Roundup: Talking About History

Cynthia C. Kelly: Leslie R. Groves and the Unchecked Forces of Nature

Cynthia C. Kelly is President of the Atomic Heritage Foundation. This article is drawn from a series on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, "Perspectives on Hiroshima," published by the Federation of American Scientists. Read the full series here.On September 17, 1942, General Leslie R. Groves took command of the Manhattan Engineer District for the Army Corps of Engineers, assuming direct responsibility for all aspects of the atomic bomb project. As Robert S. Norris documents, Groves proved himself “the Manhattan Project’s indispensable man.”[1]

Kazuko Hamada: Lessons Learned from Hiroshima and Fukushima

Kazuko Hamada is Senior Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Planning and Coordination Office Integrated Support Center for Nuclear Nonproliferation and Nuclear Security, Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA). This article is drawn from a series on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, "Perspectives on Hiroshima," published by the Federation of American Scientists. Read the full series here.

Francis J. Gavin: Hiroshima -- An Uncertain and Contested Legacy

Dr. Francis J. Gavin is Tom Slick Professor of International Affairs and Director of the Robert S. Strauss Centerfor International Security and Law at the University of Texas. This article is drawn from a series on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, "Perspectives on Hiroshima," published by the Federation of American Scientists. Read the full series here.Sixty-seven years ago, an American B-29, the Enola Gay, dropped a gun-fission weapon made with U-235 on the city of Hiroshima, Japan, killing upwards of 100,000 people. Three days later, a plutonium device was dropped on the city of Nagasaki that may have killed as many as 80,000 people. That these two detonations transformed the world of politics and international affairs forever is universally accepted. The precise meaning and consequence of this legacy, however, is deeply contested. Why have these terrible weapons not been used since 1945, and how can we ensure at least another sixty-seven years without a nuclear attack?...

Karim Tiro: Are We Having Fun Yet? Canadians Commemorate the War of 1812

Karim Tiro is associate professor of history at Xavier University and visiting professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal. He is the author of The People of the Standing Stone: The Oneida Nation from the Revolution through the Era of Removal (2011).The War of 1812 is to historians what the common cold is to doctors: an embarrassment. It should be pretty simple, but its causes, nature, and ending are maddeningly elusive. Thankfully, the War of 1812 shares another feature of colds: it doesn't seem to have done too much harm. So we ignore it.Ignoring the War of 1812 is more difficult than usual in a bicentennial year, especially for Canadian historians. Although fought by both Americans and Canadians, the war is a more important historical datum for Canadians. By repelling invading Americans, the colonists and the British army demonstrated the durability of British North America in the face of a more populous United States.

Peter Hetherington: How Republics Die

Peter Hetherington is the author of "Unvanquished: Joseph Pilsudski, Resurrected Poland and the Struggle for Eastern Europe," winner of the 2012 Independent Book Publishers Association’s Ben Franklin Award in history.Many believe republics are the best form of government. Successful long-lived examples include Rome, Venice, and the United States. Yet two of these republics failed, as did those in France, Germany, Spain, and Italy in the early part of the twentieth century. Why did these countries lose their system of government and, in some cases, their sovereignty?

John Agnew: The Eurozone Crisis and the Marshall Plan Metaphor

John Agnew is a Distinguished Professor of Geography at UCLA and co-editor of The Marshall Plan Today: Model and Metaphor. Metaphors can be hard to avoid. Much thinking involves comparing something new and unfamiliar to something old and familiar that we believe we understand. Some philosophers have tried to think without metaphors, purporting to engage in "pure" description, but that has turned out to be rather fruitless. We are pretty much captive to our metaphors. What we can do, however, is bring them to the surface of our consciousness in order to assess their relative appropriateness in any specific case. Nowhere is this more obvious than in stories about contemporary international events. As we search to understand them we have recourse to prior historical events, historical figures, literary analogies, and organizational models that provide both meaning and possible responses to what would otherwise seem like disparate and inexplicable happenings. Some metaphors, such as ‘Munich’ as a metonym for the appeasement of dictators or ‘Vietnam’ for military interventions without exit strategies, have become clichés that arguably offer little intellectual purchase in many of the situations to which they are now applied.

Phil Strongman: Hiroshima Is A War Crime That Haunts My Family, 67 Years On

On 6 August 1945 – 67 years ago today – a control operator at the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation noticed that there was no signal from Radio Hiroshima. It had, seemingly, gone off air. Telephone calls couldn't reach the city centre either. There was a simple reason for this – the city centre wasn't there any more.At 8.15am an American B-29 bomber had dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima. People were literally vaporised by a light '"brighter than a thousand suns". A firestorm and 600mph winds sucked the remaining air out of the downtown district. Soon a mushroom cloud spiralled into the stratosphere, and under it 140,000 civilians lay dead. As Japan absorbed what had happened and its rulers prepared a formal protest at the new weapon, a second strike was prepared. The target was Kokura but on 9 August, it was obscured by fog so Nagasaki was hit. The death toll was 70,000. On 12 August Japan's Emperor, Hirohito, said surrender was inevitable. The war was over, but the bomb debate was just beginning. Apologists for these events have used two arguments...

Jeff Barak: The Right Way to Remember Munich 11

The writer is a former editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post.

Jonathan Jones: Bradley Wiggins On His Olympic Throne – A Reminder of Britain's True History

Jonathan Jones writes on art for the Guardian and was on the jury for the 2009 Turner prize. The 2012 Olympics began with a vision of British history. Danny Boyle's romantic panorama started in a pastoral land of shepherds, then showed it torn apart by the rising chimney stacks of the industrial revolution. But out of this pandemonium rose the suffragettes, marching for the vote, and the wonder that is the National Health Service. Five days into the Games, and Bradley Wiggins was pictured here on a golden throne in front of Hampton Court Palace. Wiggins sprawls on his throne for photographers after winning his gold medal in the cycling time trial. He paid this royal palace the ultimate insult of apparently not knowing where he actually was – "wherever we are", he told interviewers. This picture might be seen as a sequel to Boyle's imaginary revolution. The people have occupied the palaces! Comrade Wiggins sits on the tsar's throne! And yet, the red bricks of the mighty building behind King Bradley tell another story.

A New Way to Teach History? A Graphic History of Gambling

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Michael Lind: The British Seeds of American Decline

This article is adapted from Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States (HarperCollins) by Michael Lind. 

Stephen Moore: Milton Friedman ... The Man Who Saved Capitalism

Stephen Moore is a member of the Journal's editorial board.It's a tragedy that Milton Friedman—born 100 years ago on July 31—did not live long enough to combat the big-government ideas that have formed the core of Obamanomics. It's perhaps more tragic that our current president, who attended the University of Chicago where Friedman taught for decades, never fell under the influence of the world's greatest champion of the free market. Imagine how much better things would have turned out, for Mr. Obama and the country. Friedman was a constant presence on these pages until his death in 2006 at age 94. If he could, he would surely be skewering today's $5 trillion expansion of spending and debt to create growth—and exposing the confederacy of economic dunces urging more of it. In the 1960s, Friedman famously explained that "there's no such thing as a free lunch." If the government spends a dollar, that dollar has to come from producers and workers in the private economy. There is no magical "multiplier effect" by taking from productive Peter and giving to unproductive Paul. As obvious as that insight seems, it keeps being put to the test. Obamanomics may be the most expensive failed experiment in free-lunch economics in American history...

Priyamvada Gopal: Mau Mau Verdict ... Britain Must Undo Its Imperial Anmesia

Priyamvada Gopal teaches in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge.

Clayton Swisher: What killed Yasser Arafat? France Could Find the Truth

Clayton Swisher is a head of al-Jazeera's transparency unit, and author of two books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 

Chris Beneke and Randall Stephens: Lies the Debunkers Told Me: How Bad History Books Win Us Over

Chris Beneke is associate professor of history at Bentley University and the author of Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism. Randall Stephens is reader in American Studies and history at Northumbria University and the author (with Karl Giberson) of The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age. Earlier this month, George Mason University's History News Network asked readers to vote for the least credible history book in print. The top pick was David Barton's right-wing reimagining of our third president, Jefferson's Lies: Exposing the Myths You've Always Believed about Thomas Jefferson. But just nine votes behind was the late Howard Zinn's left-wing epic, A People's History of the United States. Bad history, it turns out, transcends political divides.

Sheldon M. Stern: Robert Caro Gets Bobby Kennedy Wrong -- He Was a Hawk on Cuba

Historian at the Kennedy Library from 1977 to 2000, Dr. Sheldon M. Stern is the author of "Averting ‘the Final Failure’: John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings" (2003) and "The Week the World Stood Still: Inside the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis" (2005), both in the Stanford University Press Nuclear Age Series.Editor's Note: This article is an addendum to Sheldon Stern's earlier essay "Robert Caro and the Mythical Cuban Missile Crisis"

Noam Chomsky: How the Magna Carta Became a Minor Carta

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.  A TomDispatch regular, he is the author of numerous best-selling political works, most recently, Hopes and Prospects, Making the Future, and Occupy.  This is the full text of a speech he gave recently at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.Down the road only a few generations, the millennium of Magna Carta, one of the great events in the establishment of civil and human rights, will arrive.  Whether it will be celebrated, mourned, or ignored is not at all clear.That should be a matter of serious immediate concern.  What we do right now, or fail to do, will determine what kind of world will greet that event.  It is not an attractive prospect if present tendencies persist -- not least, because the Great Charter is being shredded before our eyes.

Michael A. Cohen: Has President Obama Kept His Campaign Promises?

Michael A. Cohen is a columnist for Foreign Policy's Election 2012 channel and a fellow at the Century Foundation.

Douglas Foster: Mandela's Mortality Is South Africa's Fear

Douglas Foster, associate professor of journalism at Northwestern University, is the author of After Mandela: The Struggle for Freedom in Post-Apartheid South Africa, which will be released in September.

Perry Anderson: Why India Was Partitioned

Perry Anderson teaches history at UCLA.