Roundup: Talking About History

David Smith: How Will Mandela-Land Cope When the World Arrives?

David Smith is the Guardian's Africa correspondent. 'Nature was our playground," writes Nelson Mandela in his memoir Long Walk to Freedom. "The hills above Qunu were dotted with large smooth rocks which we transformed into our own rollercoaster. We sat on flat stones and slid down the face of the rocks. We did this until our backsides were so sore we could hardly sit down." Walking down the grassy slope into a breeze, I came upon it: Mandela's "sliding stone". The big granite boulder has an unmissable track worn smooth and shiny by his childhood sport. It is one of the rocky outcrops overlooking the bucolic valley of Qunu, where South Africa's first black president grew up and which, at 93, he still calls home. I had come here on the "Mandela trail" in the rolling hills of the area formerly known as the Transkei. I've previously stood in the pokey bed chamber where it is thought William Shakepeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, the grander birthplace of Winston Churchill at Blenheim Palace and the cramped abode where Stan Laurel breathed his first in Ulverston, Cumbria.

Christopher Bantick: Australian Schools Become the Dustbin of History

Christopher Bantick is a Melbourne writer and senior literature teacher. He was formerly head of history at Trinity Grammar in Kew, where he taught Australian History and Revolutions.BRITISH historian Simon Schama once observed of contemporary students, "What of history do they know?" It's a good question. A more immediate one is why don't Australian undergraduates want to know about their own country?The blunt fact is that Australian history, once the gold standard of university history courses, is dying. This year, La Trobe University does not have any undergraduate Australian history subjects. The University of Melbourne is winding up its Australian Studies Centre. Why? Both La Trobe and Melbourne are universities with enviable records in the study of Australian history. So how can the decline in undergraduate demand be explained?A lack of interest in Australian history undergraduate courses does not begin at university. It starts far earlier. Look no further than schools....Schools killed Australian history. Reduced to a brain-deadening subject where nothing seemed to happen, it proved Henry Ford's assessment of history being "bunk".

Louis Galambos: Dwight Eisenhower, Quiet Radical

Mr. Galambos, professor of history at Johns Hopkins University and an editor of The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, is the author of The Creative Society—and the Price Americans Paid for It (Cambridge, 2012).

Ross Douthat: The Greatness of Ike

Ross Douthat is a columnist for the New York Times....In a 2011 Gallup poll on the greatest president, Eisenhower came in a lame 12th, in a tie with Jimmy Carter. He performs solidly in scholarly surveys, but he’s frequently ranked behind his prominent 20th-century rivals.In part, this underestimation is a result of the political persona Eisenhower cultivated — an amiable, grandfatherly facade that concealed a ruthless master politician. In part, it reflects the fact that his presidency has always lacked an ideological cheering section. Liberals (who preferred Adlai Stevenson) generally remember the Eisenhower administration as a parenthesis between heroic Democratic epochs, while conservatives (who favored Robert Taft) recall a holding pattern before their Goldwater-to-Reagan ascent.But ultimately Eisenhower is underrated because his White House leadership didn’t fit the template of “greatness” that too many Americans pine for from their presidents. He was not a man for grand projects, bold crusades or world-historical gambles. There was no “Ike revolution” in American politics, no Eisen-mania among activists and intellectuals, no Eisenhower realignment.

Robert Zaretsky: A Roller Coaster Ride of an Empire

Robert Zaretsky is a professor of history at the Honors College, University of Houston, and a co-author of “France and Its Empire Since 1870.”THE French empire is back — this time, though, rather than coming to you, you will need to go to it.Earlier this month, Yves Jégo, the mayor of a small town southeast of Paris, officially announced his plans for the Bivouac de Montereau, better known as Napoleonland — an amusement park commemorating French history, with an emphasis on the emperor’s achievements, that will rival nearby EuroDisney....Against the background of a dispiriting presidential campaign, an anemic economy and a deepening social divide — not to mention this year’s 200th anniversary of Berezina, a word long synonymous in French with “disaster” — now seems like an odd time to announce the empire’s return. But the French seem to be hoping that such a park might galvanize not just the local economy but also a national sense of purpose.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Murder in a Time of Bigotry

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history at New York University and lives in Narberth. He is the author of "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory" (Yale University Press). He can be reached at jlzimm@aol.com.In March 1942, a few months after America entered World War II, the U.S. Army issued its first official regulation designed to screen out gay men. The directive listed three supposedly telltale signs of homosexuality: "feminine bodily characteristics," "effeminacy in dress and manner," and a "patulous rectum." For those who don't have a dictionary handy, patulous means "expanded." And, yes, the Army regulation really said that.I thought of this shameful history as I read a recent Inquirer story about the mass murderer Howard Unruh, whose case files were released by the Camden County Prosecutor's Office after persistent requests by the newspaper. Nobody will ever know what exactly led Unruh, a World War II combat veteran, to gun down 13 innocent people in East Camden on Sept. 6, 1949. But the case files confirm that Unruh was gay at a time when American culture attached a heavy stigma to homosexuality....

Rick Perlstein: Reagan's Attacks On Carter's Embrace of "Big Government" Were B.S.

Rick Perlstein is the author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. He writes a weekly column for RollingStone.com....Here's the problem: Even if Obamaism works on its own terms – that is, if [Andrew] Sullivan is right that Obama’s presidency is precisely on course – it can't stop Republicans from wrecking the country. Instead, it may end up abetting them.

Aaron Bobrow-Strain: What Would Great-Grandma Eat?

Aaron Bobrow-Strain is an associate professor of politics at Whitman College. This essay is adapted from his new book from Beacon Press, White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf.Not long ago I found myself crammed into a tiny commuter plane bucking over the Cascade Range of Washington State. Behind me, two women distracted themselves from the turboprop's lurching and groaning by talking loudly about beef.A self-avowed "foodie" with a bit of ranching in my background, an overdeveloped interest in how people think about eating, and a pressing need to escape thoughts of turbulence-induced aviation disaster, I listened in.The two women had clearly read their Michael Pollan. They spoke ably about the dangers of contaminated meat, the environmental consequences of feedlot production, and the benefits of grass-fed beef. At one point I heard them bandy about the name of a company that sold organic meat in the town we had just left. Then, as we dropped low over Seattle and the bumps eased, one of them concluded: "I guess I know all that, but we still buy regular meat from Walmart. It's just who we are." "Yup," replied the second woman.

Peter Hitchens: True Conservatives Need to Come to Grips with the Failures of Margaret Thatcher

Peter Hitchens is a columnist for the Mail on Sunday and author of The Rage Against God.“The Iron Lady,” the cruel motion picture about Margaret Thatcher, makes much of her decline into bemused old age. It arouses sympathy for her among the undecided, and passionate sympathy among those who already revere her. No wonder. I cannot think of any other living person who could have been treated in this fashion. In a way it is a compliment to her that, even in the lonely, desolate weakness of her final years, her enemies—the unintelligent, intolerant left—continue to hate her.With such people attacking her, it is hard not to rally to her side. But what about those of us who have an uncomfortable and growing suspicion that she was not as good as she is made out to have been? I am one of them. I still cannot resist the feeling that her reputation is not just inflated but damaging to the conservative cause....

Katrina Gulliver: Why We're Still Looking for Amelia

Katrina Gulliver, a historian living in Munich, is the author of Modern Women in China and Japan: Gender, Feminism and Global Modernity Between the Wars. Seventy-five years ago, Amelia Earhart sent her last radio communication during her attempt to cross the Pacific. She was running low on fuel and unable to find Howland Island, where she was supposed to land. "We are on the line 157 337. We will repeat this message. We will repeat this on 6210 kilocycles. Wait." These communications, received by the U.S. Coast Guard vessel Itasca, became her final recorded words: "We are running on line north and south."

Chris Lamb: Jackie Robinson -- Crossing the Line

Chris Lamb, a professor of communication at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, is the author of the forthcoming book, "Conspiracy of Silence: Sportswriters and the Long Campaign to Desegregate Baseball." Email: lambc@cofc.edu

Craig Timberg and Daniel Halperin: Co­lo­ni­al­ism in Africa Helped Launch the HIV Epidemic a Century Ago

From “Tinderbox” by Craig Timberg and Daniel Halperin. Reprinted by arrangement with The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) inc. Copyright © Craig Timberg and Daniel Halperin, 2012. Timberg, a former foreign correspondent in Africa, is acting national security editor of The Washington Post. Halperin was a senior HIV prevention adviser in the U.S. government’s global AIDS program and is now an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina.We are unlikely to ever know all the details of the birth of the AIDS epidemic. But a series of recent genetic discoveries have shed new light on it, starting with the moment when a connection from chimp to human changed the course of history.We now know where the epidemic began: a small patch of dense forest in southeastern Cameroon. We know when: within a couple of decades on either side of 1900. We have a good idea of how: A hunter caught an infected chimpanzee for food, allowing the virus to pass from the chimp’s blood into the hunter’s body, probably through a cut during butchering.

Mark G. Brennan: NGOs ... The New Missionaries

Mark G. Brennan is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Pennsylvania. Under the supervision of Bruce Kuklick, Walter McDougall and Jonathan Steinberg, he is writing his dissertation on the activities of American Protestant missionaries in Cuba between 1898 and 1950.

Charles Duelfer: In Iraq, Done in by the Lewinsky Affair

Charles Duelfer, who was a U.N. weapons inspector in the 1990s and led the Iraq Survey Group’s search for WMD after the ouster of Saddam Hussein, is the author of Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq.This week’s public-television documentary on the Clinton presidency has focused attention anew on the scandal involving Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Overlooked is the important role this affair played in the confrontation of Iraq in 1998. As the story was breaking, I happened to be in Baghdad as the deputy chairman of the U.N. weapons inspection group called UNSCOM. These were critical times for Iraq, the United Nations and Washington. In the 1990s I was virtually the only senior U.S. official who met regularly with top Iraqi officials, due to my role at the United Nations. Our countries had no diplomatic relations. Understanding on the part of both sides was extremely limited — Washington had a cartoonish image of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, and he had an equally simplified image of Washington. Consequently, my meetings with senior Iraqis often drifted into topics beyond weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In one conversation with Hussein’s deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, he asked me a question unrelated to the U.N.: “What is an intern?”..

Tom Switzer: Not Only Nixon Could Go to China

Tom Switzer is a research associate for the University of Sydney’s United States Studies Centre and editor of Spectator Australia.President Richard Nixon’s visit to China 40 years ago this week is rightly remembered as a historic breakthrough. Decades later, however, few political myths are as persistent as the notion that “only Nixon could go to China.” The mythology runs like this: Only a red-baiting, Commie-hating Republican could do something that would have been out of reach for a soft, left-liberal Democrat. Only a bellicose and unscrupulous anti-Communist, whose credibility with fellow conservatives would shield him from any domestic attack, could sup with the devil and become a peacemaker. At the time of the rapprochement in 1971–72, the Democratic Senate leader, Mike Mansfield, declared: “Only a Republican, perhaps only a Nixon, could have made this break and gotten away with it.” The phrase “only Nixon could go to China” has since become part of the Anglosphere’s political lexicon to describe a moment when a political leader defies expectations by doing something that would anger his supporters if taken by someone without his credentials...

Sarah Mousa: How Nasser Shaped the Arab Spring

Sarah Mousa graduated from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in 2010, and was a 2010-2011 Fulbright Scholar in Egypt.

Tom Switzer: Nixon ... Avowed Anti-Communist Opened China to the World

Tom Switzer is a research associate at the University of Sydney's United States Studies Centre and editor of Spectator Australia.

Jeremy Diamond and Davida Aronovitch: The War of 1812 ... Stupid but Important

Jeremy Diamond is director of development and programs at the Historica-Dominion Institute; Davida Aronovitch is communications co-ordinator.

Bret Stephens: Europe's Strange Politics of Memory

Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs.

Aaron David Miller: Where Have All the George Washingtons Gone?

Aaron David Miller is a distinguished scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. His new book, Can America Have Another Great President? will be published this year.