Roundup: Talking About History
This is where we excerpt articles about history that appear in the media. Among the subjects included on this page are: anniversaries of historical events, legacies of presidents, cutting-edge research, and historical disputes.
SOURCE: Ken Hughes at Fatal Politics Blog (4-28-10)
[Mr. Hughes is the Nixon tapes editor for the Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.]
Since partisans have turned the April 30, 1975, Communist takeover of South Vietnam into a political weapon, I’m going to spend the anniversary doing a little myth-busting.
Mel Laird, Richard Nixon’s defense secretary, started the modern myth that “Congress snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by cutting off funding for our ally in 1975” in a 2005 article in Foreign Affairs, the journal of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations.
Laird repeated it two years later in a Washington Post op-ed column in which he wrote “of 1975, when Congress cut off funding for the Vietnam War three years after our combat troops had left...
SOURCE: Foreign Policy (5-1-10)
Ever since Parson Thomas Robert Malthus wrote his 1798 essay on population, it has been trotted out by millenarians and self-styled Cassandras as the basis for predicting famine and global woe. Malthus's arguments were resurrected as a best-seller for the modern era in the 1968 overpopulation-panic classic The Population Bomb. More recently, Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs has cited Malthus to explain the dire state of Africa, and Harvard University historian Niall Ferguson to predict a coming 20 years of global misery. The recent food crisis -- which pushed 100 million-plus people worldwide into absolute poverty -- has elevated Malthus's reputation as a prognosticator to the Delphic levels of a Nostradamus or an Al Roker.
But despite his centuries-long global celebrity and recent revival, the...
SOURCE: The Atlantic (4-26-10)
Better people than me have tackled this really weird piece in the Times on Friday, by Henry Louis Gates arguing against reparations....
Gates' contention that "there is very little discussion" of the African role in the slave trade is interesting. Among Africanists, trumpeting the fact that Africans sold slaves is akin to a physicist trumpeting inertia. Perhaps Gates meant that among non-academics there is very little discussion. Yet in his own piece Gates cites African heads of states talking to presumably non-academic African-American audiences about that which he claims is rarely discussed. As Eric Foner notes in today's Times, "virtually every history of slavery and every American history textbook includes this information." Perhaps...
SOURCE: GhanaWeb (4-29-10)
LET me state some caveats that my effort at interrogating the conclusions of Professor Henry Louis Gates do not mitigate the marginality and chattel nature that reconfigured the lived-experiences of enslaved Africans worldwide, nor does it exonerate slave-holding societies in Africa as well as some African states’ participation in the Atlantic slave trade. Second, I do understand Gates to mean that the blame for the Atlantic slave trade should be debited to both Africans and Europeans/Americans, consequently reparations should also be the responsibility of Africans. Third, this is not about reparations, but more so about querying and rethinking some of Gates’ historical arguments and conclusions from the standpoints of “Akan” oral history wedded to “Western” sources, indeed, a bold departure from most of the commentaries framed around “Western” sources.
CAREFUL...
SOURCE: Sightings (4-29-10)
The Book of Mormon is widely viewed as the quintessentially American scripture of a quintessentially American faith, but in strictly geographical terms this designation is more complicated than it might first appear. The Book’s modern manifestation is definitely American – Joseph Smith, New York farmer, said that he dug it out of a hill near his home. Believers regard the text as having an ancient history also, though, and here the geography is less clear. According to the text, its authors were pre-Columbian inhabitants of the New World, but its geographical terms are oblique: The characters war and proselytize over a “land northward” and a “land southward,” connected by “a narrow neck of land.” Many readers have assumed that what’s...
SOURCE: New Statesman (4-23-10)
The 18th-century philosopher Adam Smith wasn’t the free-market fundamentalist he is thought to have been. It’s time we realised the relevance of his ideas to today’s financial crisis.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith's first book, was published in early 1759. Smith, then a young professor at the University of Glasgow, had some understandable anxiety about the public reception of the book, which was based on his quite progressive lectures. On 12 April, Smith heard from his friend David Hume in London about how the book was doing. If Smith was, Hume told him, prepared for "the worst", then he must now be given "the...
SOURCE: Special to HNN (4-27-10)
When history, extraordinary individuals and the latest in informational technology meet, amazing and heretofore unknown facts can emerge and throw a wholly different light on past events.
April 11th was Yom Hashoah, a widely observed Day of Remembrance of the...
SOURCE: National Review (4-26-10)
If the history of slavery ought to teach us anything, it is that human beings cannot be trusted with unbridled power over other human beings — no matter what color or creed any of them are. The history of ancient despotism and modern totalitarianism practically shouts that same message from the blood-stained pages of history.
But that is not the message that is being taught in our schools and colleges, or dramatized on television and in the movies. The message that is pounded home again and again is that white people enslaved black people....
...Just as Europeans enslaved Africans, North Africans enslaved Europeans — more Europeans than there were Africans enslaved in the United States or in the 13 colonies from which the nation was formed.
The treatment of white galley slaves was even worse than the treatment of black slaves who picked cotton. But there are no movies or...
SOURCE: Foreign Policy (4-26-10)
I am an Afrikaans writer. I write in a language that is Dutch but not Dutch, European but not European, African but not African -- even though it is the only language named after this (or any other) continent. I write in a language that has little to do with tulips, windmills, or silly snowmen with carrot noses, a language honed to denote Africa in all its harshness, cruelty, and beauty. "Aardvark," "veld," and "wildebeest" -- these are the words that Afrikaans has given to the world. As is "trek," of course: to migrate, to get going, to yield to the fever of the horizon. Yes, in the language of the Enterprise, to boldly go where no man has gone before. I write in Afrikaans, a language of wanderers and migrants...
SOURCE: Jewish World Review (4-26-10)
The earliest collective action by American Jews on behalf of their overseas brethren came in 1840, in response to a false "blood libel" charge in Damascus. That spring, in the ancient capital of Syria, an Italian friar and his Muslim servant mysteriously disappeared. The Capuchin order of monks charged that Jews had kidnapped and ritually murdered the two men to fulfill a supposed Jewish injunction that non-Jewish blood be used in making Passover matzoh. Under torture, two "witnesses" named several prominent Damascus Jews as the "killers." The accused were arrested, tortured and sentenced to death. Knowing the suggestibility of child witnesses, local officials then seized 63 Jewish children to compel them to "reveal" where the blood was hidden.
Word of these outrages reached the United States in the summer of 1840. American Jews...
SOURCE: openDemocracy (4-24-10)
For Armenians everywhere, 24 April is a day of special commemoration. It marks the beginning of the genocide of 1915: the uprooting or killing by the leading figures of the Ottoman state of almost all the 2.2 million Armenians who lived in historic Armenia, using the circumstances of Europe’s “great war” as a pretext.
The ninety-fifth anniversary on 24 April 2010 finds the issue as potent as ever in the global consciousness as well as in the Armenian world. It is discussed in the international arena at all levels of political, diplomatic, historical and cultural life; its recognition as a historical reality has become a factor in the deliberations of many legislative bodies, such as the United States house of representatives' foreign-affairs committee and the Swedish parliament (both in March 2010).
This reflects a...
SOURCE: openDemocracy (4-23-10)
While scholars dispute the epistemological foundations of the discipline known as history, educationalists are working to solve a task of national importance – how to use the past to glorify the present. In the Russia that was conquered by the Bolsheviks, this was a problem that took many years to solve, and so for a long time history was not taught in school at all – it only appeared as a subject in 1934. From that time on, Soviet people were taught that the history of any nation is the history of class struggle, the crowning glory of which was the Great October socialist revolution. Then there was continuing conflict with counter-revolution, capitalists, kulaks, wreckers, cosmopolitans, Western ideology etc. – until the last enemy, in the form of low oil prices, brought about the collapse of the USSR....
The ideology of textbooks today is different: Russia is a great country. We really do have...
SOURCE: Britannica Blog (4-26-10)
[Robert McHenry is a former editor-in-chief of Encyclopaedia Britannica and author of How to Know.]
It is neither his birthday nor an anniversary of his death, which are my usual weak pegs on which to hang a little note about some writer, but I could not wait for one of those to roll by to share this. Henry Louis Mencken, usually known as H.L. Mencken, was a journalist of unusual breadth of knowledge and understanding and a critic of strong views and vigorous expression. In 1926 he published a little book called Notes on Democracy, in which he — if you will permit me a bit of vivid metaphor — performed vivisection on the dogma underlying the American political system and revealed the offal within.
Here is a long paragraph on the so-called “noble experiment” of Prohibition:
The Prohibitionists, when they foisted their brummagem cure-all upon the...
SOURCE: Britannica Blog (4-26-10)
[Nicholas Carr is a member of Britannica’s Editorial Board of Advisors, and posts from his blog Rough Type will occasionally be cross-posted at the Britanncia Blog. He is the author, most recently, of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.]
I would like to direct the Internet’s attention (when the Internet pays attention, servers fail and nodes collapse, and a rictal grin spreads across Ned Ludd’s bony face) to an article on the topic of Ludditism by Thomas Pynchon, which ran in the New York Times Book Review in that fabled year, 1984. Written nearly a decade before the World Wide Web would turn the Internet into a popular medium, the article is nevertheless entirely up to date in...
SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education (4-25-10)
When I was 9 years old, my dream job was to be the person who calls off school when it snows. Now that I have that job, it stinks. Over my 10 years of canceling classes because of snow, my decisions have rarely met with universal approval: Without fail, some loud constituency is fast to complain.
This past winter, the Washington area was hit with an extraordinary three blizzards, two of which occurred within a four-day period, and I ended up canceling six days of classes. Upon our return to class, and after much consultation with colleagues, I distributed a plan to make up the lost days, one of which involved taking back a university holiday on the day after Easter. For varied and goofy reasons, this one aspect of the plan produced some negative reactions, most of which fell within my level of tolerance as a provost who's been around the block a few times.
But one reaction, in the...
SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education (4-25-10)
School's out. That was the news in early May 1970, when hundreds of colleges and universities across the country canceled classes, exams, and graduation exercises, fearing violent student protests against the war in Vietnam. Campus demonstrations and strikes escalated following President Richard Nixon's announcement on April 30 that U.S. ground troops would cross the border from Vietnam into Cambodia. The military's mission was to find and destroy sanctuaries the North Vietnamese army used to support its forces fighting on...
SOURCE: Jewish World Review (4-25-10)
Hearing about a shortage of farm laborers in California, the couple who would become Susumu Ito's parents moved from Hiroshima to become sharecroppers near Stockton. Thus began a saga that recently brought Ito, 91, to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, where he and 119 former comrades in arms were honored, during the annual Days of Remembrance, as liberators of Nazi concentration camps. While his Japanese American Army unit was succoring survivors of Dachau, near Munich, his parents and two sisters were interned in a camp in Arkansas.
Ito attended one-room schools, graduated from high school at 16 and was accepted at Berkeley. His parents, however, believed that Japanese Americans could not rise in the professions — even the civil service — for which the university would prepare him. So he attended community college, studying auto mechanics, although he could not join the mechanics union....
SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education (4-24-10)
[Michael Ruse directs the program in history and philosophy of science at Florida State University. His forthcoming book is Science and Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science.]
This is all a prolegomenon to what is going on in historical circles in England at the moment. The deservedly distinguished historian of modern Russia, Orlando Figes, has been caught with his pants down. He has been writing reviews, on Amazon.com, trashing his rivals’ books. He has also been writing reviews praising his own books. After a week of threatening and blustering, talking of libel suits, and then blaming his wife (a distinguished law professor in her own right), he admitted to his...
SOURCE: Guardian (UK) (4-23-10)
This is a matter that has broad implications for the public interest, as can be seen from the way I've spent my week. I got up last Sunday earlier than usual. Been doing that since the week before when Figes's lawyer started to correspond. Don't know why I thought I would...
SOURCE: Times Online (UK) (4-25-10)
[Oliver Kamm is a leader writer and columnist at The Times. He was previously an investment banker and co-founder of an asset management firm.]
This is, to coin a phrase, grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre, unprecedented:
'One of Britain’s leading historians has admitted posting poisonous anonymous reviews of his rivals’ work on Amazon’s website, lying to his lawyer and letting his wife take the blame.
'Orlando Figes said that he had “panicked” and was “ashamed” of his behaviour. He has gone on sick leave from his job at Birkbeck College. His...
