Roundup: Talking About History

Clifford D. May: Herbert Hoover’s Lessons

Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism and Islamism.It was Herbert Hoover’s misfortune to be president of the U.S. when the stock market crashed in 1929. Three years later, Franklin Roosevelt would blame him for the Great Depression and defeat him at the ballot box. Historians ranking American presidents have placed Hoover near the bottom of their lists ever since.

Rob Nixon: Rachel Carson's Prescience

Rob Nixon is the Rachel Carson professor of English at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His most recent book is Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard University Press, 2011).Fifty years ago, on September 27, 1962, Houghton Mifflin published Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, among the 20th century's most influential books. To honor the anniversary, the University of Cape Town invited me to lead an interdisciplinary forum this past June on Carson's environmental legacy.Spurred by the prospect of this event, I set myself a happy task. I would read all of Carson in sequence: her ocean trilogy, Silent Spring, her essays, her collected letters. I have long loved her work—she is a writer, like James Baldwin, whom I savor for the inventive cadences of voice, someone who exhibits syntactic as well as social courage. I have taught Silent Spring often, but have gotten to know her other work only in a piecemeal, random way. I laid out a reading plan: I would start with her essay "Undersea" (published in The Atlantic Monthly, in 1937, when Carson was 30) and head toward her celebrated letter on transience and migrating monarch butterflies, written shortly before her death, at 55, in April 1964.

Wayne K Spear: India’s History With Hitler

Wayne K. Spear is a writer of essays, newspaper articles, fiction, and poetry and has worked in communications, health, and education. His next book is scheduled to be published in 2013 by McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Valerie Strauss: How School Textbooks Distort Labor History

Valerie Strauss writes The Answer Sheet for the Washington Post.This being Labor Day, it seems like a good time to look at the way the history of the labor movement is taught in U.S. schools. Unfortunately, it isn’t — at least, not much, and when it is, it is too often inaccurately portrayed.State content standards sometimes ignore the movement almost completely, and textbooks either do the same thing or else treat inadequately the role labor has played in the creation of the American middle class and the raising of living standards in the country.Why? Scholars say that the answer is largely because unions are unfavorably viewed by the business community as well as by some politicians — and that this has spilled over into the treatment of the subject in textbooks because of the political way that textbook content is approved in the states.So how distorted are the textbooks?

Michael White: 1812 ... The War That Canada Won

Michael White is assistant editor at The Guardian.

Owen Jones: William Hague Is Wrong... Britons Must Own Up To Their Brutal Colonial Past

Owen Jones is a columnist for The Independent.

William Collins Donahue: Munich’s Foiled History Lessons – An American Perspective

The writer is the chair of the Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures and a professor of German and Jewish Studies at Duke University.

Preeti Nalwa: World War II Still Haunts Asia

Preeti Nalwa is a Non-Resident Kelly Fellow at the Pacific Forum CSIS, a Japan Foundation Doctoral Fellow and PhD candidate at the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Delhi.This year, the territorial disputes between South Korea, China and Japan have coincided with Japan’s World War II commemorative services at the Yasukuni shrine. The 67th anniversary celebrations have brought the memory of war back into the political consciousness of the three most advanced nations in Asia. The three countries’ histories of World War II continue to negatively affect their perceptions of one another. China and South Korea blame Japan for having failed to offer an apology over wartime atrocities commensurate with their expectations. Japan, for its part, thinks its contribution toward the economic development of South Korea and China is expediently overlooked. Japan has also offered apologies to both nations on several occasions. The territorial disputes over the Dokdo/Takeshima and Senkaku/Diaoyu islands have prevented strengthening strategic relations that could better address the North Korean regional nuclear threat. As a result of these disputes, what could be the most powerful triangle on the international stage is still not being developed...

Alasdair Roberts: How U.S. Naval Power Grew to Match Mercantile Ambitions

Alasdair Roberts is a professor of law and public policy at Suffolk University Law School in Boston. His book “America’s First Great Depression: Economic Crisis and Political Disorder after the Panic of 1837” was published by Cornell University Press in May. The opinions expressed are his own.In the early years of the American republic, Sackets Harbor in upstate New York was one of the U.S. Navy’s most important ports, guarding access to the St. Lawrence River. In the War of 1812, Americans repulsed two British assaults there. As the war ended, they erected an odd memorial to their victories: the forlorn, uncompleted hulk of the battleship New Orleans.It could still be seen rotting on its stocks 70 years later. If it had been launched, the New Orleans would have been one of the most powerful ships in the Navy. It was larger than Horatio Nelson’s HMS Victory. But when peace came, construction stopped and the New Orleans began its long decline.

Stephen Bates: Republican Religious Fundamentalists Would Rewrite American History

Stephen Bates is a staff writer at the Guardian. 

Jeffrey Goldberg: Are Jews Who Fear Iran Obsessed With the Holocaust?

Jeffrey Goldberg, a national correspondent for The Atlantic, is a Bloomberg View columnist. 

Stuart D. Goldman: The Forgotten Soviet-Japanese War of 1939

Stuart D. Goldman is a Russian specialist and a scholar in residence at the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research. This article is based on his book, NOMONHAN, 1939: The Red Army’s Victory That Shaped World War II (U.S. Naval Institute Press).

Lydia Netzer: The Man in the Moon

Lydia Netzer is the author of the novel “Shine Shine Shine.”...Watching the first images from the rover, Curiosity, which landed on Mars early this month, I was reminded of a short story by Ray Bradbury called “Mars Is Heaven!” In it, Mars is populated by aliens who fool visiting Earthlings into thinking they’re in a familiar environment before murdering them. It’s about how stupid nostalgia is, how it tricks us into wanting things that were never that great in the first place. What strikes me about the story is that, just over 60 years ago, someone could seriously write about aliens on Mars.Can you imagine what it was like then? Mars was an impossible frontier; we wouldn’t even have decent pictures of the planet until almost 20 years after the story was published. Now it reads like a fairy tale in which the moon is made of cheese, or the sun is a horse-drawn chariot bearing a god, or the stars move in crystal spheres around the sky.

John Oliff: Thucydides to Historians: If You Don't Know for Certain, Just Make Stuff Up

John Oliff is a professor of New Testament, Greek and Theology. He is married and has five wonderful daughters. He is employed at Biblical Theological Seminary and Eastern University. In additional to his professional career he is deeply involved in teaching and training biblical studies at his local church, The Well in Feasterville, PA.Well, the more things change they appear to remain the same! Just when I thought I had thoroughly read on the nature of historiography I picked up The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. Written between 460 and 400 BCE, he chronicles the events surrounding the PPW. The following is an excerpt from book I.22. It explains the process Thucydides used in gathering information for his work. It is instructive on many levels, not least of which is insight into the nature of “history writing” leading up to the first century. You may also find it interesting that he was a fan of Homer, but that is for another post! He writes,

Amy Henderson: That’s The Way It Was: Remembering Walter Cronkite

Amy Henderson is the National Portrait Gallery's cultural historian.Who do you trust?In 1972, an Oliver Quayle Research survey reported that CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite was the “most trusted man in America”—more trusted than anyone else in public life, although, that’s not including such 1970s pop stars as Cher or Paul Newman.Trust. Today, it is an eye-popping notion that a network newsperson would have that kind of status. How many of us even watch nightly network news? The Pew Research Center for Excellence in Journalism reports that between 1980 and 2011, the three commercial networks lost 28.4 million nightly news viewers, or 54.5 percent of their audience. Does Swanson still make TV dinners? Do people even know what a Swanson TV dinner is?

Rafael Medoff: The Jewish Vote as a Factor in U.S. Politics

Rafael Medoff is director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and the coauthor with Sonja Schoepf Wentling of the new book Herbert Hoover and the Jews: The Origins of the 'Jewish Vote' and Bipartisan Support for Israel.One does not usually think of the conventions of the major U.S. political parties as having any particular impact on Jewish history. But 68 years ago, the Republican National Convention adopted a plank that would shape the future of U.S.-Israel relations and redefine the role of Jewish voters in American politics. This surprising turn of events was the result of efforts by an unlikely trio: a former president, a maverick journalist-turned-congresswoman and the father of Israel's current prime minister. The race for the 1944 GOP nomination was settled early. After his sweeping win in the Wisconsin primary, New York Gov. Thomas Dewey was set to get the party's nod. There were, however, several surprises in store when the Republicans gathered in Chicago at the end of June...

Melissa Pawson: How Relevant is Auschwitz in Today’s Society?

Melissa Pawson is a student ambassador for the Holocaust Educational Trust.

David Pilling: Japan, China and Their ‘History Problem’

David Pilling is the Financial Times' Asia editor. When the Democratic Party of Japan took power three years ago, it promised a radical overhaul of foreign policy. It wanted to rebalance relations with the US and China, by addressing its "over-dependence" on the former and its strained relations with the latter. In a world moving from US unipolarity to multipolarity, in the words of Yukio Hatoyama, then prime minister, Japan would rediscover Asia as its "basic sphere of being". It was a grand vision. Today it lies in shreds. That became clearer this week with Tokyo’s replacement of its ambassador to Beijing after a flare-up in Sino-Japanese tension. Anti-Japanese protests erupted across Chinese cities at the weekend after a renewed war of words over the Japanese-administered Senkaku islands, called Diaoyu by China. Since the Democratic party came to power it has failed to forge closer relations with China.

Pierre Manent: How the West Created Modernity

Pierre Manent is a French political scientist. His essay was translated by Alexis Cornel. We have been modern for several centuries now. We are modern, and we want to be modern; it is a desire that guides the entire life of Western societies. That the will to be modern has been in force for centuries, though, suggests that we have not succeeded in being truly modern—that the end of the process that we thought we saw coming at various moments has always proved illusory, and that 1789, 1917, 1968, and 1989 were only disappointing steps along a road leading who knows where. The Israelites were lucky: they wandered for only 40 years in the desert. If the will to be modern has ceaselessly overturned the conditions of our common life and brought one revolution after another—without achieving satisfaction or reaching a point where we might rest and say, "Here at last is the end of our enterprise"—just what does that mean? How have we been able to will something for such a long time and accept being so often disappointed? Could it be that we aren’t sure what we want? Though the various signs of the modern are familiar, whether in architecture, art, science, or political organization, we do not know what these traits have in common and what justifies designating them with the same attribute.

Ray Takeyh: The Origins of Iran's Bellicosity

Ray Takeyh is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. More than thirty years after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini came to power—and two decades after his passing—the Islamic Republic remains an outlier in international relations. Other non-Western, revolutionary regimes eventually eschewed a rigidly ideological foreign policy and accepted the fundamental legitimacy of the international system. But Iran’s leaders have remained committed to Khomeini’s worldview. The resilience of Iran’s Islamist ideology in the country’s foreign policy is striking. China’s present-day foreign policy isn’t structured according to Mao’s thought, nor is Ho Chi Minh the guiding light behind Vietnam’s efforts to integrate into the Asian community. But Iran’s leadership clings to policies derived largely from Khomeini’s ideological vision even when such policies are detrimental to the country’s other stated national interests and even when a sizable portion of the ruling elite rejects them. Many Western observers of Iran don’t understand that its foreign policy has been fashioned largely to sustain an ideological identity. Thus, we can’t understand Iran’s foreign relations and its evident hostility by just assessing its international environment or the changing Mideast power balance. These things matter.