Roundup: Talking About History

Ruth Graham: The Real Betsy Ross was a Hard-Nosed, Snuff-Loving Businesswoman

Any second grader can tell you that early in the American Revolution, a Philadelphia woman named Betsy Ross made an American flag. She often appears in this flag creation account as a demure seamstress simply eager to help out the Revolutionary effort in any way she could. This is the narrative you'll hear in countless children's books—think Betsy Ross and the Silver Thimble. But what books like Silver Thimble won't tell you is that she also accepted a hefty £14 payment (roughly $2,000 in today'

Gwynne Dyer: Rewriting History No Way to Rehabilitate a Nation's Past

[Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.] The Georgians took down the last statue of Stalin last week.... They're planning to replace it with a monument to "victims of the Russian aggression" in the 2008 war, so the history they're peddling in Gori will still be based on lies. (It was Georgia that started the war with Russia in 2008.) But the bigger lies will be told in Russia, and they wi

Mark Ashurst: An Open Letter to King Albert II

[Mark Ashurst is director of the Africa Research Institute, London] Your Majesty, Fifty years today, your predecessor, King Baudouin, stood on the steps of the Palais de Justice in Leopoldville to mark the independence of Belgium's only colony. That ceremony remains vivid in the collective imagination of most Congolese, though the vast majority were not born as the new state spiralled into the chaos that has scotched so many of the hopes vested in independence.

Daniel Oliver: The New History of the New Deal

[Daniel Oliver is a Senior Director of White House Writers Group in Washington, D.C. He served as Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission under President Ronald Reagan.] At just the moment when Barack Obama, firmly at the controls of Dodo Bird One, is plummeting towards earth, some conservatives are making a separate peace with the New Deal. The country seems to be on the cusp of a new beginning. Anti-incumbent fever is running high. Tea Party activists are talking the

Thomas E. Ricks: Patton the Last

[Thomas E. Ricks covered the U.S. military for the Washington Post from 2000 through 2008.] I've had some fun over the last couple of weeks quoting some of Gen. George Patton's loonier comments and more repulsive observations, so it is only fair to conclude these excerpts by noting that I think Patton, for all his flaws, was a great general. This is his great contradiction. He hated everybody, and was spewing bile at the end of his life. Yet as a commander, he resembled

Aleksander Kwasniewski: On Holocaust Education

[Aleksander Kwasniewski was the president of Poland from 1995 to 2005.] Before questioning the value of Holocaust education,one should first address its goals: What, exactly, are we trying to achieve in teaching about the Holocaust? Is it realistic to expect that the study of the Holocaust will diminish human rights abuses and racism, and instead nurture democracy and tolerance? Will mixing the narrative of the Holocaust with other types of atrocities really encourage bett

Christian Caryl: What Japan Still Owes America

[Christian Caryl is a contributing editor to Foreign Policy. His column, "Reality Check," appears weekly on ForeignPolicy.com.] Lester Tenney entered World War II as a strapping 21-year-old, weight 180 pounds. By the time he emerged from Japanese captivity in 1945, he was a shattered, emaciated cripple. His left arm and shoulder were partly paralyzed due to an accident in a coal mine where he'd been sent as a slave laborer. His overseers there -- civilian employees of the

Chris Rodda: No, Mr. Beck, Jefferson Did Not Date His Documents 'In the Year of Our Lord Christ'

[is the Senior Research Director for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), and the author of Liars For Jesus: The Religious Right's Alternate Version of American History.] For the third installment of my little series debunking the American history lies being told on Glenn Beck's show, I'm going to take on another of pseudo-historian David Barton's favorite lies: that Thomas Jefferson dated his presidential documents not just "in the year of our Lord," but that

Brad Hirschfield: Remembering Korea: The Forgotten War

[Brad Hirschfield is the author of You Don’t Have to Be Wrong for Me to Be Right: Finding Faith Without Fanaticism, and is the President of Clal-The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership] Sixty years ago today, North Korean soldiers crossed the 38th Parallel and began the Korean War – what has come to be called America’s Forgotten War. Oddly, by naming it the Forgotten War, it began to be remembered, and that raises the larger questions of why we forget or remember even

Joyce Appleby: Getting Ready to Lead a World Economy: Enterprise in Nineteenth Century America

[Joyce Appleby is Professor of History Emerita at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her most recent book is The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (W. W. Norton & Company, 2010).] When Jefferson won the presidency in 1801, his victory had an economic impact as great as the political one. The establishment of the new government under the Constitution twelve years earlier had laid the foundation for an integrated market, but its character remained to be shaped

Jack Shafer: The Time and Life Acid Trip

[Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.] Alan Brinkley's comprehensive new biography of Time magazine co-founder Henry R. Luce, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century, has but one flaw. Then again, this "shortcoming" has more to do with my obsessions than it does with any inadequacy on Brinkley's part. My idiosyncratic complaint: Brinkley doesn't spend near enough space on the proselytizing enthusiasm the mogul and his wife, Clare Boothe Luce, had for LSD and

Neal Ascherson: Charles de Gaulle Remembered

[Neal Ascherson is a journalist and writer. For many years he was foreign correspondent and then columnist for the (London) Observer. Among his books are The King Incorporated: Leopold the Second and the Congo (1963; Granta, 1999); The Struggles for Poland (Random House, 1988); Black Sea (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1996); and Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland (Granta, 2003).] It’s seventy years since a reedy, strained voice came from the BBC in London, telling the French to f

Kevin Mooney: Ted Kennedy's KGB Correspondence

[Kevin Mooney is an investigative reporter and Fox News contributor based in Washington D.C., who has written for the Washington Examiner and Cybercast News Service.] Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's self-serving, secret correspondence with Soviet agents during the height of the Cold War included proposals for collaborative efforts designed to undermine official U.S. policy set by Democratic and Republican administrations, KGB documents show. With the media now reporting on th

Paul Kennedy: A Time to Appease

[Paul Kennedy is the J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of History at Yale University.] APPEASEMENT!” WHAT a powerful term it has become, growing evermore in strength as the decades advance. It is much stronger a form of opprobrium than even the loaded “L” word, since Liberals are (so their opponents charge) people with misguided political preferences; but talk of someone being an Appeaser brings us to a much darker meaning, that which involves cowardice, abandoning one’s friends and

Robert Pinsky: Meet Abraham Lincoln, Poet

[Former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky's latest book of poems is Gulf Music.] The United States has had a head of state who was also a great writer. Only Marcus Aurelius can compete with Abraham Lincoln. Like many prose masters, Lincoln was a reader and writer of poetry. His poem "My Childhood-Home I See Again" combines polished but conventional passages in ballad meter with another element, powerfully imagined and turbulent. The poem is worth thinking about in relation to Ab

Dominic Sandbrook: Historians are Wrong to Kick Football into Touch

[Dominic Sandbrook is a freelance writer on history and current affairs. His most recent book is White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties (Little, Brown, 2006). He is the regular columnist for BBC History Magazine.] The story of the first black South African football team to visit these shores, as June's issue reminds us, is not only extraordinary and inspiring, but a very fitting tale as we approach the first World Cup to be held in Africa. It is also a

Nicolas Kinloch: How Do We Record History Education?

[Nicolas Kinloch teaches history at the Netherhall School & Sixth Form College, Cambridge.] There’s much excitement in my school. It used to be split-site, with two buildings separated by a main road and some playing-fields. Now, following a building project that seems to have taken longer than the construction of Versailles, one of the buildings has been abandoned and a vast new block has arisen adjacent to the surviving one. We took possession at the

Robert Fisk: German Captains, U-Boats and Other Lies About Ireland

[Robert Fisk is an award-winning Middle East correspondent for the Independent. A journalist with decades of experience in foreign reporting, Fisk has interviewed Osama bin Laden multiple times and has been repeatedly recognized and awarded for his work.] By chance, I arrived in Dublin this week on the day that the Saville report on Bloody Sunday was published.... ...[L]ooking back on those terrible years, I am horrified at not just the gullibility of us reporters but a

Craig Comstock: Castro's Big Nuclear Secret

[Craig K. Comstock is a book creation coach and former director of the Ark Foundation. He produces and hosts a weekly TV show. He is co-author of books including Sanctions for Evil: Sources of Social Destructiveness, with Nevitt Sanford (Beacon) and Citizen Summitry and Securing Our Planet, both with Don Carlson (Tarcher).] On a citizen diplomacy trip to Moscow in October 1986, I learned a disturbing secret about the Cuban missile crisis that shocked Robert McNamara when he first heard the Soviet secret six years later. The consequences of this secret continue to be relevant today. During the crisis in 1962, McNamara had been U.S. Secretary of Defense; and my Soviet source, a close aide to Nikita Khrushchev who had sent missiles and warheads to Cuba and decided, at the climax of the crisis, to remove them. That crisis, which lasted 13 days for the U.S. side, has been called the most dangerous moment in human history. What the former aide told me, over coffee, was that before the climax of the crisis the Soviets had already brought to Cuba not only big missiles that could reach much of the U.S., but also, unknown to JFK and his aides, tactical nuclear weapons for delivery systems that could be used to repel a U.S. naval invasion of the island.

Richard Snow: The Man Who Left, the Father Who Came Back

[Richard Snow, the former editor of American Heritage magazine, is the author of “A Measureless Peril: America in the Fight for the Atlantic, the Longest Battle of World War II.”] MY father, Richard B. Snow, was happily running his own Manhattan architecture practice when Pearl Harbor was attacked, and he was quickly taken into a service that needed people who knew about structures. The Navy gave him a good job: he put on a nice, new uniform and every couple of days wen