Roundup: Talking About History

Alice Kessler-Harris: Lillian Hellman's Convictions

Alice Kessler-Harris is a professor of history at Columbia University and departing president of the Organization of American Historians. Her book A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman is being published this month by Bloomsbury Press. The distinguished historian Eric Hobsbawm referred to what has come to be known as the short 20th century, from 1914 to 1991, as the history of the relationship of the West with communism. As it took power in the Soviet Union and then spun out to influence all aspects of personal and political life, the idea of communism and the reality of Soviet influence penetrated every corner of the world. The way we write history, particularly in the United States, ranks among the least visible and yet most unfortunate consequences of the conflict. I discovered that as I struggled to write about the American playwright, activist, and, yes, one-time Communist, Lillian Hellman.

Craig Stockings: Let's Have a Truce in the Battle of the Anzac Myth

Craig Stockings teaches history at the University of New South Wales in Canberra.WHEN I published a book about the Battle of Bardia, fought in North Africa between Australian and Italian troops in January 1941, I received a letter saying I was slighting the Anzac legend and spent too much time with "trendy lefties and feminist lesbians". "Take a break and just be proud Craig, because those old fellas fought for your right to deny their achievements," the writer said.As a military historian I know the power of Anzac.The legend has been a powerful and pervasive force within Australian social and cultural life for almost a century. If anything, as the last Australians with first-hand knowledge of Gallipoli have passed, Anzac imagery and sentimentality has grown stronger.Whether we consciously recognise it or not, Australians grow up feeding on an overt and subliminal diet of Anzac. Its powerful symbolism permeates all aspects of our community life. School curriculums teach as much of the Anzac mythology as they do of the kernels of historical fact on which the legend is built....

Harout Harry Semerdjian: Armenian Genocide and International Relations

The writer is a PhD candidate at the University of Oxford. He holds advanced graduate degrees from The Fletcher School of Diplomacy at Tufts University and the University of California, Los Angeles. While the modern-day Republic of Turkey was founded in 1923, eight years after its Ottoman predecessors embarked on a massive and systematic undertaking to rid the empire of its Armenian population, the country today often finds itself in diplomatic spats with various Western nations over its history. Outside the periphery of geopolitics, it would be perplexing to most as to why an event that occurred nearly 100 years ago would impact relations between Turkey and the United States and various European countries. The answer lies in the annals of history.During the First World War, while the Islamic Ottoman Empire was fighting the Allied Powers on the side of Germany, its native Christian Armenian population became a target of organized deportations and massacres.

George Monbiot: Deny the British Empire's Crimes? No, We Ignore Them

George Monbiot is the author of the bestselling books The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order and Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain, as well as the investigative travel books Poisoned Arrows, Amazon Watershed and No Man's Land. There is one thing you can say for the Holocaust deniers: at least they know what they are denying. In order to sustain the lies they tell, they must engage in strenuous falsification. To dismiss Britain's colonial atrocities, no such effort is required. Most people appear to be unaware that anything needs to be denied. The story of benign imperialism, whose overriding purpose was not to seize land, labour and commodities but to teach the natives English, table manners and double-entry book-keeping, is a myth that has been carefully propagated by the rightwing press.

Jeff Jacoby: Hitler, Pharaoh, and the Anti-Semitic Culture of Victimhood

Jeff Jacoby has been an op-ed columnist for The Boston Globe since February 1994. Holocaust Remembrance Day always falls during the week that follows Passover. At first glance, the two would seem to have little in common — one memorializes the millions of European Jews annihilated by Nazi Germany; the other commemorates the deliverance of the Jews from slavery in ancient Egypt. Yet for all their obvious differences, a fundamental similarity links these two crucial chapters in Jewish history. Both were attempts at genocide — and in both cases the perpetrators justified their savageries by claiming that they were the real victims, threatened by the people they intended to wipe out. At the Passover Seder, retelling the 3,000-year-old story, Jews read the passage from Exodus in which Pharaoh rationalizes the lethal repression he is about to inflict on the Hebrews. "Come, let us deal wisely with them," he declares. "Otherwise they may become so many that if there is a war they will join our enemies, fight against us, and leave the land." His notion of dealing wisely: slave labor, followed by mass murder.

Robert Fulford: The Return of Neo-Stalinism

Robert Fulford is a Toronto author, journalist, broadcaster, and editor.The Russian people suffer from a severe inferiority complex, if we can believe the editorial that appeared in Pravda last week. It took the form of a cry from the wounded heart of Mother Russia, a nation wronged by the malicious insults of foreigners. In Pravda’s view, there are people everywhere, particularly East Europeans and Americans, who want “to make the Russians feel guilty for the past.” They accomplish this with reminders of Joseph Stalin’s cruel dictatorship and the decades when eastern Europe was under “Soviet occupation” — a phrase Pravda now prints with quotation marks, as if it were a figment of someone’s imagination. Apparently, foreigners keep harping on these subjects because they “do not want to admit that the Soviet Union defeated both Hitler’s Nazi Germany and the whole of Europe.” This don’t-hurt-our-feelings style of Russian defensiveness was most famously articulated a few years ago when Vladimir Putin said in a speech that “others cannot be allowed to impose a feeling of guilt on us.” It has since taken root in the officially approved publishing of Russia, where it encourages persistent attempts to upgrade Stalin’s reputation...

Dan Ernst: Charles Evans Hughes's Lifelong Respect for the Courts

Dan Ernst is professor of law at Georgetown Law School.

Lou Wigdor: LBJ & The Invisible Gorilla of Succession

Senior Writer and Editor Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts.

Jed Perl: How Hilton Kramer Got Lost in the Culture Wars

Jed Perl is the art critic for The New Republic.

Wei Jingsheng: Remembering Fang Lizhi: 'Hero of the People,' Hated by China's Regime

Wei Jingsheng is one of China’s most well-known dissidents, now living in exile. He spent 15 years in Chinese prisons. In an open letter to Deng Xiaoping in 1989, Fang Lizhi called for Wei’s release.Professor Fang Lizhi, the Chinese astrophysicist whom many regarded as “China’s Sakharov,” died suddenly at his home in Arizona last week.For this great Chinese patriot to die in the American desert 22 years after he was forced into exile symbolizes the harsh truth about the ruling Communist regime which Mr. Fang often warned the world about.For those of us whose memories have not been erased by the censorship of getting rich gloriously, Fang was a hero. In the years and months leading up to the Tiananmen demonstrations in 1989, he dared to tell the historical facts – about Mao, the Party, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution – to a new generation....

Journalist Eyal: The Unsung Heroes of the Balkan Wars

Journalist Eyal Press is the author of Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times.Twenty years ago last week, Serbian snipers fired on a crowd of unarmed demonstrators in Sarajevo, launching a brutal siege that brought ethnic violence in the Balkans to menacing new heights. In the two decades since, attention has understandably focused on the deeds of the architects and perpetrators of the Balkan wars. Confronting the truth about how the violence was planned and orchestrated, many have argued, is an essential step in getting formerly warring factions to reckon honestly with their responsibility for what transpired. But this point should apply no less to the conduct of those who behaved honorably during the war, daring to cross the lines of ethnic division that too many of their fellow citizens chose not to traverse. Such people were not as rare as commonly assumed, the Serbian human rights advocate Natasa Kandic told me when I traveled through the Balkans several years ago, though she warned me that finding many willing to share their stories would not be easy...

Bettany Hughes: The Wisdom of Women Written out of History

Bettany Hughes is an award-winning author, historian and broadcaster. She is a research fellow at King's College, London and a fellow of the Historical Association.

Tom Bethell: The Mystery of Eric Hoffer

Tom Bethell is a senior editor of The American Spectator and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity Through the Ages, and most recently Questioning Einstein: Is Relativity Necessary? (2009).No one had heard of Eric Hoffer until he published The True Believer (1951), a set of reflections about mass movements and those attracted to them. He was also known as the Longshoreman Philosopher. From 1943 to 1967 he worked under Harry Bridges, the labor boss on the San Francisco waterfront. After The True Believer he wrote a number of books, mostly short, consisting of his articles or aphorisms. He became an adjunct professor at U.C. Berkeley at the time of the Free Speech movement and was interviewed by Eric Sevareid for CBS. He died in 1983, his age probably 85.

Corpus Christi Caller Times Editorial: A More Complete Texas History

CORPUS CHRISTI — It isn't often one has the opportunity to be a witness to history — particularly a history so deeply tied to your own. Last week, Tejanos, the descendants of Texas' first settlers, bore witness to a long overdue recognition — the unveiling of the Tejano monument on the historic grounds of the Texas capitol.Our story in bronze — the statue reflects the early role of Tejano settlers, from a depiction of a Spanish explorer to the traditional vaquero atop a mustang to a family of young Spanish settlers to that quintessential symbol of Texan pride, the longhorn. The 12-year effort to make the Tejano monument a reality stands as a testament to the tenacity and pride in being Texan that today's Tejanos share with their antecedents who took root in Texas nearly 150 years before the first Anglo settlers. While the state appropriated $1.1 million for the project in 2007, the Tejano Monument Committee of private citizens (many from South Texas) raised more than $1 million to see the project through.

Caleb Crain: The Culture of the New York Public Library's Research Divisions

Caleb Crain is the author of "American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation"Every institution has its own culture—its distinctive way of doing things. In the best cases, the culture is functional. Over time, people who work in the institution have figured out good ways of solving the problems that recur, and these ways have become a part of their collective memory.The research division of the New York Public Library has such a culture, and one of my fears about the proposed Central Library Plan is that it will disrupt this culture profoundly. Right now, the NYPL is a destination, a place where scholars and writers can do research with a speed and efficiency that can only be matched at places like the Library of Congress and the British Library. But I fear that the Central Library Plan will turn it into little more than a book-delivery system for professors within commuting distance.To explain why I fear this, let me start by outlining the culture of a university library, a kind of library that many people who do research are familiar with, and then describe how the NYPL’s culture differs.

Anthony Grafton: My Stomach Hurts When I Think About Upcoming Changes at the New York Public Library

Anthony Grafton is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History. He can be reached at grafton@princeton.edu.This is a tale of two libraries and how they’re being transformed. One of them is [Princeton's] own Firestone: the Gothic hull with its distinctive interior decorative scheme, half “Mad Men,” half World War II submarine; its carrels where seniors used to confine themselves like the hermits of the ancient Syrian desert; and its lower floors, the caverns measureless to man, where a German friend, looking a little desperate, said to me,“Tony, this library is not user-friendly,” and disappeared down dark rows of books, never to be seen again (I think he may still be down there).The other is the New York Public Library — or, more precisely, its Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, the great stone Beaux-Arts structure at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street that houses the library’s main reference collections, behind the two friendly lions, Patience and Fortitude, and many handsome sets of stone staircases.......NYPL is a palace for the people, open to anyone who cares to come in and order a book. But it has closed stacks accessible only to the staff who page the materials that readers order....

Bret Stephens: Why the Falklands Matter

Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs.Thirty years ago this month, Argentina's military junta seized the Falklands from the U.K. and Margaret Thatcher decided to take the islands back. Newsweek ran a picture of a British aircraft carrier on its cover with the headline "The Empire Strikes Back," implicitly casting Mrs. Thatcher as Darth Vader. What, one had to wonder, did that make Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri in the eyes of Newsweek's editors: Princess Leia? The Falklands war put partisans of the left and right to a dilemma. Some American conservatives, especially those who had criticized the Carter administration for being squeamish when it came to supporting pro-American dictators, were reluctant to abandon the anticommunist junta too quickly. But most conservatives admired Mrs. Thatcher and wanted to support a principled stand against aggression. Ronald Reagan ultimately resolved the debate in favor of Britain. But not before Secretary of State Al Haig embarrassed himself, and the U.S., by trying to split the difference with a compromise that would have sold out the Falklanders. The dilemma was even more acute on the left... 

Hal Gordon: Titanic: The Squalid Sequel

Hal Gordon, who wrote speeches for the Reagan White House and Gen. Colin Powell, is currently a freelance speechwriter in Houston. Web site: www.ringingwords.com.On the night of April 14-15, 1912, the R.M.S. Titanic struck an iceberg and sank with a loss of over 1500 lives. It was the greatest peacetime disaster in maritime history....No sooner had the British liner Carpathia docked in New York with the Titanic’s survivors when William Alden Smith, an eager, self-promoting U.S. senator from Michigan, bounded up the gangplank to inform J. Bruce Ismay, the chairman of the White Star Line who was among those rescued, that Smith was chairing a special inquiry into the disaster, and that Ismay and the crew would be detained for the proceedings.

Jeremiah Christopher Whitten: Twitter Needs Shakespeare

Jeremiah Christopher Whitten is a strategic communications expert in Chaska, MN....Twitter is at the forefront of the decline of America's patience for prose. The social-media network recently celebrated its sixth birthday with media fanfare and reproductions of the first tweet in history....In some workplaces, there seems to be an intolerance for eloquence that overrides all other considerations. I once worked for a client who demanded that everything be written in bullet points -- no verbs, adjectives or other parts of speech....The professional pressure for brevity at the expense of thoughtfulness is expressed perfectly in a PowerPoint satire of the Gettysburg Address, which renders one of the most important speeches in history into six slides. The first full slide reduces all of the nuance, history and eloquence of the speech's opening into: "• Met on battlefield (great) • dedicate portion of field • unfinished work (great tasks)."

Tanya Mohn: Crossing the Ocean, 1912 vs. 2012

Tanya Mohn is a journalist who writes frequently about travel for The New York Times.THE 100th anniversary of the Titanic tragedy is being widely observed on both sides of the Atlantic, at museum openings, special exhibits and lectures, theatrical performances, concerts, readings and walking and graveyard tours. Guests at some events are invited to dress in fashions of the era, and Titanic-themed cocktails and re-creations of the elaborate first-class meal from the storied liner’s last dinner will be served. Two Titanic Memorial Cruises to the site of the sinking are planned, and the ships are scheduled to be there on the anniversary, April 15.But what was life onboard the Titanic actually like? Not much like taking a cruise today.Traveling on the Titanic was a voyage of purpose, primarily to transport mail, cargo and passengers, many of whom were emigrating, as steadily and safely as possible....