactive smoke went straight up into Colorado's late summer night air. High into the air, if you believe the witnesses.

Padraig Mac Carron and Ralph Kenna: If Achilles Used Facebook...

Padraig Mac Carron is a doctoral student and Ralph Kenna is a reader in mathematical physics at Coventry University in England.WHEN we pick up a mythological text like “The Iliad” or “Beowulf,” we like to imagine that the societies they describe existed. Even if the stories are fiction, we believe that they tell us something about ancient Greece or the Anglo-Saxons, and that some of the characters and events were based on reality....To investigate that question, we turned to a decidedly modern tool: social-network analysis. In a study published in Europhysics Letters, we use a mathematical approach to examine the social networks in three narratives: “The Iliad,” “Beowulf” and the Irish epic “Tain Bo Cuailnge.” If the social networks depicted appeared realistic, we surmised, perhaps they would reflect some degree of historical reality....

Ryan L. Cole: Why the War of 1812 is Our Second War of Independence

Ryan L. Cole is a freelance journalist.Louis Serurier, a French diplomat stationed in Washington in the early 19th century, observed that the War of 1812 lent America “what it so essentially lacked, a national character founded on a common glory to all.” The American war effort was hardly flawless, and the final outcome may have been inconclusive, but battling Great Britain to something resembling a draw gave an adolescent country a sense of national purpose, some international prestige, and a final, definite separation from the Crown.But the two intervening centuries have been unkind to that legacy. The war’s bicentennial, now upon us, has so far mostly offered commentators a chance to reflect on how little Americans care about their second war of independence, and how the little they do know is stitched together from questionable sources (Johnny Horton’s “The Battle of New Orleans,” for example).