Roundup: Talking About History

George Weigel: Catholic ‘Americanism’

George Weigel is distinguished senior fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies. On January 22, 1899, Pope Leo XIII addressed an encyclical letter to Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore and, through him, to the entire Catholic hierarchy of the United States. Entitled Testem Benevolentiae (A Witness of Good Will), the letter raised cautions about attitudes and theories that some churchmen feared were corrupting the integrity of Catholic faith and weakening Catholic witness in the United States. The fretting churchmen in question were largely Europeans who bundled their concerns under the rubric “Americanism.”

Mona Charen: A High-School History Book Where Communism’s Crimes are disappeared.

Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist.After several cries of pain from my 16-year-old son, I finally got around to reading his AP World History textbook. Not a way to spend a placid weekend.Paging through World Civilizations: The Global Experience by Peter N. Stearns et al. is flabbergasting. The authors lean so far backward to be neutral about various cultures and nations that the text fails utterly as reliable history.

Charlotte Furth: A Flourishing Profession: Reflections on a Career in Asian Studies

At the March annual meeting of the Association of Asian Studies, held in Toronto, the association recognized Charlotte Furth with the AAS Award for Distinguished Contributions to Asian Studies. Furth is Professor Emerita of history at the University of Southern California and has written and edited five books, including A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History, 960-1665 (UC Press, 1999). Below is an expanded version of remarks that Furth gave at the AAS award ceremony, in which she reflects on the changes to Asian Studies that have taken place since she entered the field in 1959, particularly regarding the presence of women in the academy.

David Hayes: Elizabeth II: A Long Reign and a Lost Republic

David Hayes is Deputy Editor of openDemocracy. He writes each month for Inside Story.“LUCK is a synonym for ruthless adaptation.” When the Polish philosopher Stanislaw Brzozowski (1878–1911) wrote these words, Europe’s clutter of imperial houses commanded the fate of peoples not only across the continent but also in much of the world beyond. Most would fall in the cataclysms of war and revolution to come, though a handful of small-state northern variants (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Netherlands, Belgium) survived by remaining on the right side of their compatriots through the century’s traumas.Britain’s monarchy alone appears to have performed another trick in the face of recurrent social and political convulsion: finding in it material from which to carve new roles and rationales (including even a name), while continuing to live and breathe in the grand manner of old – and retaining along the way, even through its worst of times, broad public support.

Simon Schama: Celebrating Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee

Simon Schama is a professor of history and art history at Columbia University. He has been an essayist and critic for The New Yorker since 1994, his art criticism winning the National Magazine Award in 1996. Sixty years and three months ago, on Feb. 5, 1952, the heir presumptive to the British throne spent her last night as a princess up a giant fig tree. Treetops Hotel was perched in the game park of Sagana, where a hunting lodge had been given by the "Kenyan people" to Elizabeth and her husband, Philip, as a wedding present five years before. They had stopped in what was still an African colony on their way to Australia to show the flag for Britain and its monarchy, now that Elizabeth’s chronically ill father, King George VI, was unable to take trips around what was left of the empire. A violent, bloody Kikuyu insurrection was about to break out in Kenya, but the good looks and easy grace of the princess and her tall, impossibly handsome husband disarmed everyone who saw them in action. Then came the news that her father had died of a coronary thrombosis. There are no reports of how the young woman, instantly become Queen Elizabeth II, took the news.

Nancy Gibbs: President, to President, to President ... POTUS' Best Confidant May Be His Predecessors

Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy are editors at Time magazine and the authors of The Presidents Club: Inside the World's Most Exclusive Fraternity. "You will be our president when you read this note," George Herbert Walker Bush wrote to Bill Clinton, the man who defeated him in the 1992 campaign, denying Bush the provisional vindication that reelection provides until history has its chance to judge from a distance. Nonetheless, in Oval Office tradition, Bush left a note for Clinton to read on taking office, and it echoed the message of transitions past, even between bitter political rivals: "I am rooting hard for you."Note the pronoun: You will be our president. My president.

John Nagl: Does Military Service Still Matter for the Presidency?

John Nagl, a retired Army officer, is the Minerva professor at the U.S. Naval Academy and a veteran of both wars in Iraq. He is the author of "Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons From Malaya and Vietnam." In every presidential election since 1992, the candidate with the less distinguished military résumé has triumphed. Bill Clinton defeated war heroes George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole; National Guard pilot George W.

Tim Stanley: Hitler is Not to be Trifled With

Tim Stanley is associate fellow of the Rothermere American Institute, Oxford University. There is a war of words being waged between historian Richard Evans and writer A.N. Wilson. Evans, Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, dislikes Wilson’s latest book,Hitler: A Short Biography. He complains that Wilson relies exclusively on English language sources and that the book brings nothing new to the subject except purple prose and trite psychology. Evans opines that, while he accepts non-academic writers have brought fresh insight into the dictator’s life, he can find ‘no evidence of that here, neither in the stale, unoriginal material, nor in the banal and cliché-ridden historical judgements, nor in the lame, tired narrative style; just evidence of the repellent arrogance of a man who thinks that because he is a celebrated novelist, he can write a book about Hitler that people should read’.

Paul Rogers: Pan Am 103 ... Libya and A Case Unclosed

Paul Rogers is professor in the department of peace studies  at Bradford University.

David Makovsky and Olivia Holt-Ivry: Why Are Israeli Generals So Often Overruled?

David Makovsky is the Ziegler distinguished fellow and director of the Project on the Middle East Peace Process at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Olivia Holt-Ivry is a research assistant at the Washington Institute.

Clare Morgana Gillis: The End of History in the New Libya

Clare Morgana Gillis covered the Libyan revolution for The Atlantic.

Alex Joffe: Sending "Mein Kampf" Back to School

Alex Joffe is an archeologist and an historian.Important literature can't be kept under wraps forever. A case in point is Mein Kampf.  The German state of Bavaria, which holds the German copyright, has blocked the book's publication within Hitler's homeland; as recently as 2010, the state went to court to prevent an unauthorized academic edition.  But in 2015, 70 years after the author's death, Bavaria's copyright will expire.  So, the state has announced plans to fund two new editions, the first in German since 1945, including critical commentary.  The aim, say Bavarian authorities, is to "demystify" Mein Kampf and make other editions "commercially unattractive."The recent announcement was welcomed by, among others, representatives of Germany's Jews, who would prefer to see Mein Kampf remain under careful state control.

Warren Throckmorton: Faux History for the GOP

Warren Throckmorton, PhD is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Grove City College (Pa.). He blogs regularly about religious and mental health issues at www.wthrockmorton.com. Earlier this month, the evangelical writer David Barton’s new book, “The Jefferson Lies,” hit the New York Times bestseller list for hardcover nonfiction. Barton isn’t popular, however, only with the ordinary American reader. On May 8, John Boehner authorized the use of Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol for a religious service to commemorate the first inauguration of George Washington. Among the speakers was Barton, who is revered by social conservatives because he argues that the nation was founded primarily by evangelical Christians on explicitly Christian teachings.

Katherine Stewart: Texas's War on History

Katherine Stewart is a journalist and author. She has written for the New York Times, Reuters and Marie Claire, and her new book is The Good News Club: The Christian Right's Stealth Assault on America's Children (2012).

Eamon Gilmore: The Queen Has Shown the Strength of Britain and Ireland's Relationship

Eamon Gilmore is the Tánaiste (deputy prime minister) of Ireland.The 17th of May 2011 was an extraordinary day. I had the great honour and privilege of welcoming Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth on her first visit to Ireland, the first state visit by a British monarch to an independent Ireland. That moment of arrival at Casement Aerodrome, named in honour of Sir Roger Casement, the Irish patriot executed for treason, was charged with significance. I reflected that almost 100 years had passed since King George V had disembarked in July 1911 in what was then called Kingstown – a port in my own constituency – on the last visit to Dublin by a British monarch. I thought of what had passed between those two visits, of what Sir Winston Churchill described as the “integrity of the quarrel” that has so often marked our relations...

Colin Powell: Colin Powell on the Bush Administration's Iraq War Mistakes

Colin L. Powell served as the Secretary of State under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2005.Chaos in BaghdadOn the evening of Aug. 5, 2002, President Bush and I met in his residence at the White House to discuss the pros and cons of the Iraq crisis. Momentum within the administration was building toward military action, and the president was increasingly inclined in that direction.I had no doubt that our military would easily crush a smaller Iraqi army, much weakened by Desert Storm and the sanctions and other actions that came afterward. But I was concerned about the unpredictable consequences of war. According to plans being confidently put forward, Iraq was expected to somehow transform itself into a stable country with democratic leaders 90 days after we took Baghdad. I believed such hopes were unrealistic. I was sure we would be in for a longer struggle.

Daniel Pipes: Uncovering Early Islam

Daniel Pipes is president of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. © 2012 by the author. All rights reserved.The year 1880 saw the publication of a book that ranks as the single most important study of Islam ever. Written in German by a young Jewish Hungarian scholar, Ignaz Goldziher, and bearing the nondescript title Muslim Studies (Muhammedanische Studien), it argued that the hadith, the vast body of sayings and actions attributed to the Islamic prophet Mohammed, lacked historical validity. Rather than provide reliable details about Mohammed’s life, the hadith, Goldziher established, emerged from debates two or three centuries later about the nature of Islam.

Ayesha Jalal: Manto Wrote What He Saw -- and Took No Sides -- During the Partition of India

Dr Ayesha Jalal is the Mary Richardson Professor of History at Tufts University and author of The Pity of Partition: Manto as Witness to History (Princeton University Press, forthcoming).Any attempt to fathom the murderous hatred that erupted with such devastating effect at the time of the British retreat from the subcontinent, Saadat Hasan Manto remarked, had to begin with an exploration of human nature itself. For the master of the Urdu short story this was not a value judgement. It was a statement of what he had come to believe after keen observation and extended introspection. Shaken by the repercussions of the political decision to break up the unity of the subcontinent, Manto wondered if people who only recently were friends, neighbours and compatriots had lost all sense of their humanity. He too was a human being, “the same human being who raped mankind, who indulged in killing” and had “all those weaknesses and qualities that other human beings have.” Yet human depravity, however pervasive and deplorable, could not kill all sense of humanity. With faith in that kind of humanity, Manto wrote riveting short stories about the human tragedy of 1947 that are internationally acknowledged for representing the plight of displaced and terrorised humanity with exemplary impartiality and empathy.

David W. Blight and Allison Scharfstein: King’s Forgotten Manifesto

David W. Blight is the author of “American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era” and a professor of history at Yale, from which Allison Scharfstein is graduating this month.ON May 17, 1962, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered an extraordinary manifesto to the White House. Constructed as both a moral appeal and a legal brief, the 64-page document called on President John F. Kennedy to issue a “second Emancipation Proclamation,” an executive order outlawing segregation — just as President Abraham Lincoln had done with slavery a century earlier.The civil rights era, like the Civil War, produced a wealth of great writing. But unlike King’s “I Have a Dream” speech or his “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” which we remember for their visionary rhetoric, this extraordinary document has been virtually forgotten.

Philip Kitcher: Why History and the Humanities are Also a Form of Knowledge.

Philip Kitcher is John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University and the author, most recently, of The Ethical Project (Harvard University Press). This article appeared in the May 24, 2012 issue of the magazine.