Roundup: Talking About History

Source: The Gazette (Montreal)
November 16, 2005

Julian Armstrong: Myth of the Family Dinner Overdone

There's a theory that if we could only restore the family dinner, preferably home-cooked, our culture and health would be saved. Too late, food historians say. Family dinners were more myth than reality, even in Victorian times, and women have been trying to get out of their kitchens since the early 20th century, scholars told a recent conference called What's for Dinner: The Daily Meal Through History. The latest development in the effort to bring back the family dinne

Source: WSJ
November 15, 2005

Stephen Prothero: A history of spirituality from Emerson to Oprah--and a defense of it.

[Mr. Prothero, a professor of religion at Boston University, is the author of "American Jesus."] Conservative Christianity is doubtless growing in the U.S., but so is the "spiritual but not religious" demographic. This mantra seems to boil down to a critique and a desire. The critique is aimed at "organized religion," whose rites, creeds and dogmas, it is felt, fail to get to the heart of things. The desire is exactly to get to the heart of things, but

Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
November 15, 2005

A glance at the debut issue of The American Interest: The myopia of the intelligentsia

When it comes to predicting the future, intellectuals "tend to get things hopelessly wrong," writes Owen Harries, a member of the Global Advisory Council for this new, independent journal, which was founded shortly after the demise of The Public Interest and a rift among the editors of The National Interest (The Chronicle, April 15). According to a statement from members of its editorial board, who include Francis Fukuyama and Zbigniew Brzezinski, the new journal is dedica

Source: Letters to the Editor of the New York Review of Books
December 1, 2005

Staughton Lynd vs. Edmund S. Morgan: History from Below

To the Editors: In reviewing The Unknown American Revolution by Gary Nash ["The Other Founders," NYR, September 22], Edmund Morgan says that New Left historians have "compensated for political isolation by identifying themselves with the dispossessed of earlier times." He offers no evidence for this canard, which I think is sufficiently rebutted by the activity of Howard Zinn, myself, and many others in the civil rights and antiwar movements. The ess

Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
November 10, 2005

Julia M. Klein: Plagiarism a Theme of Wendy Wasserstein's New Play .. Plea for Tolerance

[Julia M. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia.] ... Plagiarism is an old-fashioned concept, and not always as straightforward as it might appear. When popular historians cobble together books from a variety of secondary sources and choose to footnote and paraphrase, rather than quote, should they inevitably be chastised for too closely following their sources? If so, is the failing a technical lapse or a major ethical breach? And who gets to decide? More interest

Source: American Prospect
November 9, 2005

An Interview with Sadakat Kadri About His Book, The Trial: A History, from Socrates to O.J. Simpson

Your book spans a range from the myth of Orestes to the trials of Bernhard Goetz and O.J. Simpson. What changes did you observe during that long period? Trials throughout the pre-modern world were very often explicitly religious rituals. Punishments, meanwhile, treated criminals as pollutants or pests. In ancient Athens, for example, murderers supposedly emitted a vapor that could be cleansed only by a court hearing. Celtic druids burned wrongdoers in huge wicker men. And lawyers i

Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
November 10, 2005

Susan-Mary Grant: America's Cult of the War Dead

A "cult of the war dead," particularly of killed volunteers, evolved in the United States well before such a cult arose in Europe, and it found expression in the development of national cemeteries devoted to war veterans and to the idea of America as a nation, writes Susan-Mary Grant, a reader in American history at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, in England. She argues that in America, more than anywhere else, the war dead are a crucial part of nationalism. The cul

Source: Telegraph (UK)
November 6, 2005

Martin Gilbert: When Churchill went to war - with America

On Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, Winston Churchill was Minister of Munitions. As Big Ben struck 11, and the guns fell silent on the Western Front, he was looking out of his ministerial window over Northumberland Avenue. The broad street was deserted. Suddenly, as he wrote, he saw "the slight figure of a girl clerk, distractedly gesticulating" dart out of the doorway of one of the government buildings that lined the street. "Then from all sides men and women came

Source: Independent (London)
November 8, 2005

Johann Hari: Our Skewed Version of Ancient Roman History

Imagine if, after the collapse of our civilisation, all that remains of 1980s Britain are the dusty diaries of Alan Clark and some yellowing copies of The Telegraph. Imagine if for 2,000 years, historians take these sources at their word. They write long theses taking it for granted that Britain was besieged by black immigrants who belonged in 'Bongo-Bongo Land', and was menaced by a flame-haired communist named Neil Kinnock who wanted to turn this country into a satellite of the Soviet Union. I

Source: Excerpt from Hanson's new book, A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War, rpt. in National Review
November 7, 2005

Victor Davis Hanson: How Did Democracy Die in Athens?

Was Athens — or Greece itself — destroyed by the war? An entire industry of classical scholarship once argued for postwar Hellenic "decline," and the subsequent tide of fourth-century poverty, social unrest, and class struggle as arising after the Peloponnesian War. Victorians, in turn, felt the loss was more a "what might have been," a conflict that had ended not just the idea of Athens but "the glory that was Greece" itself and the Hellenic civilizing influence in

Source: Ottawa Citizen
November 6, 2005

Doug Fischer: The Legacy of the 1905 "Treaty 9" In Canada's Ontario Province

Even when they discarded the clothes they wore for official occasions, the seven middle-aged white men -- three government agents, a pair of policemen, a doctor and a Hudson's Bay Co. tour organizer -- could not help but appear faintly comic. Looking at them in photographs a century later, the men who brought Treaty 9 to the Cree and Ojibway of northern Ontario and left with the rights to their land stuffed in their satchels seem unable to shake their stiff Victorian posture, even o

Source: Buffalo Report
November 4, 2005

Robert Oscar Lopez: Saving Rosa Parks from American hypocrisy

Who can argue with the honors paid to Rosa Parks, the woman described repeatedly as “the mother of the Civil Rights movement”? As the first woman ever to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda where, not too long ago, Ronald Reagan’s corpse lay, she is the heroine nobody can find fault with. Fifty years ago, she refused to give up her bus seat to a white man. In this simple act, the story goes, the American civil rights movement was born. I wish the story could end on that high note. I

Source: Cleveland Plain Dealer
November 4, 2005

Emmett Till and Me

[Akron native Robert C. Lape is a veteran of 52 years in journalism, the past 20 for Crain's New York Business and WCBS Radio in New York. Here he records the time he went to Akron's Antioch Baptist Church to hear Emmett Till's mother. It was the summer of 1955.] ... I was front and center to record the remarks of the grieving Mamie Till, an attractive, articulate woman who wore a fur stole for her church appearance. She was as quiet as Adam Powell had been dramatic, but no less fer

Source: The Irish Times
November 4, 2005

Michael O'Regan: Ireland's Defense Minister, Willie O'Dea, To Examine Archives On 1960 Congo Deaths

Minister for Defence Willie O'Dea is to examine Army archives following a claim of conflicting accounts of the death of Irish soldiers in the Congo 45 years ago. The Minister gave the commitment to Tony Gregory (Independent, Dublin Central) who said the Minister had repeated the inaccuracy, highlighted in a recent book (The Irish Army in the Congo, 1960/1964: The Far Battalions by David O'Donoghue) that nine members of the Defence Forces were killed in Niemba. The new p

Source: The Independent (London)
November 4, 2005

Cahal Milmo: Redheads Historically - And Notoriously - Tempestuous

Aristotle, for all his learning, was among the first to express hair-based prejudice when he wrote: 'The reddish are of bad character.' The Medieval inhabitants of modern Poland were so wary they burnt them all as witches, and the Normans charged twice the going rate when they were put up for sale as slaves. From Cleopatra and her auburn tresses to the blood-stained ginger locks of Boudicca and the dance-related strops of Patsy Palmer " and including Napoleon Bonaparte, Oliver

Source: The Scotsman
November 2, 2005

Anna Smyth: What The Romans Did For Scotland

HISTORY Despite the bloodthirsty, war-mongering nature of their invasion, we can be thankful that the Romans invaded Scotland. Had they never penetrated so far north, we might know a lot less about our ancestors. Calgacus - the Scots swordsman who led the Caledonian empire at the Mons Graupius battle of AD84 - is, after all, the first Scot recorded in history. His identity, and virtually all that we know about our early forebears, was recorded for us by Tacitus - celebrated historia

Source: Policy Review
Oct-Nov. 2005

Christine Rosen: What Did Christopher Lasch Get Right/Wrong in The Culture of Narcissism?

[Christine Rosen is a fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center and senior editor of the New Atlantis. Her book, My Fundamentalist Education, will be published by PublicAffairs in January.] Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure,” the historian and social critic Christopher Lasch wrote in The Culture of Narcissism. For Lasch, writing in 1979, that character structure was an unrelenting narcis

Source: Mother Jones
Nov-Dec. 2005

JoAnn Wypijewski: America’s first Truth and Reconciliation Commission is attempting to get North Carolina to face what really caused the 1979 Greensboro Massacre

GREENSBORO, NORTH CAROLINA. A highway sign on the edge of town along I-85 welcomes motorists to Guilford County, “North Carolina’s Future.” The motto distills the story that the county, especially the county seat of Greensboro, and particularly its better-off white people, has told about itself since Jim Crow days, a story of Greensboro as vanguard of the New South, bustling, progressive, “on the move” in all ways, including those of racial “tolerance.” Greensboro’s school board was the first in

Source: TownHall.com
October 27, 2005

Thomas Sowell: Why was that bus Rosa Parks took segregated?

The death of Rosa Parks has reminded us of her place in history, as the black woman whose refusal to give up her seat on a bus to a white man, in accordance with the Jim Crow laws of Alabama, became the spark that ignited the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Most people do not know the rest of the story, however. Why was there racially segregated seating on public transportation in the first place? "Racism" some will say -- and there was certainly ple

Source: The Guardian
October 29, 2005

Martin Kettle: Ireland's Bertie Ahern Making A Mistake In Planning For 1916 Anniversary

Steaming towards Guy Fawkes's 400th, with Trafalgar's 200th in our wake, there is little purpose in regretting humankind's preoccupation with anniversaries. To do so is almost as pointless as to regret the existence of humankind itself. But it is surely not pointless to hope that both humankind and its anniversaries can be set to more constructive than destructive purposes. This is specially true of anniversaries at the heart of a nation's foundation myths. There was a striking exam