Roundup: Talking About History

Kenneth O Morgan: James Callaghan ... A Great PM Who, 100 Years On, Still Stands Tall

Kenneth O Morgan's books include Callaghan: a Life (1997), Michael Foot: a Life (2007) and Ages of Reform (2011). He is a member of the Labour party and has been a life peer since 2000.

Carlos Eire: Ireland, Don’t Erect a Monument to Che

Yale Professor Carlos Eire [T. Lawrason Riggs professor of history and religious studies], author of Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy, which won the National Book Award in 2003, wrote this letter and submitted it to the Irish Times in response to plans by the city of Galway to erect a statue honoring Che Guevara. The Times demurred, but it was published in the Galway Advertiser, and Professor Eire has given National Review permission to reprint it on these pages (h/t to the great Cuban human rights blog, Babalú).Dear editors,

Andrei Lankov: What South Koreans Learn About the North

Professor Andrei Lankov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and now teaches at Kookmin University in Seoul.

Alberto Mingardi: Europe According to Hayek

Mr. Mingardi is director general of the Istituto Bruno Leoni, a Milan-based free-market think tank.

Witold Rybczynski: I Like Ike (and His Memorial)

Witold Rybczynski is a member of the United States Commission of Fine Arts and the author, most recently, of “The Biography of a Building.”ON Tuesday, the House Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands held a hearing on Frank Gehry’s controversial design for the Dwight D. Eisenhower memorial. National memorials are managed by the National Park Service, which is why the Congressional subcommittee involved itself, even though reviewing architectural design, as Representative Raúl M. Grijalva observed, involves “something well outside our purview.”What has fueled the Eisenhower memorial controversy in the media are the public pronouncements of two of the president’s granddaughters, Susan and Anne Eisenhower, who have proclaimed themselves dissatisfied with the design. Understandably, their position is being taken seriously. Yet I am concerned that the growing public brouhaha will ultimately weaken the memorial design.

Alec Nevala-Lee: Marcel Duchamp's Turning Point

Alec Nevala-Lee is the author of "The Icon Thief," a suspense novel inspired by the work of Marcel Duchamp. He blogs at http://www.nevalalee.com.One hundred years ago today, on March 18, 1912, two men dressed in black crossed the Seine in Paris to pay a call on their younger brother, an artist who lived alone in his studio on Rue Amiral-de-Joinville. Half a century later, the artist would vividly remember the dark clothes his brothers had worn that day, as if they had come to challenge him to a duel.The visit, it seems, was brief. Once his brothers had departed, the artist locked up the house and took a taxi by himself to the Quai d'Orsay, where the Salon des Independants was scheduled to begin later that week. Upon his arrival, he retrieved a painting that he had entered into the exhibition, carried it out to the taxi and took it home. And in doing so, he changed the course of art history.

Paul O’Brien: Shelley's Adventure in Irish Politics

Paul O’Brien is a writer and critic and the author of Shelley and Revolutionary Ireland (Bookmarks, London)THE GREAT lyrical poet Percy Bysshe Shelley seems destined to be forever linked to clouds and skylarks – but he was far more than that. Shelley was a republican, an atheist, a feminist, and an egalitarian; he was a poet of the revolution. He was despised when he was alive and patronised when he was safely dead.For Shelley, born in 1792 in Sussex, the revolutionary upheavals towards the end of the 18th century in France and Ireland were a tradition rather than a personal experience. But he was formed by these events, just as the first generation of Romantics – Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey – were transformed by the reality of those great revolutionary upheavals. Shelley experienced them second-hand through the books of William Godwin and Tom Paine. But his radicalism grew out of a living contact with the brutality of war and imperialism at the beginning of the 19th century, and Ireland was central to that experience. His friend, Thomas Hogg, suggested that Shelley’s interest in Irish politics was fired by Irish revolutionaries who frequented the coffee-shops of London.

Lawrence Douglas: The Face of Genocide

Lawrence Douglas is James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence & Social Thought at Amherst College. He covered the Munich trial of John Demjanjuk for Harper’s magazine. His most recent book, "The Vices," was a finalist for the 2011 National Jewish Book Award. The death of John Demjanjuk in a Bavarian nursing home brings to an end the most convoluted and lengthy case to arise from the crimes of the Holocaust. Demjanjuk’s legal odyssey began in 1977, when American prosecutors filed a motion to strip the Ukrainian-born émigré of his U.S. citizenship. It reached a conclusion of sorts last May, when a German court convicted the 91-year-old defendant of assisting the SS in the murder of 28,060 Jews at Sobibor, a death camp in eastern Poland.

Terrence M. McCoy: How Joseph Stalin Invented 'American Exceptionalism'

Terrence M. McCoy is the Gordon Grey Fellow of International Journalism at Columbia University. ...In the 1920s, the lingering specter of World War I and austere German reparations battered Europe's market-based economy, giving rise to class tension and stark inequality. For worn-down workers, socialism and communism started sounding like pretty good ideas. A world revolution -- indeed, the rise of the proletariat -- seemed possible, and the Communist International was stoked.But the Americans just wouldn't fall into line. The United States had long since passed the United Kingdom as the world's largest industrial power, but hadn't yet plunged into the Great Depression. To members of the U.S. Communist Party, it was a paradox. Why, in the what appeared to be the purest capitalist Western economy wasn't there any desire for egalitarianism? Had Marx been wrong when he wrote socialism would, inexorably and universally, emerge from the ruins of capitalism? ...

John R. McNeill: Save the War Stories — Before It’s Too Late

John R. McNeill is a professor of history at Georgetown University and a vice president of the American Historical Association.My 94-year-old father and two of my uncles were among the 16.5 million men and women who served in the American armed forces during World War II. Both uncles, and another who served with the Canadian military in the war, are now dead. I have only snippets of information about their lives in uniform. At my urging, my father recently wrote the story of his life on active duty in the U.S. Army from 1940 to 1946....Those stories are a form of national treasure. For years, historians, journalists and family members have been collecting letters, diaries, journals and interviews from a few of those 16.5 million. The Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress, created by an act of Congress in 2000, has materials of some sort from 48,000 World War II vets. University libraries, state historical societies, military units and other organizations have collected a few thousand more. No one knows exactly how many because there is no clearinghouse or coordination. But it is likely that fewer than 1 in 200 of these veterans’ stories are preserved in any fashion.

Robert Zaretsky: History's Forgotten Exodus ... French-Algerian Pieds-Noirs Were Citizens of a Nation They Scarcely Knew

Mr. Zaretsky is teaches at the Honors College, University of Houston, and is author most recently of Albert Camus: Elements of a Life (Cornell, 2010).

Anthony Lock: The End Not Yet In Sight ... Orwell’s "Road to Wigan Pier" 75 Years On

Anthony Lock is an academic and freelance journalist based in Sydney. His current research is concerned with the relationship between the sciences and arts, with a particular focus on applying Orwell's work to memetic study.

Gideon Rachman: China’s Past Needs To Be Rewritten

Gideon Rachman is chief foreign-affairs commentator for the Financial Times and author of Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety.

Jonathan D. Sarna: When General Grant Expelled the Jews

Jonathan D. Sarna is the Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University and chief historian of the National Museum of American Jewish History. This article is adapted from his new book, When General Grant Expelled the Jews.

David Cannadine: Churchill and the Special Relationship

David Cannadine  is a British historian, author and professor of history at Princeton University. In a few days' time, David Cameron will be journeying to Washington to visit Barack Obama, and according to a White House Statement, his visit will "highlight the fundamental importance of the US-UK special relationship and the depth of friendship between the American people and the people of the United Kingdom". Perhaps it will, and I hope it does, but it's also likely to give rise to at least two challenging questions. Is America's relationship with Britain as special as it used to be?

Edward G. Lengel: Forging George Washington's Signature

Edward G. Lengel, the senior editor of The Papers of George Washington and an associate professor of history at the University of Virginia, is author most recently of To Conquer Hell: The Meuse-Argonne, 1918 (Henry Holt and Co. 2008).As the editor of the papers of George Washington at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, I have the privilege of intersecting with many people who come bearing documents supposedly signed by the first president. More often than you might think, I have the unenviable task of informing them that their letter‚ often lovingly framed and passed down for decades in their family is a fake. An office file, which we've marked "Forgeries," overflows with dozens of similar examples. Individuals and families are not the only ones duped by what I've discovered has been a robust 150-year-old market in Washington forgeries. Recently a well-meaning alumnus sold a multipage letter apparently in Washington's handwriting to a major university library. The librarians placed the letter on display and trumpeted their acquisition to the media. Several months later, an astute visitor pointed out some strangely awkward flourishes in the letter's handwriting. Upon examination, the letter turned out to be the work of a prolific 19th-century forger.

Frank Jacobs: Winston’s Hiccup

Frank Jacobs is a London-based author and blogger. He writes about cartography, but only the interesting bits.“I think I’ll write a book today,” the writer Georges Simenon was said to tell his wife at breakfast. “Fine,” she would reply, “but what will you do in the afternoon?” Winston Churchill was similarly prolific, and not just in the field of letters [1]. In his later years, he liked to boast that in 1921 he created the British mandate of Trans-Jordan, the first incarnation of what still is the Kingdom of Jordan, “with the stroke of a pen, one Sunday afternoon in Cairo” [2].Also like Simenon, Churchill wasn’t averse to the odd tipple, and according to some, that Sunday afternoon in Cairo followed a particularly liquid lunch. As a consequence, the then colonial secretary’s [3] penmanship proved a bit unsteady, allegedly producing a particularly erratic borderline. The result is still visible on today’s maps: the curious zigzag of the border between Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

William Cronon: Why We Should Avoid an Overly-Narrow Definition of "Professional History"

William Cronon (Univ. of Wisconsin–Madison) is the president of the AHA....Given the immense public appetite for history, and the essential contributions history can make to public understanding of all manner of problems in the present, the risks associated with too narrow and academic a definition of "professional history" could not be more clear.This is why, I would argue, we should keep a close watch on boredom if we want to make sure history continues to reach beyond our professional circles to a public that includes not just an educated citizenry, but intellectuals in other disciplines and historians in other fields. If professional history is sometimes boring, let's ask what it is about our professionalism that makes it so.

Christopher Sultan: Fom Dictatorship to Democracy ... The Role Ex-Nazis Played in Early West Germany

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan.  Ten days before Christmas, the German Interior Ministry acquitted itself of an embarrassing duty. It published a list of all former members of the German government with a Nazi past. The Left Party's parliamentary group had forced the government to come clean about Germany's past by submitting a parliamentary inquiry. Bundestag document 17/8134 officially announced, for the first time, something which had been treated as a taboo in the halls of government for decades: A total of 25 cabinet ministers, one president and one chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany -- as postwar Germany is officially known -- had been members of Nazi organizations. The document revealed that Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger, a member of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) who governed Germany from 1966 to 1969, had been a member of the Nazi Party ever since Adolf Hitler seized power. According to the Interior Ministry list, German President Walter Scheel, a member of the business-friendly Free Democratic Party (FDP) who was in office from 1974 to 1979, had been a Nazi Party member "from 1941 or 1942." The list names ministers of all political stripes and from a wide range of social backgrounds.

Robert W. Merry: The False Neocon View of Reagan

Robert W. Merry is editor of The National Interest and the author of books on American history and foreign policy. Of all the U.S. presidents since Franklin Roosevelt, none stands taller in history or exercises a greater lingering influence on American politics than Ronald Reagan. Republican politicians invoke his name as example and lodestar, and Democrats have granted him increasing respect as the passions of his presidential years have ebbed with time. Surveys of academics on presidential performance, initially dismissive, now rank him among the best of the White House breed. Even President Obama has extolled his approach to presidential leadership. This veneration poses a dark danger—that Reagan will become associated with philosophies he never held and policies he never pursued. This is happening today with increasing force as neoconservative intellectuals and politicians seek to conflate Reagan’s Cold War strategy with their push for American global dominance in the name of American values. Their aim is to equate today’s Islamic fundamentalism with Russian Bolshevism and thus boost the argument that U.S.